Donald Trump calls Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator after United States started peace talks with Russia without Ukraine’s involvement

 

The simmering feud between President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Trump escalated on Wednesday when the US president mocked his counterpart in a post filled with falsehoods, calling him a “dictator without elections.”

 

His comments came hours after Zelensky said the American leader had been “caught in a web of disinformation” from Russia over the war in Ukraine.

The pointed exchange was set off by a meeting of American and Russian officials to open talks on ending the war in Ukraine that excluded the Ukrainian government. After that meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Trump suggested that Ukraine had started the war, a comment that brought a strong rebuttal from Mr Zelensky on Wednesday morning.

“I would like to have more truth with the Trump team,” Zelensky said in some of the most overt criticism yet of Trump and his view of the war in Ukraine.

 

Zelensky, summoning reporters to his presidential office in Kyiv, a building still fortified with sandbags, said that the U.S. president was living in a “web of disinformation.”

In a post on his Truth Social account, Trump responded with a scathing attack on Zelensky.

 

“Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending 350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle,” Trump wrote.

 

As he did in making his assertions a day earlier, Trump lied. The United States, for instance, has allocated $119 billion for aid to Ukraine, according to a research organization in Germany, the Kiel Institute, not $350 billion.

 

Trump also suggested that the future security of Ukraine would not be an American problem. “This War is far more important to Europe than it is to us,” he wrote.

“We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”

The feud threatens to undermine Ukraine’s war effort and further weaken its position in the peace talks that have already started between the U.S. and Russia notably without Kyiv’s involvement.

 

 

Trump’s fixation on the United States being repaid for military and financial assistance over three years of war could put a stop to any future aid package to the war-torn country. Ukraine has long been dependent on regular American deliveries of air-defence weapons, shells and another type of ammunition to sustain its fight against Russia.

 

“Let’s be honest: Without the U.S., it will be very difficult for us,” Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said on Wednesday.

 

Kyiv has pushed for a seat at the negotiating table with Russia. But Trump’s portrayal of Moscow as a willing partner in peace talks, and his dismissal of Mr. Zelensky as an illegitimate and ineffective leader, risks further sidelining Ukraine.

 

In his social media post-Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that Zelensky had “better move fast” to secure peace “or he is not going to have a Country left.”

 

His comments followed up similarly accusatory statements he made on Tuesday. Trump said Ukraine “should have never started” the war, and appeared to embrace what has been a Russian demand that Ukraine hold elections as a necessary step in the settlement talks. Elections were suspended under martial law after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

 

 

Trump also said that Zelensky’s approval rating was 4 percent. Zelensky said that was not true, citing polls showing far higher support. In one conducted in December by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, for example, 52 percent of Ukrainians said that they trusted his leadership.

 

“So, if anyone wants to replace me right now — that’s not going to happen,” Zelensky said, referring to his approval ratings.

 

Trump’s false statements, Zelensky said, stemmed from misinformation spread by people around him. “Such rhetoric doesn’t help Ukraine — it only helps in bringing Putin out of isolation,” he said.

 

At the news conference Wednesday, Zelensky was focused and spoke with intensity. He said he was not personally ruffled by the negotiations with the Trump administration. “This is not my first dialogue or fight,” he said. “I take it calmly.”

 

Russia, he said, is clearly pleased with the turn of diplomatic developments. “I think Putin and the Russians are very happy because questions are discussed with them,” Mr. Zelensky said.

 

 

“Yesterday, there were signals of speaking with them as victims,” he said of the Trump officials’ tone toward the Russians, whose government set off the largest war in Europe since World War II, one that has killed or wounded about a million people on both sides. “That is something new.”

 

 

Ukrainians, Mr. Zelensky said, are not likely to trust promises Russian negotiators offer in talks. “Nobody in Ukraine trusts Putin,” he said.