Trump calls Zelensky a ‘dictator’ in tit for tat
US President Donald Trump has launched an extraordinary social media attack on Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump has called Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator without elections” who has done a “terrible job” in an escalating war of words between the two leaders.
Trump lashed out on social media on Thursday (AEDT) after the Ukrainian president said Trump was “living in a disinformation space” created by Russia.
Trump called Zelensky a “modestly successful comedian” and said he’d “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left”.
“He refuses to have elections, is very low in the Ukrainian polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle’,” said Trump.
Because of Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has delayed elections that were scheduled for April 2024.
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Trump also accused the Ukrainian leader of talking the US under former president Joe Biden into spending $US350 billion ($550 billion) on the war that, without the United States and Trump, they “never will never be able to settle”.
“We are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only ‘TRUMP’, and the Trump Administration, can do,” he wrote.
“Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelensky probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going.”
The sharp back-and-forth came after senior US and Russian officials met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday and agreed to negotiate a settlement to an end to the three-year-old war.
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Kyiv is ropable that it has been excluded from the negotiating table and fears the US and Russia will agree on terms that are too favourable to Moscow.
But Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to quickly bring the war to a close, reaffirmed his position that Zelensky should have negotiated an end earlier and appeared to accuse him of starting the deadly conflict.
Zelensky accused Trump on Wednesday of living in a Russian-made “disinformation space”.
That comment was in response to Trump saying that Zelensky’s rating stood at 4 per cent.
Zelensky said that “we have seen this disinformation. We understand that it is coming from Russia”. He went on to cite a survey, which he said suggested 58 per cent of Ukrainian people had confidence in him as leader.
Zelensky said Trump “lives in this disinformation space.”
Meanwhile, Zelensky has rejected US demands for billions in mineral wealth from Ukraine to repay Washington for wartime aid, saying America had supplied nowhere near that sum sought and offered no specific security guarantees in the agreement.
The Ukrainian leader, who is under major pressure from Trump’s White House, said Washington had supplied his country with $US67 billion ($105 billion) in weapons and $US31.5 billion ($49.5 billion) in direct budget support throughout the war with Russia.
“You can’t call this $US500 billion ($786 billion) and ask us to return 500 billion in minerals or something else. This is not a serious conversation,” Zelensky said.
– with AAP/Reuters
