It’s one of former President Donald Trump’s most regular claims on the campaign trail: give him the chance, and he’d make sure Russia’s war in Ukraine was over in just a day.
Russia clearly disagrees.
“The Ukrainian crisis cannot be solved in one day,” Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, said when asked about the claim on Monday.
Nebenzia went on to blame Ukraine’s Western allies — naming in particular former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson — for getting in the way of cease-fire talks that took place in Istanbul in April 2022.
Political scientist Samuel Charap and historian Sergey Radchenko, who analyzed those talks closely, have said that the idea that the West forced the negotiations to close is “baseless.”
They also noted that a lot more was on the table during those talks than leaders are willing to consider today.
On Monday, Nebenzia called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent statements — in which he called on Russia to withdraw from occupied territories before negotiations could take place — a “joke.”
Instead, he said that any negotiations would have to take into account what he called “the new reality that emerged during the period between April 2022 and July 2024” — meaning Russia’s territorial gains.
Russia currently controls Crimea and large areas within four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Even if Ukraine were to accept a ceasefire by ceding territory, the negotiations would likely be complex, because Russia does not physically control the entirety of the regions it lays claim to.
In June, Putin also insisted on Ukraine’s demilitarization, as well as the end of its ambitions to join NATO, as conditions for ending the war.
Trump has so far revealed little publicly about how he would achieve the peace he claims to be able to broker.
But many believe it would strongly favor Russia’s interests.
Those attending a November meeting of the right-wing Heritage Foundation heard from former Trump White House aide Michael Anton that Trump’s plan was expected to involve allowing Russia to keep Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, as well as limiting NATO’s expansion, The Washington Post reported.
Anton later told the outlet he knew nothing of Trump’s plans for Ukraine.
Critics have slammed the reported plan as emboldening to Putin and highly detrimental to the US and Europe’s security interests, the Post reported.
In March, following a meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — Putin’s closest ally within the EU — claimed that Trump’s plan was simply to starve Ukraine of further military aid.
The Post later reported, citing an anonymous source, that Trump had never said this to Orbán.
However, the move would be broadly in line with his own urgings of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
Earlier this year, Trump-aligned Republicans held up $61 billion in US military aid for Ukraine, badly straining its ability to hold off Russian attacks.
More recently, Trump has floated the idea of replacing Ukraine aid with loans.
Trump’s claim that he could end the war almost overnight is one of the few areas where Russia and Ukraine seem to agree with each other.
A year ago, Zelenskyy called Trump’s claim a “beautiful” notion, but said it is not grounded in “real-life experience.”
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