Face to Face With Zelensky, Trump Waffles on Providing Tomahawk Missiles

TIME

The U.S.-made missiles, described by Trump as “vicious, offensive, incredibly destructive", can strike targets at least 1,550 miles away and are capable of bypassing heavily defended airspace. Should Trump approve the sale of the highly sophisticated weaponry to Zelensky, military targets in Russia’s two major cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, would be well within range for Ukraine.

Transcript

00:00Well, thank you very much, everybody. It's an honor to be with a very strong leader, a man who

00:07has been through a lot, and a man who I've gotten to know very well, and we've gotten along really

00:13very well. And we had a big call yesterday, as you know, with President Putin, and we'll be

00:17talking about it. President Zelensky of Ukraine has endured a lot. I mean, he really has. He's

00:25endured a lot, and we've endured it with him, to be honest. It's been a long time, and I think

00:32we're making great progress. So we're going to be talking about that today. We'll be talking about

00:37what took place yesterday with my phone call with President Putin, and I think that things are

00:43coming along pretty well. Thank you very much for the invitation. Again, my congratulations with

00:48your successful ceasefire in the Middle East. Thank you. Yeah, and you did it, and I think this is

00:54the momentum to finish Russia's war against Ukraine. I think that, yes, we understand

01:01that Putin is not ready. I think not ready, but I think that I'm confident that with your

01:09help, we can stop this war, and we really need it. We see that they don't have successful

01:16steps on the battlefield, and it's good. I think that the army is weak now, but a lot of losses.

01:22They have a lot of losses in economy and people, and I think this is a very important moment.

01:29And I think it looks beautiful in his jacket. It's beautiful. I hope people notice. It's

01:34a good, it's actually very stylish. I like it.

01:37First of all, I think we need to sit and speak. The second point, we need ceasefire. Even now,

01:45you see in the Middle East, it's very difficult to hold ceasefire. Everywhere, in every war,

01:50it's very difficult. We want this. Putin doesn't want. That's why we need pressure on it. We will

01:58speak with President today what we need. We understand what we need to push Putin to negotiation table.

02:06And as I said previously, so we are ready to speak in any kind of format, bilateral, trilateral,

02:13doesn't matter. Matter, just peace. This is important. The most important thing for people

02:19in Ukraine, which are under each day's attacks, to have really strong security guarantees.

02:27NATO is the best, but weapon is very important. Allies on our side is very important. And between

02:34us, for us, bilateral security guarantees between me and President Trump is very important. I don't

02:43know. We didn't speak with details about it, but this is the most important document because

02:48United States is very strong. What's going to happen if the United States

02:52is in a conflict and we need the tomahawks? Well, that's, that's a problem. We need tomahawks

02:59and we need a lot of other things that we've been sending over the last four years to Ukraine.

03:04We've been, you know, we gave, we gave them a lot. Now we have a different situation.

03:08We sent it to the European Union. They pay for it and all that. And they have plenty of

03:12money. But we, it's beyond the money. You know, we need tomahawks. So we need a lot of

03:18other weapons that we're sending to Ukraine. One of the reasons we want to get this war over

03:22is exactly that. It's not easy for us to give. You're talking about massive numbers of very

03:28powerful weapons. So that's one of the things we'll be talking about. Hopefully they won't

03:33need it. Hopefully we'll be able to get the war over with without thinking about tomahawks.

03:38Of course, we want to finish this war, but the war is another technological war. You don't

03:43use just tomahawks. If you want to target a military goal, you need thousands of drones.

03:51It goes together with such missiles. Ukraine has such thousands of our production drones,

03:58but we don't have tomahawks. That's why we need tomahawks. But the United States is a very

04:03strong production. And the United States has tomahawks and other missiles, very strong missiles.

04:11But they can have our thousands of drones. That's why where we can work together, where

04:16we can strengthen American production.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended