He then escalated on Wednesday, just a day after his negotiating team sat down with senior Russian officials in Saudi Arabia to discuss ending the war and begin cooperation on a range of topics.
“A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Trump warned, accusing the Ukraine leader of “talking” the U.S. into spending billions to support its defense.
The Kremlin seemed barely to believe its luck, as Trump was essentially parroting many of Moscow’s talking points about Ukraine.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council and the country’s former president, endorsed Trump’s anti-Ukraine tirade: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the U.S. president, I would have laughed out loud. @realDonaldTrump is 200 percent right. Bankrupt clown … ”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov didn’t directly address Trump’s first public denunciation of Zelenskyy, but expressed satisfaction with the U.S. president’s more recent remarks on the war, saying Trump “understands” the Kremlin’s position.
“He is the first, and so far, in my opinion, the only Western leader who has publicly and loudly said that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the impudent line of the previous administration [of former U.S. President Joe Biden] to draw Ukraine into NATO,” Lavrov said, echoing a long-term Kremlin narrative about the reasons for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.