Photo: EPA
US President Donald Trump said Russia had the battlefield advantage, was continuing to advance and had a far larger manpower pool than Ukraine. He again urged Kyiv to agree to a deal to end the war, warning that the situation could worsen if no agreement is reached.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on October 20, Trump described Russia as a “big machine” that kept grinding forward and had captured a large amount of territory.
“Regardless of how well Ukraine is doing, Russia is moving forward week after week,” he said, arguing that Russia had an effectively unlimited supply of personnel while Ukraine had suffered heavy losses.
Trump said Kyiv needed to take a more active role in pursuing a settlement.
“Ukraine has to want to settle this war. Zelenskyy has to want to settle this war. And if he doesn’t, I think it’s going to be very bad,” he said, warning that the war would “just get worse” without an agreement.
Trump also claimed that tens of thousands of soldiers were dying each month, citing figures ranging from 27,000 to 34,000. He said most of the casualties were military personnel, while acknowledging that civilians were also being killed in attacks on cities. He did not provide evidence for the monthly figures.
The previous day, Trump again accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being unwilling to end the war and suggested that someone else should lead Ukraine’s negotiations.
Trump repeats his account of Russia’s failed advance on Kyiv
Trump also revisited Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, repeating his version of why Russian forces failed to capture Kyiv.
He claimed that a Russian column of around 1,000 tanks could have reached the Ukrainian capital within three or four hours if its commander had not ordered it off the highway and onto waterlogged fields.
“The war would have been over in one day,” Trump said, attributing the failure to Russian vehicles getting stuck in the mud after the route was changed.
Trump has previously said that US-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles delivered in 2018 helped prevent Russian tanks from entering Kyiv during the full-scale invasion.
However, publicly available footage from the early days of the invasion shows a Russian column moving along the M01 highway near the village of Skybyn in Kyiv region. The footage shows no fields, while Russian soldiers can be heard discussing significant losses.
