O’Reilly: Trump ‘looks at Putin in a different way’

Political commentator Bill O’Reilly on Monday weighed in on President Trump’s recent decision to loosen sanctions on Russia.

When asked by NewsNation’s Leland Vittert about how his perspective differs from the president’s on Russian President Vladimir Putin, O’Reilly said Trump “looks at Putin in a different way.”

The former Fox News host pointed to his 2017 interview with Trump in which O’Reilly said, “Putin’s a killer,” and the president replied, “There are a lot of killers.”

“So Trump is going to deal with you even if you’re a killer,” O’Reilly told Vittert. “He deals with Xi in China, and China commits all kinds of human rights violations.”

The commentator added that Trump “doesn’t have a line” like some of his predecessors.

In the past several weeks, the Trump administration lifted sanctions on Russian diesel and waived sanctions on the country days before they were set to be imposed under a newly signed sanctions package .

These moves drew bipartisan criticism from members of Congress, as well as pushback from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose country has been engaged in a years-long war with Russia.

On Tuesday morning, Zelensky said he spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and had a “substantive conversation” about ballistic missile interceptors, early warnings for Russian attacks and Starlink satellite access .

Rubio told reporters following the call there was “nothing being deliberately denied to Ukraine.”

“It’s simply a balance between our obligations to other partners, and frankly, our own standards and requirements for our own facilities as well,” he continued.

A day before, Trump signaled he was open to a trilateral meeting with Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. His comment followed reporting from The Wall Street Journal that Putin had proposed a trilateral meeting with China to discuss the war in Ukraine.

Trump told reporters Monday that he would not want to discuss Ukraine as much “because Russia, frankly, has been doing fine on Ukraine.”

Instead, the president said he wanted the meeting’s focus to center on “weapons and denuclearization.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha condemned the meeting plans in a statement shared on social media and called for Ukraine to be included in the talks.

“A trilateral meeting between the leaders of Ukraine, the U.S. and Russia could help end the war sooner,” he wrote. “A trilateral meeting between the leaders of Russia, China and the U.S. would do only the opposite: encourage Putin to continue this war.”