US president Donald Trump has said it is time for Ukraine to get a new president, suggesting Volodymyr Zelenskiy has not done enough to end his country’s war with Russia.
Speaking at the White House on Saturday, Trump said: “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal″, adding that “for some reason [Zelenskiy] never does”.
He has also sought to blame record US diesel prices on Ukraine rather than the US-led war in Iran, which has elevated world energy prices.
“He wants to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel,” Trump said, before departing for Tennessee where he was set to rally Republican voters.
Trump also suggested that if he had been US president in 2022, “that war would have never started. There was no reason that that war with Ukraine and Russia started. It started due to incompetence.”
He said Zelenskiy had “lost 30 per cent of your country and you’ve had over a million people go between the two of them, over two million people killed”.
“That’s a war that should have never started. And I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” Trump said.
[ Trump agrees diesel supply deal with RussiaOpens in new window ]
The extraordinary intervention came after Russian strikes killed at least 20 people in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, Ukrainian officials said on Saturday.
Three children were among those killed when Russian aerial bombs hit residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine’s state emergency service said. At least 18 people were wounded.
The attacks came a day after Trump announced a deal to buy Russian diesel that Kyiv warned would help bankroll Moscow’s war.
Russia and Ukraine are locked in a long-range aerial war while their armies remain largely deadlocked on the front line, more than 4½ years since Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
Ukraine is struggling to counter escalating Russian bombardments that have killed more than 55 people over the past four days.
Trump said on social media on Friday that he struck the deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin in a phone call in which he had been expected to discuss a suspected case of plague in Russia.
Instead, Trump announced that Russia would immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, followed by an additional 500,000 tons in November and a million tons “immediately thereafter”.
Russia will deliver an additional three million tons “within a short period of time” after that, he wrote.
The rubble of a residential building destroyed by a Russian airstrike in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Saturday. Photograph: Kateryna Klochko/AP
Trump’s shock announcement was in stark contrast to a sweeping Russia sanctions law he signed last month that aimed to clamp down on the oil and gas revenues that fuel Russia’s war against Ukraine.
In a lengthy post online reacting to the deal, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia would repay it “with further terror and perfidy”. He cast it as an investment in the war, allowing it to be prolonged.
“It plays into Russia’s hands – allowing it to kill more, wage war for longer, have even less respect for America, and inflict even greater losses and damage on the world,” he said.
According to a statement released by the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, Zelenskiy called it “a weak decision, unfortunately, a weak decision by strong partners”.
Trump announced the deal as his envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner were meeting Ukrainian officials in Miami to discuss a proposal to end the war.
“I believe our team is simply being used as a smokescreen. And that is certainly not fair. It is certainly not how partners should treat each other,” Zelenskiy said. – AP