Round Two

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday fired back at US President Donald Trump’s comments that Ukraine is to blame for the 2022 Russian invasion, a claim that came just a day after Washington and Moscow held talks in Saudi Arabia to end the three-year war, the Washington Post reported.

Following Tuesday’s US-Russia meeting, Trump blamed Ukraine for the start of the war while responding to complaints from Kyiv about not being invited to the talks in Saudi Arabia.

“Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said, referring to the Ukrainian leader. “You should have ended it – you should have never started it.”

He also accused Zelenskyy of being extremely unpopular in the country with an approval rating of four percent – a claim echoing Russian narratives about the Ukrainian leader’s legitimacy, the newspaper wrote.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has described Zelenskyy’s ongoing term as illegitimate, citing the postponement of the country’s 2024 presidential elections due to martial law, according to ABC News.

Zelenskyy dismissed Trump’s remarks over his popularity, calling it disinformation that “is coming from Russia.”

A Wednesday survey by the Ukrainian polling organization, Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, found that around 57 percent of Ukrainians trust Zelenskyy – an increase of five points from a survey in December.

However, Trump’s remarks provoked an unusual display of unity across Ukraine’s political spectrum: Opposition figures and critics of Zelensky rallied behind him, seeing Trump’s comments as an attack on Ukrainian sovereignty.

Some Ukrainians warned that elections should not happen until the war is over, while others warned that an election could spark chaos in the war-torn country, a gift for Putin.

The recent controversy came a day after US and Russian diplomats met in the Saudi capital to discuss an end to the war that began in February 2022.

The Saudi talks did not include the participation of Ukraine or other European nations, a move that raised alarms among Washington’s allies that the US is preparing to pressure Kyiv into making territorial concessions to Russia.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine would reject any agreement without Kyiv’s involvement.

The diplomatic overtures have also caught many of Washington’s European allies off-guard as they struggle to come up with a united strategy to address the recent developments, according to the Wall Street Journal.

On Monday, European leaders met in the French capital Paris to coordinate a unified response to Trump’s shift in policy and Ukraine’s exclusion.

But that meeting exposed divisions over how to properly respond, including questions on whether to deploy European troops in Ukraine.

Even so, European Union nations agreed Wednesday on another package of sanctions against Russia amid concerns that the Trump administration is softening its stance on the country, Reuters added.