Donald Trump told Elon Musk last night that he would have been able to stop Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine.
The ex-US president, who is running for re-election on the Republican ticket, spoke to the X boss in a long and rambling two-hour interview.
Trump said he “knows” both the North Korea leader Kim Jong Un and the Russian president Putin, saying: “They’re smart and vicious.”
Taking aim at the outgoing president Joe Biden and his vice-president Kamala Harris, Trump said: “When they see a Kamala or sleepy Joe, they can’t believe it.”
He then repeated his previous claims about having a supposedly strong bond with Putin in particular, saying: “I know Putin very well, I got along with him very well, he respected me and it’s just one of those things, and we would talk a lot about Ukraine. It was the apple of his eye!
“But I said to him, ‘Don’t ever do it.’”
Recalling a particular conversation between them, he said: “I said to him, Vladimir Putin, ‘Don’t do it. You can’t do it, Vladimir, you do it, it’s going to be a bad day, you cannot do it.’
“And I told him things – that what I do, and he said, ‘no way,’ and I said, ‘way’,” Trump said.
However, the US president also acknowledged Moscow’s military strength, saying: “Russia defeated Germany with us, and they defeated Napoleon. You know, they’ve been around a long time.”
“They’re a big fighting force, and it’s very unfair … We’re in a very bad position. And I’m not going to blame, exclusively, but I can tell you, I could have stopped that,” he added.
He then said he shut down the Nord Stream 2, the oil pipeline coming out of Russia and going to Europe.
It was actually Germany who froze the project in February 2022 after Putin invaded Ukraine, although Trump did place sanctions against Russia over the pipeline in 2017.
Trump claimed: “Biden came along and they say I loved Russia, I was a friend of Putin, and I loved Russia, no – he [Putin] actually said to me one time, if you’re my friend I’d hate to see you as an enemy. I shut down his pipeline!”
He suggested Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if it wasn’t for Biden – a claim Musk did not deny, instead describing it as an “excellent point”.