Fury over Donald Trump’s ‘pure Disney’ Ukraine rants that ‘can have happy Russia’

Donald Trump’s attacks on “dictator” Volodymyr Zelensky and claims that Ukraine is to blame for the war with Russia have been deemed “pure Disney” as Western politicians condemn him.

The US has embarked on talks with Russia over the three-year-long war and Trump has shown little patience for Ukraine’s objections to being excluded in a stance that members of his own Republican Party have said is a mistake. He has repeatedly said Ukraine’s leaders never should have allowed the conflict to begin, indicating Kyiv should have been willing to make concessions to Russia before it sent troops into Ukraine in 2022.

“Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago,” Trump told reporters at his Florida residence. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

The US president also suggested that Zelensky doesn’t have the full support of his country. He claimed the Ukraine leader has just a 4% approval rating in his country, a statistic that Zelensky claimed was straight from Russian propaganda. And Trump followed that wild rant with another on social media where he called Zelensky a “dictator”.

There has been plenty of concern from America’s Western allies over how the Trump administration has gone ahead with the talks without Ukraine. It led to France calling an emergency meeting of European leaders on Monday and again today.

Keir Starmer hit back at Trump by calling Zelensky a “democratically elected leader” after having a call with him today. Mr Starmer said it was “perfectly reasonable to suspend elections during wartime” as Winston Churchill did during World War II. A Downing Street spokesperson said: “The Prime Minister spoke to President Zelensky this evening and stressed the need for everyone to work together. The Prime Minister reiterated his support for the US-led efforts to get a lasting peace in Ukraine that deterred Russia from any future aggression.”

Sweden’s Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said elections in Ukraine are just what Russia wants to weaken the country. “Putin doesn’t want elections in Ukraine because he cherishes Ukrainian democracy. He wants elections to weaken Ukraine under the current state of emergency. We must not fall into that trap,” Stenergard told Swedish outlet Aftonbladet.

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius also lashed out at the US for barring Ukraine from joining NATO. “The Americans made a mistake,” Pistorius said in an interview with public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. “The Americans seem to take the Europeans less seriously when it comes to geopolitical issues.”

Earlier London Mayor Sadiq Khan branded Trump’s latest treacherous moves “bonkers” and former UK defence secretary Ben Wallace tore into the US leader for blaming Ukraine for the war. Mr Wallace said: “I know Mar-a-Largo is quite close to Disney World, but that was pure Disney in both sort of facts and reality.” He told LBC he believed the Kremlin “have been quite happy since day one” with the White House repeating “propaganda lies” that Ukraine started the war.

On a visit to Norway, UK Defence Secretary John Healey warned that forgetting about the war while talks take place between the US and Russia risks “jeopardising the peace”. Asked for the UK’s response to Trump’s assertion that Ukraine “started it”, Mr Healey told reporters: “Three years ago, one country illegally invaded another, and since then, the Ukrainians have been fighting for their freedom.

“They’ve been fighting for their future, and they still are. So whilst all the focus may be on talks, not even negotiations, our concern as defence ministers is that we’re not jeopardising the peace by forgetting about the war.”

While members of Trump’s own Republican Party have also disagreed with their leader. “I don’t agree,” said Senator Susan Collins when asked. And Senator John Kennedy said: “To the extent that the White House said that Ukraine started the war, I disagree. I think Vladimir Putin started the war.”

Congressman Dan Crenshaw believes the comments were just part of a play to get Putin to the table. He told Piers Morgan Uncensored: “It’s not great, to put a nicer spin on it, Trump tends to talk that way to his friends. He tends to talk nicer to his enemies. So, if he’s talking to you that way it still means you are his friend.

“And I would always of course warn people like Zelensky, ‘Don’t get into it with Donald Trump, don’t get into it’. What’s the point? We’ve been backing you the whole time, we will continue to back you, but there must be a paradigm shift… That’s what they are attempting to do.”

And White House national security adviser Mike Waltz told Fox News no one should criticise Trump for trying to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict. “What he said yesterday and today is, why hasn’t President Zelensky tried to end this war for the betterment of his country? And we have to ask ourselves, is Ukraine’s position improving or not on the battlefield?,” he said.

Trump followed up his attack on Zelensky today with more bizarre comments on his Truth social platform. He wrote: “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr 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, but a War that he, without the U.S. and ‘TRUMP’, will never be able to settle.

“The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us — We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.

“On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING.’ He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle.’

“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. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues.”

The claim made by Trump that Zelensky only has a 4% approval rating was immediately denied by experts. Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and the minister of economy in Ukraine in 2019-2020, responded on X by saying: “Trump says Zelensky has 4% approval rating (not true) and there should be elections.”

Polls from last autumn showed that 56% of Ukrainians were against holding elections during the war while Zelensky won more than 73% of the vote in the second round of the 2019 presidential election. In Ukraine. Zelensky himself responded by saying Trump is living in a Russian-made “disinformation space”.

All along in Russia, Trump’s comments have been well received. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said: “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.” If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud. @realDonaldTrump is 200 percent right. Bankrupt clown.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov praised the US president for echoing the Kremlin’s narrative, telling the Russian parliament Trump “understands our position”/ He added: “Trump, I think, is the first Western leader to publicly and openly say that the cause of the Ukrainian conflict was the efforts of the previous administration to expand NATO. No Western leader has actually said that before. So that is already a signal that he understands our position.”

And Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said Moscow would be “very pleased” with the early results of its “successful charm offensive” of the Trump administration. “I think (the) Russians feel very confident and very happy that, deal or no deal, they are getting what they want. The fact that ‘Team Ukraine’ is no longer the same as ‘Team US’ is amusing Putin a lot,” Gabuev told CNN.