President Donald Trump said Thursday that he expected the war in Ukraine would be the “easiest” war to solve — an acknowledgement that his appeals to Russian President Vladimir Putin have yet to bear fruit.
“I’m very honored to tell you that we’ve solved seven wars,” Trump said during a joint press conference with the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “The one that I thought would be easiest would be because of my relationship with President Putin — but he’s let me down, he’s really let me down — was going to be Russia and Ukraine, but we’ll see how that turns out.”
The president has framed himself as a peacemaker, even floating the idea of receiving a Nobel Prize, but has struggled to bring an end to wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
He once framed the Ukraine war as relatively simple: Trump promised in his campaign that he would end the war before he even took office. After that deadline passed, he signaled a resolution was on the horizon. Despite some negotiations appearing promising, the war is still ongoing, leaving Trump’s party to try to make sense of his strategy.
While Trump acknowledged he hadn’t ended the war, he repeated a familiar line that he could have prevented it: “This was a thing that would have never happened had I been president.”
Trump said that Russian soldiers are being killed at higher rates than Ukrainian soldiers, and that the war doesn’t affect the United States, “unless you end up in a world war over this thing, you could.” But he still seems determined to bring about a conclusion.
“The soldiers are being killed at levels nobody’s seen since the Second World War,” Trump said. “And I feel I have an obligation to get it settled for that reason.”
Trump has similarly suggested an end to Israel’s war in Gaza was in sight, only to have the conflict continue. Starmer said that earlier in the day, he and Trump privately assessed the war in Gaza and the return of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, among other global affairs.
“We absolutely agree on the need for peace and a roadmap, because the situation in Gaza is intolerable. The hostages have been held for a very, very long time, and they must be freed, and we need aid to get into Gaza at speed,” Starmer said.
Trump pushed back on a reporter’s question about his own influence over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, focusing on the Israeli hostages and Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Trump said getting the hostages back would “certainly help” in influencing Netanyahu to end the war, “but I have to have the hostages back.”