Why Trump Just Slammed ‘Dictator’ Zelensky For Having ‘Started’ War with Russia

U.S. President Donald Trump on February 19 launched an unprecedented criticism of his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, branding him a “dictator without elections, and stating that he was “very disappointed” with his failure to resolve the ongoing war with Russia. “You’ve been there for three years, you should’ve ended it… You should’ve never started it,” he stated of the conflict, marking an unprecedented endorsement by a Western head of state of the narrative that Kiev, rather than Moscow, was to blame for the initiation of hostilities. Western sources have over three years consistently referred to Russia’s initiation of a large scale assault on Ukrainian forces on February 24, 2022, as being an unprovoked act of aggression, with the term “unprovoked and illegal invasion” becoming a staple of Western commentaries. Russia, by contrast, has alleged that Ukraine’s violation of the Minsk Agreements and large scale assault on Russian-speaking separatist regions in the country’s eastern regions forced it to take action to end the threat. Russian sources have cited the large number of dual citizens in the Donbas holding Russian passports to assert that the Russian state had an obligation to protect them.

President Trump’s apparent support for the narrative that Ukraine is to blame for starting the war marks an important turning point in Washington’s position on the conflict. Under the Biden administration, the United States consistently took a more conservative position relative to many of its more hawkish allies across continental Europe, with European states having consistently faced considerable resistance in Washington when seeking to escalate the conflict. Examples of points on which European states proved much more eager to escalate included deliveries of new kinds of armaments, initiating ground force deployments, or facilitating Ukrainian missile strikes deep into Russia using Western satellites, equipment and advisors. The United Kingdom, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and the Baltic States have been among those which took much harder line positions than the United States, with changes in policy in Washington including the decisions to allow provision of cluster bombs, F-16 fighters, Abrams tanks and depleted uranium rounds all seen to have been the results of sustained European lobbying efforts. Under the Trump administration, the rift between Washington and its European allies in their positions towards Russia has grown considerably further, fuelling concern among European states regarding their continued ability to sustain the Ukrainian war effort without American support.