Trump Urges Allies To Readmit Russia To The G7, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Group Of Industrialized Democracies Still Excluded The Man Currently Invading One

EVIAN-LES-BAINS, France. President Trump used his first full day at the Group of Seven summit to call for the readmission of Russia, the nation absent from the table since 2014, telling reporters that its expulsion had been a mistake and that he would welcome its return to the circle of the world's leading industrialized democracies.

"I'd love to have them back. I think it was a mistake to throw them out," the President said, referring to the decision by the other members to remove Russia from what was then the Group of Eight after it annexed Crimea, a region of Ukraine, in 2014. In the years since, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the rest of Ukraine, a war that was the official reason the summit's host, France, had invited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to address the very same gathering.

The remarks placed the President in the position of lobbying for the inclusion of a government currently at war with a country whose leader had been seated, at France's request, a short distance down the hall. Zelensky had offered to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin alongside Trump and European leaders during the summit, according to a Ukrainian official; the Kremlin did not reply. Trump had spoken by phone with both men in the days before traveling to France.

Readmitting Russia would require the agreement of the other six members, several of whom are actively supplying Ukraine with the weapons it is using to repel the Russian military, and all of whom would first need to conclude that the invasion of a European democracy was not, on reflection, disqualifying. Sources within the administration described the President as genuinely puzzled that an ongoing invasion should affect a country's standing at an economic forum.

The President has called for Russia's return at nearly every such summit he has attended since 2018, a consistency his aides cited as evidence of conviction. He did not specify what Russia would be asked to contribute in exchange for its seat, nor whether Ukraine, the country Russia is invading, might be offered one as well.

At press time, the President had clarified that the only nation whose designs on its neighbors' territory disqualified it from polite company was Denmark.