The simmering feud between President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Trump escalated on Wednesday when Mr. Trump mocked his counterpart in a post filled with falsehoods, calling him a “dictator without elections.”
His comments came hours after Mr. Zelensky said the American leader had been “caught in a web of disinformation” from Russia over the war in Ukraine.
The pointed exchange was set off by a meeting of American and Russian officials to open talks on ending the war in Ukraine that excluded the Ukrainian government. After that meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Mr. Trump suggested that Ukraine had started the war, a comment that brought a strong rebuttal from Mr. Zelensky on Wednesday morning.
“I would like to have more truth with the Trump team,” Mr. Zelensky said in some of the most overt criticism yet of Mr. Trump and his view of the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Zelensky, summoning reporters to his presidential office in Kyiv, a building still fortified with sandbags, said that the U.S. president was living in a “web of disinformation.”
In a post on his Truth Social account, Mr. Trump responded with a scathing attack on Mr. Zelensky.
“Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle,” Mr. Trump wrote.
As he did in making his assertions a day earlier, he misrepresented verifiable facts. The United States, for instance, has allocated $119 billion for aid to Ukraine, according to a research organization in Germany, the Kiel Institute, not $350 billion.
Mr. Trump also suggested that future security of Ukraine would not be an American problem. “This War is far more important to Europe than it is to us,” he wrote. “We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”
The deepening feud threatens to undermine Ukraine’s war effort and further weaken its position in the peace talks that have already started between the U.S. and Russia — notably without Kyiv’s involvement.
Mr. Trump’s fixation on the United States being repaid for military and financial assistance over three years of war could put a stop on any future aid package to the war-torn country. Ukraine has long been dependent on regular American deliveries of air-defense weapons, shells and other type of ammunition to sustain its fight against Russia.
“Let’s be honest: Without the U.S., it will be very difficult for us,” Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said on Wednesday.
Kyiv has pushed for a seat at the negotiating table with Russia. But Mr. Trump’s portrayal of Moscow as a willing partner in peace talks, and his dismissal of Mr. Zelensky as an illegitimate and ineffective leader, risks further sidelining Ukraine.
In his social media post Wednesday, Mr. Trump said in a menacing tone that Mr. Zelensky had “better move fast” to secure peace “or he is not going to have a Country left.”
His comments followed up similarly accusatory statements he made on Tuesday. Mr. Trump said Ukraine “should have never started” the war, and appeared to embrace what has been a Russian demand that Ukraine hold elections as a necessary step in the settlement talks. Elections were suspended under martial law after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Mr. Trump also said Tuesday that Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating was 4 percent. Mr. Zelensky said that was not true, citing polls showing far higher support. In one conducted in December by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, for example, 52 percent of Ukrainians said that they trusted his leadership.
“So, if anyone wants to replace me right now — that’s not going to happen,” Mr. Zelensky said, referring to his approval ratings.
Mr. Trump’s false statements, Mr. Zelensky said, stemmed from misinformation spread by people around him. “Such rhetoric doesn’t help Ukraine — it only helps in bringing Putin out of isolation,” he said.
Until this week, Mr. Zelensky had walked a fine line of staking out Ukrainian positions while avoiding any suggestion of an open breach with the United States, Ukraine’s most important ally in a war that is nearing the three-year mark. But after the initial cease-fire talks between Russia and the United States on Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky starkly laid out his refusal to accept terms negotiated without Ukrainian participation.
His comments on Wednesday — pushing back on Mr. Trump’s false assertions while refraining from direct criticism by attributing them to a broader disinformation bubble — were in line with his efforts to maintain a balancing act and maintain ties with the U.S.
At the news conference Wednesday, Mr. Zelensky was focused and spoke with intensity. He said he was not personally ruffled by the negotiations with the Trump administration. “This is not my first dialogue or fight,” he said. “I take it calmly.”
Russia, he said, is clearly pleased with the turn of diplomatic developments. “I think Putin and the Russians are very happy, because questions are discussed with them,” Mr. Zelensky said.
“Yesterday, there were signals of speaking with them as victims,” he said of the Trump officials’ tone toward the Russians, whose government set off the largest war in Europe since World War II, one that has killed or wounded about a million people on both sides. “That is something new.”
Ukrainians, Mr. Zelensky said, are not likely to trust promises Russian negotiators offer in talks. “Nobody in Ukraine trusts Putin,” he said.
Mr. Zelensky also laid out efforts to coordinate from allies security guarantees intended to prevent Russia from violating any cease-fire. This has been an overriding focus of Ukrainian diplomacy going into any peace talks.
For Russia, a continuation of the war also carries costs, including by the estimate of military analysts a staggering toll of 1,000 soldiers or more killed or wounded daily, as well as punishing economic sanctions. Ukraine wants to trade this pressure on Russia for acceptance of a peacekeeping force or other guarantee of security to prevent the war, already the bloodiest in Europe in generations, from restarting.
Mr. Zelensky repeated that one option would be membership in NATO, a possibility that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has rejected and that the United States has said it does not support. The Ukrainian leader also mentioned maintaining the country’s standing army of about one million soldiers and a peacekeeping contingent from European countries, or some combination of these measures.
Mr. Putin on Wednesday praised the Trump administration officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for having fostered a “very friendly” atmosphere. Unlike past American administrations, he suggested, the Trump team did not criticize Russia’s actions.
“On the American side, there were completely different people who were open to the negotiation process without any bias, without any condemnation of what was done in the past,” Mr. Putin said, speaking to reporters while on a visit to St. Petersburg.
Mr. Putin said he looked forward to a meeting with Mr. Trump, but declined to give a date, cautioning that there was still a lot of preparatory work to be done, “including on the Ukrainian track.”
“I’ll be happy to meet with Donald,” he said. “We haven’t seen each other in a while. But we’re in a situation where it’s not enough to meet just to have tea or coffee and sit and talk about the future.”
Mr. Putin dismissed fears that American allies in Europe were being excluded from the U.S.-Russia talks, arguing that the two countries had bilateral issues to discuss, such as the expiration of the New START nuclear arms control treaty next year.
“Why are they being hysterical?” Mr. Putin said, apparently referring to the Europeans. “Hysteria is not appropriate here.”
Mr. Putin said that Mr. Trump told him in their phone call last week that “the United States expects that the negotiating process will take place with the participation of both Russia and Ukraine.”
“No one is excluding Ukraine from this process,” Mr. Putin said.
Mr. Zelensky delivered his comments on the same day that Keith Kellogg, the retired general appointed by Mr. Trump as his special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, arrived in Kyiv for a three-day visit to discuss possible ways to end the war.
Speaking from Kyiv’s railway station upon arrival, Mr. Kellogg said his mission would be “to sit and listen” to Ukraine’s concerns. The United States, he said, understands Ukraine’s “need for security guarantees” and the “importance of sovereignty of this nation” — remarks that contrasted sharply with Mr. Trump’s disparaging comments from the day before.
Mr. Zelensky said he wanted to take Mr. Kellogg to the front line so he could see the war firsthand. Hoping the visit might pierce Mr. Trump’s disinformation bubble, he urged the American envoy to speak with civilians and soldiers, and ask them “whether they trust their president, what they think of Putin, and what they think of Trump after his statements.”