United States President Donald Trump has made a series of claims about Ukraine and its leader as he seeks to end the country’s three-year war with Russia.
Trump’s relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy soured publicly as Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator” and said he “started” the war with Russia, a claim PolitiFact rated pants-on-fire false. The war of words has escalated after Zelenskyy accused Trump of repeating Russian misinformation.
Trump, who sent a team to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to begin negotiations on ending the war that did not include Ukraine, described Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian” who was only good at playing former US President Joe Biden “like a fiddle”.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Here, we fact-checked six of Trump’s claims about Zelenskyy and Ukraine:
Claim: Zelenskyy started the war with Russia
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long sought to blame Ukraine for the war he started when he launched an invasion on February 24, 2022. Trump echoed that talking point to reporters on Tuesday after Zelenskyy said Ukraine had not been invited to US-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia to end the war.
“Today I heard [from Ukraine], ‘Oh well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years – you should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump said.
The killing of an estimated 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers and at least 12,000 Ukrainian civilians in the conflict is well documented.
News coverage, video footage and the United Nations documented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in real time. Putin announced it as a “special military operation” at 6am in Moscow (03:00 GMT) on February 24, 2022.
“The purpose of this operation is to protect people who for eight years now have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime,” Putin said in a televised address. A transcript of his speech used the Russian spelling of Ukraine’s capital. “To this end, we will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.”
Putin’s false rationalisations for the war were named PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year in 2022.
Claim: Zelenskyy is a dictator
A professor who researches democracy and dictatorships said this is a mischaracterisation.
Zelenskyy was democratically elected in March 2019 to a five-year term with more than 73 percent of the vote. He would have been up for re-election in March or April last year. However, Ukraine imposed martial law after Russia’s invasion. Ukrainian law prohibits elections under martial law.
Trump called Zelenskyy “A Dictator without Elections” in a Truth Social post on Wednesday. At his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida the day before, reporters asked Trump whether he supported Russia’s demand for Ukraine to hold new elections to reach a peace deal.
Trump said: “Yeah, I would say that, you know, when they want a seat at the table, you could say, the people have to – wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have to say, like, you know, ‘It’s been a long time since we’ve had an election?’”
Millions of Ukrainian citizens have been displaced by the war or have fled the country and many others reside in Russian-occupied territory, so holding elections could disenfranchise many voters.
“To call Zelensky a dictator is like calling Winston Churchill a dictator because the UK postponed elections until after the end of World War Two,” Fathali Moghaddam, a Georgetown University psychology professor who researches democracy and dictatorships, said in an email to PolitiFact. “Clearly, the term dictator does not apply to Zelenskyy, just as it does not apply to Churchill.”
A spokesperson for United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the BBC it was “perfectly reasonable to suspend elections during wartime as the UK did during World War II” and Zelenskyy is Ukraine’s “democratically elected leader”.
Putin won re-election to another six-year term in March in an election the US National Security Council said was “obviously not free nor fair”.
“Trump would be correct to use the term dictator to describe Putin, who has used fake elections to remain in power for a quarter of a century,” Moghaddam said.
Claim: Zelenskyy has a 4 percent approval rating
This is inaccurate. Trump made these comments at a news conference on Tuesday, and it wasn’t clear what poll he was citing. A search of Google and the Nexis news database found no reports of polls showing Zelenskyy with a 4 percent approval rating.
In a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll conducted February 4-9, Zelenskyy had a trust rating of 57 percent among 1,000 Ukrainians surveyed. That’s down from 90 percent in May 2022 shortly after Russia’s invasion but up from 52 percent in December 2024.
Some social media users, including X owner Elon Musk, sought to discredit the polling by linking the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology to the US Agency for International Development, which has been at the centre of distorted claims. The social media posts offered no evidence for their claim that the polling is not credible.
The Ukrainian news site Ukrainska Pravda reported the country’s leading polling agencies have not published polls showing approval ratings during the war. One that has published approval ratings, the Sotsys Group, shows Zelenskyy with 16 percent approval. That poll, Ukrainska Pravda said, is tied to the former chief political strategist of Ukraine’s fifth president, Petro Poroshenko, who Zelenskyy beat in 2019.
Claim: The US has spent $350bn to help Ukraine
This is inaccurate. Trump’s figure nearly doubles the amount that Congress has appropriated or made available since the war began.
Ukraine Oversight – the website of the special inspector general for Operation Atlantic Resolve, which the US government created in 2014 to coordinate its military aid to Ukraine – said that as of September 30, the US had spent $183bn to help Ukraine.
Mark Cancian, a senior defence and security adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the amount the US has spent varies depending on what is being counted as “aid to Ukraine” but most estimates are in the range of $175bn to $185bn.
“No matter what you add, however, the total doesn’t get close to $350bn,” Cancian said.
The numbers cited by Trump in terms of aid to Ukraine contradict data from the US government itself. Independent research institutes also said the aid sent to Ukraine by the US was lower than $350bn. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the US sent about $120bn as of December.
Claim: Zelenskyy said he doesn’t know where half of the money the US has given Ukraine went
In a February 2 interview with The Associated Press, Zelenskyy said Ukraine’s military has received only a portion of the billions in US aid earmarked for Ukraine’s defence against Russia.
Zelenskyy cited a total of $177bn or $200bn spent by the US and said Ukraine had not received about $100bn of that total. The official amount spent by the US on Ukraine is $183bn.
Zelenskyy wasn’t saying that the rest of the money was missing. Direct military support to Ukraine totalled about $70bn. Of $175bn appropriated by Congress, much of it was spent in the US on weapons manufacturers and US military and government operations.
Claim: Zelenskyy was ‘sleeping and unavailable’ to meet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last week in Kyiv
Photos show this is inaccurate. Trump told reporters on Wednesday on board Air Force One that Bessent was treated “rather rudely” when he visited Kyiv on February 12 because Ukraine rejected a Trump administration proposal to give the US a share of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals. Trump also said Zelenskyy was “sleeping and unavailable” to meet Bessent.
Trump’s statement is contradicted by news photos and videos of Bessent and Zelenskyy meeting in Kyiv. Photos and a recap of the meeting are also on the Ukrainian president’s website.
On Thursday, US National Security Adviser Michael Waltz demanded that Zelenskyy return to negotiations over the minerals deal with the US. Zelenskyy has publicly rejected the US rare earths demand. The Ukrainian leader has been demanding security guarantees as part of any peace deal.
