The war of words between President Donald Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy intensified in the last few days as Trump claimed Ukraine started the war, Zelenskyy retorted that Trump lives in Russian disinformation and then again Trump struck calling Zelenskky a dictator without elections. In an interview with Fox on Friday morning, Trump did not repeat his earlier claim that Ukraine started the war but said that Russia could have been talked out of invading Ukraine.
Trump said both former president Joe Biden and Zelenskyy said the wrong things and thus Ukraine got attacked by somebody that’s much bigger and much stronger. “That should never have been a war, and all those dead people shouldn’t be dead, and all those cities shouldn’t be demolished right now,” Trump said. “Russia attacked, but they shouldn’t have let them attack, because they wouldn’t have attacked if you had people that knew what they were doing.”
“And I will tell you, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin could have been talked out of that so easy, but they didn’t know how to talk.”
“I’ve had very good talks with Putin, and I’ve had not such good talks with Ukraine,” the president told the nation’s governors during remarks at the White House. “They don’t have any cards, but they play it tough.”
As Trump is pushing for an immediate resolution to the three-year-long war and Russia is happy about it, US and Russian officials held their first meeting in Saudi Arabia on how to end the war but Ukraine was not included in the meeting. Trump said Zelenskyy has no cards and hence he did not think the Ukraine side was important to be at meetings. “he makes it very hard to make deals,” Trump said about Zelenskyy.
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent presented a deal to Zelenskyy that sought 50 per cent of the country’s rare-earth minerals. Zelensky said he rejected the first deal because he didn’t see enough “security guarantees” offered by the US in exchange for the billions in mineral rights.