Trump blames Zelenskiy for Russia- Ukraine war

Donald Trump, president of the United States, has accused Volodymyr Zelenskiy, president of Ukraine for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine  saying he should have agreed to a deal with Russia, while also dismissing complaints that Kyiv is being denied a seat at negotiations to bring an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine.”

“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well. But today, I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it…,” Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

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Trump said that he was “much more confident” of reaching an agreement following the talks in Riyadh led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

“They were very good. Russia wants to do something, they want to stop the savage barbarism,” he said.

When asked whether his administration would support Russia’s calls for elections in Ukraine as part of a potential peace deal, Trump falsely claimed that Zelenskiy had an approval rating of just 4 percent and pointed out that elections in the country had been suspended under martial law. However, a December opinion poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 52 percent of respondents trusted Zelenskiy, a 12-point decline from February.

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“Yeah, I would say that, you know, when you want a seat at the table… Wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have to say like, ‘It’s been a long time since we’ve had an election?’” Trump said.

“That’s not a Russia thing, that’s something coming from me, and coming from many other countries also.”
Trump’s comments came after Zenlenskiy earlier said that Kyiv wanted to ensure Washington and Moscow would not decide any terms of a deal “behind our backs”.

“No decision can be made without Ukraine on how to end the war in Ukraine,” Zelenskiy told reporters in Turkiye, where he held talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

During Tuesday’s talks in Riyadh, Rubio and Lavrov agreed to “appoint respective high-level teams to begin working on a path to ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible”, according to the US State Department, Al Jazeera reports.

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz later told reporters in Riyadh that it was a “practical reality” that the negotiations would involve discussion about territory and post-conflict security guarantees.