Trump calls Ukraine's Zelenskyy a 'dictator,' escalating a spat between the leaders
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President Donald Trump on Wednesday called Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator” after earlier in the day the Ukrainian president accused him of living in a Russian “disinformation bubble,” as a spat between the two spiraled.
Trump's post on Truth Social included a number of inaccuracies — Zelenskyy was elected president, for example — and followed the administration's attempt to reset relations with Russia by holding high-level talks on ending the war in Ukraine, among other things.
The exchange comes at a crucial time for Ukraine, which is struggling to lock in Western support to fight Russian invaders who have occupied 20% of the country and regularly bomb its cities and infrastructure.
Trump also called Zelenskyy a “modestly successful comedian” who “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."
“A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Trump wrote
Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday called Zelensky's comments "disgraceful."
"He is attacking the only reason this country exists, publicly, right now," Vance said during an interview with The National Pulse. "And it’s disgraceful. And it’s not something that is going to move the President of the United States. In fact, it’s going to have the opposite effect.”
Several Republicans senators said Wednesday that they disagreed with Trump's comments about Zelensky, but they stopped short of criticizing the president directly.
"I don't agree," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said when asked for her reaction to Trump's comments.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said that "to the extent that the White House said that Ukraine started the war, I disagree. I think Vladimir Putin started the war.”
Zelenskyy, who was a popular actor and comedian before running for president, earlier referred to U.S. support given to Ukraine so far — $67 billion in weapons and $31.5 billion. He added that American demands that Ukraine should hand over more than $500 billion in rare earth minerals was “not a serious conversation” and added that he cannot sell his country.
Zelenskyy's pugnacious comments about not wanting “anyone making decisions behind our backs” came in response to Trump saying that Ukraine was responsible for Russia’s invasion.
White House national security adviser Mike Waltz said in an interview on Fox News Wednesday that no one should criticize Trump for trying to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict. "What he said yesterday and today is, why hasn’t President Zelenskyy tried to end this war for the betterment of his country? And we have to ask ourselves, is Ukraine’s position improving or not on the battlefield?" he said.
Waltz also added that there's been "bizarre pushback and escalation of rhetoric" over the Trump administration's proposal to invest in Ukrainian infrastructure and rare minerals.
In Kyiv, meanwhile, ordinary Ukrainians reiterated their support for Zelenskyy, while keeping an anxious eye on the rapprochement between Trump and Putin.
“I don’t like Trump’s flirting with Putin,” said 49-year-old Fedir Logvynenko. “I don’t quite understand whether it’s from great intelligence or from complete incompetence.”
He added that he agreed with Zelenskyy’s position of refusing to “accept an agreement on Ukraine without Ukraine,” also reserving criticism for Ukraine’s European allies.
Yuliya Antonyuk, a 42-year-old real estate agent, meanwhile, said that Ukrainians “couldn’t cope without American weapons and support.”
“I want people to stop dying every day. I want to sleep calmly,” she said, adding that it would be “impossible” to hold presidential elections in the country given the current conditions “as there is shelling all the time.”
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held talks in Saudi Arabia, which alarmed and distressed Ukrainians and European allies who said any decision on ending the war had to include them.
Trump said that the U.S. is “successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia” and that “Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going.”
Trump earlier claimed that Zelenskyy had approval ratings of just 4%, even thought an opinion poll released Wednesday by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology showed that 57% of Ukrainians trust him.
“As we are talking about 4%, we have seen this disinformation, we understand it’s coming from Russia,” Zelenskyy told a news conference in Kyiv on Wednesday.
Earlier this month, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 47% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance to some extent.
Zelenskyy added that any attempts to replace him during the war would fail — Trump's questions about Ukrainian elections following Putin’s repeated assertions that Zelenskyy is not Ukraine’s legitimate leader — contending that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians would not support concessions to Russia.
Trump also wrote that "MILLIONS have unnecessarily died" in the war.
It is not known how many have died since Russia and Ukraine do not release casualty numbers, but reliable estimates put the number of those killed at a fraction of 1 million.
Trump echoed criticism from Putin, who has ruled Russia for all but four of the past 25 years via elections widely considered illegitimate, but has repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of Zelenskyy’s continuing leadership.
Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort late Tuesday, Trump said he believed he had the power to end the war in Ukraine, "but today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years.”
