U.S. President Donald Trump has said he is likely to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin this month.
During a press briefing on Tuesday, after U.S. and Russian officials held talks in Saudi Arabia, Trump strongly suggested that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was responsible for Russia’s invasion.
He also brushed aside concerns about Ukraine not being included in discussions aimed at ending the war.
“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well. But today, I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it…,” Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine.”
Trump said that he was “much more confident” of reaching an agreement following the talks in Riyadh led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“They were very good. Russia wants to do something, they want to stop the savage barbarism,” he said.
Asked if his administration would support Russia’s calls for elections in Ukraine as part of any peace deal, Trump claimed without evidence that Zelenskyy had an approval rating of just 4 percent and noted that the country’s elections had been suspended under martial law.
In an opinion poll carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in December, 52 percent of respondents said they trusted Zelenskyy, down 12 percentage points from February.
“Yeah, I would say that, you know, when you want a seat at the table… Wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have to say like, ‘It’s been a long time since we’ve had an election?’” Trump said.
“That’s not a Russia thing, that’s something coming from me, and coming from many other countries also.”