United States Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump offered a muddled explanation of his views about the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russian Federation and its continued efforts to undermine Ukraine’s control of other parts of the country, amplifying his earlier suggestion that, if elected president, he might recognise Russia’s claim and end sanctions against it.
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On the topic of Putin and Ukraine, the Republican said: “He’s not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand”.
Donald Trump took to Twitter on Monday in an attempt to clear up a statement he made on ABC’s “This Week” that Russian Federation was “not going to go into Ukraine”.
When an interviewer noted that Trump had claimed he was being sarcastic, Clinton replied: “If you take the encouragement that Russians hack into email accounts, if you take his quite excessive praise for Putin, his absolute allegiance to a lot of Russian wish-list foreign policy issues”, it suggests that “he is not temperamentally fit to be president and commander-in-chief”.
Interpreting Trump’s statements – what he understands about the current status of Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, and how it would change in a Trump administration – is hard given the fractured nature of the exchange.
“It’s okay to go out here and load your mouth up and say stuff and say, ‘Yeah we are going to come to your aid, we’re going to provide you arms, we’re going to come out and do all these things.’ But nobody has taken the time to think this through to its logical conclusion”, Clovis said.
In the end, it seems a foreign state actor wants to help the Trump campaign win the American presidential election and we can not allow that to happen. George, you know me pretty well.
Trump also suggested that Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea was legitimate Sunday and used a justification similar to that of Putin. Khizr Khan said Trump’s proposals would have barred his son from immigrating to the United States because they are Muslims.
During an interview on ABC Sunday, Trump said he feels Putin “treats me with great respect” but that the two do not know each other. You have Obama there. Manafort has said neither he nor anyone else with the Trump campaign pushed for the platform changes. He asked “what do you call a relationship?” and said he doesn’t know what it “means by having a relationship”.
In the past Mr Trump’s campaign manager, political strategist Paul Manafort, lobbied on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych, a Ukrainian president and supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Hope Hicks, Trump’s spokeswoman, did not respond immediately to questions about whether Manafort is now involved in any work related to Ukrainian politics. Cybersecurity experts and United States officials, however, said they believed Russian Federation engineered the release of the emails to influence the November 8 USA presidential election. “I don’t – I’ve never met him”, said Trump.
The US would not tolerate that from any other country, especially one considered an adversary, Clinton said.
In 2015 a GFK Ukraine poll found that 82 percent of people in Crimea fully supported Crimea’s inclusion in Russian Federation, 11 percent showed partial support, and 4 percent were against it. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama, with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and all of this, in the meantime, he’s going where – he takes – takes Crimea, he’s sort of – I mean…
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“Oh, sure. I think they’re sacrifices, he said, before going on to list things, like hiring people with employee benefits and raising money for charity, that don’t qualify as sacrifices in any context, much less when comparing them to a family who lost a son in the nation’s service”.
