Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pointed to President Donald Trump's first term in response to the latter's claim that he could end Russia's war in a day, should he win his reelection bid.
While Russian troops did not embark on their full-fledged invasion of Ukraine until Ukraine 2022, more than a year after Trump left office, Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 — before Trump's term — with fighting occurring since then in the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas.
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“It seems to me that the sole desire to bring the war to an end is beautiful," he told ABC's Martha Raddatz in an interview that aired on Sunday. "But this desire should be based on some real-life experience. Well, it looks as if Donald Trump had already these 24 hours once in his time. We were at war, not a full-scale war, but we were at war, and as I assume, he had that time at his disposal, but he must have had some other priorities.”
Trump has said on multiple occasions in recent months that he would simply end the war within one day of assuming the presidency again, though he has not provided details on how that would be. One possible way to end the war in the short term would be for Ukraine to concede territory currently under Russian occupation in the south and east, though that has long been a red line the Ukrainian government has said it is not willing to cross.
“If we are talking about ending the war at the cost of Ukraine — in other words, to make us give up our territories, well — I think, in this way, [Joe] Biden could have brought it to an end even in five minutes, but we would not agree,” Zelensky said.
During Trump's presidency, he temporarily withheld congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine in an effort to pressure Zelensky to open an investigation into then-Democratic front-runner Biden, an incident that led to his first impeachment in the House of Representatives and subsequent acquittal in the Senate.
The Republican presidential candidates have a wide spectrum of opinions about the United States providing aid to Ukraine and whether they would maintain it should they win in next November's presidential election.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another leading candidate, initially described the war as a "territorial dispute" but backtracked following criticism, while former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott have supported backing Ukraine.
The Biden administration has provided roughly $40 billion of military aid for Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, and with the possibility of the war dragging past next year's election, whoever is sitting in the White House by then may influence the outcome of the war.