President Donald Trump compared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin to children when asked about a potential meeting between the two leaders.
In an Oval Office interview on Friday with The Daily Caller, Trump responded to questions about his talks with Putin and Zelensky this month to end the war in Ukraine. When asked what he and Putin disagreed about during their summit in Alaska earlier this month, Trump told the outlet that the two of them got along and suggested the war may continue “a little longer.”
“I don’t know. We got along,” he said. “You saw it, we’ve had a good relationship over the years, very good, actually. That’s why I really thought we would have this done. I would have loved to have had it done. Maybe they have to fight a little longer. You know, just keep fighting — stupidly, keep fighting.”
Trump then compared Zelensky and Putin to children fighting on a playground, noting he isn’t sure a bilateral meeting between the two leaders will happen. The president previously said he was arranging for Putin and Zelensky to meet, and that he would join them for a trilateral summit afterward.
“A [trilateral] would happen. A [bilateral], I don’t know about, but a [trilateral] will happen,” Trump told The Daily Caller. “But, you know, sometimes people aren’t ready for it. I say, I use the analogy. I’ve used it a couple of times. You have a child, and there’s another child in the lot, in the playground, and they hate each other, and they start swinging, swinging and swinging, and you want them to stop, and they keep going.”
He continued: “After a little while, they’re very happy to stop. Do you understand that? It’s almost that way. Sometimes they have to fight for a little bit before you can get them to stop. But this has been going on for a long time. A lot of people are dead.”
When Trump met with Putin on August 12, the pair walked away without any signs of a deal to end the war. The Russian president also reportedly demanded that Ukraine cede the eastern Donbas region, which has been partially occupied by Russia for more than a decade.
Afterward, Zelensky and several European leaders — including UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte — met with Trump in the White House to discuss a deal and potential security guarantees for Ukraine.
Top White House officials now believe that some European leaders may be prolonging the war by publicly supporting Trump’s push for peace while privately urging Zelensky to wait for a “better deal,” Axios reports. An unnamed senior European official who was involved in the recent talks told the outlet they were surprised to hear about the criticism from White House officials and maintained that European leaders aren’t playing a game behind Trump’s back.
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. There have been more than 950,000 Russian casualties since the war began, including up to 250,000 fatalities, according to a report released in June by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“That means that Russia has suffered as many as five times the number of fatalities in Ukraine (in just over 3 years) as in all Russian and Soviet wars combined since World War II (covering roughly 77 years),” the report says.
Meanwhile, there have been more than 400,000 Ukrainian casualties, which includes both the wounded and the killed, according to the report.
