After repeating his claim that seven planes were shot down during the brief conflict between India and Pakistan in May, US President Donald Trump has changed his tune and now claims that not seven but eight planes were shot down.
Donald Trump’s latest comments came Wednesday during the America Business Forum in Miami, Florida, where the US president reiterated his involvement in brokering peace between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.
Tariffs stopped the Indo-Pakistani war
“Pakistan and India…I was in the middle of a trade deal with both of them and then…I heard they were going to war. Seven planes were shot down and the eighth was really badly injured…Eight planes were shot down, basically,” Trump said.
“I said, this is war… ‘I’m not going to make any trade deals with you unless you agree to peace’. Both nations said, ‘No way. This has nothing to do with it…’ I said, ‘It has everything to do with it. You’re a nuclear power. I’m not doing business with you. We’re not making any deals with you if you’re at war with each other,'” Trump added.
“A day later they called me, ‘We’ve made peace.’ They stopped. I said, ‘Thank you. Let’s do business.’
Trump’s latest comment is the latest in a series of claims he has made about the India-Pakistan ceasefire, which he announced on May 10 at the Truth Social, claiming the ceasefire was agreed after a “long night” of talks between Islamabad and Delhi, brokered by Washington.
In fact, since then, Trump has promoted his self-proclaimed role in brokering the ceasefire a whopping 60 times, mentioning that seven planes were shot down every now and then.
But his current claim about the downing of eight planes is new, and the US president has not yet commented on which sides suffered losses.
Despite Trump’s repeated claims to bring India and Pakistan to the negotiating table (a claim also supported by Islamabad), India vehemently denies any third-party involvement in the ceasefire, which it says was negotiated through direct talks between the two countries’ chiefs of military operations.
After India’s Operation Sindoor – carried out in retaliation for the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack that killed 26 civilians – Delhi and Islamabad engaged in four days of intense cross-border exchanges and missile attacks before declaring a ceasefire.