“You should have never started it," he added.
The reaction in Moscow to the broader change in direction of U.S. foreign policy has been more upbeat. Speaking to Russian lawmakers Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov did not directly address Trump's comments but suggested the Kremlin was pleased with the talks.
The U.S. president is “the first, and so far, apparently, the only Western leader who has publicly and loudly said that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the brazen path of the previous administration to draw Ukraine into NATO,” Lavrov said. “No Western leader has ever said this."
“This is already a signal that he understands our position,” Lavrov added, in a speech that covered the broader second Trump administration rather than the president’s specific remarks Tuesday.
As Trump detonates relationship with Ukraine, Europe has no fast answerQuote:
In just days, the Trump administration has torn up Washington's script on the war in Ukraine and its relationship with Europe. Now, even as the U.S. and Russia press ahead with peace talks that exclude Kyiv, Ukraine's European neighbors are struggling to unite around a shared response.
French President Emmanuel Macron was preparing to host his second set of emergency talks this week in Paris on Wednesday, amid mounting pressure to form a clear and cohesive response to Trump’s decision to negotiate directly — and so far exclusively — with Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
“The understanding that Europe is going to be treated in a very different way by this administration is something that’s left European leaders stunned,” John Lough, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Program in London, said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
Macron hosted talks on Monday after President Donald Trump excluded European leaders, including members of NATO, from ceasefire talks Tuesday in Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh.
Talks on Wednesday will include NATO-constituent Canada and Ukraine’s neighbors from Europe's Baltic and Nordic regions, according to a spokesperson from the Élysée Palace.
Trump's swift reversal of American policy toward Russia may have thawed relations with Moscow, which has faced diplomatic and financial isolation since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but it has brought with it a sharp turn away from Kyiv and sparked alarm across Europe.
We are in, I think, a very serious situation here where the assumptions of many decades have simply been blown away — and principally, the assumption that the U.S. will underwrite Europe’s security,” said Lough, who previously served as a NATO representative based in Moscow.
The sharp shift in Washington comes at a rare moment for the European Union — the disparate and sprawling 27-nation bloc of more than 500 million people — when the region has few strong leaders.
With German Chancellor Olof Scholz's party expected to perform poorly in elections on Sunday and after Macron's party lost its parliamentary majority last summer, the E.U.'s usual power centers are weak.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who won a landslide election last year and heads one of Europe's largest economies, can only advise the E.U. from the outside following the U.K.'s departure from the bloc in 2020.
Now, drained of firm leadership and fatigued by Ukraine's long war, “the Europeans have been really slow to recognize” America's shift, said Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow for European security at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.
That Europeans “can’t fully rely on the U.S., that’s something that’s just been around for a number of years but it’s now that the Europeans are starting to panic at it because actually it could be worse than they have assumed,” he said.
Whether that realization has set in remains unclear.
After European leaders consulted Tuesday with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio following talks in Saudi Arabia with his Russian counterparts, E.U. foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas wrote on X that “Russia will try to divide us. Let’s not walk into their traps.”
“By working together with the U.S., we can achieve a just and lasting peace — on Ukraine’s terms,” she said.
But so far, European leaders have failed to present a clear and cohesive response to the rapid-fire developments in diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Instead, turmoil over Trump's stance on the war is highlighting divisions and disunity within Europe, Arnold said.
"I think that’s what Trump’s trying to do in Europe. He’s trying to circumvent the organization," he said, adding that Trump wants to "almost play them a little bit off each other to almost get what he wants."
A key focus in emergency discussions has been determining what potential security guarantees for Ukraine might look like, with French President Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders maintaining that any agreement to end the war in Ukraine must come with “strong and credible security guarantees for the Ukrainians.”
After leaders discussed the possibility of countries including Britain, France and Poland deploying troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers, the U.K.’s Starmer said he was considering committing British forces, but maintained that “a U.S. security guarantee is the only way to effectively deter Russia.”
With Starmer and Trump due to meet in Washington next week, Lough said European leaders were having a "panic reaction" as they "try to figure out what they can do to persuade Trump" to jointly safeguard Ukraine's security.
So far, Russia has known what it wants. The talks Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov engaged in this week culminated in a plan to restore embassy staffing on both sides and to continue discussions on a path to ending the war in Ukraine.
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