Kremlin critic Bill Browder immediately corrected MAGA-boosting Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday after she trumpeted President Donald Trump’s false claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky only holds a 4 percent approval rating in his country.
“That number comes out of thin air,” Browder told the Fox anchor during an interview.
While speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, Trump unleashed a tirade in which he mocked Zelensky for complaining that he hadn’t been invited to negotiations to end Russia’s war with Ukraine. In response, Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting the three-year war that began with Russia’s unprovoked invasion.
“Today I heard, ‘Oh, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump exclaimed. “You should have ended it three years – you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
The president also tossed out a groundless assertion that Zelensky has no support among the Ukrainian population, claiming “he’s down at four percent approval rating and where a country has been blown to smithereens.” Trump also suggested that Ukraine must hold new elections as a condition of having a “seat at the table,” which comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin has relentlessly attacked Zelensky’s legitimacy and insisted that he has no authority to sign off on a peace deal.
While elections were supposed to be held last year, Ukrainian law states that voting cannot happen while martial law is in effect, which is the case during a war that has displaced roughly one-fifth of the population. And though Zelensky’s popularity is nowhere near the stratospheric levels it reached at the beginning of the war, recent surveys have found that between 52 percent to 63 percent of Ukrainians “trust” him or “approve” of his actions.
During Wednesday’s broadcast of Mornings with Maria, Bartiromo brought on Browder — a prominent critic of Putin who leads the Magnitsky Justice Campaign — to weigh in on Trump’s willingness to meet with the Russian leader as Browder has “had plenty of run-ins with Vladimir Putin.”
Noting that Putin “murdered” his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and has issued death threats against him, Browder labeled the autocrat a “very bad guy” before criticizing how Trump has handled the peace negotiations.
“And so when I'm watching this whole thing playing itself out, I'm thinking to myself that we need to be more supportive of Ukraine, who are the victims, and a little bit less chummy with Putin, who is the aggressor in this whole situation,” he said. “At the end of the day, Putin could end this war right this minute by just stopping. That's the thing. If Ukraine is defending, Putin's attacking, and he could stop. And so that's what we should be pushing for.”
Calling that a “great point,” Bartiromo then immediately echoed Trump’s bogus claim about Zelensky’s approval rating.
“You know, it certainly felt in those comments from President Trump that he was more critical of Zelensky, certainly…noting his lack of popularity with that 4 percent number in terms of the potential for elections,” she declared.
“That number comes out of thin air. There's no 4 percent number,” Browder pushed back. “Zelensky's got a 52 percent approval rating, not a 4 percent approval rating. And they're under attack.”
He continued: “The reason they have martial law is because this country has been invaded. They have air strikes every day from Russia. I think it's highly unfair for him to be critical of the victim. He should be critical of the person who's launching the air strikes.”
Bartiromo reacted by acknowledging that no one can “believe anything on the Russia side either in terms of approval of Vladimir Putin” before wondering what Browder thought of Zelensky’s complaints about being left out of the negotiations.
“This was not a time for negotiation. This was a time for them to defend themselves,” Browder responded. “This was a brutal dictatorship invading a peaceful neighbor who didn't wanna be invaded. And so I think President Trump is being very unfair to Volodymyr Zelensky.”
He concluded: “It pains me to see him saying these things. I think that he should be supporting the victim in this thing, the democratically elected victim. Vladimir Putin has been a dictator for 25 years… I think we need to understand who the good guys are and who the bad guys here. Ukraine is the good guys and Putin is the bad guy.”
Hours after Browder’s appearance on Bartiromo’s program and with Zelensky saying Trump was living in a Russian-made “disinformation space,” Trump fired off an unhinged social media rant describing the Ukrainian leader as “a dictator without elections” who was only keeping the war going to siphon off American aid.
