Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Donald Trump of repeating disinformation, a day after the US president falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war with Russia.
Zelensky’s comments were part of what is shaping up to be far the most public exchange of accusations between Kyiv and Washington since the full-scale war started nearly three years ago.
Speaking to reporters in Kyiv, Zelensky pushed back on several unfounded claims the US president made on Tuesday, while reinforcing Ukraine’s position that no deal on ending the war could be done without it.
“Unfortunately, President Trump – I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us – unfortunately lives in this disinformation space,” Zelensky said.
US and Russian officials held high-level talks on ending the war in Ukraine in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on Tuesday, a meeting from which Kyiv was excluded.
The two sides agreed to appoint high-level teams to negotiate the end of the war and said they were working to reestablish diplomatic channels.
Zelensky said that while any country has the right to discuss bilateral issues with Saudi Arabia, the fact that the US held direct talks with Russia “helped Putin out of his long isolation.” Russia has been banished from the global stage since the war began.
It was Kyiv’s complaint about being shut out of the talks that sparked Trump’s tirade of falsehoods on Tuesday.
Speaking late on Tuesday, Trump said: “Today I heard, ‘Oh well, we weren’t invited. Well, you been there for three years. You should’ve ended it after three years. You should’ve never started it. You could’ve made a deal.”
The incorrect claim that Ukraine somehow started the war has long been repeated by the Kremlin and its supporters. The conflict began in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea, the southern Ukrainian peninsula, and began sponsoring pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Moscow then launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, attacking its smaller neighbor at night, sending tanks across the border, bombing Ukrainian cities and sending special forces into Kyiv to assassinate Zelensky.
Zelensky hits back
But Trump did not stop at questioning who started the war in Ukraine. Repeating another line often pushed by the Kremlin, Trump appeared to question Zelensky’s legitimacy.
“We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort, incorrectly claiming that Zelensky’s approval rating was “at 4%.”
Zelensky won more than 73% of the vote in the second round of the 2019 presidential election. While his mandate was meant to end last May, a new election was not held because Ukraine has been under martial law since Russia launched its unprovoked invasion of the country. The martial law prohibits elections.
Speaking on Wednesday, Zelensky specifically said the claim that his approval rating was at 4% comes from Russia, and that Kyiv has some evidence that the numbers were discussed between the US and Russia.
He pointed to a poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) earlier this month which showed that while his popularity dropped significantly since the early days of the war, his approval rate has never dropped below 50% and currently stands at 57%.