Trump calls Ukraine’s Zelenskyy a ‘dictator,’ escalating a spat between the leaders

NBC News – President Donald Trump on Wednesday called Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator” after earlier in the day the Ukrainian president accused him of living in a Russian “disinformation bubble,” as a spat between the two spiraled.

Trump’s post on Truth Social included a number of inaccuracies — Zelenskyy was elected president, for example — and followed the administration’s attempt to reset relations with Russia by holding high-level talks on ending the war in Ukraine, among other things.

The exchange comes at a crucial time for Ukraine, which is struggling to lock in Western support to fight Russian invaders who have occupied 20% of the country and regularly bomb its cities and infrastructure.

Trump also called Zelenskyy a “modestly successful comedian” who “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.”

“A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Trump wrote.

Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday called Zelensky’s comments “disgraceful.”

“He is attacking the only reason this country exists, publicly, right now,” Vance said during an interview with The National Pulse. “And it’s disgraceful. And it’s not something that is going to move the President of the United States. In fact, it’s going to have the opposite effect.”

Several Republicans senators expressed Wednesday that they disagreed with Trump’s comments about Zelensky, but they stopped short of criticizing the president directly.

“I don’t agree,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said when asked for her reaction to Trump’s comments.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said that “to the extent that the White House said that Ukraine started the war, I disagree. I think Vladimir Putin started the war.”

Zelenskyy, who was a popular actor and comedian before running for president, earlier referred to U.S. support given to Ukraine so far — $67 billion in weapons and $31.5 billion. He added that American demands that Ukraine should hand over more than $500 billion in rare earth minerals was “not a serious conversation” and added that he cannot sell his country.

Zelenskyy’s pugnacious comments about not wanting “anyone making decisions behind our backs” came in response to Trump saying that Ukraine was responsible for Russia’s invasion.

In Kyiv, meanwhile, ordinary Ukrainians reiterated their support for Zelenskyy, while keeping an anxious eye on the rapprochement between Trump and Putin.

“I don’t like Trump’s flirting with Putin,” said 49-year-old Fedir Logvynenko. “I don’t quite understand whether it’s from great intelligence or from complete incompetence.”

He added that he agreed with Zelenskyy’s position of refusing to “accept an agreement on Ukraine without Ukraine,” also reserving criticism for Ukraine’s European allies.

Yuliya Antonyuk, a 42-year-old real estate agent, meanwhile, said that Ukrainians “couldn’t cope without American weapons and support.”

“I want people to stop dying every day. I want to sleep calmly,” she said, adding that it would be “impossible” to hold presidential elections in the country given the current conditions “as there is shelling all the time.”

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held talks in Saudi Arabia, which alarmed and distressed Ukrainians and European allies who said any decision on ending the war had to include them.

Trump said that the U.S. is “successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia” and that “Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going.”

Trump earlier claimed that Zelenskyy had approval ratings of just 4%, even thought an opinion poll released Wednesday by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology showed that 57% of Ukrainians trust him.

“As we are talking about 4%, we have seen this disinformation, we understand it’s coming from Russia,” Zelenskyy told a news conference in Kyiv on Wednesday.

Earlier this month, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 47% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance to some extent.

Zelenskyy added that any attempts to replace him during the war would fail — Trump’s questions about Ukrainian elections following Putin’s repeated assertions that Zelenskyy is not Ukraine’s legitimate leader — contending that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians would not support concessions to Russia.

Trump also wrote that “MILLIONS have unnecessarily died” in the war.

It is not known how many have died since Russia and Ukraine do not release casualty numbers, but reliable estimates put the number of those killed at a fraction of 1 million.

Trump echoed criticism from Putin, who has ruled Russia for all but four of the past 25 years via elections widely considered illegitimate, but has repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of Zelenskyy’s continuing leadership.

Ukraine last held a presidential election in 2019 and was due to have one last April, but Zelenskyy has said in the past that it is not possible for Ukrainians to go to the polls in wartime and that view is also backed up by the country’s constitution.

Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort late Tuesday, Trump said he believed he had the power to end the war in Ukraine, “but today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years.”

“You should have never started it,” he added.

The reaction in Moscow to the broader change in direction of U.S. foreign policy has been more upbeat. Speaking to Russian lawmakers Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov did not directly address Trump’s comments but suggested the Kremlin was pleased with the talks.

The U.S. president is “the first, and so far, apparently, the only Western leader who has publicly and loudly said that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the brazen path of the previous administration to draw Ukraine into NATO,” Lavrov said. “No Western leader has ever said this.”

“This is already a signal that he understands our position,” Lavrov added, in a speech that covered the broader second Trump administration rather than the president’s specific remarks Tuesday.