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Donald Trump called Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator without elections”, and accused him of talking America into spending $350bn on a “war that couldn’t be won”. In a post on Truth Social, Mr Trump said that America is “successfully negotiating” an end to the war in Ukraine, and argued that Europe had “failed to bring peace” to the region.
Mr Trump’s comments came after Mr Zelensky accused America’s president of peddling Russia’s disinformation and bringing the country’s leader, Vladimir Putin, back from his “long isolation”. He noted that fighting off invasion had cost Ukraine $320bn, of which $200bn had come from America and the EU—well short of the $500bn in compensation that Mr Trump is seeking to extract from Ukraine’s mineral wealth.