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Trump calls Zelenskyy a ‘dictator’ as US rift with Ukraine deepens
US president warns Ukrainian leader he ‘better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left’
Donald Trump has called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” and warned that he “better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left”, in a deepening rift between the two leaders.
In a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, the US President hit out at his Ukrainian counterpart hours after Zelenskyy accused Trump of living in a “disinformation bubble” and disputed his $500bn bill for aid to Kyiv.
The bitter exchange comes after Trump upended decades of US policy by convening bilateral talks with Moscow on the Ukraine war without inviting Kyiv and blaming Zelenskyy for the 2022 Russian invasion.
In his most overt threat yet to end the war on terms favourable to Moscow, Trump wrote: “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”
He added that Zelenskyy had “talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won”.
Speaking in Kyiv earlier on Wednesday, Zelenskyy, who was sidelined this week from high-profile talks between the US and Russia in Riyadh over the conflict, blasted Trump for pushing “a lot of disinformation coming from Russia”.
“Unfortunately, President Trump, with all due respect for him as the leader of a nation that we respect greatly . . . is living in this disinformation bubble,” he said.
He made his comments as Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the US-Russian rapprochement and argued that European leaders had excluded themselves from the talks.
Zelenskyy’s retort was prompted by Trump’s remarks from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Tuesday, in which the US president falsely claimed Kyiv had started the conflict, the largest on European soil since the second world war.
Trump added he was “very disappointed” that Ukraine was “upset about not having a seat” at Tuesday’s talks in Saudi Arabia.
“Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited’,” the US president said. “Well, you’ve been there for three years . . . you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
Zelenskyy’s comments came a day after the US and Russia agreed to “lay the groundwork for future co-operation” on ending the war, in their first high-profile talks since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
Amid a dramatic reversal of decades of US policy towards Russia, Trump last week announced that he had spoken to Putin about ending the Ukraine war, without consulting Kyiv or its European allies.
In his first comments since his conversation with Trump, Putin said he “highly appreciates” the US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia, which he said “made the first step to resuming our work on all sorts of issues of mutual interest”.
“The US negotiators were totally different — they were open to a negotiating process without any biases or judgments about what was done in the past,” he said. “They intend to work together.”
Putin said Russia would not “speculate” on US-European relations, but claimed EU leaders had “insulted” Trump during his election campaign and said “they are themselves at fault for what is happening”.
Putin said he would meet Trump “with pleasure” but that any summit required substantial preparation.
On Wednesday, Zelenskyy pushed back against Trump’s suggestion that elections should be held in Ukraine, after the US president claimed that his Ukrainian counterpart had an approval rating of just 4 per cent.
Pointing to polling from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, which in February found that 57 per cent of Ukrainians trusted their president, Zelenskyy said: “So if anyone wants to replace me right now, that will not work.”
Putin has long sought regime change in Kyiv.
The Ukrainian president also disputed Trump’s claim that Ukraine owed the US $500bn worth of rare minerals and other resources for past military assistance.
Kyiv has spent $320bn on its war efforts against Russia, with $200bn coming from international military assistance, Zelenskyy said.
“The United States has contributed approximately $60bn so far, with an additional $31.5 billion in financial assistance,” he said. “That’s $67bn in weaponry and $31.5bn in direct budgetary support.”
US state department data broadly supports Zelenskyy’s figure for US military support for Ukraine.
Public opinion? Whose? Europe’s, who look down on rampant American capitalism and Trump? Africa’s, who have just been screwed by Trump and Musk? The Middle-East, who have been screwed by America for decades? Asia, who are waiting to hear what China says?
How about Europe's own right wing movements, and their massive public followings. Brexit? AFD? Hungary? Many more are gaining traction right under your nose.
Take it from an American; that's just the start.
Brexit wasn’t left/right wing. Eurosceptics on both sides. I’d also point out France where right-wing populism ultimately lost out despite an increase in protest votes.
There’s also a greater tradition of public service broadcasting, meaning politicians are more rigorously interrogated than in the highly commercial, partisan American system.
The EU and EC are somewhat stabilising influences too. An EU member government simply wouldn’t be allowed to do some of the stuff Trump is doing.
The lack of economic and political agility in Europe is a big reason much of Europe is 2nd world, and why Europe won’t return to its previous state of popularity for at least another 100 years.
Unfortunately, there are still plenty of fascist Europeans. Anecdotally, my mom recently told me her friend likes Trump, and that same person votes for our own far-right party whose leader has essentially been trying to emulate Trump.
One of my biggest fears that I think not enough people have though about, is that - due to how much more connect the world is with the internet - WW3 would devolve into a bunch of civil wars. WW2 was extremely different from WW1 and already had its far share of in fighting in some countries, this time it could be worse and happen in basically every country involved.
Do you think the global militaries haven’t spend a considerable amount of time strategizing possible war scenarios? If every country on earth had no strategic planning, then perhaps it would evolve into some wars within each country. But many countries have been running simulations for the scenarios since before electricity.
Right, I was gonna make that point, but it seems you made it for me. Because despite doing that, most wars in recent history, especially the world wars, did not go at all as predicted. Both world wars played out very different from previous wars and from what was to be expected. A standout example is British strategy for both world wars: in the first they made shitty trenches because they didn't realize they'd be used so much; in the second they made much better and more comfortable trenches because they had learned from the first war, and they turned out to be mostly useless because the trenches used were no longer static.
Spain even had a civil war as a prelude to the second world war, then during WW2 you even had Vichy France and the French Resistance fighting each other, and recently we had the Syrian civil war. Right now, it seems the USA might be on the brink of civil war as well. Not sure what makes you so sure WW3 wouldn't devolve into several civil wars when people are so much more connected with people from other countries nowadays.
It’s war, very obviously it’s hard to control by nature. It’s hard to hold water because of its nature. I love your British example because it proves my point. Americans have lots of war experience do they know what war time tools are outdated, like tanks. It’s not just money that makes the US a military leader but experience. The more experience, the more accurate the war games are or are not. Gamblers get better with experience. Gamblers call it ‘beginners luck’ because those without experience are rarely the best.
The British example goes straight against what you are saying, because at the time of both world wars, and especially the first, the British had plenty of war experience. And not just the British, but every empire at the time had plenty of war experience, but the war did not go at all like most were expecting it to. For a modern example of that with the US, just look at the war in Vietnam and in Iraq.
But more importantly than all of this, you are working under the assumption that the US is being led by extremely qualified people, and that every soldier would fall in line; however not only has the current US government been firing extremely qualified top officials because of "DEI", but I doubt everyone in the military would happily invade a NATO member - with whom they've been allied and trained side by side for years - without even blinking an eye. Military experience does nothing to prevent a civil war, because one thing has nothing to do with the other. The military is made up of people too, who like I said before are a lot more connected with the rest of the world than they used to be.
Finally, even if it's true that the US would somehow be immune to a civil war, that would still not mean the majority of countries would not fall into a civil war. To give just one example, Germany has a very big nazi far-right party that has been directly supported by Musk and Vance; if Germany went to war with the US, those people might take up arms against their own country.