WASHINGTON — President Trump claimed Friday that he could persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to order the release of thousands of Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped and taken back into Moscow’s territory during the three-year-old European war.
“I believe I could, yes. I didn’t know too much about it,” Trump told Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade when asked about the prospect during an interview.
“I was hearing about it yesterday. It’s pretty tough stuff, but I believe I could do that.”
According to the pro-Kyiv non-profit Razom for Ukraine, Russian forces have abducted 19,546 Ukrainian children since 2022.
The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine reported in 2023, citing media reports and local accounts, that the kids were mainly taken from Russian-occupied territories in the east of Ukraine and moved deeper into the Kremlin’s heartland.
Some of the children were given Russian citizenship and were placed in foster care, while others had lost all contact with their rightful families. .
Parents told the UN commission that their children were being treated poorly — including being beaten and forced to wear dirty clothes.
The Russian child deportation practices amounted to a “war crime” and violated international humanitarian law, the commission wrote, calling for Moscow to release all Ukrainian deportees and detainees.
Some charity operations have successfully returned children to Ukraine, but thousands more remain behind enemy lines.
“Russia’s trafficking of Ukrainian children should leave no room for doubt: This invasion has nothing to do with NATO and everything to do with destroying the Ukrainian identity,” Mykola Murskyj, advocacy director of Razom for Ukraine, told The Post Friday.
“Trafficking children goes against everything we stand for as America. We cannot and must not falter in our fight against evil.”
Trump has praised Putin for wanting to find “peace” — while bashing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the process.
The president sent a US delegation to speak with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. The US team, lead by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, walked away wanting to establish closer ties with Russia and reopen embassies — and eventually wanting to grow economic relations once a solution to the war is found.
Trump and Zelensky have sparred over the last week, with the latter saying Trump was living in a “disinformation space” and the US president calling the Ukrainian leader a “dictator” for refusing to hold elections in a state of war-induced martial law.
“When Zelensky said, oh, he wasn’t invited to a meeting, I mean, it wasn’t a priority because he did such a bad job in negotiating so far,” Trump told Kilmeade during a discussion of the Saudi Arabia talks.
“Number one, you shouldn’t have had a war. And if you did, it should have been solved and settled immediately. It could have been.”
