WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday hinted he would demand that Ukraine give up territory seized by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin during his three-year invasion and once again blamed Ukraine’s democratically elected leader for getting invaded.
“I get along with Zelenskyy, but, you know, I disagree with what he’s done, very, very severely disagree. This is a war that should have never happened,” Trump said at a White House press conference of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his recent statement that he cannot legally cede territory.
“I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval,’” Trump said. “I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap because there will be some land-swapping going on.”
Trump announced last week he would host a meeting with Putin in Alaska to broker a peace agreement, and his comments to reporters Monday are the most detailed about his view of what needs to happen to persuade Putin to end the war.
His insinuation that Zelenskyy was somehow to blame for Putin’s invasion was a repeat of his attacks on the Ukrainian president during his Oval Office visit in February.
“What you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country,” Trump told Zelenskyy then. “You’re not winning this. You have a damn good chance of coming out OK because of us.”
Six weeks later, Trump outright blamed Zelenskyy for starting the war. “You don’t start a war with someone 20 times your size and then hope people give you some missiles,” he said in an Oval Office photo opportunity with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele.
Trump called the coming summit a “feel-out meeting” and that he would afterward call Zelenskky and America’s NATO allies in Europe, who have since the 2022 invasion been eager to counter Russia and help Ukraine and even more so since Trump returned to office in January.
He added that his discussions with Russia and others led to his belief that Ukraine would have to give away land to end the war. “I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody,” Trump said.
Trump’s special envoy, his friend from New York real estate days Steve Witkoff, met with Putin last week and apparently misunderstood what Putin was saying. Witkoff reported back that Putin was willing to give up two Ukrainian regions and keep a third, when in fact Putin’s offer was to hang on to all three in return for stopping his attacks.
Trump on Monday also repeated his lie that the U.S. under former President Joe Biden had given far more help to Ukraine than had Western Europe. “Biden approved $350 billion. Europe has spent $100 billion,” he said.
In reality, Europe has provided more assistance to Ukraine from the start, both in weapons and economic help.
Trump is scheduled to go to Alaska on Friday for his meeting with Putin, his first such summit with him since 2018, when in Helsinki he said he took the word of the former KGB agent over his own intelligence agencies about Russia’s work to help Trump win the 2016 election.
On Monday, though, Trump, who is 79, twice conflated Alaska with Russia itself. Alaska has belonged to the United States since 1867, when it was purchased from Russia, then under the rule of Czar Alexander II.
“I’m going to Russia on Friday,” Trump said, explaining his coming trip. An hour later, preparing to leave the podium, he said it again: “We’re going to Russia.”