Most People Believe Putin Wouldn’t Have Invaded Ukraine If Trump Were Still in Office

A majority of American voters believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had former Republican President Donald Trump still been in office, according to a new poll’s results released Friday.

The new Harvard Center for American Political Studies (CAPS)-Harris Poll survey found that 62 percent of respondents think Putin would not have launched an invasion of Ukraine if Trump were still president. Party-wise, 85 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats answered this way, The Hill reported.

Trump himself on Tuesday went public with harsh criticism of the Biden administration, saying that this would never have happened on his watch.

“If properly handled, there was absolutely no reason that the situation currently happening in Ukraine should have happened at all,” the former commander-in-chief said, slamming President Joe Biden’s handling of the conflict.

“I know Vladimir Putin very well, and he would have never done during the Trump Administration what he is doing now, no way!” Trump wrote.

59 percent of those polled said that they considered the Biden administration’s apparent weakness a factor in Putin’s decision to make a move on neighboring Ukraine, while 41 percent said it didn’t factor into the decision-making process.

So far, the Biden administration has imposed sanctions on Russia’s elites and plans to train Ukrainian troops “remotely,” a move critics have lambasted.

The survey, an online sample drawn from the Harris Panel and weighted to reflect known demographics, was conducted between Feb. 23 and Feb. 24. A total of 2,026 registered voters participated. As a representative online sample, it does not report a probability confidence interval, according to The Hill.

The poll’s results come after Biden has faced low approval ratings in recent months, with poor polling numbers on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, skyrocketing crime, and inflation.