President Donald Trump has invited accused war criminal Vladimir Putin to join his “Board of Peace” initiative.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday that Moscow is “studying all details” of Trump’s overture to the Russian leader, and “hopes for discussions with Washington to go over all the nuances.”
If accepted, the MAGA leader’s offer would see the Russian tyrant join a U.S-led group set up to ostensibly “promote stability” and restore “lawful governance” in areas of conflict, with a principal focus on the restoration and reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Bizarrely, news of Putin’s invite came just hours after Trump cited the “Russian threat” to Greenland as a reason for the U.S. to seize control of the Danish-owned territory.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a Putin ally commonly described as Europe’s last dictator, is also said to have received an invitation to join the board, along with several other world leaders. Permanent membership in what Trump described as “the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled” reportedly comes with a $1 billion price tag. Trump hailed it as a “bold new approach to resolving Global Conflict” in the invitation letter sent to Lukashenko.
Putin’s inclusion on the board would mark his return to the global stage as his war against Ukraine rages on, having already killed tens of thousands of people and eluded Trump’s own repeated promises to quickly broker a peace deal.
The Russian leader’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 has since devastated the embattled Eastern European country, itself a U.S. ally.
Throughout his campaign, Trump repeatedly pledged to end that conflict on “Day One” of his second presidency. Twelve months since that deadline passed, however, there’s no end to hostilities in sight.
Trump has also increasingly framed Putin’s Russia as a threat to U.S. security and interests in the Arctic, further raising questions about why he would be invited to join the board.
On Sunday night, Trump took to Truth Social to declare that Denmark, a founding NATO member, had failed to “get the Russian threat out of Greenland,” citing those failures as justification for his bid to annex the autonomous Danish territory.
The U.S. is similarly a founding member of the transatlantic security alliance, which has since the outset of the Cold War served to protect member states from attack by non-member states—principally, Russia.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
