Former President Trump on Monday called for an end to the violence in Ukraine weeks after Moscow launched its unprovoked military attack.
“It doesn’t make sense that Russia and Ukraine aren’t sitting down and working out some kind of an agreement,” Trump, who initially praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as “smart” over the invasion before later denouncing the move as genocide, said in a statement.
“If they don’t do it soon, there will be nothing left but death, destruction, and carnage,” he added.
“This is a war that never should have happened, but it did. The solution can never be as good as it would have been before the shooting started, but there is a solution, and it should be figured out now—not later—when everyone will be DEAD!” the former president also said.
Trump had drawn bipartisan criticism
“They asked me if Putin is smart. Yes, Putin was smart,” he said at a rally last month.
“That’s a hell of a way to negotiate, put 200,000 troops on the border,” Trump added at the time. “That was a big mistake, but it looked like a great negotiation. That didn’t work out too well for him.”
After Putin recognized the separatist regions in Ukraine has independent just ahead of Moscow’s invasion, Trump also called the authoritarian leader “very savvy.” He has appeared to walk back those remarks and has condemned the invasion as “a holocaust.”
Now, weeks into the war, millions of Ukrainians have fled the country and almost 2,000 civilians have been killed in the attack, according to the United Nation’s Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner.
However, the office noted that the actual figure regarding the death toll is likely “considerably higher.”
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