President Donald Trump said he didn’t call Vladimir Putin in front of European leaders that he’d invited to the White House because he was worried that would be “disrespectful” to the Russian leader.
In an interview with Fox & Friends on Tuesday, Trump was asked about his call with Putin a day earlier—the same day that European leaders assembled in Washington, D.C. for a peace summit on Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“I didn’t do it in front of them, I thought that would be disrespectful to President Putin,” Trump said. “I wouldn’t do that, because they have not had the warmest relations and actually President Putin wouldn’t talk to people from Europe. I mean, that was part of the problem.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Trump claimed he “sort of” set up a meeting between Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and even suggested the two mortal enemies are “getting along a little bit better than I thought.”
“Now by the time I called him, it was 1 in the morning in Russia,” Trump said of his call with Putin. “But he picked it up very happily. Sure, he works very hard, like we all do. And we had a very good call. And I told him that ‘We’re going to set up a meeting with President Zelensky, and you and he will meet. And then after that meeting, if everything works out OK, I’ll meet and we’ll wrap it up,’” he added.
Trump also spoke of meeting Putin during their summit in Alaska last Friday, which saw the president literally roll out the red carpet for Putin and usher him into a presidential limousine for an informal chat before the ceremony began.
“You saw that when he got off his plane, I got off my plane, there’s a warmth there that you can’t, you know, there’s a decent feeling, and it’s a good thing, not a bad thing,” the president told Fox & Friends.
Trump continued to urge Zelensky to agree to a meeting with Putin, who has tried to kill the Ukrainian leader on multiple occasions since the start of the war in 2022, insisting that it “takes two to tango” and suggesting that Zelensky “needs to be flexible.”
“I hope President Putin is going to be good. If he’s not, that’s going to be a rough situation,” Trump added. “And I hope Zelensky, President Zelensky, will do what he has to do. He has to show some flexibility also. The thing is a mess.”
Reacting to the summit, CNN’s military analyst and retired Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton said Trump must be in attendance for any meeting between Putin and Zelensky in order to prevent the Ukrainian president from being assassinated.
“I mean, basically, if there was a one-on-one meeting between Zelensky and Putin, Putin would probably want to eliminate Zelensky one way or the other,” Leighton said on CNN. “And that’s the kind of thing that you actually have to consider in this situation.
“There have been several assassination attempts against Zelensky. Putin would not stop at that,” he added. “Even if Trump doesn’t want to be there, he has an obligation to be there basically because he’s in a position now where he’s basically the one, along with the Europeans, that can protect Zelensky.”
