US President Donald Trump has come under severe criticisms after he escalated his attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him a “dictator” and saying he “better move fast” on a deal to end the war with Russia.
Trump on Wednesday expressed dismay that “a modestly successful comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion, to go into a war that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a war that he without the US and “Trump”, will never be able to settle.”
Trump, who also berated his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden, said the United States has spent $200 billion more than Europe, but Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back.
“Why didn’t Sleepy Joe demand Equalisation, in that this war is far more important to Europe than it is to us? We have a big, beautiful ocean as a separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is MISSING.”
The US President accused the Ukrainian leader of refusing to hold elections, stressing that Zelenskyy is very low in Ukrainian polls, adding the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle”.
“A dictator without election, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a country left,” Trump warned.
“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 Zelensky has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died and so it continues,” Trump said.
However, Zelenskyy slammed Trump’s earlier claim that Ukraine started the war against Russia, saying Washington was living in a Russian-made “disinformation space”.
Similarly, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has condemned Trump’s social-media rant against Zelenskyy as out of step with reality.
“If you look at the real world instead of just firing off a tweet, then you know who in Europe has to live in the conditions of a dictatorship,” she said, pointing to “people in Russia, people in Belarus”.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, meanwhile, told the newspaper Spiegel that it was “simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelenskyy his democratic legitimacy”.
Anatol Lieven, the director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that Trump’s negotiations with Russia could usher in a new detente in international relations.
“It’s of immense significance that it seems that the Trump administration wants to bring Russia back into some form of new security architecture in Europe,” Lieven said.
“If that can be achieved, that would be transformative because this is something that Russians — and not just Russians, many Europeans, as well — have hoped for since the end of the Cold War, but have not achieved.”
But Lieven added that future relations hinge on the outcome of peace negotiations over Russia’s war in Ukraine. He echoed the Trump administration’s view that it was unlikely that Ukraine would regain all of the territory lost to Russia’s invasion.
“What did we do against Turkiye when it invaded Cyprus in 1974? Did we even expel it from NATO? No, we did not,” Lieven said.
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