‘Ukraine Lies About the Numbers,’ Trump Says – Ukraine at War Update for Sept. 4

As Russian bombardments increase by the day, and many Ukrainian businesses struggle to thrive, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration carried out a sweeping round of dismissals on Tuesday with the perceived goal of restoring the public’s trust in his martial-law government.

At least six high-ranking officials, including cabinet ministers, submitted their resignations. More vacated posts could appear this week, a party official said.

The top brass of Ukraine’s military, including Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who replaced Oleksii Reznikov last September, and Armed Forces’ Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, installed in February, remains intact.

Among those receiving pink slips by presidential decree was one of Zelensky’s top aides, Rostyslav Shurma, who recently has had the unenviable role of defending the government’s stringent treatment and strict regulation of private businesses in war time.

“As promised, a major government reset can be expected this week. More than 50 percent of the Cabinet of Ministers’ staff will be changed,” David Arakhamia, the head of Zelensky’s party in parliament, posted to social media on Tuesday. “Tomorrow we will have a day of dismissals, and the day after that a day of appointments,” he said.

Cabinet ministers who had submitted resignations by Tuesday night included the Minister for Strategic Industries, the Minister for Justice, and the Minister of Environmental Protection.

Other Topics of Interest

Fact-Checking: North Korean Merc Seeing Food for First Time? Nah, He’s Chinese

Social media got terribly excited by a video of an Asian man in a Russian uniform “[expressing] surprise at the variety and abundance of food provided,” only he wasn’t.

Deputy Prime Ministers Iryna Vereshchuk and Olga Stefanishyna also stepped down.

Zelensky’s presidential term officially ended on May 20 but he has remained in power under martial law, with the nation’s next elections postponed indefinitely. While legal scholars have debated whether his cancellation of elections was constitutional, some 80 percent of Ukrainians polled this spring said the time was not right for a new vote.

Russians continue missile strikes on students in Ukraine’s northeast

On the same day that Russian missiles rained down on Poltava, killing at least 51 people, invading forces launched additional airstrikes on a university building in Sumy on Tuesday evening. Rescue workers on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning searched for survivors in the debris of a destroyed building of Sumy State University.

“Tonight, 3 September, the Russians launched an airstrike on a building at one of the universities in the city of Sumy. The enemy used a guided aerial bomb. All necessary services are working at the scene. The consequences of the enemy attack are being established.”

Earlier on Tuesday, in Russian airstrikes killed at least 51 people and injured more than 270 civilians in Poltava, just southeast of Kharkiv. There, Moscow’s ballistic missiles also targeted hospitals and a school, specifically Poltava’s military academy.

That academy trains officers in electronics among other subjects, including drone operation, a skill in high demand in the defense of Ukraine.

Trump says he has a ‘very exacting plan on how to stop Ukraine and Russia’

In a Tuesday interview with Tajikistan-born computer-scientist-turned-podcaster Lex Fridman, US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump again insisted he had a secret plan to stop the Russo-Ukrainian war, and said that Kyiv is lying about the number of dead.

Trump insisted that, if he is elected, he has a “very exacting plan” to end the war.

“As president-elect, I’ll have a deal made,” the former president said. “You’ve gotta get that done, that could end up in a third world war…”

“But I can’t give you those plans,” he said, “because if I give you those plans, I’m not going to be able to use them, they’ll be very unsuccessful. You know, part of it’s surprise, right? They won’t be able to help us much.”

Trump began by addressing the number of people who have been killed in the war, insisting that the actual number is “a lot higher than people think.”

“When you take a look at the destruction and the buildings coming down all over the place in Ukraine, I think those numbers are going to be a lot higher,” Trump said.

“They lie about the numbers, they try to keep them low. They knock down a building that’s two blocks long – these are big buildings – and they say that one person was mildly injured,” the real-estate-heir-turned-public-figure went on.

“No, no, a lot of people were killed. And there are people in those buildings, and they have no chance. Once they start coming down, there’s no chance.”

Born in the Soviet Union in 1983, Fridman is a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, initially hired by Google as an artificial intelligence (AI) expert. In 2018, he started a podcast about AI-related issues, but more recently has been interviewing high-level politicians and entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Bloomberg: Iranian missiles en route to Moscow in “a matter of days”

Bloomberg News this week reported that an unspecified European official told the business wire that Iran could begin shipping close-range and short-range ballistic missiles to Russia “within a matter of days.” 

European intelligence sources told Reuters last month that Iran and Russia agreed in December that Tehran would deliver Ababil close-range ballistic missiles and Fateh-360 short-range ballistic missiles to Russia. The intelligence officials added that dozens of Russian military personnel are currently in Iran training to operate the Fateh missiles.

Analysts from the Institute for the Study of War wrote that “Russia’s acquisition of Ababil or Fateh-360 ballistic missiles would likely allow Russian forces to strike Ukrainian near-rear targets while preserving Russia’s stockpiles of domestically produced missiles, such as Iskanders, for deep-rear Ukrainian targets.”