Donald Trump describedRussia 's attack onUkraine as a "holocaust" in a Fox News interview.- It is an abrupt shift from Trump's recent praise for Russian President
Vladimir Putin .
Former President Donald Trump described Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a "holocaust" and urged an end to the fighting there, in an abrupt shift from his recent praise for Russia's president.
In an interview Wednesday with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo, Trump said Russia has to "to stop killing these people" and suggested that a deal could be struck with Russia to stop the fighting.
"We're watching a holocaust. We're watching something that I've never seen before, the way that they're going to go in — they're blowing up buildings with children, with women, with professionals, with people — think of just people," Trump said.
"They're blowing up indiscriminately, they're just shooting massive missiles and rockets into these buildings and everybody is dying."
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 3, 2022
"But they don't respect the United States and the United States is like, I don't know, they're not doing anything about it. This is a — this is a holocaust. This is a horrible thing that's happening. You're witnessing and you're seeing it on television every night."
Trump's comments represent a huge shift, exactly one week since he praised Putin as a "genius" and "very savvy" on February 23.
At that point, Putin had recognised two separatist regions of Ukraine as independent states, as a pretext for overtly deploying Russian troops into Ukraine.
On the following day, February 24, the limited incursion escalated into an all-out war as Russian forces pushed into Ukraine from multiple directions and bombed major cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv.
Even in his Wednesday exchange with Bartiromo, Trump did not criticize Putin personally.
Trump had criticized the invasion already, condemning it at a recent speech at the CPAC conservative conference. In a series of public statements Trump has blamed the Biden administration for the crisis.
Trump claimed that he could have prevented the war if he were still in office, though has given no specifics on how. Ukrainian and Russian delegations began ceasefire talks in Belarus this week, but no agreements were reached.
Trump's relations with Russia and Ukraine were a source of enduring controversy during his presidency.
Russia launched a widespread campaign to help secure Trump's election in 2016, according to US intelligence agencies and multiple independent reports.
Amid unsubstantiated rumors Trump had been entrapped by Russian intelligence, Robert Mueller, a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, in a 2019 report did not find evidence that Trump's campaign had deliberately conspired with Russia.
Later that year Trump was impeached for the first time for pressuring Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to produce dirt on Joe Biden, and cancelling military aid to Ukraine to force Zelensky's hand. He was acquitted after a Senate trial.
Zelensky has been widely praised for his courage and leadership during Russia's attack, and in Wednesday's interview Trump said he had been "very impressed by him" and defended the phone call with Zelensky that resulted in the impeachment.