Written by Vladimir Soldatkin and Guy Faulconbridge
SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday congratulated Donald Trump on his victory in the US election, praised him for showing courage when a gunman tried to kill him, and said Moscow was ready to negotiate with the Republican president-elect.
In his first public remarks since defeating Trump, Putin said Trump acted like a real man when he tried to assassinate him during a speech at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July.
“He behaved, in my opinion, appropriately, courageously, like a real man,” Putin said at the Valdai chat club in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi. “I take this opportunity to congratulate him on his election.”
Putin said Trump’s words during his election campaign about Ukraine and restoring relations with Russia should be taken into account.
“What was said about the desire to restore relations with Russia, to end the crisis in Ukraine, in my opinion this deserves at least some attention,” Putin said.
Trump said during the campaign that he could bring peace to Ukraine within 24 hours if elected, but gave few details on how he would seek to end Europe’s biggest global war since World War II.
The 72-year-old Kremlin chief offered just one note of warning: “I don’t know what will happen now. I have no idea.”
When pressed by someone who asked what he would do if Trump called to postpone the meeting, Putin said he was ready to resume communications if the Trump administration wanted it, and he was ready for talks with Trump.
Russia and Trump have repeatedly dismissed as nonsense other allegations in the Western media that Trump was some kind of agent of Russian influence. Russian officials say that during his first term, from 2017 to 2021, Trump was tough on Russia.
The US special counsel, Robert Mueller, investigated allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 US presidential election, but in a 2019 report he said he found no evidence of collusion.
Moscow has also repeatedly denied US claims that Russia interfered in the 2024 election and other presidential elections and spread disinformation in an attempt to sow chaos.
WAR?
Ukraine’s 2-1/2-year-old war is entering what some Russian and Western officials say could be its final — and most dangerous — phase after Moscow’s forces advanced at a rapid pace from the first weeks of the conflict and the West thinks so. how the war will end.
Putin on June 14 laid out his terms for the end of the war: Ukraine would have to abandon its NATO ambitions and withdraw all its troops from all four regions claimed by Russia.
Russia controls Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, about 80 percent of Donbas – a coal and steel region that includes Donetsk and Luhansk regions – and more than 70 percent of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
Speaking for several hours on Thursday, Putin blasted the “adventurism” of Western leaders whom he accused of pushing the world to a “dangerous line” by seeking to defeat Russia in Ukraine.
“It doesn’t help to put pressure on us. But we are always ready to negotiate with full consideration of common legitimate interests,” Putin said, moments after scolding the West for promising Ukraine and Georgia to keep NATO membership in 2008.
He said the West has not accepted Russia as an equal partner since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, treating it as a defeated power and expanding the US-led NATO military alliance eastwards towards Russia.
Russia, Putin said, is ready to restore relations with America but the ball is in Washington’s court. Putin also said that China is an “ally” of Russia.
Asked about Kamala Harris’ warning that Putin would eat Trump for lunch, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said with a laugh: “Putin doesn’t eat people.”
