Donald Trump appeared to blame Ukraine for the war with Russia and signalled Kyiv should hold elections, in comments that prompted President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to accuse the US president of living in a “disinformation bubble”. In Riyadh on Tuesday, Russia and the US agreed to “lay the groundwork for future co-operation” on ending the war and a lightning normalisation of relations, in their first talks since President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion. The discussion came after Trump called Putin last week in an effort to end the war — without consulting Ukraine or its European allies — as Washington accelerates an extraordinary turnaround in Russia policy. In comments to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump falsely claimed Kyiv had started the conflict, the largest on European soil since the second world war, and added he was “very disappointed” that Ukraine was “upset about not having a seat” at the talks. “Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited’,” the US president said. “Well, you’ve been there for three years . . . you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” The full-scale war began when Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine on February 24 2022. But Russia’s military aggression began in 2014, with Moscow’s forced annexation of Crimea and armed conflict in the eastern Donbas region under the guise of a separatist uprising. Speaking in Kyiv on Wednesday, Zelenskyy blasted Trump for pushing “a lot of disinformation coming from Russia”. “Unfortunately, President Trump, with all due respect for him as the leader of a nation that we respect greatly . . . is living in this disinformation bubble,” said Zelenskyy.
He called for “Trump’s team to have more truth”, arguing that because of what he depicted as a lack of information, “they are taking Putin out of isolation . . . Putin and the Russians are very happy.” The comments came a day after Zelenskyy said he had not been informed ahead of time about the Riyadh talks, adding that Ukraine would reject any settlement that did not directly involve Kyiv. “This is only the first month,” said one EU diplomat who expressed shock at Trump’s shift from decades of US policy on Russia since returning to office on January 20. “We need to wake up.” In further comments critical of Zelenskyy, Trump said: “It’s been a long time since we’ve had an election” in Ukraine. “That’s not a Russia thing. That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries,” he added. However, his comments closely resembled previous remarks from the Kremlin, which has questioned Zelenskyy’s legitimacy. One of Russia’s central goals in its war against Ukraine has been regime change, according to Ukrainian and western intelligence agencies. Ukrainian officials have shown the Financial Times intelligence from the early days of the war suggesting that Moscow had wanted to install Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Putin, as leader if the invasion had gone as planned. Putin has questioned Zelenskyy’s legitimacy after the Ukrainian president’s term expired in May 2024, but Kyiv has said it can only hold an election after the fighting stops and martial law is lifted.
On Tuesday, Trump claimed that Zelenskyy’s approval rating stood at 4 per cent. But an opinion poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in February found that 57 per cent of Ukrainians trusted their president, up from 52 per cent in December. KIIS executive director Anton Hrushevsky said the survey results showed that Zelenskyy “maintains a fairly high level of trust in society . . . and, moreover, retains legitimacy”. Commenting on the latest polling, Zelenskyy said on Wednesday: “So if anyone wants to replace me right now, that will not work.” The Ukrainian president also pushed back against Trump’s claim that Ukraine owed the US $500bn worth of rare minerals and other resources for past military assistance. Ukraine has spent $320bn on its war efforts against Russia, with $200bn coming from international military assistance, Zelenskyy said. “The United States has contributed approximately $60bn so far, with an additional $31.5 billion in financial assistance,” he said. “That’s $67bn in weaponry and $31.5bn in direct budgetary support.” State Department data broadly supports Zelenskyy’s figure for US military support for Ukraine. On Wednesday, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, arrived in Kyiv and told Ukraine’s public broadcaster he would be “listening” and taking what he heard back to Trump. “We’re going to listen. We understand the need for security guarantees,” he said. “It’s very clear to us the importance of sovereignty of this nation . . . Part of my mission is to sit and listen.” There are widespread fears in Kyiv and throughout Europe that Trump wants to settle the war on Putin’s terms. The US already appears to have made significant concessions to Putin by brushing aside Ukraine’s desires to join Nato and restore its control over Russian-occupied land. Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that the talks in Riyadh showed that Moscow and Washington were “moving to normalise relations in all areas”. Lavrov told lawmakers that Russia hoped the two countries would hold talks on security, arms control and “very promising projects on the economy” in addition to negotiations over the Ukraine crisis. “We have begun to walk away from the edge of the abyss where the Biden administration took our relations, but these are just the first steps,” the Russian foreign minister said. Holding elections would be a formidable challenge for Ukraine since millions of citizens are displaced, living abroad or residing in areas under Russian occupation. Kyiv has also expressed security concerns around any polls.
