Putin’s aggression against Ukraine started in 2014, with Russia illegally annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and fuelling uprisings in the Donbas region of Ukraine. The Russian hostility led to a stalemate and positional conflict that continued throughout Trump’s presidential term.
During the U.S. presidential debate last week, Trump twice dodged the question of whether he wants Ukraine to win the war against Russia. Instead, he said the war must end. In his video on Friday, which was not distributed beyond the Kyiv conference, Trump repeated that if he wins in November, he would end the Ukraine-Russia conflict quickly.
Trump recorded the video address for the YES conference at the request of former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who attended the gathering. Johnson told the attendees that he was asked to bring Trump to Kyiv for the conference, but “completely failed to do so” and then offered the video instead.
Sullivan, in his remarks to the Kyiv conference on Saturday, said that suggestions that the Ukraine war can be solved “in one day from the outside” are off the mark.
“Anyone, who steps forward and says they could solve the Ukraine war in one day from the outside, you really have to ask whose side are they going to be solving it on,” Sullivan said. “And that I think is something that should be a source of real concern,” he added, saying he was not referring specifically to Trump’s claims.