Verification of Acts Donald Trump’s claims about war in Ukraine

The president of the United States, Donald Trump, seems to accuse Ukraine of being responsible for the war with Russia, in a series of statements by his Mar-A-Lago mansion in Florida.

Speaking to journalists, Trump also made statements about the popularity of President Volodymyr Zelensky and observed that Ukraine had not yet held scheduled elections due to martial law. Later he doubled those comments in a social publication of the burning truth on Wednesday.

Trump’s accusations, some of which seemed to reflect the common Russian conversation points about the war, occurred only a few hours after US officials met a Russian delegation in Riyadh to open conversations to put an end to the conflict, which It has been unleashed for almost three years.

Later, Zelensky accused Trump of “Living in a disinformation space” created by Russia.

BBC Verify has verified Trump’s claims.

Initially, Trump caught attention to the fact that Ukraine has not celebrated the presidential elections since 2019, when Zelensky, previously a comedian without a political base, swept power.

He repeated the statements in a real social position in which he accused the Ukrainian leader of being a “dictator without elections.”

Zelensky’s first five -year term had to come to an end in May 2024. However, Ukraine has been under martial law since the Russian invasion in February 2022, which means that the elections are suspended.

The martial laws of Ukraine were written in 2015, shortly after Russia attached the Crimean Peninsula and years before Zelensky and his servant of People Party came to power.

The OSCE independent observers said the 2019 elections It had been “competitive and fundamental freedoms were generally respected”.

Zelensky won 73% of the votes In the second round of the second round.

Zelensky has promised to celebrate a new choice once the conflict ends and does not confirm that he intends to stand. Some experts have observed that celebrating elections in Ukraine before the end of the conflict would be practically impossible, since Russian attacks against many cities persist and millions of citizens are displaced abroad or live under Russian occupation.

Trump’s intervention on the subject occurred only a few hours after the Kremlin questioned Zelensky’s legitimacy as his term in office is over, a claim that Moscow has made repeatedly in recent months. On January 28, the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, described Zelensky “illegitimate” in an interview with the Russian media.

Referring to the electoral situation, Trump seemed aware that it had been a frequent Russian accusation used to undermine Zelensky, saying in his press conference: “That is not something Russian, that is something that comes from me from other countries.”

For its part, Zelensky has said previously that it would be “absolutely irresponsible to launch the issue of elections” in the middle of the conflict.

President Trump also said that Zelensky’s approval index has fallen to 4%.

It is not clear which source was citing the president, since he did not provide evidence. We have asked the White House to clarify this.

Official surveys are limited and is extremely difficult to carry out precise surveys during a warm moment. Millions of Ukrainians have fled and Russia has occupied around a fifth of the country.

However, it has been possible that some surveys are carried out by phone. A survey conducted this month found that 57% of the Ukrainians said they trusted the president, according to Ukraine, based in Ukraine. International Institute of Sociology of Kyiv.

However, that decreased from 77% to the end of 2023, and 90% in May 2022, suggesting that the president has suffered a fall in his popularity.

Some other surveys suggest that Zelensky follows his closest opponent, former head of the Valerii Zaluzhnyi army, in the first round of any future choice, indicating that the two would face each other in a runoff.

Following Trump’s comments, some important Russian media confiscated the claim and cited a survey conducted by the Ukrainian deputy and Zelensky’s critic, Oleksandr Dubinsky, on Telegram who said they supported Trump’s evaluation.

Dubinsky He has been accused of betrayal in Ukraineand accused of “operating at the request of Russian intelligence”, which he denies.

The Ukrainian authorities expressed their dissatisfaction for not being part of Tuesday’s conversations in Riyadh. But Trump dismissed these concerns, telling the journalists that Ukraine had had three years to end the war, before he seems to blame kyiv for starting the conflict.

“You should never have started it,” he said. The Kremlin has previously accused Ukraine of starting the war against Russia.

“It was they who began the war in 2014. Our goal is to stop this war. And we did not begin this war in 2022,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin, the presenter of the Interview Program, Tucker Carlson, in February 2024.

Ukraine did not begin the war. Russia launched a large -scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as it attached Crimea in 2014.

The annexation occurred after Ukraine President was expelled by popular demonstrations.

Russia also supported the forces of power that confiscated areas of eastern Ukraine, and accused the new government in kyiv of discrimination and genocide against Russian speakers. He International Court of Justice He has rejected Moscow’s claims.

After the failure of the agreements that aimed to finish the conflict after 2014, Russia began a massive accumulation of troops on its border with Ukraine at the end of 2021.

Putin launched the invasion on February 24, 2022, stating that the objective of the operation was to “demilitarize and denoz” the western government of Volodymyr Zelensky and prevent the country from joining NATO.

In the last parliamentary elections of Ukraine, Support for extreme right -wing candidates was 2%. It should also be taken into account that Zelensky is Jewish and that his party has been considered centrist.

And while NATO officials said in 2021 that Ukraine was a candidate to join the Western Alliance in the future, it was not part of any formal process.

Additional BBC monitoring reports.