At a White House Q&A with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday, President Donald Trump seemed to not remember calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator just a week ago.
“Do you still think that Mr. Zelenskyy is a dictator?” a reporter asked during a back-and-forth in the Oval Office.
“Umm, did I say that?” Trump responded.
Then, after an awkward pause, he added, “I can’t believe I said that. Next question.”
Indeed, Trump last week called Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections,” apparently referring to Ukraine’s decision to delay elections originally planned for April 2024 as a result of Russia’s unprovoked and ongoing brutal attacks.
Russian propagandists seized on Trump’s quote, which was itself a regurgitation of Russian propaganda.
“If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” Dmitry Medvedev, a lieutenant of Russian President Vladimir and a former Russian president himself, wrote in response. “@RealDonaldTrump is 200 percent right.”
While the U.S. steadfastly supported Ukraine under President Joe Biden’s administration, Trump instead has aligned himself with Putin, who he showed a bizarre affinity for in his first term, breaking decades of precedence with traditional U.S. allies.
On Friday, Zelenskyy will travel to the White House and is expected to sign a deal granting U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in a deal Trump suggests will pay back the aid the U.S. has provided over the past three years.
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Former U.K defense secretary Ben Wallace called the deal “total extortion.”
“I think it’s extortion. It’s total extortion,” Wallace told CNN. “The United States and Europe gave most of the aid [to Ukraine] on condition of gifting, certainly the military equipment.
“Having gifted old equipment predominantly, we rearmed ourselves with new equipment. If you look at the spend America claims, a lot of it was actually in the Pentagon and also a lot of it was with American companies manufacturing for Ukraine.”