Russian leader Vladimir Putin is believed to have ordered a portrait of US President Donald Trump and attended a church service following an assassination attempt on Trump’s life last year.
In July 2024, before Trump ascended to the role of the 47th president of the United States, he was hurried off stage during a speech after being targeted by gunfire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Thanks to Trump ‘turning his head’ at the right moment, the bullet only grazed his ear, and the 20-year-old assailant was neutralized by the Secret Service during the incident.
After surviving the attempt on his life, Trump attributed his survival to divine intervention, saying it was God who ‘prevented the unthinkable happening’.
He further expressed on social media: “We will fear not, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.”
Putin, it seems, also considered the divine, commissioning a portrait of Trump and going to church to pray, according to Trump’s chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff.
In a conversation with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Friday (March 21), Witkoff revealed that following the assassination attempt, President Putin ‘commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump, from the leading Russian artist’.
Witkoff noted that Putin ‘actually gave’ the painting to him and ‘asked [him] to take it home to President Trump’.
Witkoff elaborated: “It was such a gracious moment, and [he] told me his story… about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president. Not because he was the president of the United [States]… but because he had a friendship with him, and he was praying for his friend.”
Unfortunately, the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania was not the only one that year.
A second attempt on Trump’s life occurred in Florida on September 15.
While spending an afternoon at his golf resort in West Palm Beach, shots were ‘fired in his vicinity’.
This time, his ear was spared, and a man named Ryan Routh was later charged with the attempted assassination of Trump.
Witkoff’s recounting of the Trump-Putin ‘friendship’ story comes amid ongoing negotiations between Putin, Trump, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in efforts to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, which began over three years ago when Russia invaded on February 24, 2022.