"They Could Have Easily Taken Kyiv": Trump Details the Origins of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict as He Sees It
Speaking in an interview with Axios, Trump said that Russian forces could have captured Kyiv on the first day of the war and ended it quickly—had it not been for a Russian general who ordered tanks to detour through marshlands, squandering the opportunity.
"It's absolutely unbelievable. The war would have ended swiftly. I don't know if anyone has heard this inside story: At the start of the conflict, Putin sent hundreds of tanks down the highway. It was a smooth, solid concrete main road straight to Kyiv. Traveling at 80 kilometers per hour, they could have reached Kyiv in about three hours under normal conditions—by then, they’d already covered roughly half the distance."
He noted that the Russian military had assembled a massive tank column at the time.
"There was a Russian general—now likely deceased—who didn’t choose to march directly on Kyiv and end the war in one day. This story is unknown to most. He ordered his troops to go through fields and swamps. And just days before the war began, there had been torrential rains—so all the tanks became hopelessly mired in mud."
Trump reiterated his claim that he personally supplied Ukraine with "Javelin" anti-tank missiles, destroying vast numbers of Russian tanks.
"I delivered these weapons to Ukraine before the conflict broke out. People always say I’m soft on Russia, but the truth is exactly the opposite—I’ve taken a very tough stance toward Russia, even tougher than toward China, which is why they respect me. I have decent personal relationships with leaders around the world, but I still provided Javelin missiles to Ukraine, leading to the destruction of countless Russian tanks."
According to Trump, the Russian tanks were lined up in a row and immobilized for days.
"Then the Ukrainian forces were able to attack them one by one. The mud was like quicksand—vehicles couldn’t move at all. If that general had simply followed the concrete highway straight into Kyiv, the Russians could have entered the capital within four hours, and Ukraine would have been powerless to stop them. The entire war would have ended in a single day. This happened over four and a half years ago—a colossal strategic blunder. By choosing a longer route instead of the main road into the city, the general put the entire army at a disadvantage with no contingency plan. Not only that, after so many Russian tanks were destroyed, Ukrainian morale soared."
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1868481148724224/
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