On the eve of his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump continued to take credit in brokering a ceasefire across global conflicts. In what was evidently a bid to boost his campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize, the American leader stuck to his big claims about playing “peacemaker” between several countries, including the nuclear-armed neighbours, India and Pakistan.
“You know, I’ve solved six wars in the last six months, a little more than six months now,” Trump said ahead of his Friday meeting with Putin in Alaska, during which he sought to diplomatically put an end to Russia’s continued onslaught on Ukraine.
Trump again tries to take credit for India-Pakistan ceasefire
While dissecting what all global wars he’s “solved” since coming back to office for his second presidential term, Trump went on: “If you look at Pakistan and India, planes were being knocked out of the air.”
“… 6 or 7 planes came down. They were ready to go maybe nuclear, we solved that,” he told reporters at the White House.
Trump’s claims about pushing for a ceasefire between India and Pakistan began months ago following April’s Pahalgam attack, which compelled India to take retaliatory action against Pakistan-based terror infrastructure through the Operation Sindoor campaign. Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly rejected the US playing mediator.
“We had said from day one that our action was non-escalatory. No leader in the world asked us to stop Operation Sindoor,” PM Modi previously said.
Trump ramps up Nobel Prize campaign ahead of Putin meeting
His interaction with the reporters was largely focussed on how his upcoming meeting with Putin would go. As he continued to take credit for resolving various global skirmishes, he said that the Russia-Ukraine conflict “never made sense,” and it would’ve never happened if he were president at the time of its commencement. He then went on to call it “Biden’s war,” and not his own, and yet, he was the one trying to “stop the killing.”
Trump highlighted that while he was expecting the Friday meeting with Putin to be a “good” one, he billed a subsequent sit-down with the Russian president alongside Ukrainian leader Zelenskyy and himself, with possibly some European leaders in the midst, as more “important.”
The POTUS described the Russia-Ukraine conflict as the “most difficult” one to solve, contrary to how he initially thought it would be the “easiest.”
“We have one war raging as you know for 37 years, one in the Congo with Rwanda was raging for 31 year… We solved six of them, not just solved them, made peace,” he added before switching over to his comments about India and Pakistan, and then back to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
White House officials on Trump’s Nobel Prize pitch
While White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made her July addresses a lot about pitching Trump forth as a solid candidate deserving the Nobel Prize, another White House official said that the US president already knew that he wouldn’t be getting the honour.
“The president feels that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, but does not think he will get it,” the official said, as per NBC News. “He has remarked that it will go to someone who writes a book about how Donald Trump thinks rather than Donald Trump himself.”
According to Politico, a White House official also candidly divulged that the president was enjoying his position as the global “peacemaker.” They said, “He loves being in the position to be a kingmaker for all of these smaller, weaker countries around the world.”