By Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, clashed repeatedly over Russia, Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine in Tuesday night’s closely watched presidential debate.
Harris told Trump, who previously served as U.S. president, that Putin “would eat you for lunch” and said that, if the Republican were to become president, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.”
She also accused Trump of being ready to abandon Ukraine after 2½ years of war and an immense military funding effort by the U.S.
“Understand why the European allies and our NATO allies are so thankful that you are no longer president and that we understand the importance of the greatest military alliance the world has ever known, which is NATO,” Harris said during the ABC News presidential debate, according to a transcript of the debate.
“What we have done to preserve the ability of Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians to fight for their independence. Otherwise, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe. Starting with Poland,” she said, before describing Putin as “a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”
Trump rejected Harris’ comments, claiming that the war would not have started if he had been in power in 2022 and telling the audience that Putin “would be sitting in Moscow, and he wouldn’t have lost 300,000 men and women” in the war.
Exact war casualty figures are unknown. Neither Russia nor Ukraine release such sensitive information, but U.S. intelligence estimated last year that around 315,000 Russian soldiers — the vast majority of whom are men — had been killed or wounded in the war up to that time.
Trump has repeatedly insinuated that he could cut military funding for Ukraine and would seek an immediate end to the conflict, with officials in Kyiv concerned that the policy would mean it has to cede occupied territory to Russia as part of a deal.
Trump was asked several times Tuesday night if he wanted Ukraine to win the war, or whether it was in the U.S.’ best interests for Kyiv to achieve victory. He responded by insisting that he wants the war to stop in order to save lives, and that he would look to negotiate a deal with Russia. He has previously said he would end the war within 24 hours if he was president, without stating how he would do so.
On Tuesday, he again did not state how a deal would be reached, or whether it would involve Ukraine ceding occupied territory to Russia — a concession that Kyiv has previously refused to make.
“I think it’s in the U.S.’ best interest to get this war finished and just get it done. All right. Negotiate a deal. Because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed,” he said during the ABC News presidential debate, according to a transcript.
“I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly … people being killed by the millions. It’s the millions. It’s so much worse than the numbers that you’re getting, which are fake numbers,” Trump said, without providing evidence or further detail.
Harris said she believed “the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up. And that’s not who we are as Americans.”
The presidential nominees clashed over military funding for Ukraine, a high-profile issue between Democrats and Republicans that resulted in months of gridlock over a $60 billion aid package for Ukraine that was finally agreed in the spring.
To date, the U.S. has provided more than $55.7 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, the U.S. State Department said in a statement last week, since Russia launched what Washington described as a “premeditated, unprovoked, and brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine” on February 2022.
Harris said Tuesday that military funding from the U.S. and Ukraine’s international allies had enabled it to resist Russia’s invasion, stating that “because of our support, because of the air defense, the ammunition, the artillery, the javelins, the Abrams tanks that we have provided, Ukraine stands as an independent and free country.”
Trump on Tuesday again repeated his much-stated position that the U.S. should not be paying more than its European partners to support Ukraine, nor paying more into the NATO alliance, as Europe was “a much bigger beneficiary to getting this thing done than we are.”
“They [Europe] should be forced to equalize. With that being said, I want to get the war settled. I know [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy very well, and I know Putin very well. I have a good relationship [with them],” Trump said.
Early Wednesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described Trump and Harris’ debate as a spectacle.
“To be honest, I don’t know why you think that’s big news,” the official told Sputnik Radio when asked to comment on the debate, according to Russian state news agency Tass.
“Is that big news that we could see yet another show performed by people who clearly take no responsibility whatsoever for their words?” she asked rhetorically.
Ukraine has not publicly commented on the Harris-Trump debate and has been careful to avoid taking sides ahead of the election, wary of alienating either political camp and the future president.
The Kremlin said Wednesday that it didn’t like the way Putin’s name featured in the debate and said, “the U.S. as a whole, whichever party the candidates may be from, preserves its negative, unfriendly attitude to our country.”
“Putin’s name is used as, so to say, one of the tools for the internal political struggle in the U.S. We really, really do not like that. We still hope they will leave our president’s name alone,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, in comments translated by NBC News.
“The rest, I think, is a matter of concern for the U.S. voters. It is up to them to assess the actions of their candidates – not up to us, we have our own matters of concern, our own achievements and our own problems,” he added.
