Donald Trump’s attitude towards Russia has shifted. While he initially appeared to be soft towards Russian President Vladimir Putin, a leaked audio tape, obtained by CNN, suggests otherwise. Trump allegedly said he threatened Putin to bomb Moscow – and now, Russia has replied to the claim.
The relationship between the US and Russia is a very complex matter. As Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, the world as we know it changed, and so did relations between Russia and many, many countries, including the United States.
Donald Trump has previously to have had a good relationship with Vladimir Putin, and before he took office in January, he said he would end the Ukraine-Russia war in 24 hours. That didn’t happen, but at the time, Trump spoke on the phone with the Russian president several times.
“I believe he wants peace,” Trump said about Putin at the time: “I mean, I know him very well. Yeah, I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t. … I trust him on this subject.”
However, today things have changed drastically. The peace talks between Ukraine and Russia are down the drain, and on Tuesday, referring to Putin’s resistance to a peace deal, Donald Trump said Putin was “throwing “a lot of bullsh*t at the US.”
“I’m not happy with Putin,” Donald Trump said during a Cabinet meeting. “I’m very unhappy with them.”
Donald Trump threatened to ‘bomb Moscow’
While Donald Trump hasn’t been too harsh on Putin in the press, it appears as if he had other ideas last year. On Tuesday, CNN reported that they had obtained audio from his 2024 Presidential Campaign, when meeting donors, in which Trump had told them that he threatened to “bomb the sh*t out of Moscov to retaliate if Putin would attack Ukraine.
“With Putin I said, ‘If you go into Ukraine, I’m going to bomb the sh*t out of Moscow. I’m telling you I have no choice,’” Trump said during a 2024 fundraiser, per CNN. “And then [Putin] goes, like, ‘I don’t believe you.’ But he believed me 10%.”
Donald Trump later claimed he had given Chinese President Xi Jinping a similar warning over a potential invasion of Taiwan. That time, it was about bombing Beijing.
“He thought I was crazy,” Trump said of Xi, adding that “we never had a problem.”
The audio tapes had also been obtained by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, who detailed some of the exchanges in their book, 2024.
Donald Trump and his administration have not made any comments regarding the audio files obtained by CNN. While the news outlet reported that the audio was from 2024, it remains unclear when or where the alleged conversation between Putin and Trump took place.
Russia responds
The Kremlin didn’t take long to respond to Donald Trump’s claims made in the audio tape. On Wednesday, Newsweek, citing the Russian state news agency TASS, reported that Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, neither confirmed nor denied that Trump had warned Putin about Ukraine.
Meanwhile, he said that there had been no phone contact between the two when Trump was not the President of the United States.
“The fact is that there were no telephone conversations then,” Peskov said. “After all, we are talking, as far as I understand, about the period when Trump was not yet the president of the United States.”
“Whether this is fake or not, we also do not know. There are a lot of fakes now. Often, there are many more fakes than true information. And we always proceed from this when we analyze certain news,” Peskov added.
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