President Donald Trump
US President Donald Trump has again urged the G7 countries to readmit Russia at the group’s ongoing summit in Canada, saying the war in Ukraine would not have happened if Moscow had been kept in the club.
Trump made the call while speaking to the press alongside Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, who is hosting the G7.
Russia was thrown out of the G8 after it invaded Crimea in 2014, and Trump’s defence of Vladimir Putin came a day before the US president is scheduled to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the fringes of the summit. It will be the first meeting between the two men since Pope’s Francis’s funeral in April.
Zelenskyy is pressing for a reluctant Trump to respond to Putin’s refusal to agree a 30-day ceasefire by applying sanctions on Russia that the US Senate has already approved.
Trump, however, has shown little sign of losing patience, saying he was still waiting to see whether a deal could be reached with Moscow.
“Sanctions costs us a lot of money. It costs the US a lot of money. You are talking about billions and billions of dollars,” he said.
The US president had earlier repeated his opinion that expelling Russia from the G8 was a “big mistake”.
“You wouldn’t have that war,” he said. “You know you have your enemy at the table, I don’t even consider, he wasn’t really an enemy at that time.”
He blamed the former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Barack Obama for Putin’s expulsion.
“Obama didn’t want him, and the head of your country didn’t want him,” Trump said, naming Trudeau several times and calling the ousting a mistake.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, signalled that the EU would be asking the US and other G7 member states to tighten sanctions on Russia by lowering the cap at which Russian oil can be bought from $60 a barrel to $45.
The aim is to reduce Russia’s revenues from oil sales. The G7 originally set up the complex price cap, so the EU needs the support of all G7 states to lower it.
About The Author
