Trump boasts that he threatened to "bomb the shit out of Moscow" if Putin invaded Ukraine.

BarcelonaDonald Trump claimed that during his first term, he warned Vladimir Putin that if Russia invaded Ukraine, he would "bomb the hell out of Moscow." This is revealed in a leaked audio recording, recently released by CNN, in which the former US president boasts of having made the threat during a private dinner with donors before last year's presidential elections. "I told Putin, 'You go into Ukraine, I will bomb the hell out of Moscow. I have no choice,'" Trump says in the recording. According to the president, the Russian leader responded with disbelief, but ultimately "believed me 100%."

Trump also claims he made a similar warning to Chinese President Xi Jinping if Beijing tried to invade Taiwan. He said Xi warned that he would bomb Beijing and called the Chinese leader "crazy," but he added, "we never had a problem."

The audio is part of the material collected by two journalists for a book about Trump's return to the White House. The former president has often repeated these kinds of stories in public, claiming that during his time in office he avoided wars and that, had he won the 2020 election, the conflict in Ukraine "would never have broken out." Recently, at the G-7 summit in Canada, he reiterated: "If I had been the president, this war would never have happened."

Last October, in an interview on the Wall Street JournalDonald Trump already explained that he had warned Putin: "I will hit you directly in the center of Moscow. We are friends, I don't want to do it, but I will have no choice." According to him, Putin reacted with incredulity, but he insisted. From this perspective, the audio confirms statements that, at the time, seemed like just another of the tycoon's stretch bots.

However, Donald Trump has become increasingly frustrated by his inability to make progress in the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu continues his visit to the United States without, so far, any explicit announcement of a truce in Gaza.

Yesterday, Tuesday, during a meeting of his government, Trump also harshly attacked Putin: "I am not happy with him at all, he is killing a lot of people." And he accused him of talking nonsense during their direct talks, while warning that he was considering imposing new sanctions on Moscow after the US Senate introduced a bill to increase sanctions against Russia.