US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he believed Ukraine could retake all its land occupied by Russia and that Kyiv should act now with Moscow facing “big” economic problems, in a sudden and striking rhetorical shift in Ukraine’s favor that was yesterday met with criticism from Moscow.
However, there was no sign that Trump’s words would be matched by a change in US policy, such as a decision to impose the heavy new sanctions on Russia sought by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as he traveled to New York this week.
“Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, shortly after meeting Zelenskiy on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Photo: Reuters
“After seeing the Economic trouble [the war] is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” he said.
That would ostensibly require Kyiv to expel Russian forces from 20 percent of its territory, including the Crimean Peninsula that Moscow has held since 2014, in what would be an extraordinary reversal.
Trump previously suggested that Kyiv should consider giving up territory in order to make peace, fueling Ukrainian fears of behind-the-scenes talks for a deal that would seek to recognize its occupied lands as legally Russian.
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas praised Trump’s statement.
“These have been very strong statements that we haven’t heard before in such formats, so it is really good that we are in the same understanding now,” she said.
Zelenskiy told reporters at a briefing that he had a “good, constructive” meeting with Trump, declining to go into detail, while praising Trump’s statement as a “big shift.”
Zelenskiy later told Fox News that he thought the positions of the Ukrainian and US teams were “closer than any time before,” and that he thought Trump’s position had changed.
The US statement criticized Russia, saying it had been fighting “aimlessly” in a war that a “real military power” would have won in less than a week.
That made Russia look very much like a “paper tiger,” Trump added.
However, the Kremlin yesterday countered that the Russian economy was stable, despite some problems caused by sanctions, and that Russian forces’ slow, but steady advance in Ukraine was part of a deliberate strategy, with Kyiv, not Moscow, on the back foot.
“As far as we understand, President Trump’s statements were made after communicating with Zelenskiy and, apparently, under the influence of a vision set out by Zelenskiy. This vision contrasts sharply with our understanding of the current state of affairs,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“The fact that Ukraine is being encouraged in every possible way to continue hostilities and the argument that Ukraine can win something back is, in our view, a mistaken argument... The dynamics on the front lines speak for themselves,” he said.
Peskov bridled at Trump’s description of Russia as a “paper tiger.”
Russia was more associated with a bear than a tiger and paper bears do not exist, Peskov told the RBC radio station.
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