Trump sides with Putin AGAIN

Jon Sopel (0:02)

This is a Global Production.

Lewis Goodall (0:04)

Mr. President, have you agreed to a trilateral meeting with President Putin and Xi, talk about Ukraine?

SPEAKER_3 (0:09)

No, but I would do it. Not so much for Ukraine, because Russia frankly has been fine on Ukraine, they haven't been doing much. And the same thing with China.

Jon Sopel (0:20)

Yeah, Russia has been just fine, hasn't been doing that much. Apart from the Shaheed drones, the ballistic missiles, the attacks on civilian infrastructure, the attack on civilians, the hundreds of thousands without power, the millions left traumatized. No, Russia really hasn't been doing that much. For the last two years, it's felt that in public at least, European countries, including our own, have been telling ourselves what we wanted to hear, of pretending that Trump was in fact in a place he wasn't. Is that dance possible any longer? Welcome to The News Agents.

The News Agents. It's Jon. It's Lewis. And Donald Trump's comments on Ukraine get ever more angry, ever more infuriated by Zelensky. And his support for Vladimir Putin seems to get ever warmer, ever nicer. No, Russia hasn't been doing much. It's a good country. They're very nice to deal with. Well, when you're doing, Mr. President, exactly what Russia wants, it's not surprising that Vladimir Putin is playing you with kid gloves because he's getting everything that he ever wanted. And I think the question, as you say, Lewis, for European leaders is, okay, what are you going to do now? Because it seems that you can't rely on America, whether that be in terms of the intelligence sharing, access to the Starlink satellites that allow the Ukrainians to put up some kind of protection against the ballistic missiles that are coming in every night from Russia. And, you know, the options are limited, but we do hold an awful lot of Russian money in banks in Brussels and places like that. Are you going to release that to help the Ukrainian war effort? We should talk about that, Jon. We should talk about the different options that might be available. But, you know, we should just take a second to correct the president, not for the first time, but about the historical record. And when I say the historical record, I'm not just talking about the fact that hardly bears repeating, but just for the sake of it, that Russia is the aggression nation here. It's been an aggressive nation since 2014 Since 2014, for the best part of 12 years, it hasn't respected Ukraine's sovereign borders or its right of self-determination. That's the obvious first invasion of Crimea followed by the full-scale invasion in 2022 But just in the last 24 hours, let's take the last 24 hours, Trump says they haven't done much. In the last 24 hours, 14 people have been killed, 71 people have been injured, 12, count them, 12 Ukrainian regions have been with power outages or suffering from power outages, this is the sort of autumn and winter descends. Just to go into some of the details because we talk about these numbers as if they're almost punctuation of daily European life. But just to sort of drill into it a little bit more, in Harkiv, 6 people were killed when a Russian drone struck a public park. Public park, not a weapons factory or a barracks or a military installation, a park.

Six people killed. The president says, not a lot. Victims included young kids. Among them, a one-year-old girl in a push chair. Several other children were wounded. In Kiev itself, three people were killed in an overnight strike on a warehouse facility. In the Kivri region, two people were killed and eight injured in an attack on a factory.

In Kyrgyzstan, 18 were injured, including a child, when Russian forces attacked 36 villages and towns.

And on and on it goes. And that includes 165 drones and other aerial weapons with the Ukrainians shooting down or suppressing 115

That's 24 hours. That's 24 hours in this war that has gone on for longer than the First World War. That the president, out of willful ignorance, because let's be clear, that's what it is, it's willful ignorance. He does not know and he does not care to know the true picture of the humanitarian tragedy, the slaughter that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine because it suits his paranoid fantasies to think otherwise. Well, just listen to him. Just listen to the anger with which he talks about Ukraine, which, let's remember, is the victim in all of this. It didn't start a war with Russia. Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine back in 2022 You know what?

SPEAKER_3 (4:44)

We've given a lot to Ukraine. They've given nothing to us. Remember that.