Trump blames Ukraine for starting war after Zelensky pushes back against Kyiv’s exclusion from peace talks

US President Donald Trump appeared to hold Kyiv responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Tuesday in a series of incendiary comments he made to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Shortly beforehand, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had called the decision to exclude Kyiv from US-Russia talks held on ending the war earlier that day in Saudi Arabia a “surprise”.

Trump said he was “disappointed” by Zelensky’s reaction to being sidelined, adding that Zelensky had had “three years” to make a deal with Russia.

“Today I heard, ‘oh, well, we weren’t invited’. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal”, Trump said, adding that a “half-baked negotiator” could have settled the conflict “years ago” without Ukraine making any territorial concessions to Russia.

Trump said he was “much more confident” of striking a deal to end the war after Tuesday’s talks, stressing that the Russian delegation had shown it was committed to stopping the “savage barbarianism” of the war.

Though Trump expressed his support for deploying European peacekeepers to Ukraine once a deal to end the war has been reached, he stressed that no US troops would be committed to such a force.

Trump also called for Ukraine to hold elections, falsely claiming that Zelensky had a domestic approval rating of just 4%, echoing the Kremlin narrative that he is an “illegitimate” president, despite the fact that recent polling has shown that Zelensky has the support of over half the Ukrainian population.

Last year’s presidential elections in Ukraine had to be postponed due to a clause in the country’s constitution banning the holding of elections while the country is under martial law, as Ukraine has been since February 2022.

Zelensky canceled a scheduled visit to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, saying that he wanted to avoid “coincidences” after Tuesday’s high-level talks between Russia and the US, which Zelensky said his team had learned about from the media.

During a state visit to Türkiye on Tuesday, Zelensky criticised the US for holding talks about Ukraine’s future “without Ukraine’s involvement” and reiterated his pledge that he would never obey Russian ultimatums.