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“A modestly successful comedian talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion”: Five of Trump’s false claims about Zelensky
The Insider
After Volodymyr Zelensky declined to sign a draft agreement that would have granted the U.S. half of Ukraine's mineral resources, Donald Trump began accusing the Ukrainian president of every imaginable — and unimaginable — act of wrongdoing. Below is a brief list of the American president's false claims.
False claim #1: Zelensky's approval rating is 4%
In a Feb. 19 post on Truth Social, Trump claims:
“He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden 'like a fiddle.' A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”
Additionally, in a meeting with reporters at Mar-a-Lago, Trump stated that Zelensky’s approval rating in Ukraine is just 4%.
Trump hasn’t come up with anything new. The claim that Zelensky usurped power by refusing to hold elections in April 2024, when his term was scheduled to end, is a favorite false claim of Kremlin propaganda, which has long referred to the Ukrainian president as “expired.” In reality, Ukraine’s law “On the Legal Regime of Martial Law” explicitly prohibits holding presidential elections during this period, and the Constitution states that the president serves until the newly elected president of Ukraine takes office.
As for the 4% approval rating, these figures come from an unknown source and bear no resemblance to the actual results of any legitimate surveys conducted among the people of Ukraine. According to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, Zelensky’s trust rating is 57%, and it consistently exceeds 50% both nationwide and in each of the country’s regions.
At the same time, the president’s approval rating, which reached 90% in the early months of the war, predictably declined over time, but since the beginning of 2025, it has started to rise again. It has never fallen below 52%.
Elon Musk later defended Trump, claiming that the 52% result came courtesy of a state-controlled social service and that it was inflated. However, according to the British polling agency IBIF, Zelensky's trust rating is even higher, at 63%.
As for Trump, his approval in the U.S. is lower than Zelensky’s in Ukraine and has shown a tendency to decline further. For instance, according to Gallup, Trump's approval rating has dropped to 45%, which is the lowest for a newly inaugurated president since the mid-20th century (the only lower ratings were seen during Trump’s own first term).
A Reuters poll gives Trump an even lower rating — 44% — and attributes the decline to his failure to manage the country’s economic challenges. Similar numbers appear in a CNN poll, with the network’s sociologists attributing Trump's unpopularity to his abuses of power.
False claim #2: The U.S. has spent $350 billion on aid to Ukraine
Trump writes on his social media platform:
“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. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us — We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”
It’s unclear where Trump got the $350 billion figure. According to a report from the Special Inspector General, from fiscal year 2022 to 2024 Congress allocated around $183 billion in support for Kyiv — either directly to Ukraine or indirectly as part of NATO’s Atlantic Resolve operation. This amount also includes assistance to ensure the security of NATO allies in partner countries, so not all of it is earmarked for use specifically in Ukraine.
Trump had already mentioned the $350 billion estimate in a December 2024 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as Newsweek points out, the $350 billion figure appeared in a World Bank statement in September 2022 as an estimate of the cost of Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction — but it has nothing to do with U.S. spending.
Moreover, part of the funds allocated to support Ukraine flows back to the U.S. As the Washington Post noted, these funds have been used by American companies to produce new weapons in order to replace those sent to Ukraine.
Regarding the comparison of U.S. and European spending on aid to Ukraine, there is a quarterly chart available on Statista.com.
Total quarterly aid allocations to Ukraine between January 2022 and June 2024, by donor (in billion euros)
Statista
As we can see, U.S. expenditures exceeded European spending only in the third quarter of 2022 (by €7.6 billion) and the third quarter of 2024 (by €2.2 billion). In every other quarter, Europe spent more than the U.S., with the difference reaching €12.2 billion in just the first quarter of 2024. There is no data yet for the final quarter of 2024. U.S. aid did increase toward the end of the year, but certainly not by more than $200 billion. Still, it appears that this chart does not account for the full amount of aid allocated by Congress, as the total listed here is estimated at just €85 million.
False claim #3: Half of the U.S. money sent to Ukraine has disappeared
In the same Truth Social post, Trump claims:
“On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is 'MISSING.''”
In reality, Zelensky never said this. He only disputed inflated estimates of the total amount of aid Ukraine had received. In an interview with the Associated Press on Feb. 1, he stated:
“We didn’t receive this [U.S. aid] as cash, but as weapons. We received weapons worth over $70 billion; there’s training, exercises, additional transport — not just the price of the weapons. There were humanitarian and social programs as well. But when people say that Ukraine received $200 billion to support the military during the war — that’s not true. I don’t know where all that money is. Maybe it’s on paper, maybe there are hundreds of different programs…maybe. We’re not arguing, we’re very grateful for everything, but as president, I document what we received — more than $70 billion, around $76 billion. And that’s a huge help, but it’s not $200 billion. Let’s be honest, it’s not $200 billion.”
In other words, as CNN points out, Zelensky was reiterating what experts in the U.S. and other countries have repeatedly stated: a significant portion of the overall U.S. budgetary “response” to the war in Ukraine does not arrive in the form of money handed over to the Ukrainian government. For example, analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in May of last year:
“The notion of 'aid to Ukraine' is a misnomer. Despite images of 'pallets of cash' being sent to Ukraine, about 72 percent of this money overall and 86 percent of the military aid will be spent in the United States. The reason for this high percentage is that weapons going to Ukraine are produced in U.S. factories, payments to U.S. service members are mostly spent in the United States, and even some piece of the humanitarian aid is spent in the United States.”
According to Reuters, on Feb. 19 Zelensky clarified that over three years of war, Ukraine received $67 billion in weapons and $31.5 billion in direct budgetary support from the U.S. There was no mention of any missing funds.
False claim #4: Zelensky is to blame for starting the war
At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Feb. 19, in response to a BBC correspondent’s question about what he would say to Ukrainians who felt betrayed by the exclusion of their representatives from negotiations with the Russian delegation in Riyadh, Trump responded:
“I hear that they're upset about not having a seat, well, they've had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily... You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land — and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished.”
The fact that Trump blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion came as a shock even to many Republicans. Russian propaganda itself does not deny that Russia initiated hostilities — after all, Putin declared on Feb. 24, 2022, that he was launching a “special military operation,” after which Russian forces began a full-scale invasion without presenting any clear demands to Ukraine, as Putin’s so-called ultimatum, put forward in December 2021, was a set of proposed agreements with the U.S. and NATO in which Ukraine was not even considered a party. How exactly Ukraine contributed to the start of the war and what kind of deal Trump could have brokered in this situation remain unclear.
False claim #5: Zelensky humiliated the U.S. Treasury Secretary during his visit to Kyiv
On Feb. 19, Trump claimed that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was treated disrespectfully during his visit to Kyiv to offer a mineral resources deal:
“Scott Bessent actually went there and was treated rather rudely, because essentially, they told him ‘no,’ and Zelensky was sleeping and unavailable to meet him,” Trump said Wednesday night on Air Force One. “He traveled many hours on the train, which is a dangerous trip, and we’re talking about the secretary of the Treasury. He went there to get a document signed, and when he got there, he came back empty. They wouldn’t sign the document.”
This is a blatant lie. Zelensky met with Bessent on Feb. 12, as confirmed by multiple photographs.
According to Ukrainian media, it was Bessent who acted inappropriately, giving Zelensky only an hour to review the draft document. Zelensky refused to sign due to the fact that it did not include security guarantees for Ukraine.