Former U.S. President Donald Trump said during the 2024 presidential debate on Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin would never have invaded Ukraine if he had remained in office.
Among other factors, Trump said Putin was emboldened by President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden countered by accusing Trump of being too willing to make a deal with the “war criminal” Putin to end the conflict.
“If we had a real president — a president that was respected by Putin — he would have never invaded Ukraine,” Trump said.
“A lot of people are dead right now, much more than people know. They talk about numbers. You can double those numbers, maybe triple those numbers,” Trump said of the casualties from the Ukraine war.
Trump said Biden did “nothing to stop it.”
“In fact, I think he encouraged Russia from going in,” Trump continued. “I’ll tell you what happened. He was so bad with Afghanistan, it was such a horrible embarrassment — the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country — that when Putin watched that, and he saw the incompetence — he should have fired those generals like I fired the one that you mentioned, so he’s got no love lost.”
This was a sarcastic aside to Biden for his earlier criticism about Trump having a tempestuous relationship with his defense secretary, Gen. Jim Mattis.
“No general got fired for the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan,” Trump continued. “Where we left billions of dollars of equipment behind, we lost 13 beautiful soldiers, and 38 soldiers were obliterated. And by the way, we left people behind too. We left American citizens behind.”
“When Putin saw that, he said, ‘You know what? I think we’re going to go in,’” Trump said. “This was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream. The difference is, he never would have invaded Ukraine, ever, just like Israel never would have been invaded in a million years by Hamas.”
“You know why? Because Iran was broke with me. I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for anything. They had no money for terror. That’s why you had no terror at all during my administration. This place, the whole world is blowing up under him,” Trump concluded.
It is difficult to argue that Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was anything but a disaster, although Biden certainly tried. Trump was fundamentally correct about the American casualties. A suicide bomb attack on the Kabul airport on August 26, 2021, that was later claimed by the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan (known as ISIS-K) killed 13 U.S. service members, as Trump indicated. His comment about “38 soldiers obliterated” was probably a reference to the Taliban shooting down a U.S. Special Forces helicopter in August 2011, during the second term of the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president.
As Trump said, Biden left $7.2 billion in U.S. military equipment behind in Afghanistan for the Taliban to capture, a figure confirmed by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR).
Trump was also correct that Biden rescinded the sanctions Trump restored on Iran after he pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal. Biden’s enforcement of sanctions against Iran became very relaxed — dangerously so, according to critics like Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA).
Biden controversially unfroze $6 billion in Iranian assets in August 2023, insisting the money rightfully belonged to Iran and measures would be put in place to keep Iran from using the funds to sponsor terrorism. Those assurances were very unconvincing to skeptics who pointed out that even if Iran spent every nickel of the money on food and medicine, it would now have $6 billion freed up to spend on more nefarious activities.
“I’ve never heard so much malarkey in my life,” Biden said in response to Trump’s criticism:
Look, the fact of the matter is, we’re in a situation where — take the last point first — Iran attacked American troops, caused brain damage for a number of these troops, and he did nothing about it — not when he was president. Here they attacked, he said they’re just having headaches, that’s all it is, and he didn’t do a thing when the attack took place.
Iran launched a missile attack on the al-Asad military base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, in retaliation for the U.S. airstrike that killed terrorist mastermind Gen. Qassem Soleimani at the airport in Baghdad.
Both the Pentagon and then-President Trump initially said there were no American casualties from the attack, but later, the Pentagon said an increasing number of service members present during the attack complained of concussion symptoms from the missile blasts.
The number of reported concussion injuries eventually increased to 109, of which about 70 percent were able to return to duty within a month.
Biden’s criticism was exceptionally risky and disingenuous because the exact same thing happened under his watch. When Iran used its proxy militia to attack American targets in Iraq due to the Gaza war last year, no casualties were initially reported, but later U.S. service members complained of concussion-like symptoms. The number of these complaints soon grew to double what the Pentagon initially reported.
