President Donald Trump on Thursday issued a rare and pointed criticism of Russian president Vladimir Putin after Moscow unleashed the deadliest airstrike on Kyiv since last year, killing at least nine people.
In a post on his Truth Social website, Trump said he was “not happy” with the Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital, which came less than 24 hours after he baselessly accused Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy of starting and working to prolong the war that began in 2022 when Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine.
The strike was described by the Ukrainian defense ministry as “massive” and consisting of attacks by “cruise missiles, drones, [and] ballistic weapons” in what the ministry called “yet another strike on peaceful cities and Ukrainian homes.” Zelensky, who was traveling in South Africa when the attack hit, said it was “extremely important that everyone around the world sees and understands what is really happening” in his country.
Trump called the Russian attack on Ukraine’s capital “not necessary” and slammed the “very bad timing” of the attack, which Ukrainian officials say left at least 70 people — including six children — injured.
He then exhorted the Russian leader to halt the attacks and get to the negotiating table, writing: “Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE!”
The president’s extremely rare criticism of Russia marks a head-spinning reversal from what he was saying less than a day ago when he appeared to have fully adopted Moscow’s position on at least one outcome of the war: The status of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Russian forces illegally seized the Ukrainian territory in 2014 and up until now the American government had steadfastly refused to even consider recognizing Russia’s unlawful annexation.
But Trump, who appeared upset about Zelensky refusing to recognize Russia’s theft of his country’s territory as part of a Trump-brokered peace deal under which Russia would end the war in exchange for having their wartime gains legitimized, said Crimea “was lost years ago” to Ukraine and said it was “not even a point of discussion” in a separate Truth Social post.
Trump also taunted Zelensky in the same post, writing that Zelensky had “no cards to play” and accusing him of making it “so difficult to settle this war.”
“He has nothing to boast about! The situation for Ukraine is dire — He can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country,” he said.
Trump, who has had a rocky history with Zelensky dating back to his attempt to blackmail the Ukrainian leader into announcing sham investigations into then-former vice president Joe Biden and his son ahead of the 2020 presidential election, has repeatedly — and falsely — accused Zelensky of having started the war while pressuring him to make broad concessions and asking nothing of the sort from Putin.
He, Vice-President JD Vance, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio have threatened to “walk away” from efforts to broker a settlement between Moscow and Kyiv over what they describe as Zelensky’s intransigence even though it is Russia that has repeatedly broken previously-announced ceasefire agreements.
The president’s criticism of Putin comes just a day after British, American and European officials met in London for what were described as “substantive” technical discussions as Vance again suggested that the US would abandon the process unless Kyiv agreed to massive territorial concessions of a scope not seen since the 1938 Munich agreement that legitimized Nazi Germany’s annexation of part of what was then Czechoslovakia.
Rubio, who had been set to attend the London talks, backed out and left the task of attendance to Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, retired U.S. Army general Keith Kellogg.