Former U.S. President Donald Trump issued early Tuesday morning his harshest attack to date on the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in the shadow of the Ukrainian fear that if Trump wins the presidential election in November and returns to the White House he will stop aid to Kiev and hand victory to Russia. At a rally in Pennsylvania Monday night in the U.S., Trump said that Zelensky wants the Democrats "to win this election so badly," and presented him as someone who manages to underhandedly extract money from Washington.
"I think Zelensky is the greatest salesman in history," Trump said at the rally. "Every time he comes into the country, he walks away with $60 billion." Trump added that: "He wants them (Democrats)to win this election so badly, but I would do differently - I will work out peace."
The former president reiterated that, if he is elected president again, he will contact Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin and urge them to come to an agreement.
Trump's words come amid concern in Kiev and the European Union about the possibility that he will return to the White House. Trump has often over the years praised the power of Russian President Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian and dictatorial leaders, and is seen as a much less confrontational candidate for the Russian president than his rival Kamala Harris and incumbent President Joe Biden.
Washington is Ukraine's main arms supplier in its war against Moscow, but quite a few Republicans want to dramatically cut that aid, and Trump himself has often described it as a waste of money." He also consistently refuses to state that he wants Kiev to win the war. His statements that if he is elected he will put an end to this war" have made it reasonably clear that Trump will stop the flow of funds and weapons to Zelensky's army or at least significantly reduce them, thus handing victory to Putin in his war against Ukraine.
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Volodymyr Zelinsky says he will bring a 'victory plan' to the UN this week
(Photo: Timothy A. Clary / AFP)
Trump's statements against Zelensky Monday night contradict the line that some of his allies have tried to adopt recently, claiming that Ukraine would actually be happy if Trump returned to the presidency because only he – according to them – has the talent needed to negotiate with Putin on ending the war.
Zelensky himself is currently in the United States for the annual gathering of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, and last week Trump said that he would likely meet with the Ukrainian president during his stay in the U.S. However, sources close to Trump said Monday night that no meeting has been scheduled between the two.
Although in July Trump spoke with Zelensky by telephone, the two have not met face to face since Trump ended his term as president. Zelensky previously admitted that he cannot predict what Trump will do if he wins the election, but expressed hope that he will continue to provide U.S. military aid to Ukraine. In an interview with the BBC in July, he said that "working with Trump will be difficult, but we are people who work hard."
Zelensky: 'Putin is afraid. The US needs to be decisive'
Over the weekend, Zelensky visited a weapons manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania, accompanied by the state's Jewish Democratic governor Josh Shapiro, an ally of Harris. Their joint visit to the plant angered some Trump supporters, since Pennsylvania is a key state in the election, a state that divides its 19 electoral votes and because winning it is extraordinarily crucial for Harris to win the entire race. Americans of Eastern European origin, including those from Ukraine and Poland, have become in recent months a group of voters that Trump and Harris often woo, and this is especially true for Pennsylvania, where there are large Ukrainian and Polish communities.
In an interview with ABC over the weekend, excerpts of which were revealed Monday night, Zelensky said that Ukraine is "closer to the end of the war than we think," and in a post he published overnight on Telegram after meeting with U.S. congressmen, he emphasized that decisive actions by the U.S. is required to bring about the end of the war. Also in the interview with ABC he said that, from a position of strength, Ukraine could make Putin stop the war.
In the last few days, people around Zelensky are talking about a "victory plan" that he formulated and which he intends to reveal later this week in Washington. So far he has not presented its details, but has said that it would lay the groundwork for a peace summit to which Kiev wants to invite Moscow later this year. The head of Zelensky's office Andrii Yermak said Monday in New York that the plan includes accelerating the process of Ukraine's admission to NATO - a step that Russia has made clear it will never agree to.
Putin, meanwhile, insists that peace talks with Kiev can only begin after it withdraws its forces from large areas that Moscow has occupied in the east and south of Ukraine and gives up its ambition to join NATO. Russia currently controls about 20% of the territory of Ukraine and is making progress in its military campaign in the east, where it took control of a series of villages in the Dunbas region in recent weeks.
Zelensky told ABC that the dramatic invasion of the Ukrainian army into the Kursk region in western Russia, where his soldiers remain a month and a half after they infiltrated it, revealed Putin's weakness: "He is very afraid. Why? Because his people saw that he was unable to defend all of his territory."