WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are similar to children fighting on a playground and that more time may be needed before “pulling them apart.”
“Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy. They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled,” Trump told reporters while hosting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office.
“Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart. And I gave that analogy to Putin yesterday. I said, ‘President, maybe you have to keep fighting and suffering a lot’ because both sides are suffering, before you pull them apart before they’re able to be pulled apart.”
Trump didn’t say how Putin responded to the analogy, but revealed that the Russian leader shared plans to further attack Ukraine in the wake of Zelensky’s covert operations over the past week to sabotage warplanes and infrastructure — including an audacious drone strikes to destroy bombers deep inside Russia and a fresh bombing of the Kerch Strait bridge to Crimea.
“He actually told me him and made it very clear, he said, ‘We have no choice but to attack based on that, and it’s probably not going to be pretty,’” Trump said.
“I don’t like it. I said, ‘Don’t do it. You shouldn’t do it. You should stop it.’ But again, there’s a lot of hatred.”
Trump has attempted to browbeat both sides to the bargaining table — attacking Zelensky as a “dictator without elections” in February in a sign of wavering US support before blasting Putin last month for continued bombing of civilian areas of Ukraine, saying he had “gone absolutely CRAZY!”
His remarks about the sides needing to fight it out for longer are a significant evolution from his campaign-trail prediction that he would bring peace immediately by calling the parties on the phone.
