Russian President Vladimir Putin lavished praise on US President Donald Trump on Friday, extolling the US leader’s efforts to broker a peace deal in the Middle East and taking a swipe at the Nobel Committee for rewarding figures he said had “done nothing for peace.”
It prompted a quick response from the US President on his Truth Social network, thanking Putin and posting a video of his Russian counterpart’s comments.
“I don’t know whether the current US president deserves the Nobel Prize, but he is truly doing a lot to resolve complex crises that have dragged on for decades,” Putin told reporters, according to Russian state media.
Putin was speaking at a press conference in Tajikistan, where he is meeting with leaders of other ex-Soviet republics to discuss regional development and relations with Moscow amid fears that Russia’s influence is declining in the region that the Kremlin considers its backyard.
Putin also used the appearance to denounce the Nobel Committee for awarding the peace prize to people who “did nothing for peace,” just hours after the announcement that Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado had won the prize for her decades-long struggle for democracy in her home country.
“There have been cases where the committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to people who have done nothing for peace,” he said. “A person comes, good or bad, and [gets it] in a month, in two months, boom. For what? They didn’t do anything at all.”
“In my view, those decisions have done enormous damage to the prize’s reputation,” he continued, arguing that “the authority [of the prize], it seems to me, has largely been lost.”
Putin’s comments, perhaps consciously, echoed remarks Trump made to top US military officers in September that the Nobel Prize would likely be awarded to “some guy that didn’t do a damn thing.”
Putin’s comments came after Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said earlier on Friday that Russia would “support the decision” to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, according to state media agency TASS.
“Thank you to President Putin!” Trump wrote in response on Truth Social just hours after the White House hit back at the perceived snub.
“The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace,” wrote Trump aide and White House spokesman Steven Cheung in a post on X, adding that the US President would “continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives.”
Trump claims to have ended eight wars since taking office, but negotiations with Moscow over bringing the war in Ukraine to a close have stalled.
Speaking on Oct. 8, Trump conceded that bringing peace to Ukraine had turned out to be “maybe tougher” than striking a peace deal to end Israel’s assault in Gaza.
On Oct. 9, Kremlin aide Ushakov contradicted earlier claims by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov that momentum from the August summit in Alaska between presidents Putin and Trump had been “largely exhausted”, describing them as “completely incorrect.”
“We continue to work with Americans based on what was agreed upon between the presidents in Anchorage,” he said in quotes cited by state media agency TASS.
Ryabkov had blamed Europe for bringing negotiations to a halt, saying that the continent wanted to wage a “war to the last Ukrainian.”