President Donald Trump told conservative radio host Mark Levin on Tuesday that he was optimistic about solving the war between Russia and Ukraine — the latest in a series of peace deals that he has pulled together.
Earlier this month, Trump brokered a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, ending decades of conflict — just one of several wars he has stopped or prevented.
Trump told Levin that his method in peacemaking relied on “instinct, more than process,” drawing on a career of dealmaking to bring conflicting parties together.
“I like doing it — I love stopping the wars,” Trump said.
He noted that he had stopped an escalation between Thailand and Cambodia, whom he said had been fighting, off and on, for five hundred years. “I said, that’s a long time,” he recalled.
Solving the conflict between Russia and Ukraine had proven more difficult than anticipated, he said — made even more difficult, he suggested, by the false accusations of collusion that had haunted his first term. But he remained optimistic that it could be done, especially after the meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week, and the meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders on Monday.
“We’re going to try and stop it, and I think we have a good shot.” He said he would like to see what might happen if Putin and Zelensky met “without me,” in a bilateral conference (as opposed to a trilateral meeting).
He traced the conflict back to the Obama administration, when the U.S. allowed Russia to take Crimea from Ukraine with no resistance. That, he said, encouraged Putin to take more — which, however, he did not do when Trump was president, by the Russian leader’s own admission.
Trump also spoke about how he had worked with Israel’s “war hero” prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to free some of the Israeli hostages from Hamas — though 50 still remain, 20 of them still thought to be alive.
He praised the success of the American pilots who had carried out the successful strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but warned that Israel might have to continue fighting Hamas if it hoped to free the hostages.
“Ultimately, you’re going to have to fight like hell,” he predicted.
Trump said that despite the circumstances that saw him leave office in 2021, he was having a greater impact in his “third” term. “This term … is far more powerful, and I think far more important than the second term could have been.”
He noted the many wars that he had resolved in his first seven months back in the Oval Office — six, by his count, including one unnamed conflict that he said few people knew about.
“Do you know how many people I’ve saved?” Trump reflected, looking back on his diplomatic record. “I’ve saved, like, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of people.
“That’s a good feeling.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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