Donald Trump has said Volodymyr Zelenskyy “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left” as peace talks between the US and Russia continue – without Ukraine at the table.
Officials from the White House and the Kremlin have this week begun holding discussions in Saudi Arabia.
The decision for the talks to take place without representatives from Kyiv or Europe has caused concern, and sparked an emergency meeting of European leaders in France earlier this week.
Ukraine latest: Follow updates as Putin makes peace talks claim
Mr Trump’s latest comments – in which he also calls Mr Zelenskyy “a dictator without elections” – come after the Ukrainian prime minister accused him of living in a Russian-made “disinformation space” as a result of his administration’s discussions with Kremlin officials.
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In a post on his social media platform TruthSocial, the US president said Mr Zelenskyy had “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.”
“The only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle’,” he added.
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Mr Trump continued: “Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.
“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.
“Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going.”
“I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues,” he wrote. Top end estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of people, most of them soldiers, have died in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Millions of Ukrainians have fled their country as refugees.
Mr Trump also repeated his claim that the Ukrainian prime minister has low approval ratings – which has already been dismissed by Mr Zelenskyy as Russian disinformation.
The latest poll, carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in early February, says 57% of Ukrainians trust their PM.
Putin: ‘No one is excluding Ukraine from talks’
Trump’s latest post comes after Vladimir Putin insisted Kyiv could have a seat at the negotiating table.
The Russian PM said earlier today: “No one is excluding Ukraine from peace talks.”
“We are ready, I have already said this a hundred times – if they want, please let these negotiations take place and we will be ready to return to the table,” he said.
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Mr Putin also reiterated the Kremlin’s official line that Russia has never rejected the possibility of talks with Ukraine or its European allies.
Referencing Mr Zelenskyy’s 2022 decree that rejected talks with Moscow, he added: “The Europeans have stopped contacts with Russia. The Ukrainian side has forbidden itself to negotiate.”
According to the Russian PM, the “goal and subject” of yesterday’s talks in Saudi Arabia “was the restoration of Russia-US relations”.
