KANANASKIS, Alberta — “The G7 used to be the G8,” Donald Trump mused after a bilateral meeting with host Prime Minister Mark Carney at the G7 summit in the Canadian Rockies.
Standing next to a mute Carney on Monday, the U.S. president blamed his predecessor, Barack Obama, and previous Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for dropping Russia from the alliance over its 2014 invasion of the Crimean peninsula.
“Barack Obama and a person named Trudeau didn’t want to have Russia in. And I would say that was a mistake because you wouldn’t have a war right now,” he said of Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Trump continued that at the time he hadn’t considered Russia or its leader, Vladimir Putin, as the enemy. “There was no concept — if I were president, this war would have never happened.”
Asked if Putin should be invited back to the G7, Trump said: “I’m not going to say he should at this point, because too much water’s gone over the dam, maybe. But it was a big mistake.”
The U.S. leader added that “Putin speaks to me, he doesn’t speak to anybody else because he was insulted when he got thrown out of the G8.”
Carney didn’t respond to Trump’s comments on the Ukraine war or Russia’s expulsion from the G7. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will attend the G7 meeting as a guest on Tuesday.
Contrary to Trump’s claim, it was actually former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper who helped boot Putin from the G8. Several months after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Harper confronted Putin at a private leaders’ retreat ahead of the G20 summit in Australia.
As Putin extended his hand to Harper, the former Canadian leader reportedly responded sharply: “I guess I’ll shake your hand, but I have only one thing to say to you: You need to get out of Ukraine.”
By the time Trudeau came to power in Ottawa in 2015, Russia was out of the G7 alliance. But Trump was correct in claiming that Trudeau was no fan of Putin: Every major party leader in Canada has stood in lockstep behind Ukraine, including Carney, whose Ukraine policies mirror Trudeau’s and Harper’s before him.
Trump also told his Canadian audience that it was “not a bad idea” to have China as part of the G7.
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