Fox News host Jesse Watters has claimed that Ukraine should give Russian President Vladimir Putin a large chunk of its land — because "borders change all the time".
Discussing President Donald Trump's diplomatic summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday evening, the conservative commentator cited the changing borders of Germany and the U.S. over the past few centuries as proof that Ukraine should accept territorial dismemberment.
"How are you gonna get Vladimir Putin to relinquish the land he won in battle?" Watters said. "The United States won lands in battle. We didn't just give it back.
"No country gives back land they win in battle. That's what this is all about. You have to accept reality and that's what these Democrats aren't doing."
"Borders change all the time! Think about Germany: it used to be the Prussian Empire, then it was the German Empire. It expanded, it contracted in the world wars. Then they divided it in two, and now it's reunited.
"And they can't do this to Ukraine? Come on, that's ridiculous."
After suffering an estimated one million casualties and killing tens of thousands of civilians since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia continues to demand that Ukraine formally cede control of the strategically crucial Crimean peninsula and the former industrial heartlands of the Donbas region.
Both areas have been under Russian occupation since 2014, and Trump has said that Zelensky could end the war "almost immediately" if he simply accepted that there was "no getting back" Crimea.
But Zelensky has repeatedly ruled that out, arguing that allowing Russia to retain control of captured territory back in 2014 only made it easier for Russia to attack again in 2022, rather than settling the matter.
Monday’s summit was more successful — and far less chaotic — than Zelensky’s last meeting with Trump in February, with both men vowing to take part in trilateral peace talks with Russia.
Still, other Fox News anchors were less impressed by the meeting which saw European leaders fly to Washington D.C. in a show of solidarity with Zelensky.
“It certainly was an impressive display,” said the cable network’s chief political analyst Brit Hume on Monday evening. “Perhaps even a historic display of U.S.-European unity, at least in these recent years.”
But he also noted that Russia had strongly rejected any notion of the U.S. or other allied nations sending a peacekeeping force to Ukraine to enforce a truce.
“They would have to give some real ground there in order to change Russia’s mind about that,” Hume said. “And I think it suggests that the path toward a final deal here may be some considerable ways off, as much as the president, who always likes to have things done quickly, as we hear him say, would like this to happen on a fast track.”
It's true that the U.S. itself acquired its current borders partly through military conquest, seizing vast swathes of territory from native American nations and capturing Puerto Rico and Guam from the Spanish Empire.
The Fox News studio, for instance, is in New York City, which was the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people until it was forcibly taken by European settlers.
Other territories, though, have been relinquished, such as the Philippines or the U.S.-occupied zone of Germany after the Second World War.
Russia's borders have changed enormously too, from annexing Siberia over the course of the 16th to 18th centuries to losing control of Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, and other areas of eastern Europe and central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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