WHAT TRUMP SAID: “You’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it ... You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
THE FACTS: Russia’s army crossed the border on Feb. 24, 2022, in an all-out invasion that Putin sought to justify by falsely saying it was needed to protect Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine and prevent the country from joining NATO.
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law,” Trump said in Mar-a-Lago, adding on Wednesday in a post on social media: “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”
THE FACTS: Zelenskyy was elected to a five-year term in 2019, and the next presidential elections had been scheduled for spring 2024. But Ukrainian law prohibits parliamentary or presidential elections during a state of martial law, so Zelenskyy has remained in office. He has said he believes elections will be held in Ukraine after martial law is lifted. The country would need to amend the law if it decided to hold a vote.
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “The leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating.”
THE FACTS: Zelenskyy “retains a fairly high level of public trust” — about 57 percent - according to a report released Wednesday by the Kyiv International Institution of Sociology, whose executive director is Anton Hrushetskyi.
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “When you see what’s taken place in Ukraine with millions of people killed, including the soldiers, millions of people killed, a big percentage of their cities knocked down to the ground, I don’t know how anybody even lives there.”
THE FACTS: No estimates by any reputable analysis place deaths near the millions.
While exact figures of the number of deaths are unknown, Zelenskyy said earlier this month that over 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the start of the full-scale war in February 2022. He has also said that “tens of thousands of civilians” had been killed in occupied areas of Ukraine, but that no exact figures would be available until the war was over.