WASHINGTON – Donald Trump has said Volodymyr Zelenskyy “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left” as peace talks between the US and Russia continue – without Ukraine at the table. Officials from the White House and the Kremlin have this week begun holding discussions in Saudi Arabia.
The decision for the talks to take place without representatives from Kyiv or Europe has caused concern, and sparked an emergency meeting of European leaders in France earlier this week. Mr Trump’s latest comments – in which he also calls Mr Zelenskyy “a dictator without elections” – come after the Ukrainian president accused him of living in a Russian-made “disinformation space” as a result of his administration’s discussions with Kremlin officials. In a post on his social media platform TruthSocial, the US president said Mr Zelenskyy had “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”. “The only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle’,” he added. Mr Trump continued: “Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a country left. “In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only ‘TRUMP,’ and the Trump Administration, can do. “Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going.” “I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues,” he wrote.
Top end estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of people, most of them soldiers, have died in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Millions of Ukrainians have fled their country as refugees. Mr Trump also repeated his claim that the Ukrainian president has low approval ratings – which has already been dismissed by Mr Zelenskyy as Russian disinformation – and claimed American aid money had been misused.
The latest poll, carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in early February, found 57% of Ukrainians trust their leader. Ukraine’s general election, scheduled for April 2024, were delayed because of Russia’s invasion in February 2022. European leaders have begun reacting to Mr Trump’s comments. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the US president labelling Mr Zelenskyy a “dictator” is “false and dangerous”, German newspaper Spiegel reported. “It is simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelenskyy his democratic legitimacy,” Mr Scholz said. Mr Trump’s latest post comes after Vladimir Putin insisted Kyiv could have a seat at the negotiating table. The Russian president said earlier on Wednesday: “No one is excluding Ukraine from peace talks.” “We are ready, I have already said this a hundred times – if they want, please let these negotiations take place and we will be ready to return to the table,” he said.
