Russian President Vladimir Putin said today that the criminal charges against former US President Donald Trump are about revenge and that the Republican is the victim of “political persecution” over his decision to run for re-election. in the Presidency of the United States in 2024. election against Joe Biden, the current Democratic president.
“This is a politically motivated pursuit on the part of your competitor,” Putin told a plenary session of the Eastern Economic Forum in the eastern city of Vladivostok, saying that at some point it was “good” that the accusations were brought forward. , because they show “the perversity of the American system, which does not pretend to teach the lessons of democracy to others.”
“Everything that happened to Trump was to persecute a political opponent for political reasons. That’s it. And they did it in front of the people of the United States and the whole world,” said Putin.
Trump presented his candidacy on November 15, 2022, before the rest of his competitors in the Republican Party, with him comfortably ahead in the primaries, according to polls.
However, in 2024 he will have to carry out his campaign towards the November elections amid several trials against him in the United States for conspiracy, for allegedly being behind the attack on the Capitol in January 2021, and for alleged fraud in presidential election in 2020 in a state in the southeast of the country and pleaded “not guilty” in the first hearings in August.
He will also face trials in New York for allegedly paying a former porn actress to hide an affair and for taking classified documentation with her after she left the White House.
The former US president, for his part, criticized that all these accusations are part of a “witch hunt” against him to prevent him from running.
Trump is the favorite for the Republican Party elections, which will be held between January and June 2024 and the run-up to the presidential elections in November next year.
Regarding the war between Ukraine and Russia, the magnate said that he could resolve the conflict “in a few days” if he becomes a tenant of the White House again, however, he did not give details of his plan.
On the other hand, Putin stated that he does not expect the US policy towards Russia to change, no matter who wins next year’s presidential election, because he believes that the current authorities in Washington have put “an anti -Russian sentiment in American society.”
“I don’t think there will be fundamental changes in the direction of US foreign policy regarding Russia, regardless of who is elected president,” he said.
In addition, he also rejected accusations of closeness between Trump and Russia, which he called “absolutely absurd,” and pointed out that the former president increased sanctions against Moscow when he was in the White House.
