The president of the United States, Donald Trump, said that former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau led the effort that Russia retired from the G8, despite the fact that the decision took place more than a year before Trudeau came to power.
Talking together with the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, in an event of the World Cup in Washington on Tuesday, Trudeau and former US president Barack Obama “did not like” having Russia in the G8 and in a “silly decision” took him out of the group.
“I thought it was a very bad decision,” he said. “He was headed by Trudeau, by the way, and Obama, they were the ones who really fought hard to get Russia … and that’s why millions of people are dying.”
After meeting with Trump in the White House that day, Prime Minister Mark Carney told the journalists of the Canadian embassy that the president of the United States will attend the G7 summit, Canada will be the host from June 15 to 17.
“We agreed to have more conversations in the coming weeks and we are eager to gather in person at the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta,” Carney said from the roof of the embassy.
Russia guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ukraine into the 1994 Budapest memorandum, and Charania agreed to renounce the nuclear arsenal that inherited when the Soviet Union broke.
Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper repeatedly criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin for violating that agreement when he took care of Crimea in early 2014.
During a trip to Ukraine in March of that year, Harper said that Russia was expelled from the G8 for its annexation of Crimea weeks before.
“It’s not a good time now,” Readmit to Russia, says Trump
Days after that visit, Harper and the other six leaders of the group broadcast The Hague DeclarationAnnouncing that they would celebrate their own summit in Brussels in June 2014, instead of going to the G8 summit, Russia was organizing in Sochi, effectively killing G8.
“We will suspend our participation in the G8 until Russia changes the course and the environment returns to where the G8 can have a significant discussion,” said the statement.
Earlier this year, Trump said he wanted to see Russia readmitted to G7 so that the country could attend the Kananaskis summit.
“I would love to have them back” Trump said in February. “I think it was a mistake to throw them out. Look, it is not a matter of like Russia or not like Russia. It was the G8.”
He asked Tuesday again at the World Cup event if he was still in that position, Trump said: “It’s not a good time now … We missed that door, we didn’t.”
The president said that there would have been a diplomatic advantage of having Putin around table G8 where other leaders could have been “hammering and saying that we did not do this.”
“If it were the G8, if Russia were in it, I think you would probably not have this ridiculous and mortal war at this time,” Trump said.
