Fact check: Trump falsely claims no other president has ever ended a war

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump made multiple false claims to the press during a Friday meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House – including a long-debunked claim about the war in Ukraine.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine

Trump repeated his previous fake history about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, saying that Russia failed to win the war in a mere week because it decided to invade through muddy ground rather than simply using highways.

“They got stuck in the mud. They would’ve been in Kyiv very quickly. They were heading to Kyiv,” adding moments later, “That was a very interesting moment. When the tanks started rolling and some brilliant general said, ‘Let’s go through the mud instead of going down the highway.’ Right? So they got a little bit lucky.”

This is not what happened, as military analysts and various Ukrainians have pointed out since the president began making similar claims earlier in the year. In reality, Russia tried and failed to make it to Kyiv using roads and highways. Its tanks were thwarted by fierce Ukrainian resistance and logistical problems in addition to muddy conditions.

“Russian forces used roads and highways as much as possible during the initial invasion, and took heavy losses on many of them. Russian tanks did get stuck in the mud during the initial invasion, but this was often after they struggled to advance along roads,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program who has closely followed military tactics during the war. “One of the factors that hindered Russia’s invasion is that there were not many good highways and roads leading from Belarus to Kyiv, which canalized their forces.”

When CNN asked the White House for comment in August, an official responding on condition of anonymity noted that Russian tanks did get stuck in mud during and even before the invasion. The official provided links to some articles that mentioned this happening.

But even one of those articles clearly contradicted Trump’s claims that Russia didn’t make it to Kyiv because it chose not to use highways. The article said, “The Russians invaded using Ukraine’s major highways expecting a blitzkrieg-like attack that would leverage speed and overwhelming firepower to capture the capital city of Kyiv.”

Previous presidents and wars

Trump repeated his regular false claim that he has “solved” or “ended” eight wars. That figure is a significant exaggeration – counting two disputes that weren’t actually wars and one war that is still running. (You can read more here.) He also delivered a version of a false claim he started making on Thursday – suggesting no other president has ever ended a war.

“So to the best of my knowledge we’ve never had a president that solved one war. Not one war,” he said this time, adding, “A lot of them start wars, but they don’t solve the wars, they don’t settle them.”

We can’t say for sure what history Trump has “knowledge” about, but this narrative is nonsense. US presidents have played a major role in ending various wars by winning those wars, including World War I, World War II and the Gulf War. In addition, presidents have brokered numerous peace agreements in wars not being fought by the US.

President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his role in a peace agreement ending a war between the Russian and Japanese empires; President Jimmy Carter played a major role in brokering a 1979 peace agreement to end a long-running state of war between Egypt and Israel; President Bill Clinton played a major role in the 1995 peace agreement that ended the Bosnian War; US administrations have mediated a long list of other armed conflicts.

Other Trump claims

• Trump claimed, as he has for years, that he gave Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine while former President Barack Obama “gave them sheets.” While it’s true that Trump provided Javelins and other weapons to Ukraine and that Obama declined to do so, Obama didn’t give Ukraine mere bedsheets (or pillows and bedsheets, as Trump has also said). Rather, the Obama administration provided more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016 that included counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, armored Humvees, tactical drones, night vision devices and medical supplies.
• Trump repeated his usual lie that the 2020 election “was rigged.” He legitimately lost a fair election to Joe Biden.
• Trump repeated his false claim that, through tariffs, “we took in hundreds of billions of dollars in my first term from China.” In reality, US importers, not China or other foreign countries, make the tariff payments to the US government, and they often pass on at least some of their costs to consumers; study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission, found that Americans bore almost the entire cost of Trump’s first-term tariffs on Chinese products.
• Trump repeated a false claim he made during his first presidency, saying that a Democratic senator, Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, “wanted a tunnel from the mainland to Hawaii, then she said, ‘Well we can’t do that, so we’re gonna build a railroad to Hawaii.’ Do you remember?” But Hirono never called for such a tunnel or railroad; Trump was mischaracterizing an exchange Hirono had with a reporter in 2019, which you can read about here.

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