US President Donald Trump said that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, reportedly described the 2020 presidential elections as “rigged” because of mail-in voting.“Vladimir Putin said your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. He said no country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News on Friday.Trump also reiterated his claim that there would not have been a war between Russia and Ukraine, and millions of lives would have been saved if he won the 2020 elections.“And if you have won, we wouldn’t have had a war. You’d have all these people, millions of people, alive now instead of dead,” Trump said in the interview. Following a closed-door meeting with Putin in Alaska that lasted more than three hours, Trump described the talk as “warm” and said that he agreed on a lot of points with Putin and they are pretty close to making a deal on the ongoing conflict.When asked for his advice to Kyiv, Trump strongly urged Ukraine to strike a deal, stressing the imbalance of power between the two countries. “Make the deal. Gotta make a deal. Yeah. Look, Russia is a very big power and they’re not. They’re great soldiers and they have great. But, you know, they also had the best equipment. You know, they had our equipment,” Trump said.Putin has previously said that the “crisis in Ukraine,” referring to Russia’s full-scale military offensive, might not have happened if Trump had been the US president at that time.“I cannot but agree with him that if he had been president, if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020, then maybe there would not have been the crisis in Ukraine that emerged in 2022,” Putin said earlier this year, as per a state TV reporter. Trump also previously criticised former president Joe Biden’s handling of the crisis as “not good”. “I always felt, so when I left, there wasn’t even a chance that this would happen. When Biden got involved, I won’t say whether or not he handled it properly, but obviously it wasn’t good, because the war started,” Trump said.“I think if I didn’t win the election, he would have gotten all of Ukraine. I think he would have taken all of Ukraine,” he added. Trump previously demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to examine the 2020 election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, once again repeating an unfounded claim of widespread fraud.“Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD!” he said through a post on social media. “The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING. A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin!”The cybersecurity division of the Department of Homeland Security declared the election “the most secure in American history,” reported Al Jazeera.
