Trump says Crimea to ‘stay with Russia’

Zelenskyy "understands that"

Crimea went to the Russians in 2014 and it will remain with Russia, U.S. President Donald Trump said in an interview with Time magazine published on Friday.

“Crimea will stay with Russia,” Trump told the magazine, adding that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “understands that.”

“Everybody understands that it’s been with them for a long time. It’s been with them long before Trump came along,” the U.S. president said.

“This is a war that should never have happened. I call it the war that should have never happened,” Trump said.

Earlier this week, Trump ranted against Zelenskyy for refusing to ever recognize Crimea as Russian, claiming Ukraine should have fought for it in 2014 and blaming Zelenskyy for prolonging the war.

“Well, Crimea went to the Russians. It was handed to them by Barack Hussein Obama, and not by me,” Trump said in the Time interview. “With that being said, will they be able to get it back? … [the Russian’s] have had their submarines there for long before any period that we’re talking about, for many years. The people speak largely Russian in Crimea,” he said.

“This wasn’t given by Trump,” he said. “Would it have been taken from me like it was taken from Obama? No, it wouldn’t have happened,” Trump told Time, claiming that if he were president in 2014, Russia would have never taken Crimea.

In 2014, before he ran for the U.S. presidency, Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine as “so smart.” In a interview with Fox News, Trump said Putin has “done an amazing job of taking the mantle.”

“You look at what he’s doing. And so smart,” Trump told Fox. “When you see the riots in a country because they’re hurting the Russians, okay, ‘We’ll go and take it over.’ And he really goes step by step by step, and you have to give him a lot of credit,” Trump said.