WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Saturday it was time for Ukraine to get a new president, suggesting Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not done enough to end his country’s war with Russia and blaming him for high diesel prices in the U.S.
“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does,” Trump said.
The president, who on Friday struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Russia in an attempt to address high fuel prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, has been urging Zelenskyy for weeks to stop strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. He has also sought to blame record U.S. diesel prices on Ukraine rather than the U.S.-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.
Ukrainian and European officials on Saturday reacted to Trump's diesel deal with dismay, saying it will help pay for Russia's war efforts. Diesel prices have skyrocketed due to a collision of events, including the difficulty of getting oil out of the Middle East since the start of the Iran war, which has raised the price of all oil products.
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted last month and published Oct. 1 found that Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, and blame him for higher prices.
Trump also suggested that if he had been U.S. president in 2022, “that war would have never started. There was no reason that war with Ukraine and Russia started. It started due to incompetence.”
Zelenskyy has “lost 30% of your country and you’ve had over a million people go between the two of them, over 2 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.
Independent estimates are that about 20% of Ukraine's territory is under Russian control. British defense officials recently estimated that about half a million Russian soldiers have been killed in the war; there are no reliable recent estimates about how many Ukrainians have died.
