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Donald Trump has signalled there should be elections in Ukraine, in his first public remarks after the US held high-level talks with Moscow in Riyadh.
Russia and the US on Tuesday agreed to “lay the groundwork for future co-operation” on ending the war in Ukraine and a lightning normalisation of relations after their first high-level talks since President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion.
The talks marked an extraordinary turn of events after Trump called Putin last week in an effort to end the war — without consulting Ukraine or its European allies.
In comments critical of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s handling of the war, the US president said: “It’s been a long time since we’ve had an election” in Ukraine.
“That’s not a Russia thing. That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries,” he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “You have leadership [in Ukraine] now that’s allowed a war to go on that should have never even happened.”
The president did not mention Russia’s role in destroying Ukrainian cities and towns during its invasion — the largest armed conflict on European soil since the second world war.
Zelenskyy’s term expired last year, but Kyiv has said it can only hold an election after the fighting stops and martial law is lifted.
Zelenskyy said he had not been informed ahead of time about the talks and has said Ukraine would reject any settlement that does not directly involve Kyiv. “We don’t want a peace brokered behind the scenes without our involvement,” he said. “Without Ukraine, peace cannot be achieved.”
The US president also said he was “very disappointed” that Ukraine was “upset about not having a seat” at the Riyadh talks, chastising Kyiv for not ending the war. “Well, they’ve had a seat for three years, a long time before that, this could have been settled very easily,” Trump said.
Holding elections would be a formidable challenge since millions of Ukrainians are displaced, living abroad or residing in areas under Russian occupation. Kyiv has also expressed security concerns around any polls, saying western peacekeepers or a security force would be needed to ensure voters’ safety.
A survey of Ukrainians conducted in September and October by the non-profit International Republican Institute found that 60 per cent of respondents were opposed to holding a presidential vote during the war, and 52 per cent said they did not support voting for a new parliament while the conflict was ongoing.
David Arakhamia, head of Zelenskyy’s ruling party in parliament, said this month that elections should not be held earlier than six months after the end of martial law.
There are widespread fears in Kyiv and throughout Europe that Trump wants to settle the war on Putin’s terms. The US already appears to have made significant concessions to Putin by brushing aside Ukraine’s desires to join Nato and restore its control over Russian-occupied land.
Trump said he was “more confident” of reaching a peace deal in Ukraine after the US talks with Russia in Riyadh on Tuesday, which he thought were “very good”.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, led the delegations in a four-and-a-half hour meeting in the Saudi capital.
Trump also said he would support European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine after the war, although Lavrov said on Tuesday that any European peacekeeping deployment in the country would be “unacceptable”.
“If they want to do that, that’s great. I’m all for it if they want to do that” and would “not object to it at all”, Trump told reporters.
He added that he did not want to pull all US troops out of Europe as part of a peace agreement. “Nobody’s asking to do that, so I don’t think we’d have to do that. I wouldn’t want to do that. But that question has never really come up.”
As Trump hammered at the leadership of Zelenskyy, he claimed that his counterpart’s approval rating stood at 4 per cent.
An opinion poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in December found that 52 per cent of Ukrainians trusted Zelenskyy.
“I like him personally,” Trump said of Zelenskyy. “He’s fine. But I don’t care about ‘personally’. I care about getting the job done.”
Additional reporting by James Politi in Washington