WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
Trump and Zelenskyy war of words heats up even as US looks to wind down war in Ukraine
President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy exchanged terse insults on Wednesday, following meetings between U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday without representatives from Ukraine.
Trump repeatedly has said that he is the only one who can bring an end to the war between Ukraine and Russia, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was in contact with Zelenskyy and was working to ensure "that all parties are heard" during the peace talks.
Yet Ukraine’s absence from the negotiations on Tuesday appears to have exacerbated a wedge between Washington and Kyiv.
While Zelenskyy accused Trump of perpetuating Russian "disinformation" on Wednesday, Trump clapped back and labeled Zelenskyy a "dictator" who has failed his country.
"A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only ‘TRUMP,’ and the Trump Administration, can do," Trump wrote in a social media post Wednesday.
"I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died."
Trump’s post included a series of inaccurate statements, including that 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." Meanwhile, Congress has appropriated $175 billion since 2022 for aid to Ukraine, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Trump’s comments build on statements he delivered Tuesday at his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate, where he said that Russia wasn't the only one exerting pressure to force Ukraine to hold an election. One of Russia's conditions for signing a peace deal includes Ukraine holding an election, nearly a year after Zelenskyy's five-year term was slated to end.
But Zelenskyy has remained in his position leading Kyiv because the Ukrainian constitution bars holding elections under martial law. Ukraine has been under martial law since February 2022.
Additionally, Trump chastised Ukraine on Tuesday for not ending the war sooner, and also appeared to suggest that Ukraine started the conflict, even though Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
"I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it's going very well. But today I heard, 'Oh, we weren't invited,'" Trump said Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. "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."
In response, Zelenskyy delivered his own jabs toward Trump, and said the U.S. president lived in a "disinformation space" peddling inaccurate information that originated from Russia.
"We have seen this disinformation," Zelenskyy said Wednesday at a news conference before meeting with retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellog, the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. "We understand that it is coming from Russia."
"I think Putin and the Russians are very happy, because questions are discussed with them," he added.
Zelenskyy has stressed in recent days that Ukraine must be involved in negotiations for a peace deal with Russia, and said Sunday that Ukraine wouldn’t accept a peace deal if his country was absent from negotiations.
He also announced on Tuesday that he would postpone a scheduled trip to Saudi Arabia until March, after revealing during a joint press conference with Turkish President Recept Tayyip Erdoğan that Ukraine wasn’t invited to the U.S.-Russia discussions in Riyadh.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House national security advisor Mike Waltz and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff met in Riyadh with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin’s foreign affairs advisor Yuri Ushakov to hash out ways to end the conflict.
The first action the U.S. plans to take after the meetings with Russian officials is to "reestablish the functionality of our respective missions in Washington and in Moscow," Rubio told reporters from The Associated Press and CNN.
"For us to be able to continue to move down this road, we need to have diplomatic facilities that are operating and functioning normally," Rubio said, according to a State Department transcript.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and Trump vowed on the campaign trail in 2024 that he would work to end the conflict if elected again.
RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE
Russian forces enter new Ukrainian region – Putin
Russian troops have entered Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy Region for the first time since 2022, President Vladimir Putin has said. He briefly spoke about the situation of the battlefield with reporters in St. Petersburg, a day after the US and Russia held first high-profile talks in three years.
According to Putin, in the early hours of Wednesday, the soldiers from the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade “crossed the border between the Russian Federation and Ukraine and entered the enemy territory.”
“Our troops are on the offensive in all sections of the front line,” he added, without providing more details.
The Russian Defense Ministry posted videos of an Iskander ballistic missile hitting Ukrainian artillery positions in the Sumy Region and Russian naval infantrymen flying kamikaze drones into the enemy trenches. The ministry did not report any major advancements in the area in its daily update on Wednesday.
Kiev provided a different account of the events. Andrey Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, claimed that Ukrainian troops have “destroyed” a reconnaissance unit that had tried to cross the border. He denied a “large-scale offensive” in the area.
Russia first invaded the Sumy Region in the early days of the conflict in February 2022 and withdrew two months later. In August 2024, Ukraine used the area to invade Russia’s Kursk Region and capture several border villages, as well as the town of Sudzha. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has since said that he had planned to use an incursion across Russia’s internationally recognized borders as leverage during potential peace talks.
The Russian troops have since been fighting to gradually push the Ukrainians from Kursk, with the MOD reporting the liberation of the village of Sverdlikovo on Wednesday. “We took many prisoners,” a soldier from Russia’s battlegroup North told RIA Novosti.
The teams led by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed paths to end the Ukraine conflict in Riyadh on Tuesday. While no breakthroughs have been archieved, both sides agreed to work towards the normalization of bilateral ties that were suspended by the Biden administration in 2022.
Fox News/RT
