FACT CHECK: Trump Administration and Ukraine – First Week

The new US government led by Republican President Donald J. Trump in its first week in power offered up multiple claims about Ukraine and recent European history and how the Russo-Ukrainian War might be ended.

All of them were highly debatable and many were verifiably wrong, Kyiv Post fact checks of recent administration official’s statements found.

• President Trump claimed: Russia suffered 60 million deaths during World War Two and “helped” the US win World War II.

In a Jan. 22 @realDonaldTrump post, the US President in an appeal to the Kremlin to come to the negotiating table stated, “I love the Russian people… We must never forget that Russia helped us win the Second World War, losing 60,000,000 lives in the process.”

This Trump statement is directly contradicted by historians and archival evidence. Regarding the 60 million figure, widely accepted research by post-Soviet academic Grigory Krivosheev puts the total Soviet military deaths during the conflict at 8.8 million.

Other official sources including the Russian Ministry of Defense have estimated 14 million military dead. Maximum estimates by Russia of civilian losses during the conflict usually range from 15-18 million making Trump’s figures, compared to high Russian-generated estimates, inflated by more than a factor of two.

Trump’s claim that “Russia” suffered losses during World War II is, in addition, highly misleading.

The Soviet Union was a multi-national state in which ethnic Russians were only a plurality.

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Post-Soviet research led by academic Vadim Erlikman, among others, generally estimate that ethnic Russian deaths during WWII suffered about 12 percent of all losses, while the other 88 percent of Soviet war deaths were suffered by soldiers from other ethnicities. Belarussians followed by Ukrainians, Latvians and Armenians relative to total population suffered higher death rates than ethnic Russians.

Trump’s assertion that “Russians” sacrificed the most during World War II negates the sacrifice by non-Russian citizens of the Soviet Union. This negation matches Russian state media messaging that Russia and Russians fought and won World War II.

• Trump administration Chief Negotiator for Ukraine Keith Kellogg claimed: The US could pressure Russia into negotiations on Ukraine by forcing world oil prices to $45/barrel, which would make Russian oil export unprofitable and drastically cut Russian state ability to pay for war-making.

During a Friday interview with the US broadcaster Fox Kellogg said: “What if you dropped that [world oil price] to $45/barrel? Which is basically the baseline, break-even point. That when he [Trump] made the comment yesterday when he was speaking to the people at Davos… That’s how we’re going to finish this thing [the Russo-Ukrainian War] off.”

Kellogg’s statement is highly speculative and assumes a great deal out of the Trump administration’s control, would go in the Trump administration’s favor.

Kellogg’s claim that $45/barrel is the break-even price of oil is misleading. His assertion that the US administration might somehow depress world oil prices to that level ignores the basic facts of world oil markets.

In the US, most industry researchers agree the average break-even price for world producers is between $40 and $70. A Rystad Energy estimate suggested about half of world oil reserves might still be profitable were the prevailing price dropped to $45, but the other half would become unprofitable.

A Statistica.com estimate found that, in the US, were the price of a barrel of produced oil to fall in the US from $78 to Kellogg’s proposed $45, all US new well production – costing between $59-70/barrel would immediately become unprofitable. About 1/3 of existing US production would become either marginally profitable or unprofitable.

The oil price cut suggested by Kellogg would, therefore, devastate both US and world oil production and if maintained it would cut that production by as much as 50 percent. This would deliver a domestic energy policy result directly opposite to the Trump campaign promise of maximizing US oil production and increasing employment, income and profits in US energy companies.

Kellogg’s suggestion the Trump administration might somehow engineer a world oil price reduction  $45/barrel is implausible. By most estimates the US exports only about 9 percent of all oil delivered to world markets crowded with other major players like Saudi Arabia, Russia and United Arab Emirates, and smaller exporters like Canada, Iraq, Norway, Nigeria and Kuwait – all of whom would have to agree to voluntary production (and therefore income) cuts for the Kellogg plan to work.

• President Trump said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was responsible for the Russo-Ukrainian War because in the early days of the conflict Zelensky chose to fight Russian invasion rather than accept a deal.

During a Thursday interview with Fox interviewer Sean Hannity, Trump said: “Putin shouldn’t have done it… He [Zelensky] shouldn’t have allowed this to happen either. He’s no angel. He shouldn’t have allowed this war to happen… First of all ,he was fighting a much bigger entity. Much more powerful. He shouldn’t have done that. Because we could have made a deal. It would have been a deal. It would have been a nothing deal. I could have made that deal so easily. And Zelensky decided that ‘I wanna fight!’“

Trump’s claim Ukraine had a shot at a negotiated settlement in the early days of the war has been repeated by Russian state media frequently. The actual history is different.

