US President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, shortly after a meeting in Paris with French and Ukrainian leaders, claiming Kyiv “would like to make a deal” to end the more than 1,000-day war.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed that Moscow and Kyiv have both lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a war that “should never have started”.
“There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed,” he said, as he called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to act to bring the fighting to an end.
Trump’s remarks came after a meeting Saturday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that Zelenskyy later described as “constructive”.
Speaking to reporters later that day, Zelenskyy insisted that any peace deal “should be just” for Ukrainians, “so that Russia and Putin or any other aggressors will not have the opportunity to return”. In a separate social media update Sunday, Zelenskyy asserted that Kyiv has so far lost 43,000 soldiers since Moscow’s all-out invasion on Feb 24, 2022, while a further 370,000 have been wounded.
Both Russia and Ukraine have been reluctant to publish official casualty figures, but Western officials have said that the past few months of grinding positional warfare in eastern Ukraine have meant record losses for both sides, with tens of thousands killed and wounded each month. Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday said Syrian President Bashar Assad has fled his country and his protector, Russia led by Vladimir Putin, “was not interested in protecting him any longer”.
In a post on social media platform Truth Social, Trump also wrote that Russia “lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead”.
He added that “Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success”.
Syrian refugees in Beirut say they want to go home: Syrian refugees in Beirut rejoice Assad’s downfall on Sunday, with some saying they are considering returning to Syria.
“After all these years of suffering, God granted us relief,” Hilal Youssef, a Syrian from Hama, said on Sunday. “We will go back to Syria with pride and joy. We got rid of this army. We got rid of the injustice that we lived before and freed Syria. Now we can go there anytime we want.”
“For sure we want to go back,” said Bilal al Khleif, also from Hama. Refugees will return “to Hama, to Damascus, to Idlib and all areas and chant Freedom,’” he said.