US President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026 during an Oval Office presentation of new whistleblower law fielded reporter questions on among other subjects Ukraine, its past history, and his administration’s policies towards that country.
Kyiv Post fact-checked what Trump said. The transcript of the exchanges is here:https://trump-archive.com/item/7c941fa6-26b0-4278-9d62-a0a1d5f78a83
JOIN US ON TELEGRAM
Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.
Trump answered reporter questions during some 30 minutes of the 1:05 hour public appearance. Of that time, about ten minutes covered Ukraine.
1. Russia is advancing in Ukraine, its forces cannot be stopped.
Trump said: “I think that – and, you know, Russia’s a big machine. They just keep grinding forward, and that’s what they’ve done. They’ve taken a very large piece of land. And, you know, you can say that Ukraine is doing well or poorly, but the land gets bigger and bigger all the time, week by week. It’s just a march forward. They just keep marching forward.”
This is false. The reality is that the front is generally at stalemate and that Ukrainian forces, not Russian, are gaining ground at the moment.
On-the-ground reporting by independent media, including Kyiv Post, confirms that Russia’s advances slowed to a crawl in early 2026, largely due to Ukraine’s expanding use of drone swarms and improved defensive tactics. Assessments by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and other think tanks indicate that Russia’s net territorial gains across the entire front in 2026 amount to roughly 100 square kilometers (39 square miles), an area comparable to the British island of Jersey or New York City’s Bronx borough.
Other Topics of Interest
Trump Envoy Witkoff Calls Putin a ‘Humanist’ Amid Deadly Russian Attacks on Ukraine
Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff praised Putin as a “humanist” while presenting peace proposals. Meanwhile, Russian attacks continued to kill civilians in Ukraine.
In September and October 2026, according to Ukrainian military announcements generally confirmed by OSINT trackers and internal unit information feeds monitored by Kyiv Post, Ukrainian counteroffensives in the Lyman and Oleksandrivka sectors resulted in modest net territorial gains for Ukraine and major losses for Russia.
2. Russia is continuously advancing because it has bottomless reserves of manpower.
Trump said: “They (Russia) have an unlimited supply of people...They can lose a lot of people in a war, and they have lost a lot of people. They lost 50 million people in the Second World War. They lose a lot of people, but they’re very big.”
Aside from Trump’s point that Russia is a large country, this statement is false.
Russian manpower shortages are longstanding and widely-reported – undermining Russia’s ability to prosecute combat operations.
Russia mobilized reserves in 2022, began mass recruitment of prison felons in 2023, and since then has mobilized law enforcement and offered signing bonuses equivalent to a year’s salary of a professional worker in order to convince men to join their armed forces.
Ukrainian army intelligence, in an estimate supported by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), estimates that Russia is currently recruiting about 30,000 contract soldiers per month. That figure is significantly below reported monthly losses of 40,000-50,000 personnel killed and wounded, according to estimates by Ukraine’s General Staff and NATO.
Ukrainian combat units report that Russian forces attack almost exclusively with small groups of foot soldiers unsupported by tanks or other fighting vehicles. Those infantries are, per those accounts, effectively defenseless against drones and suffer severe casualties executing orders to advance. Near-total absence of Russian tactical medical evacuation exacerbates casualty rates and prevents many otherwise savable injured soldiers from dying.
Currently, the best example of Russian casualty-intensive tactics gaining little or no ground is in the eastern Dobropillya sector, where Ukrainian 1st Corps ground units, backed by Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) drone squadrons, have reported breaking their record for the number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded in a single day three times during October.
Therefore, Trump’s claim about Soviet World War II deaths is exaggerated.
3. The US has given Ukraine $350 billion in assistance.
Trump said: “We gave $350 billion to Ukraine...Look, we have given tremendous amounts to Ukraine. We’ve gotten nothing back, other than high diesel. We have – we have given probably – possibly more money to Ukraine than almost anybody over the years, hundreds of billions of dollars.”
This is absolutely false, nevertheless, Trump has repeated this statement for years.
No credible source supports a $350 billion figure for US aid to Ukraine. Official US and independent tallies put total US bilateral aid commitments to Ukraine at roughly $130-136 billion in direct military, financial, and humanitarian aid since 2022.
Trump’s administration in Feb. 2025 cut off all financial assistance and practically all military assistance to Ukraine. On Trump’s orders, since that time, US weaponry can be sold to Europe in limited quantities for donation to Ukraine, but for that service the US charges a 10 percent markup. The total value of quantifiable US-donated aid to Ukraine since Trump took office is less than $1 billion.
Compared to the US, Europe has donated about twice as much to Ukraine, and since early 2025, has been overwhelmingly Ukraine’s main source of foreign support.
Regarding Trump’s claim that the US “got nothing back,” Ukraine, at the insistence of the Trump administration, signed a “mineral deal” in April 2025 granting selected US corporations monopoly access to major Ukrainian rare-earth reserves. More generally, thanks to Ukraine’s sacrifice in blood and treasure, the cost to the US of deterring Russia in Europe and worldwide has been reduced.
4. Ukraine would have been defeated by Russia on the first day of the war, but an incompetent Russian general lost 1,000 tanks in a swamp.