Simply put, Trump is conflating a non-existent fair deal with a total Ukrainian capitulation to Russia and the effective end to Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign state.

In April and May 2022 talks were widely reported as in progress between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s representatives with Turkey as the primary intermediary.

Russian terms to Ukraine for an end to hostilities were clearly stated by Russian officials including President Putin and they were brutal: Turnover of Ukraine’s Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions to Russia; reduction of Ukraine’s armed forces to a shell of 100,000 personnel, permanent Ukrainian neutrality; and Ukrainian “forever” commitment never to join NATO nor allow foreign troops on its territory.

As the elected leader of the Ukrainian people, Zelensky had the constitutional and arguably moral obligation not only never to acquiesce to Russian takeover of 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory and the displacement of some five million Ukrainian citizens under Russian police state rule.

Further, in the early months of the war public will to resist Russia was massive, recruiting centers were turning away volunteers.

Ukrainian regular troops along with thousands of volunteers defeated the Russian army’s main effort against Kyiv, and resistance to Russian attacks elsewhere was ferocious, most visibly during the dramatic Russian siege of the Azov Sea port city Mariupol.

Trump’s assertation that a deal surrendering Ukraine to Russia with Zelensky’s complicity, would have been agreed to by the Ukrainian population, implies that Zelensky had near total control of forces resisting Russian invasion, and that if his government had ordered a surrender. Ukrainians doing the fighting would have obeyed.

Arguably, Trump’s error in the Hannity interview is the same as the Kremlin’s was in 2022: He depicted Ukrainian civil society as obedient and subordinate to the political leadership, when in fact Ukraine is a democracy where voters expect the political leadership to execute the majority will.

• Trump in the same interview repeated claims that the US has paid almost entirely for Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Europe has contributed almost nothing. He said American taxpayers have ponied up $200 billion dollars more than European nations.

Trump said: “When he [Zelensky] was, you know, talking so brave, now, two things happened. They were brave but we gave them billions of dollars. The United States spent $200 billion dollars more than Europe. Why did we spend more?”

This is false. In fact, Europe has contributed about 30 percent more than the US. Independent research data and government statements do not support Trump’s $200 billion claim. Going forward, based on that data, US support to Ukraine relative to other states will shift from less to significantly less.

According to the gold standard group Kiel Institute for the World Economy, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the US has allocated €88.3 billion ($92.1 billion) worth of aid to Ukraine while Europe and other Ukrainian allies have allocated €124.7 billion ($130.1 billion).

In terms of promised aid, the US has promised an additional €30.6 billion ($31.9 billion), and other states €115.9 billion ($120.9 billion).

Further, the US halted all aid to Ukraine from late Dec. 2023 through April 2024. Other Ukrainian allies picked up the slack. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly complained that promised US assistance is, in practical terms, on the battlefield, about half of what Washington DC announcements have said it was.

• Trump in the same interview said Russian tank reserves at the outset of the war were about two or three times bigger than they actually were. He went on to claim claimed bullets and flat terrain are the main cause of Ukrainian casualties. In fact, observation by drones and attacks by FPV drones and artillery or mortars are responsible for most Ukrainian casualties.

Trump said: “You know, they [the Russian Federation] had 30,000 army tanks. Russia has 30,000 army tanks. Zelensky had none, practically. You don’t fight those. Now we started pouring equipment, pouring, pouring. And they had the bravery to use the equipment. But, in the end, that’s a war that has to be settled. The field, that’s where it’s interesting. It’s very flat. It’s great farmland. OK? Very flat. There’s no protection. The only thing that’s stopping a bullet, that gets shot, they can go for miles, is a human body. And they’re being hit left and right.”

Independent security information tracking groups placed the actual theoretical maximum number of tanks within the Russian Federation – including hulks left in open fields for up to a half century – at about 12,500 vehicles in 2021, or about 40 percent of what Trump claimed they were.

Ukrainian battlefield performance over the past three years contradicts Trump’s claim that the large number of Russian tanks must have overwhelmed Ukrainian defenses. Ukraine since Feb. 2022 has destroyed between 4,000 and 6,000 Russian tanks according to independent estimates, and 9,876 Russian tanks according to Ukrainian official estimates.

According to accounts by the overwhelming majority of people present at or near front lines, including Kyiv Post reporters, bullets fired by rifles and machine guns are a real but minor threat in combat in the Russo-Ukrainian War. By far, the most common war injury comes from an exploding drone, mortar round or artillery shell after being detected by an observation drone.

Ukrainian medical personnel usually say that around 80 percent of soldier battle wounds are from shrapnel and blast, rather than bullets. Terrain relief – flat or uneven – has little effect on whether someone gets hit, because most attacks come from the sky in the form of an explosive munition or a drone carrying explosives, rather than a bullet flying along a flat trajectory.