President Donald Trump recounted a seemingly off-the-cuff remark made during a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin — and it has Ukrainians on social media fuming.
During an Oval Office press conference Thursday with Germany's chancellor, Trump likened the war — begun when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory — to "two children fighting in a park."
"Sometimes you're better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart. And I gave that analogy to Putin yesterday," Trump said. "I said, president, maybe you're going to have to keep fighting and suffering a lot because both sides are suffering before you pull them apart, before they're able to be pulled apart.
"And he actually told me — I mean, I made it very clear. He said, 'We have no choice but to attack based on that, and it's probably not going to be pretty. I don't like it.'
"I said, 'Don't do it. You shouldn't do it. You should stop it.' But again, there's a lot of hatred."
CNN's Jim Sciutto called the war an "existential" threat for Ukraine.
"They're fighting for the existence of their country from an ongoing Russian invasion to absorb Ukraine into Russia, and they've lost many hundreds of thousands of people," Sciutto said. He asked global affairs analyst Kimberly Dozier how Ukrainians were reacting to the "park" analogy.
"I went straight to Telegram message boards where Ukrainians post news and react to it," Dozier began, "and there were a lot of heads exploding emojis, flames, angry faces. Just one gauge of how they just don't understand why Trump keeps siding with Putin."
Dozier continued, "That he doesn't seem to understand that their civilians are under constant attack. They have apps on their phones that go off several times a day telling them to head to bomb shelters. And this has been going on and on and on...and, yet, Trump seems like he's stepping back like some sort of outsider or referee and said, 'This is not about me — you guys, you just, you got to stop this. You're doing this because you hate each other.'"