KYIV: US President Donald Trump’s trade war and annexation threats have upended Canada’s election and improved the fortunes of the Liberal Party, which could win a fourth consecutive term in power next week.
.S. President Donald Trump said in an interview published Friday that “Crimea will stay with Russia,” the latest example of the U.S. leader pressuring Ukraine to make concessions to end the war while it remains under siege.
“Zelenskyy understands that,” Trump said, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “and everybody understands that it’s been with them for a long time.”
The U.S. president made the comments in a Time magazine interview conducted on Tuesday. Trump has been accusing Zelenskyy of prolonging the war by resisting negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Western European leaders, however, have accused Putin of dragging his feet in the negotiations and seeking to grab more Ukrainian land while his army has battlefield momentum. Crimea is a strategic peninsula along the Black Sea in southern Ukraine. “They’ve had their submarines there for long before any period that we’re talking about, for many years. The people speak largely Russian in Crimea,” Trump said. “But this was given by Obama, not by Trump.”