President Trump escalated his feud with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday by mocking his counterpart as a failing, unpopular president and characterizing him as a “dictator” who would have lost his country without the U.S. “gravy train.”
The blistering attack on social media marks a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy after the Biden administration’s four years of portraying Mr. Zelenskyy as a brave hero and critical ally against Russian authoritarianism.
It is the latest in a series of notable foreign policy changes toward Ukraine since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. Under his leadership, the U.S. broke from its long-standing policy of nonengagement with Russia and met for peace talks that excluded the Ukrainian government. The move angered Mr. Zelenskyy and irritated European leaders.
Mr. Zelenskyy’s frustration boiled with pointed comments late Tuesday after the U.S. president suggested that Ukraine started the war, which began when Russia invaded on Feb. 24, 2022. He said Mr. Trump lives in a “bubble” of Russian disinformation.
Mr. Trump responded with a scathing attack on Mr. Zelenskyy.
“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,” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social. “A dictator without elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”
It is unclear how Mr. Trump calculated $350 billion. The inspector general monitoring the U.S. aid flowing to Ukraine pegged the number at roughly $183 billion at the end of 2024. The president said last week that $350 billion is “the real number” of U.S. aid.
Mr. Trump suggested that the war in Ukraine is Europe’s problem and blasted European leaders for not doing their part to end it.
He said Mr. Zelenskyy refuses to hold elections and is “very low in Ukrainian polls.”
“The only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle.’ … 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,” Mr. Trump wrote.
The feud, which threatens to weaken Ukraine’s position in peace talks, deepened Wednesday morning, the day after Mr. Trump suggested that Ukraine started the war with Russia.
Mr. Zelenskyy said Mr. Trump is trapped in a “circle of disinformation” and Ukraine is not for sale.
“I would like to have more truth with the Trump team,” he said.
Mr. Trump suggested that Kyiv could have made a deal to avoid the Russian invasion.
“You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said while speaking to reporters Tuesday.
“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well. But today, I heard, “Oh well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” he said.
The president has said a proposal for Ukraine to join NATO was known to be unacceptable to Moscow and essentially provoked the war.
Mr. Trump also suggested that Ukraine’s security 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.”
Vice President J.D. Vance told the Daily Mail that Mr. Zelenskyy’s criticism of Mr. Trump was not helping his cause: “The idea that Zelenskyy is going to change the president’s mind by bad mouthing him in public media, everyone who knows the president will tell you that is an atrocious way to deal with this administration.”
Mr. Trump’s comments sparked political blowback. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, called them “disgusting.”
“It deliberately distorts the truth. It’s just disgusting to see an American president turn against our friends and openly side with a thug like [Russian President] Vladimir Putin,” he said.
Sen. John Kennedy, Louisiana Republican, said he disagreed with Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine was responsible.
“I think Vladimir Putin started the war,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I also believe, from bitter experience, that Vladimir Putin is a gangster. He’s a gangster with a black heart” who has Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s “taste for blood.”
European leaders widely condemned Mr. Trump’s comments, but some expressed hope that the bad blood between Kyiv and Washington could paradoxically spur all parties involved to get serious about the requirements for a durable ceasefire and the need to support Ukraine after the fighting stops.
“Nobody other than Putin started or wanted this war in the heart of Europe,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in a statement Wednesday. “But no one in Europe should allow any doubt to arise that we are not doing everything we can now for peace and security in Europe and the future of our children.”
French government spokeswoman Sophie Primas described Mr. Trump’s remarks on Ukraine and the origins of the war as “diverse, varied and often incomprehensible.”
“We don’t understand the logic very well,” she said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who led the Kremlin delegation that met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other top Trump national security aides for face-to-face discussions in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, praised Mr. Trump’s diatribe against the Ukrainian president.
Mr. Lavrov described Mr. Trump as a “completely independent politician … who is used to talking directly.”
“Such people typically do not hide their opinions about pathetic individuals like Mr. Zelenskyy,” he told lawmakers in the State Duma, according to the state-run Tass news agency.
Mr. Trump “is the first, and I think the only Western leader so far, to say publicly and loudly that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the previous administration’s cocky policy of pulling Ukraine into NATO,” Mr. Lavrov said.
Meanwhile, U.S. allies who support Ukraine were gathering in Paris for the second time in a matter of days to discuss the scrambled diplomatic landscape engineered by the Trump administration and to affirm they would back a peace deal only if it had the support of the Ukrainian government.
“It’s a fundamental principle for Canada and for the vast majority of our allies. … Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said before the meeting in Paris.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a sometime political confidant of Mr. Trump, said Mr. Trump’s words should be taken seriously but not literally.
“Of course, Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a social media post. “Of course, a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the U.K. from 1935 to 1945. Of course, Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.”
Mr. Trump’s provocative words, Mr. Johnson said, “are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.”
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
• David R. Sands can be reached at dsands@washingtontimes.com.
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