Zero collusion will soon be followed up by zero conspiracy, in Trump’s lexicon of mantras.
BREAKING NEWS: If this Bloomberg report is accurate, Trump secretly agreed to consider giving Crimea to Putin via a sham "vote" (which would in effect be giving his blessing to a war crime) and then conspired with him to hide that agreement from America's voters and elected reps. https://t.co/u0q4Ivkozm
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) July 20, 2018
Vladimir Putin told Russian diplomats that he made a proposal to Donald Trump at their summit this week to hold a referendum to help resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine, but agreed not to disclose the plan publicly so the U.S. president could consider it, according to two people who attended Putin’s closed-door speech on Thursday.
Details of what the two leaders discussed in their summit in Helsinki, Finland, remain scarce, with much of the description so far coming from Russia. While Putin portrayed the Ukraine offer as a sign he’s seeking to bring the four-year-old crisis to an end, a referendum is likely to be a hard sell with Ukraine and its backers in Europe, who remain committed to an 2015 European-brokered truce deal for the Donbas region, parts of which are controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
Putin gave his latest account of the meeting during at a conference with top Russian ambassadors and officials at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing the president’s comments to the part of the session that was closed to the public.
Putin’s proposal would call for a vote conducted under international auspices by the residents of the separatist territories on their status, the people said. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the details of what Putin said about Ukraine at the summit, saying only, “Some new ideas were discussed. They will be worked on.”
On Twitter Thursday, Trump called the summit “a great success” and cited Ukraine among the areas discussed, without providing details.
Putin tried this in 2014, when referendums were held in Donetsk and Luhansk, so called rebel republics. On that occasion the votes were rejected as illegal by the U.S. and the European Union, while Ukraine called them a “farce.” Russia, however, said it “respects” the votes, which makes sense since they showed 96 percent support for breaking away from Ukraine. Putin always respects the votes cast in a rigged election, why shouldn’t he? And he loves to destablize regions and countries, just look at what he’s doing with this one.
We really need to get the transcript of that summit. It’s getting to be a drag having to rely on word from anonymous sources or the Voice of America, which is where we found out that John Bolton was spending the 4th of July in Moscow.
