President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine appealed to the Trump administration on Wednesday to respect the truth and avoid disinformation in discussing the war that began with a Russian invasion of his country, in his first response to President Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine had started the war.
“I would like to have more truth with the Trump team,” Mr. Zelensky said in some of the most pointed criticism yet of Mr. Trump and the new American administration, which on Tuesday opened peace talks with Russia that excluded Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky said that the U.S. president was “living in a disinformation space” and in a “circle of disinformation.”
Mr. Zelensky made the remarks to a group of reporters he had summoned to his presidential office in Kyiv, a building still fortified with sandbags to avoid blasts from Russian missiles.
He was responding to a flurry of accusatory statements on Tuesday, some of them false, by Mr. Trump. He said of Ukraine’s leadership and the war, “You should have never started it,” and appeared to embrace what has been a Russian demand that Ukraine hold elections before some stages of talks. Elections were suspended under martial law after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Mr. Trump also said that Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating was 4 percent. Mr. Zelensky said that was not true, citing polls showing far higher support. In one conducted in December by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, for example, 52 percent of Ukrainians said that they trusted Mr. Zelensky’s leadership.
Mr. Zelensky had until this week walked a fine line of staking out Ukrainian positions while avoiding any suggestion of an open breach with the United States, Ukraine’s most important ally in the now nearly three-year war. After the initial cease-fire talks between Russia and the United States, Mr. Zelensky on Tuesday had starkly laid out his refusal to accept terms negotiated without Ukrainian participation.
At the news conference, Mr. Zelensky was focused and spoke with intensity. He said he was not personally ruffled by the negotiations with the Trump administration. “This is not my first dialogue or fight,” he said. “I take it calmly.”
Russia, he said, is clearly pleased with the turn of diplomatic developments. “I think Putin and the Russians are very happy, because questions are discussed with them,” Mr. Zelensky said.
“Yesterday, there were signals of speaking with them as victims,” he said of the Trump officials’ tone in discussing the Russian officials, whose government prompted the largest war in Europe since World War II, which has killed or wounded about a million people on both sides over three years. “That is something new.”
Ukrainians, Mr. Zelensky said, are not likely to trust promises Russian negotiators offer in talks. “Nobody in Ukraine trusts Putin,” he said.
Mr. Zelensky also laid out efforts to coordinate from allies security guarantees intended to prevent Russia from violating a cease-fire. This has been an overriding focus of Ukrainian diplomacy going into any peace talks.
For Russia, a continuation of the war also carries costs, including by the estimate of military analysts a staggering casualty count of 1,000 soldiers or more killed or wounded daily, as well as punishing economic sanctions. Ukraine wants to trade this pressure on Russia for acceptance of a peacekeeping force or other guarantee of security to prevent the war, already the bloodiest in Europe in generations, from restarting.
Mr. Zelensky repeated that one option would be membership in NATO, a possibility that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has rejected and that the United States has said it does not support. The Ukrainian leader also mentioned maintaining the country’s standing army of about one million soldiers and a peacekeeping contingent from European countries, or some combination of these measures.
Mr. Putin on Wednesday praised the Trump administration officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for having fostered a “very friendly” atmosphere. Unlike past American administrations, he suggested, the Trump team did not criticize Russia’s actions.
“On the American side, there were completely different people who were open to the negotiation process without any bias, without any condemnation of what was done in the past,” Mr. Putin said, speaking to reporters while on a visit to St. Petersburg.
Mr. Putin said he looked forward to a meeting with Mr. Trump, but declined to give a date, cautioning that there was still a lot of preparatory work to be done, “including on the Ukrainian track.”
“I’ll be happy to meet with Donald. We haven’t seen each other in a while,” Mr. Putin said. “But we’re in a situation where it’s not enough to meet just to have tea or coffee and sit and talk about the future.”
Mr. Putin dismissed fears that American allies in Europe were being excluded from the U.S.-Russia talks, arguing that the two countries had bilateral issues to discuss, such as the expiration of the New START nuclear arms control treaty next year.
“Why are they being hysterical?” Mr. Putin said, apparently referring to the Europeans. “Hysteria is not appropriate here.”
Mr. Putin said that Mr. Trump told him in their phone call last week that “the United States expects that the negotiating process will take place with the participation of both Russia and Ukraine.”
“No one is excluding Ukraine from this process,” Mr. Putin said.
Over three years of war, the Ukrainian Army succeeded in repelling Russia’s military from about half of the territory it captured in the initial invasion, but the fighting then bogged down in bloody but mostly static trench warfare, with Russian forces pressing forward slowly.
Several Ukrainian soldiers in telephone interviews on Wednesday expressed worry about Mr. Trump’s misstatements about Ukraine, including Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating, but said nothing had changed in the conduct of the war.
One officer in the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, who declined to give his name for security reasons, said in a telephone interview that the Ukrainian forces would keep fighting, regardless of what Mr. Trump “says he’ll give us or won’t, what funds have been sent or haven’t, where we’ve been invited or not.”
