Donald Trump appeared to blame Ukraine for the war with Russia and signalled Kyiv should hold elections, in his first public remarks after the US held high-level talks with Moscow in Riyadh.
Russia and the US on Tuesday agreed to “lay the groundwork for future co-operation” on ending the war and a lightning normalisation of relations, in their first talks since President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion.
The discussion came after Trump called Putin last week in an effort to end the war — without consulting Ukraine or its European allies — as Washington accelerates an extraordinary turnaround in Russia policy.
In comments to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump falsely claimed Kyiv had started the conflict, the largest on European soil since the second world war, and added he was “very disappointed” that Ukraine was “upset about not having a seat” at the talks.
“Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited’,” the US president said. “Well, you’ve been there for three years . . . you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
The full-scale war began when Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine on February 24 2022. But Russia’s military aggression began in 2014, with Moscow’s forced annexation of Crimea and armed conflict in the eastern Donbas region under the guise of a separatist uprising.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had not been informed ahead of time about the Riyadh talks, adding that Ukraine would reject any settlement that does not directly involve Kyiv.
“This is only the first month,” said one EU diplomat who expressed shock at Trump’s shift from decades of US policy on Russia since returning to office on January 20. “We need to wake up.”
In further comments critical of Zelenskyy, Trump said: “It’s been a long time since we’ve had an election” in Ukraine.
“That’s not a Russia thing. That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries,” he added.
However, his comment closely resembled previous remarks from the Kremlin, which has questioned Zelenskyy’s legitimacy.
One of Russia’s central goals in its war against Ukraine has been regime change, according to Ukrainian and western intelligence agencies.
Ukrainian officials have shown the Financial Times intelligence from the early days of the war suggesting that Moscow had wanted to install Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Putin, as leader if the invasion had gone as planned.
Putin questioned Zelenskyy’s legitimacy after his term expired in May 2024, but Kyiv has said it can only hold an election after the fighting stops and martial law is lifted.
On Tuesday, Trump claimed that Zelenskyy’s approval rating stood at 4 per cent. But an opinion poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in February found that 57 per cent of Ukrainians trusted their president, up from 52 per cent in December.
KIIS executive director Anton Hrushevsky said the survey results showed that Zelenskyy “maintains a fairly high level of trust in society . . . and, moreover, retains legitimacy”.
On Wednesday Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, arrived in Kyiv and told Ukraine’s public broadcaster he would be “listening” and taking what he heard back to Trump.
“We’re going to listen. We understand the need for security guarantees,” he said. “It’s very clear to us the importance of sovereignty of this nation . . . Part of my mission is to sit and listen.”
There are widespread fears in Kyiv and throughout Europe that Trump wants to settle the war on Putin’s terms. The US already appears to have made significant concessions to Putin by brushing aside Ukraine’s desires to join Nato and restore its control over Russian-occupied land.
Holding elections would be a formidable challenge for Ukraine since millions of citizens are displaced, living abroad or residing in areas under Russian occupation. Kyiv has also expressed security concerns around any polls.
A survey of Ukrainians conducted in September and October by the non-profit International Republican Institute found that 60 per cent of respondents opposed holding a presidential vote during the war.
David Arakhamia, head of Zelenskyy’s ruling party in parliament, said this month that elections should not be held earlier than six months after the end of martial law.
Putin’s spokesperson on Wednesday said a decision on Ukrainian elections “cannot be taken in Moscow or Washington”.
At an emergency meeting in Paris on Monday, European leaders clashed over dispatching peacekeeping forces to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire. While the UK offered to put “boots on the ground”, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain expressed reluctance to do so.
Trump said on Tuesday that he would support European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine after the war, although Lavrov said on Tuesday that any European peacekeeping deployment in the country would be “unacceptable”.
Trump said the US would not have to contribute any troops to peacekeeping operations in Ukraine since “we’re very far away” but added that he did not want to pull all US troops out of Europe as part of a peace agreement.
European Council president António Costa was on Wednesday holding one-on-one calls with all EU leaders to gauge what additional support they would be willing to provide to Ukraine.
Discussions included possible peacekeeping troop deployments and moves towards higher collective defence spending, officials said.
French President Emmanuel Macron has convened a second emergency meeting on Wednesday of European Nato members who did not participate in an initial meeting on Monday, plus Canada.
The afternoon meeting, a hybrid of virtual and in-person attendance, will seek to “assert that there is a European-Atlantic group” whose interests must be taken into account, said a person briefed on the preparations, adding that it was also about “maintaining Trump’s attention”.
Additional reporting by James Politi in Washington and Henry Foy in Brussels
