Fox News cut out Trump saying he might let Russia take over areas of Ukraine as part of peace deal
- Fox News edited out remarks by Trump when it replayed an interview with him.
- In the part excluded, he said he could have let Russia have parts of Ukraine.
Fox News cut out comments by former President Donald Trump in which he said he would have considered letting Russia have parts of Ukraine as part of a peace deal between the nations.
In an interview on Fox News host Sean Hannity's radio show on Monday, which is not broadcast by Fox, Trump revealed how he would try and broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in the wake of Russia's invasion last year.
Trump has claimed he can quickly bring an end to the war as he seeks election again in 2024.
In the interview, he boasted of how Russia would not have dared to launch an attack during his presidency, and added: "I could have negotiated. At worst, I could've made a deal to take over something, there are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly, but you could've worked a deal."
The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona reported that when Hannity played excerpts from the interview later that day on his prime time Fox News show, the part where Trump suggests he may have backed an agreement handing parts of Ukraine to Russia was edited out, with the excerpt cutting out after Trump says "I could've negotiated."
Fox pointed Insider to the fact that the Trump comments were part of a 22-minute radio interview on a separate platform that was edited down to a 2 minute clip as part of the usual editorial process.
Russia annexed swaths of east Ukraine and the Crimea peninsula in 2014, two years before Trump became president, and last year launched a wider invasion aimed at toppling the Ukrainian government in Kyiv.
The annexations and invasion have been condemned as illegal by the international community, and Ukraine says that the only conditions under which it would negotiate were if Russia withdrew from its territory.
Trump last year praised Putin for being "smart" in seeking to invade Ukraine, and declaring large swaths of it "independent" as a prelude to illegally annexing it.
Trump has long drawn criticism for his refusal to criticise Russian aggression, as well as his comments about its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin.
As president, he famously sided with Putin at a 2018 summit in questioning his own intelligence agencies' assessment that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election. He was impeached in 2019 over allegations that he threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless it dug up dirt on his political rival Joe Biden.
For two years, Trump was investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller amid claims he had conspired with Russia to win in 2016. Mueller found insufficient evidence to substantiate the claim.
Trump has also repeatedly threatened to withdraw from NATO, the defense treaty that forms the main Western bulwark against Russian aggression.