Trump said: “When the stupid general for Russia, very stupid gentleman, they had 1,000 tanks riding up a concrete highway, they would have been in Ukraine in four hours, going maximum tank speed, which is 48 miles an hour to be exact. Nothing to stop them, the war would have been over in one day. And this very stupid general, I have no idea who he is. I doubt he’s still with us, I doubt he’s still living. He decided to hang a right onto the farmland and then take a left and go up to Kyiv. And rather than staying on the highway, the concrete highway, perfectly good highway where they were doing very nicely, would have been there in three and a half or four hours and the whole war would have ended. He ended up getting stuck in the mud. It was like quicksand. They had -- the night before they had the heaviest rainfall they’ve had in 10 years, and the land was soaking wet; it was like quicksand. Most people don’t remember, but I do, because it’s called war, you never know what happens. But he made a terrible decision, legendarily bad decision and the tanks got stuck. They couldn’t go forward, they couldn’t go back, they were dead stuck.”
This narrative is false and effectively fiction. The Battle of Kyiv was one of the most decisive and large-scale battles of the Russo-Ukraine War with tens of thousands of participants and even more civilian eyewitnesses. Their accounts and experiences differ dramatically from Trump’s narrative.
In early 2022, Russia attempted to capture Kyiv by launching paratrooper and air assault infantry attacks to capture a key airfield north of the city, following up with a massive ground force offensive invading Ukraine from the territory of Belarus – at the time a neutral state. The airborne operation went awry when Ukrainian air defenses shot down Russian helicopters and paratrooper planes approaching the airport, and failed after Ukrainian ground forces and artillery surrounded and destroyed lightly-armed Russian paratroopers on the ground.
Simultaneously, Ukrainian commanders opened sluices in dams containing water from drained wetlands north of Kyiv. That inundation and difficult forested terrain, part of it including the irradiated Chernobyl exclusion zone, forced Russian tank columns driving to reinforce the paratroopers to stay on roads leading south. Those advancing Russian forces met fierce resistance by Ukrainian regular forces, national guard, and volunteer civilian militia. This created Russian armored vehicle traffic jams 50 km (31 miles) long and even visible from space.
Over the following month, Russian armored units suffered heavy losses in ambushes, typically set by Ukrainian anti-armor teams in villages or along forested stretches of road. Ukrainian strike drones armed with anti-tank missiles added to Russian casualties. Russian attempts to bypass roads and move cross-country resulted in some vehicles becoming bogged down and subsequently destroyed by Ukrainian forces. However, according to most historians, the main causes of Russia’s failure to take Kyiv were due to widespread Ukrainian resistance, combined with a Russian invasion plan that assumed Ukrainian military forces would surrender and civilians would welcome the invading troops. A standard historical treatment of the battle is available here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Battle-Kyiv-Fight-Ukraines-Capital/dp/1399048481/?tag=5812456021-20
5. Ukraine’s survival was the result of Trump’s agreement to transfer Javelin missiles
Trump said: “And they [Ukrainian forces] used the Javelins – that’s the anti-tank weapon that I gave them. So, you know, the statement is Obama gave them sheets, I gave them Javelins. So, I’ve helped Ukraine a lot.”
This statement is also very misleading.
Limited use of Javelin anti-tank missiles against Russian armor north of Kyiv in February and March 2022 is well documented, but only in isolated incidents. Almost all of those engagements were against tanks on roads or in open fields, and not against tanks mired in swamps.
Besides Javelins, among other weapons, Ukrainian forces used British NLAW missiles, Swedish AT-4, and Carl Gustav anti-tank rockets, Swedish- and Turkish-made Bayraktar drones, domestically produced Stugna missiles, regular Ukrainian army T-64, T-72, and T-80 tanks, anti-tank mines, and anti-armor grenades to blunt the Russian armored attack. Compared to the mass of anti-armor weaponry operated by Ukrainian forces, Javelins were rare and usually reserved for use by commando teams specially trained in their use.During his first term as US President, Trump did green-light the first US delivery of lethal weaponry to Ukraine, including 210 Javelin missiles delivered in 2018. A second batch of 150 missiles was sent in 2019. Besides Trump, Estonia and the Biden administration also supplied Ukraine with Javelins in early 2022.
By far the most significant foreign anti-tank weapon delivery to Ukraine prior to Russia’s second invasion was the shipment of more than 2,000 NLAW missiles, a weapon similar to the Javelin, in late 2021 and early 2022. Those deliveries had increased to more than 5,000 by April 2022.
Given the scale of those anti-armor deliveries and the wide range of anti-armor weaponry available to Ukraine’s armed forces, Trump’s claim that the 360 Javelin missiles his administration sent to Ukraine in 2018-19 won the Battle of Kyiv is not credible.
Relevant to any discussion of US arms deliveries to Ukraine between 2016-22 is a 2019 phone call between Presidents Zelensky and Trump, during which the release of $391 million in US military aid to Ukraine was made contingent on Kyiv launching a criminal investigation into Ukrainian businesses linked to Hunter Biden, the son of then-US Vice President Joe Biden. Biden was Trump’s principal political rival at the time and would go on to defeat him in the 2020 US presidential election.
Prior to leaving office, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over allegations that he attempted to leverage US military aid to Ukraine for personal political gain and pressure a foreign government to investigate the child of a political opponent. Arguably, that impeachment undermines Trump’s October 2026 contention that he has been a significant and effective supporter of US arms transfers to Ukraine.