US President Donald Trump on Wednesday launched a vicious attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, accusing him of leadership failure and labeling him a “dictator without elections.” The comments, posted on Trump’s Truth Social, followed Zelenskyy’s criticism of him for spreading disinformation.
Earlier in the day, Zelenskyy had rejected Trump’s assertion that a paltry 4% of Ukrainians had confidence in their government, saying the US president was in a “disinformation space.” Trump shot back with a scathing post accusing Zelenskyy of having fooled America into committing $350 billion to a war that “never had to start” and implying Ukraine could not end the conflict on its own.
Trump stated that the war was more important to Europe than to America but that America had invested $200 billion more than European countries. Trump criticized President Joe Biden for not providing financial equalization to allies and for half of US assistance to Ukraine being “missing.”
“He won’t hold elections, is polling very poorly in Ukraine, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle,'” Trump posted. He threatened that if Zelenskyy didn’t move quickly, he could lose his nation altogether. Trump also claimed that his administration was the only one that could negotiate peace with Russia.
Trump later on Wednesday brushed aside Ukraine’s fears of being left out of US-Russia negotiations in Saudi Arabia, saying Kyiv could have put an end to the war earlier. Trump called Zelenskyy “grossly incompetent” and a bad negotiator.
Zelenskyy countered, repeating that Trump was acting on Russian misinformation and pledged to refute such myths with objective facts about the level of trust in Ukraine’s leadership worldwide.
