Trump Criticized The Interpreter Who Worked With Him At His Meeting With Putin
- 9.03.2026, 12:59
She allegedly abbreviated the words of the President of the United States.
U.S. President Donald Trump criticized the work of a translator at a meeting "with a very powerful person from another part of the world" at the America's Shield summit in Florida on Saturday. He did not specify who exactly he was meeting with, but almost immediately mentioned Vladimir Putin, The Agency noted.
After addressing the leaders of 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries, Trump devoted several minutes to translation issues. The U.S. president said he was not going to learn their "damn language" and that a "good translator is enough for him."
He went on to describe a meeting with a "very influential person from another part of the world."
"I was talking to a very influential person from another part of the world, and even though I don't know the language, I realized that the translator is not working well. When you say a long, flowing, beautiful phrase and the interpreter - in this case it was a woman - delivers it in about a quarter of the time [that was spent in the original], I think: well, yeah, maybe their language is more efficient, but not that efficient," Trump told me.
Because of the interpreter, Trump said, it can feel like the meeting went well. "Was I good when I talked to Putin today? Was I good when I talked to the president's administration?" - Trump explained.
The US president added that "there was even a case where the translator didn't agree with what we were saying and just changed the translation." "What, is she to be considered foreign minister now?" - Trump asked.
Trump has met with Putin seven times as US president. The first meeting took place at the G20 summit in Hamburg in July 2017. In a photo from the talks, Alexei Sadykov, a senior adviser to the Russian Foreign Ministry's Department of Linguistic Support, sits next to Putin. A male translator also takes a seat next to Trump.
The next time Trump and Putin spoke was on the sidelines of the APEC summit in November 2017.
In July 2018, Trump and Putin met in Finland. During the summit, there was a closed-door meeting between the presidents, where, apart from Trump, only State Department interpreter Marina Gross was present from the United States.
In November 2018, Putin and Trump communicated with each other in France, at the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the presidents "exchanged a couple of words in Paris." Whether interpreters were present during the conversation is unknown.
In December 2018, the presidents spoke on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires. According to Putin, the communication took place "on their feet."
In June 2019, Putin and Trump met on the margins of the G-20 summit in Osaka. In a photo from the summit, Gross is seated to Trump's left. Next to Putin, Russian Foreign Ministry interpreter Darya Boyarskaya is seen in the photo. Later, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham wrote that during the meeting, then-deputy assistant to the U.S. president for national security Fiona Hill leaned over to her and asked if I had "noticed Putin's translator." "She then said she suspected: this was a woman Putin had chosen specifically to distract our president," Grisham wrote.
The only meeting with Putin since the beginning of President Trump's second term took place last August in Alaska. Photos of the summit published by the Kremlin show translator Evgeny Sokol next to the U.S. president, who was repeatedly caught in footage of events involving Trump. Putin was accompanied by Sadykov.
In January, Sokol flew with U.S. presidential negotiators Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner to meet with Putin in Moscow. This was preceded by a scandal involving Whitkoff's participation in the talks with Putin as Whitkoff's interpreter, Natalya Koshkina, the second secretary of the Russian Foreign Ministry's linguistic department, who previously worked in the Russian mission to NATO and appeared in photos with the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, and Putin.