Republican nominee for US presidency Donald Trump has tried to backtrack on what he has earlier stated about Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine.
"When I said Putin 'is not going into Ukraine, you can mark it down,' I meant if he were president, President Vladimir Putin of Russia would not send his forces into Ukraine," Trump said in an interview on ABC on 29 July
"Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?” the interviewer, Mr. Stephanopoulos, interrupted.
“O.K., well, he’s there in a certain way,” Mr. Trump replied, and tried to blame for the crisis in Europe, including Ukraine, on the outgoing US President:
"Whole part of the world is a mess under Obama," he said
"He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want," Trump argued.
In the previous interview, Trump also alleged that Putin has seized Crimea for a reason. “The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,” Mr. Trump said. “And you have to look at that, also.”
Jake Sullivan, the chief policy adviser to Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, said the assessment reinforced his lack of temperamental fitness for the presidency.
“Today he gamely repeated Putin’s argument that Russia was justified in seizing the sovereign territory of another country by force,” Mr. Sullivan said.
“This is scary stuff. But it shouldn’t surprise us.”