Trump said "Crimea is Russian because its people speak Russian"?

US President Donald Trump (Photo: Getty)

According to anonymous sources of Buzzfeed, President Trump is said to have told the leaders of the G7 that: “Crimea belongs to Russia because all the people who live there speak Russian.” In addition, President Trump is said to have questioned why world leaders often side with Ukraine when it comes to issues related to Russia.

Buzzfeed said the US leader made the above statement while discussing foreign affairs at the dinner within the framework of the G7 summit in Quebec, Canada last week. The White House has not yet commented on this issue.

Earlier, in an interview with Austrian radio earlier this month, President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia would never return Crimea to Ukraine because the peninsula had chosen to join Russia in a free referendum. According to Mr. Putin, Russia was forced to act in Crimea because of an “unconstitutional armed coup” that occurred in Ukraine in February 2014.

The 2014 referendum showed that 96.77% of Crimean voters supported the annexation of the peninsula to Russia, with a voter turnout of 83.1%. Russia's annexation of Crimea was met with strong criticism from the West and Moscow was hit with a series of sanctions.

At the G7 summit, President Trump was criticized when he announced that he wanted to bring Russia back to the bloc, and even called on G7 leaders to support his idea. President Trump said that Russia's presence in the G7 would be better and that the G7 needed Russia at the negotiating table.

The G7 group of the world's leading industrialized nations was founded in the 1970s. The group became the G8 after Russia joined. However, the leaders of the member countries decided to exclude Russia from the G8 in 2014 after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula. In 2017, Russia announced its permanent withdrawal from the G8.