Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have mounted an attack on Ukraine, if Donald Trump had been the US president, most Americans feel, as per a poll, The Hill reported. 

The results of the survey released from the Harvard Center for American Political Studies (CAPS)-Harris Poll showed that 62% of Americans held the opinion that Trump’s presidency would have managed to deter Putin from attacking. 

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As per The Hill, an overwhelming 85% of Republicans subscribed to this view, but surprisingly, 38% of Democrats felt the same way as well. Further, 59% of the voters said that Putin had sensed weakness on part of Joe Biden, which prompted his decision to attack now. However, 41% of the voters were of the opinion that the American president’s weakness hadn’t played any role in Putin’s decision. 

This poll was conducted online between February 23 and 24 and took 2,026 registered voters into consideration. 

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Notably, Biden imposed sanctions on Russia after Putin’s forces entered Ukraine. However, these sanctions haven’t impeded Russia’s actions and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev even claimed that the nation didn’t care about the sanctions. 

Meanwhile, Trump himself spoke at the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, saying that Putin was “savvy” and a “genius”. He took the opportunity to iterate how Russia would have never attacked during his term as president. Trump said, as per AFP, “If properly handled, there was absolutely no reason that the situation currently happening in Ukraine should have happened at all. I know Vladimir Putin very well, and he would have never done during the Trump administration what he is doing now, no way!”

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When asked about what went wrong with the situation in Ukraine, AFP reported Trump blasting off, saying, “Well, what went wrong was a rigged election and what went wrong is a candidate that shouldn’t be there and a man that has no concept of what he’s doing,” Trump said, later adding that an invasion “never would have happened with us — had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened”.