Donald Trump set his sights on Volodymyr Zelensky while addressing reporters at his Florida residence hours after the Ukrainian President protested about being sidelined from U.S.-Russia ceasefire talks.
The U.S. president made multiple remarks about Ukraine and its leader in an impromptu press conference amid signing a new round of executive orders at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday.
Just 12 hours before sending Keith Kellogg, his special envoy to Ukraine, to Kyiv, Trump blamed Zelenksy for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, took a jab at the leader’s approval ratings and challenged him to hold a general election.
Trump said he was pleased with how the U.S.-Russia peace talks between his Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Saudia Arabia were panning out, initially brushing aside Ukraine’s concern about being left out of the meeting.
“They were very good,” he said. “Russia wants to do something. They want to stop the savage barbarianism.”
He added that he will likely meet Putin next month.
The president repeated several times that the “senseless war” would have never happened if he defeated Joe Biden at the ballot box in November 2020.
He later claimed he could have either struck a deal with Putin to end the conflict that would have given Ukraine “almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land – and no people would have killed, and no city would have been demolished.”
On being asked about the prospect of European countries sending troops to Ukraine to provide security guarantees in the event of a peace deal, Trump said: "If they want to do that, that's great. I'm all for it… I would not object to it at all."
The president then delivered a stinging rebuke to Zelensky for complaining he was not invited to the mediation table.
“I hear that they're upset about not having a seat, well, they've had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily,” he said after being probed by a BBC News reporter.
“This could have been settled very easily. Just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without, I think, without the loss of much land, very little land, without the loss of any lives, and without the loss of cities that are just laying on their side.”
Trump said he is seeking peace and that he has the power to put an end to the bloodshed.
In arguably his most incendiary remarks of the press conference, he pointed fingers at Kyiv for Moscow’s 2022 invasion and claimed Ukraine had “started the war.”
“Today I heard, ‘Oh, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said. “You should have ended it three years – you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
The president added that, during his first term, he allegedly dissuaded Putin from invading Ukraine, which he said was the “apple of his eye.”
Without substantiating his claim, Trump said Zelensky’s approval ratings were plummetting before challenging him to call an election. The Ukrainian leader, who was selected for a five-year term in 2019, remains in office with Ukraine under martial law.
“Well, we have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at four percent approval rating and where a country has been blown to smithereens,” he said.
According to one opinion poll in December 52 percent of Ukrainians said they “trust” Zelensky.
He later added: “They want a seat at the table, but... wouldn't the people of Ukraine have a say? It's been a long time since we've had an election.”
Trump denied his demand for an election in Ukraine was prompted by the Russians.
“Requests for Ukrainian elections are not ‘a Russia thing,’” he said. “That’s coming from me and many other countries also.”
Zelensky was also pressed for his apparent lack of accounting for money that has been poured into Ukraine from the U.S. and its allies.
“I believe President Zelensky said last week that he doesn't know where half of the money is that we gave him," Trump said.
“We gave them, I believe, $350 billion, but let's say it's something less than that. But it's a lot, and we have to equalize with Europe because Europe has given us... a very much smaller percentage of that.”
Trump noted he was fond of the Ukrainian leader, before issuing a scathing critique about his handling of the Russia conflict.
“I like him [Zelensky] personally. He’s fine. But I don’t care about… personally. I care about getting the job done. You have leadership now that’s allowed a war to go on that should have never happened.”
Trump then drew comparisons to the desolation in Gaza and said that Ukrainians have grown tired of their cities being flattened.
“These cities look like Gaza. Actually, many have, percentage-wise, more buildings knocked down than in Gaza. So, people are tired of it. People want to see something happen,” he said.
