UNITED NATIONS, Sept 23 U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he believed Ukraine could retake all its land occupied by Russia and that Kyiv should act now with Moscow facing “big” economic problems, in a sudden and striking rhetorical shift in Ukraine’s favor. But there was no sign that Trump’s words would be matched by a change in U.S. policy, such as a decision to impose the heavy new sanctions on Moscow sought by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as he traveled to New York this week. Make sense of the latest ESG trends affecting companies and governments with the Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter. Sign up here.
“Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, shortly after meeting Zelenskiy on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. “After seeing the Economic trouble (the war) is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” he said. That would ostensibly require Kyiv to expel Russian forces from 20% of its territory, including the Crimean peninsula Moscow has held since 2014, in what would be an extraordinary reversal.
Europe’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, praised Trump’s statements, saying: “These have been very strong statements that we haven’t heard before in such formats, so it is really good that we are in the same understanding now.”
The U.S. president’s tone was in stark contrast to his red-carpet treatment for Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Alaska last month, part of an ostensible push to expedite an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Zelenskiy told reporters at a briefing that he had a “good, constructive” meeting with Trump, declining to go into detail, while praising Trump’s statement on Truth Social as a “big shift.” Zelenskiy later told Fox News that he thought the positions of the Ukrainian and U.S. teams were “closer than any time before,” and that he thought Trump’s position had changed. The U.S. statement criticized Russia, saying it had been fighting “aimlessly” in a war that a “real military power” would have won in less than a week. That, Trump added, made Russia look very much like a “paper tiger”. Addressing the General Assembly earlier, Trump said he was ready to impose strong economic measures if Russia did not end its war, but that allies would have to do the same. He also derided some European powers for continuing to buy Russian oil.