U.S. President-elect Donald Trump called the war in Ukraine “carnage” on Monday, citing flattened cities and pictures of corpses, and said it has to stop.
“We’re trying to get the war stopped. That horrible, horrible war that is going on in Ukraine with Russia. We’ve got a little progress. It is a tough one, it is a nasty one,” Trump said at his first press conference since winning the presidential election in November.
“People are being killed at levels that nobody’s ever seen,” Trump said. Referring to Ukraine’s topography, he added: “It’s very level fields, the only thing that stops a bullet is a body. And the number of soldiers that are being killed on both sides is astronomical.”
Trump lamented Ukraine’s destroyed cities and the dead on both sides, claiming the actual losses will ultimately be far higher than both Kyiv and Moscow have so far reported. “Everyone is being killed, it’s the worst carnage that this world has seen since WWII. It has got to stop,” he said, adding his administration would talk with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Trump’s transition team has been working on a plan to bring Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table, and the businessman hinted that both Kyiv and Moscow will have to accept compromises.
“You know it’s nice to say they want their land back, but the cities are largely destroyed,” Trump said, possibly a reference to Kyiv’s demand for the full restoration of its territorial integrity.
He suggested the Russian army may have spared Kyiv because the Kremlin eventually intends to use it or occupy it. “They’ve done a lot of damage but relatively, compared to the other cities, it’s very little. But many of those other cities are gone, those beautiful towers, beautiful buildings that they had are now laying on their sides destroyed,” Trump said.
He also claimed, falsely, that “four years ago we had no wars. You did not have Russia going into Ukraine.” Moscow actually annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and continued its proxy invasion of the Donbas region during Trump’s presidency. Trump, in fact, was the first U.S. president to send weaponry to Kyiv.
Later in his press conference, the president-elect also talked about launching missiles at Syria during his last White House tenure.
At the same time, Trump did not condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and refused to say whether he had spoken to Putin. He claimed, however, that Zelenskyy had told him he wanted peace.
“We’d like to get them to stop on Ukraine and Ukraine stop also,” Trump said of Russia.
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