On Wednesday, former President Donald Trump criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for not reaching a peace deal with Russia to end the war, saying that whatever agreement was possible would not be worse than the current situation for Ukraine.
“Those cities are gone. They’re gone, and we continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refused to make a deal, Zelensky. There was no deal that he could have made that wouldn’t have been better than the situation you have right now,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina.
“You have a country that has been obliterated, not possible to be rebuilt. It’ll take hundreds of years to rebuild it, there’s not enough money to rebuild it if the whole world got together. If they made a bad deal, it would have been much better,” the former president added.
Trump said Zelensky was making “aspersions” toward him, an apparent reference to comments the Ukrainian leader made in a recent New Yorker interview about Trump’s desire to end the war.
“My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how. With this war, oftentimes, the deeper you look at it the less you understand. I’ve seen many leaders who were convinced they knew how to end it tomorrow, and as they waded deeper into it, they realized it’s not that simple,” Zelensky said.
In the same interview, Zelensky called Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, “too radical.” In a June interview with The New York Times, Vance said that he would favor a deal that freezes the battle lines, guarantees Ukrainian independence, and includes some sort of long-term US military assistance for Ukraine.
Zelensky is at odds with other Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who is upset with Zelensky for visiting an ammunition factory in Pennsylvania without inviting any Republicans. Johnson wrote a letter to Zelensky demanding he fire the Ukrainian ambassador to the US.
“I demand that you immediately fire Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova,” Johnson said in the letter. “The facility was in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a top political surrogate for Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because – on purpose – no Republicans were invited. The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference.”
Zelensky toured a factory in Scranton with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who was a leading candidate to be Vice President Harris’s running mate before she picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Both Zelensky and Shapiro signed artillery shells at the factory.
