President Donald Trump claimed in part two of a televised interview 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 Zelensky’s failure to preemptively capitulate before Russian troops began their attack.
Trump made the incendiary comments in a pre-taped interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that aired Thursday on Hannity’s program.
After Hannity asked about Trump’s threat to impose tariffs as a penalty on Russia if the Ukrainian war continues much longer, Trump responded that 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,” even though it was Russia that invaded Ukraine.
“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 claimed.
He added that had he been in Zelensky’s position he could have “made that deal so easily.” He claimed that it was the Ukrainian leader who decided on hostilities even though it was Putin who ordered the invasion of Ukraine that violated a 1994 agreement. Russia and the United States agreed then 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 baselessly claimed.
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 to initiate hostilities against Russia is absolutely false.
