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US President Donald Trump has said that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would have preferred it if his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton would have won the US Presidential election. “Why would he want me? Because from day one I wanted a strong military, he doesn’t want to see that. From day one I want fracking and everything else to get energy prices low and to create tremendous energy. We’re going to be self-supporting, we just about are now. We’re going to be exporting energy – he doesn’t want that,” he said in an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN).
He also said that if Clinton would have been elected as the President, US military “would be decimated”. “So there are many things that I do that are the exact opposite of what he would want. So what I keep hearing about that he would have rather had Trump, I think ‘probably not,” he added.
Talking about Putin and US relations with Russia, he said the two countries might not always get along because both leaders put the interests of their own respective countries first. “He (Putin) wants what’s good for Russia, and I want what’s good for the United States. And I think in a case like Syria where we can get together, do a ceasefire, and there are many other cases where getting along can be a very positive thing, but always Putin is going to want Russia and Trump is going to want the United States and that’s the way it is,” he told CBN.
This was his first major interview after the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany where Trump and Putin met for the first time. He said he had a good meeting with his Russian counterpart. “I think we had an excellent meeting. One thing we did is we had a ceasefire in a major part of Syria where there was tremendous bedlam and tremendous killing. And, by the way, this is now four days,” Trump said.
“The ceasefire has held for four days. Those (previous) ceasefires haven’t held at all. That’s because President Putin and President Trump made the deal, and it’s held. Now, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe as we’re speaking they start shooting again. But this has held unlike all of the other ceasefires that didn’t mean anything,” he continued.
He also emphasised on the need of having a dialogue. “We are a tremendously powerful nuclear power, and so are they (Russia). It doesn’t make sense not to have some kind of a relationship,” he said.
(INDIANEXPRESS)