Some of the missiles launched by Iran’s proxies targeted the very same al-Asad airbase in western Iraq. Biden was strongly criticized for his remarkably slow and weak response to these attacks. Biden did not order retaliatory strikes until Iran’s proxy forces managed to kill three U.S. troops with a missile and drone attack against an outpost in Syria.
“Number two, we got over a hundred thousand Americans and others out of Afghanistan during that airlift,” Biden said, repeating a talking point he has been using ever since the Afghanistan debacle. Biden has frequently insisted he deserves credit for getting so many people evacuated so quickly.
“Point three, we found ourselves in a situation where, if you take a look at what Trump did in Ukraine, this guy told Trump, ‘Do whatever you want. Do whatever you want,'” Biden claimed, “And that’s exactly what Trump did to Putin, encourage him.”
Biden frequently confused his words during the debate and this was one example, as he clearly meant that Trump supposedly told Putin to do whatever he wants. He did not offer any evidence of Trump having such a conversation with Putin.
“Listen to what he said when he went in,” Biden continued, speaking of Putin. “He said we’re going to take Kyiv in five days. Remember, because it’s part of the old Soviet Union. That’s what he wanted to re-establish. Kyiv.”
“He in fact didn’t do it at all. He wasn’t able to get it done. And they’ve lost thousands and thousands of troops. Five hundred thousand troops,” he said.
This was a difficult criticism for Biden to land, since Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, long after Donald Trump left office. If he was motivated by Trump supposedly telling him to do whatever he wanted, he waited a rather long time to do it.
Russia’s total losses in the Ukraine invasion are a matter of much debate. Biden’s 500,000 figure was roughly consistent with European estimates of the total dead and wounded, with about 150,000 of them fatalities. Ukraine claims about 509,000 Russian casualties with 180,000 dead.
Trump denied telling Putin he could have his way with Ukraine and he said the terms suggested by Putin for a ceasefire — including Russia keeping much of the Ukrainian territory it has occupied and Ukraine vowing never to join NATO — were “not acceptable.”
“This is a war that never should have started,” Trump insisted. “If we had a leader in this war — he led everybody along. He’s given $200 billion or more to Ukraine. That’s a lot of money. I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it.”
“Every time Zelensky comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion,” Trump said, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “He’s the greatest salesman ever. And I’m not knocking him. I’m not knocking anything. I’m only saying the money that we’re spending on this war, and we shouldn’t be spending — it should have never happened.”
“I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelensky as president-elect, before I take office on January 20. I’ll have that war settled,” Trump promised.
“People being killed, so needlessly, so stupidly. I will get it settled. I will get it settled fast, before I take office,” he repeated.
“The fact is that Putin is a war criminal,” Biden responded. “He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: he wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet empire. Not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine. That’s what he wants.”
“And then you think he’ll stop there?” Biden continued. “You think he’ll stop if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think happens to Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries?”
Putin is indeed a war criminal, although his outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) is not so much for killing people as for kidnapping Ukrainian children.
It will pain President Biden to learn that something very bad has already happened to Belarus, which is ruled by a brutal dictator named Alexander Lukashenko who is absolutely loyal to Vladimir Putin. Lukashenko has said he is ready to join Putin in a war against NATO, and he claims Russia has moved some of its nuclear arsenal into his territory.
“So if you want a war, you ought to find out what he’s gonna do, because if in fact he does what he says and walks away — and by the way, all that money we give Ukraine is for weapons we make here in the United States. We give them the weapons, not the money, at this point,” Biden said.
The weapons currently being sent to Ukraine are drawn from the U.S. military’s inventory, not ordered from American manufacturers in a manner that creates U.S. jobs and income, as Biden implied. This approach was deemed necessary by the Pentagon to get weapons to the Ukrainian front line quickly. Tensions between the U.S. and Russia are rising sharply as Ukraine makes use of these advanced American weapons.
“Our NATO allies produced as much funding for Ukraine as we have. That’s why we’re strong,” Biden said.
This is not true, although the numbers are fairly close on the titanic scale of government spending. NATO’s target for Ukraine funding this year is $42 billion, while the U.S. has committed over $60 billion. More worrisome is that some NATO countries are balking at maintaining this level of spending in the future.