Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy gives a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 19, 2025, amid the Russian attack on Ukraine. TETIANA DZHAFAROVA/Pool via REUTERS
20 Feb 2025 01:13AM (Updated: 20 Feb 2025 07:02AM)
MIAMI: US President Donald Trump called Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” Wednesday (Feb 19), widening a personal rift with major implications for efforts to end the conflict triggered by Russia’s invasion three years ago.
The United States had provided funding and arms to Ukraine, but in an abrupt policy shift since coming to power, Trump has opened talks with Moscow.
“A Dictator without Elections, Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform of the Ukrainian leader, whose five-year term expired last year.
Ukrainian law does not require elections during wartime.
On Tuesday Trump held a press conference in which he criticized Zelenskyy, repeated several Kremlin narratives about the conflict and called for an end to the war.
Zelenskyy in turn accused Trump of succumbing to Russian “disinformation”, including Trump blaming Kyiv for having “started” the war and echoing Kremlin questions over Zelenskyy’s legitimacy.
“He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing (Joe) Biden ‘like a fiddle,’” said Trump in the Truth Social post of Zelenskyy.
“In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only ‘TRUMP,’ and the Trump Administration, can do,” the president added.
Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 for a five-year term but has remained leader under martial law imposed following the Russian invasion.
His popularity has eroded, but the percentage of Ukrainians who trust him has never dipped below 50 per cent since the conflict started, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS).
“DOUBLETHINK”
Trump has long held his party in lockstep, but moderate Republicans swiftly pushed back against his attack on Zelensky Wednesday.
“Putin started this war. Putin committed war crimes. Putin is the dictator who murdered his opponents. The EU nations have contributed more to Ukraine. Zelensky polls over 50%. Ukraine wants to be part of the West, Putin hates the West,” Congressman Don Bacon, from Nebraska, wrote on X.
“I don’t accept George Orwell’s doublethink,” he added, referring to the author of the dystopian novel 1984.
New York Republican Mike Lawler said that Putin demanding elections in Ukraine was “both comical and self-serving”.
“Vladimir Putin is a vile dictator and thug, who has worked in a concerted effort with China and Iran to undermine and destabilize the United States, Europe, Israel, and the free world. He is not our friend, nor our ally,” he wrote, also on X.
Trump’s staunch ally Senator Lindsey Graham, meanwhile, threaded the needle carefully, writing that he blames Putin “above all others” for the war — but adding on X that he still saw the US president as Ukraine’s “best hope.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who broke with Trump after his supporters stormed the US Capitol in 2021 in a bid to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden, also issued a rare public rebuke.
“Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives,” he wrote on X.