Trump gives strongest signal yet he won’t back Ukraine and Zelenskyy against Putin

Former U.S. President Donald Trump lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday for not making concessions to Russia, giving his strongest indication to date he would stop backing Kyiv if he wins the U.S. presidential election.

Trump, speaking at a campaign event in North Carolina, said Ukraine should have “given up a little bit” to appease Moscow and avoid a bloody conflict with its invading neighbor, which he said “didn’t need to happen.”

“We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal, Zelenskyy,” Trump railed in a lengthy tirade.

He added that “any deal, even the worst deal, would’ve been better than what we have right now,” referring to the Kremlin’s destruction in Ukraine, which accelerated with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

“Ukraine is gone, it’s not Ukraine anymore. You can never replace those cities and towns and you can never replace the dead people, so many dead people,” the Republican candidate said. “If we made a bad deal, it would have been much better. They [Ukraine] would have given up a little bit and everybody would be living.”

Trump has frequently claimed Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if he was president and has repeatedly vowed to negotiate an end to the conflict if he is returned to the White House — though he has declined to give further details, wouldn’t say whether he wanted Ukraine to defeat Russia when pressed at the presidential debate with opponent Kamala Harris earlier this month and ignored that the conflict has raged since 2014, including during the entire period he was U.S. president.

He has also threatened to cut U.S. aid to Kyiv and vowed Wednesday that he would not send American troops to “die” in Ukraine.

“They’re [the Democrats] not going to be satisfied until they send American kids to Ukraine, and that’s what they’re trying to do,” he said. “And the moms and dads of America don’t want their kids fighting Ukraine and Russia, and we’re not going to have our soldiers die across the ocean.”

Zelenskyy, who is currently in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, is unlikely to meet with Trump in the coming days, a campaign official for the ex-president said.

Earlier this week, the Ukrainian leader visited a munitions factory in Pennsylvania — a critical swing state in November’s knife-edge election — as part of a tour to shore up support for Kyiv’s resistance against Russia’s war, giving a boost to the Harris campaign and riling Trump’s camp.

The Scranton shop-floor trip was slammed by Republican U.S. House Speaker and Trump ally Mike Johnson, who called it “shortsighted and intentionally political” and demanded Zelenskyy “immediately” fire his country’s ambassador to the U.S.