US President Donald Trump on Wednesday made a fresh assertion as he once again claimed to have brokered a ceasefire between India and Pakistan in May 2025 after the launch of India’s military action, Operation Sindoor.
While Trump repeated the assertion, which the Indian government disputed, several times, he added a new claim: “The Prime Minister of Pakistan said 35 million would have died had it not been for my involvement.” Trump had earlier claimed that Shehbaz Sharif thanked him for saving the lives of 10 million people by brokering the truce.
This new claim and reference to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif came during Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Wednesday. Trump once again claimed to have resolved eight wars, including the conflict between India and Pakistan.
However, the lack of punctuation and clear pauses during the part of the speech in which he referred to Operation Sindor resulted in several meanings being drawn.
Trump also repeated the claim that India and Pakistan were on the brink of nuclear war and that his intervention stopped it.
India launched Operation Sindoor on May 7, two weeks after 26 civilians were killed in a terror attack in Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir. The military operation targeted terrorists and terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and led to the killing of more than 100 terrorists.
However, the following days saw a military escalation between the two countries, and India and Pakistan agreed to cease hostilities on May 10. Since then, Donald Trump has claimed credit for brokering a truce several times.
However, India has always maintained that the agreement was reached bilaterally, without third party interference.
Trump has also linked the ceasefire agreement to trade in the past, another assertion denied by India. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said in July 2025: “The record of what happened at that time was very clear and the ceasefire was something that was negotiated between the Directors General of Observers of the two countries…”
