President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed that the nearly three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine that started when Moscow’s forces kicked off an invasion in 2022 was the fault of Ukrainian President Volodymyr’s failure to preemptively capitulate before Russian troops began their attack.
Trump made the incendiary comments on Wednesday during a pre-taped interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. The president’s remarks aired late Thursday during Hannity’s eponymous program on the right-wing network.
After Hannity asked about Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Russia if the war continues much longer — tariffs that would be ineffective because three years of Biden-era sanctions have brought Russo-American trade to a standstill — Trump claimed Zelensky “has had enough” and “wants to settle” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Zelensky, he said, is “no angel” and “shouldn’t have allowed this war to happen.”
“First of all, he’s fighting a much bigger entity, okay, much bigger. When he was, you know, talking so brave … Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful. He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal, and it would have been a deal that would have been, it would have been a nothing deal,” Trump continued.
He added that had he been Zelensky’s position he could have “made that deal so easily,” and claimed that it was the Ukrainian leader who decided on hostilities even though it was Putin who ordered the invasion of Ukraine and violated a 1994 agreement in which Russia and the United States agreed to guarantee Kyiv’s security in exchange for Ukraine’s government giving up Soviet-era nuclear weapons that had been stored there before the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
“I could have made that deal so easily. And Zelensky decided ‘I want to fight,’” he said.
The president’s contention that Zelensky, with whom he has a checkered history dating back to his first four years in the White House, decided on commencing hostilities with Russia is absolutely false.
Russian forces have occupied parts of Ukrainian territory since 2014, when they seized the Crimean Peninsula on Putin’s orders.
In February 2022, Putin announced what he described as a “special military operation” against Ukraine, which he described as an illegitimate state governed by neo-Nazis. He said at the time that the goal of the invasion by Russian troops was to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine even though Ukraine’s government has nothing to do with Nazism and Zelensky himself is Jewish.
The UN General Assembly and the International Court of Justice have both condemned the invasion and ordered Russian troops to withdraw from Ukrainian territory.
Trump has previously called for negotiations to end the war, most recently on Wednesday when he took to his Truth Social platform to say he was “not looking to hurt Russia” and expressed “love” for the Russian people while boasting of his “very good relationship” with Putin – who in 2016 ordered what the Department of Justice called a “sweeping and systematic” effort to interfere in the presidential election on Trump’s behalf.
Trump also noted that the former Soviet Union lost 60 million people when it allied itself against Nazi Germany and with the U.S. and the U.K. during the Second World War.
“All of that being said, I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE,” Trump said.
The president added a threat that if a “deal” was not reached “soon,” he would have “no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”
“Let’s get this war, which never would have started if I were President, over with! We can do it the easy way, or the hard way – and the easy way is always better. It’s time to “MAKE A DEAL.” NO MORE LIVES SHOULD BE LOST!!!”
Trump has long promised that he would bring the war in Ukraine to an end when he returned to the White House. He frequently said he would end it on his first day, but the war is ongoing. So far, the U.S. has given more than $65 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since 2022.
