Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky responded to President Trump’s latest rebuke, calling out Trump for living in a Russian “disinformation space.”
“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 told reporters early Wednesday.
His claim follows Trump’s news conference from his Mar-a-Lago resort Tuesday evening, where he criticized the Ukrainian leader and claimed his approval ratings were low.
Zelensky also pressed Trump and U.S. officials to “be more truthful.” The request follows a high-stakes meeting in Saudi Arabia between Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian officials, who kicked off discussions about how to end the nearly three-year war and renew ties between the two countries.
Ukraine was notably not invited to the negotiation table — a move Zelensky has denounced. He’s urged European officials to muscle their way into the discussions and argued that no peace agreement should be accomplished without his country in the mix.
Trump on Tuesday repeated his previous claims that he could end the Eastern European conflict and seemed to blame Ukraine’s leadership for the war, claiming that Zelensky “should have never started it.”
“But today I heard, ‘Oh, well we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said from his Florida resort.
“You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” he continued. “I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.”
Zelensky’s reply came ahead of his meeting with Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia Gen. Keith Kellogg, who arrived in Kyiv on Wednesday. The Ukrainian leader said he was “ready to go to the front line” with Kellogg so that he could “see for himself” what was unfolding on the ground.
Russia started the full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022, after repeatedly warning Kyiv could not join the NATO alliance and stationing troops near Ukraine’s borders. The invasion came eight years after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
