President Donald Trump’s false claim, an attack on Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has ignited outrage from U.S. allies abroad and from his frequent critics at home — who branded him a “Russian asset” and a “traitor to the free world.” While Trump’s remarks are being described as “a watershed moment in the war,” the criticism that may carry the most weight and leave the longest-lasting impact came from the Ukrainian President himself.
In a stunning display echoing Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric, President Trump, speaking from his Florida resort and residence at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, falsely placed the blame for the Russian President’s full-scale illegal war on Ukraine squarely on President Zelenskyy.
Trump’s remarks appeared to be a direct response to Zelenskyy’s public criticism of a meeting in Saudi Arabia between Trump administration officials and members of the Putin regime — talks about ending Russia’s war and about Ukraine’s future, that excluded Zelenskyy and his administration.
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Instead of addressing those concerns, Trump launched a blistering attack on the Ukrainian leader.
“Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years — you should have never started it,” Trump said, talking about Zelenskyy. “You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land. Everything, 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.”
Trump then went on to attack his predecessor.
Trump says Zelenskyy “should have never started” the war with Russia
(Putin started the war by invading Ukraine) pic.twitter.com/54EA21gjbu
— FactPost (@factpostnews) February 18, 2025
Responding to a reporter’s question about Russia’s call for elections in Ukraine as part of negotiations, Trump baselessly accused Zelenskyy of imposing martial law and falsely claimed his approval rating is in the single digits.
“Well, we have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine,” Trump said. “Well, we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at four percent approval rating and where a country has been blown to smithereens. You got most of the cities are laying on their sides.”
CBS News reported that Trump “appeared to shift three years — if not many decades — of U.S. foreign policy almost 180 degrees, issuing remarks that made his administration sound aligned more with Russian President Vladimir Putin than America’s European allies of the last eight decades.”
President Zelenskyy pushed back.
“We are seeing a lot of disinformation and that is coming from Russia,” Zelenskyy said Wednesday, CBS reported. “Unfortunately, President Trump, with all due respect… is living in this disinformation space.”
He also accused the American President of being trapped in a Russian “disinformation bubble.”
Zelenskyy also said he “would like Trump’s team to be more truthful,” in what the Associated Press characterized as “his first response to a series of striking claims the U.S. president made the previous day.”
The Ukrainian president also took issue with remarks Trump officials made at Tuesday’s talks in Saudi Arabia.
“Yesterday, there were signals of speaking with them as victims,” Zelenskyy said, according to The New York Times, which reported he was referring to “the Trump officials’ tone in discussing the Russian officials, whose government sparked the largest war in Europe since World War II, which has killed or wounded about a million people on both sides over three years.”
“That is something new,” Zelenskyy observed.
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Indeed, as The Guardian reported, former UK defense secretary Ben Wallace “described Trump’s claims as being ‘straight out of the Kremlin talking points’.”
Trump’s remarks stretched around the globe. In the UK, former British prime minister Boris Johnson, a conservative, appeared to mock the American president.
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor,” Johnson said, according to The Independent.
Former British Army colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon told The Independent, “I agree with Boris – Trump is talking bollocks and being hoodwinked by Putin – he said he’d end the war in 24 hours. He’s living in some sort of fantasy land and doesn’t seem to realize people are dying out there as he ‘show boats’ – we with Europe need to step up our support to Ukraine.”
The Trump administration, perhaps sensing the damage the President did to America’s relationship with Ukraine and its allies, quickly dispatched Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, retired general Keith Kellogg, a longtime Trump aide, to Ukraine.
“Upon arriving, Kellogg, a retired three-star general, said it was nice to be visiting Kyiv ‘just a few days before the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,’ seemingly acknowledging which side had initiated the war,’ CBS noted.
US special envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg has arrived in Kyiv. He says he’ll be “listening” and taking what he hears back to Trump, who just last night blamed Ukraine for starting the war. “We understand the need for security guarantees,” Kellogg said.pic.twitter.com/IeGUh6TGgS
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) February 19, 2025
“Zelenskyy said he hoped Kellogg would walk through Kyiv and ‘ask (Ukrainians) if they trust their president? Do they trust Putin? Let him ask about Trump, what they think after the statements made by their president,’” the AP reported.
Meanwhile, in a fact-check, The Guardian took a look at several of Trump’s “misleading and outright false statements.”
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked and widely condemned by the international community as an act of aggression,” The Guardian reports. “In the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Zelenskyy repeatedly offered to meet his Russian counterpart. Five days before Russian troops rolled into Ukraine, Zelenskyy said: ‘We are ready to sit down and speak. Pick the platform that you like.’”
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