Donald Trump says the former US president could end the war between Russia and Ukraine in a day if …

Former US President Donald Trump often claimed that he could resolve the conflict between Russia and Ukraine within a day if he were re-elected. Russia’s UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzia, on the other hand, stressed that the Ukraine crisis could not be resolved within 24 hours.

“Russians and Ukrainians are dying. I want them to stop dying. And I will do it – I will do it in 24 hours,” Trump said at a CNN town hall meeting in May 2023. He repeated this claim repeatedly during the US presidential election campaign.

During the debate with President Joe Biden last week, Trump claimed that Vladimir Putin would never have attacked Ukraine if the United States had a real president respected by his Russian counterpart.

“If we had a real president, a president who knew what he was doing – who was respected by Putin… he would never have attacked Ukraine,” Trump claimed, as quoted AP.

Nebenzia mentioned that the war could have ended during the Istanbul talks in April 2022, when Russia and Ukraine were “very close” to reaching an agreement.

Moscow had invaded Ukraine two months earlier, on February 24, 2022. However, Russia claims that its “special military operation” began in 2014 following conflicts in eastern Ukraine that led to Moscow’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula.

The Russian ambassador accused Ukraine’s Western allies of blocking the April 2022 peace agreement and pushing Kyiv to continue its fight against Russia.

He noted that Zelensky is now “walking around with his so-called peace plan, which is not a peace plan, it is a joke.” At a meeting in Switzerland last month, nearly 80 countries supported the idea that Ukraine’s “territorial integrity” should be the basis of any peace deal to end the war.

However, some major developing countries did not support this, and Russia did not attend the conference. Nebenzia highlighted Putin’s offer on June 14 to “immediately” order a ceasefire in Ukraine and start negotiations if Kyiv withdraws its troops from the four regions annexed by Moscow in 2022 and abandons its plans to join NATO.

After Russia’s large-scale invasion, Ukrainian forces managed to halt their advance towards the capital. The main fighting was concentrated in the south and east of Ukraine, where Moscow illegally annexed four regions, over which it does not have full control.

Ukraine is still struggling to stabilize parts of its front line, largely due to the delayed arrival of crucial military aid from the United States, which was only approved in April, several months later. Russia took advantage of this lack of Ukrainian weapons to launch an offensive and achieved significant success.

Nebenzia dismissed Zelenskyy’s peace proposal as “unworkable” and urged him to be “realistic” and take into account developments since April. He warned that the deteriorating situation on the ground in Ukraine makes it increasingly difficult to reach a diplomatic solution to end the war.

(With AP inputs)