The Kremlin said Wednesday it was unfazed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s accusations that President Vladimir Putin was talking “a lot of bulls***” when it comes to Ukraine peace talks.
“We’re fairly calm about it. First of all, let’s just say that Trump in general talks tough, in terms of the expressions he uses,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about the American president’s comments from the day before.
Peskov also sought to portray Russia’s position as aligning with that of Trump, noting his admission during a televised cabinet meeting on Tuesday that resolving the war in Ukraine had proven “tougher” than expected.
“We also heard Trump’s very important statement that the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict turned out to be much more difficult than he thought from the very beginning. This is what we’ve been talking about all along, that it can’t be solved overnight,” Peskov said.
“There’s no disagreement,” he added, saying Trump’s peace efforts are confronting “the very complexity of the problem.”
At the same time, Peskov said the Kremlin still expects to continue talks with Washington on “repairing the badly broken bilateral relations” between the two countries despite Trump’s increasingly critical remarks.
He deferred questions to the White House when asked to comment on a leaked audio of Trump allegedly telling donors at a 2024 campaign fundraiser that he warned Putin not to invade Ukraine or else “I’m going to bomb the sh** out of Moscow.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny this, as much as I’d like to,” Peskov said. “We don’t know whether it’s fake or not.”
He added that “there were no telephone conversations [between Trump and Putin]” during Trump’s re-election campaign last year.
The Trump campaign declined to comment on the reported tapes, CNN reported.
AFP contributed reporting.
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