Moscow pointed out that US President Donald Trump rightly said that it was a big mistake to exclude Russia from the G-8 in 2014, but that the G-7 is no longer relevant to Russia and the group now seems "pretty useless", reports "Reuters".
At the G-7 summit in Canada yesterday, Trump said that the G-8 was wrong to kick Russia out in 2014 after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine.
"It was a big mistake," he noted and expressed confidence that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine in 2022 if President Vladimir Putin was not kicked out of the leaders' club. He pointed out that Putin "basically doesn't even talk to the people who kicked him out, and I agree with him."
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "We agree with President Trump: it was a big mistake to exclude Russia from the G-8 format then."
In his words, the G-7 has "lost practical significance" for Russia, given the state of world affairs.
"Given the decreasing share of the G-7 countries in the world economy, given all the trends that are observed in the G-7 countries and, of course, against the background of, for example, such formats as the G-20, the G-7 looks stupid and rather useless," Peskov reported.