Agencies
Philadelphia
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, clashed repeatedly over Russia, Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, and the war in Ukraine in Tuesday night’s closely watched Presidential Debate.
Harris told Trump, who previously served as US president, that Putin "would eat you for lunch” and said that, if the Republican were to become president, "Putin would be sitting in Kiev right now.” She also accused Trump of being ready to abandon Ukraine after two and a half years of war and an immense military funding effort by the US.
"Understand why the European allies and our NATO allies are so thankful that you are no longer president and that we understand the importance of the greatest military alliance the world has ever known, which is NATO,” Harris said during the ABC News Presidential Debate, according to a transcript of the debate.
"What we have done to preserve the ability of Zelensky and the Ukrainians to fight for their independence. Otherwise, Putin would be sitting in Kiev with his eyes on the rest of Europe. Starting with Poland,” she said, before describing Putin as "a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”
Trump rejected Harris’ comments, claiming that the war would not have started if he had been in power in 2022 and telling the audience that Putin "would be sitting in Moscow, and he wouldn’t have lost 300,000 men and women” in the war.
Exact war casualty figures are unknown. Neither Russia nor Ukraine release such sensitive information, but US intelligence estimated last year that around 315,000 Russian soldiers — the vast majority of whom are men — had been killed or wounded in the war up to that time.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that it didn’t like the way Vladimir Putin’s name featured in the debate and said "the US as a whole, whichever party the candidates may be from, preserves its negative, unfriendly attitude to our country.” "Putin’s name is used as, so to say, one of the tools for the internal political struggle in the US. We really, really do not like that. We still hope they will leave our president’s name alone,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.