He added that “any deal, even the worst, would have been better than the one we have now,” referring to the Kremlin’s destruction of Ukraine, which has accelerated with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
“Ukraine is gone, it’s not Ukraine anymore. You can never replace those towns and villages, and the dead, the dead, the dead,” the Republican candidate said. “If we had made a bad deal, it would have been much better. They (Ukraine) would have made some concessions and everybody would be alive.”
Trump has often claimed that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if he were president and has repeatedly promised to negotiate an end to the conflict if he returned to the White House — though he declined to elaborate, and would not say whether he wanted Ukraine to defeat Russia when pressed during the presidential debate with his opponent Kamala Harris earlier this month. and ignored that the conflict has been raging since 2014, including during the entire period when he was President of the United States.
He also threatened to cut off U.S. aid to kyiv and vowed Wednesday that he would not send American troops “to die” in Ukraine.
“They (Democrats) will only be satisfied when they send American children to Ukraine, and that’s what they’re trying to do,” he said. “American parents don’t want their children fighting Ukraine and Russia, and we’re not going to let our soldiers die across the ocean.”
Zelensky, currently in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, is not expected to meet with Trump in the coming days, a campaign official for the former president said.
Earlier this week, the Ukrainian leader visited a munitions plant in Pennsylvania — a key battleground state in November’s presidential election — as part of a tour aimed at drumming up support for kyiv’s resistance to Russia’s war, giving Harris’ campaign a boost and angering Trump’s camp.
The trip to Scranton was criticized by Republican House Speaker and Trump ally Mike Johnson, who called it “short-sighted and intentionally political” and demanded that Zelenskyy “immediately” fire his country’s ambassador to the United States.
