For the past three years, the U.S. has been Ukraine's leading supporter in its war with Russia. Yet with a series of blunt comments, President Trump is now sounding more aligned with Russia than Ukraine.
Trump, writing on social media, used his strongest language to date in describing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: "A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left."
With limited room for maneuver, Zelenskyy has said relatively little. But he did strike a nerve when he said Wednesday that Trump seemed to be living in a Russian-created "disinformation space."
Trump is pushing for a rapid end to the Russia-Ukraine war, which began with a limited Russian invasion in 2014 and escalated dramatically with a full-scale invasion in 2022. The Biden administration stitched together a coalition of more than 50 nations, most of them European, that coordinated military and political efforts to assist Ukraine against the much larger Russian military.