Trump calls Zelenskyy a ‘dictator’ as US rift with Ukraine deepens

US president warns Ukrainian leader he ‘better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left’

Donald Trump has called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” and warned that he “better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left”, in a deepening rift between the two leaders.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, the US President hit out at his Ukrainian counterpart hours after Zelenskyy accused Trump of living in a “disinformation bubble” and disputed his $500bn bill for aid to Kyiv.

The bitter exchange comes after Trump upended decades of US policy by convening bilateral talks with Moscow on the Ukraine war without inviting Kyiv and blaming Zelenskyy for the 2022 Russian invasion.

In his most overt threat yet to end the war on terms favourable to Moscow, Trump wrote: “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”

He added that Zelenskyy had “talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won”.

Speaking in Kyiv earlier on Wednesday, Zelenskyy, who was sidelined this week from high-profile talks between the US and Russia in Riyadh over the conflict, blasted Trump for pushing “a lot of disinformation coming from Russia”.

“Unfortunately, President Trump, with all due respect for him as the leader of a nation that we respect greatly . . . is living in this disinformation bubble,” ​he said.

He made his comments as Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the US-Russian rapprochement and argued that European leaders had excluded themselves from the talks.

Zelenskyy’s retort was prompted by Trump’s remarks from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Tuesday, in which the US president falsely claimed Kyiv had started the conflict, the largest on European soil since the second world war.

Trump added he was “very disappointed” that Ukraine was “upset about not having a seat” at Tuesday’s talks in Saudi Arabia.

“Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited’,” the US president said. “Well, you’ve been there for three years . . . you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

Zelenskyy’s comments came a day after the US and Russia agreed to “lay the groundwork for future co-operation” on ending the war, in their first high-profile talks since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.

Amid a dramatic reversal of decades of US policy towards Russia, Trump last week announced that he had spoken to Putin about ending the Ukraine war, without consulting Kyiv or its European allies.

In his first comments since his conversation with Trump, Putin said he “highly appreciates” the US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia, which he said “made the first step to resuming our work on all sorts of issues of mutual interest”.

“The US negotiators were totally different — they were open to a negotiating process without any biases or judgments about what was done in the past,” he said. “They intend to work together.”

Putin said Russia would not “speculate” on US-European relations, but claimed EU leaders had “insulted” Trump during his election campaign and said “they are themselves at fault for what is happening”.

Putin said he would meet Trump “with pleasure” but that any summit required substantial preparation.

On Wednesday, Zelenskyy pushed back against Trump’s suggestion that elections should be held in Ukraine, after the US president claimed that his Ukrainian counterpart had an approval rating of just 4 per cent.

Pointing to polling from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, which in February found that 57 per cent of Ukrainians trusted their president, Zelenskyy said: “So if anyone wants to replace me right now, that will not work.”

Putin has long sought regime change in Kyiv.

The Ukrainian president also disputed Trump’s claim that Ukraine owed the US $500bn worth of rare minerals and other resources for past military assistance.

Kyiv has spent $320bn on its war efforts against Russia, with $200bn coming from international military assistance, Zelenskyy said. 

“The United States has contributed approximately $60bn so far, with an additional $31.5 billion in financial assistance,” he said. “That’s $67bn in weaponry and $31.5bn in direct budgetary support.”

US state department data broadly supports Zelenskyy’s figure for US military support for Ukraine.