President Trump this week ramped up attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, accusing him of somehow causing Russia’s invasion nearly three years ago, and saying he has done a “terrible job” as the country’s leader.
During a news conference in Florida on Tuesday, Trump made unsupported claims about the Ukrainian leader’s approval rating, asserting that it plummeted to just single digits.
“I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at a 4 percent approval rating,” the president said from his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort during the signing of several executive orders.
Recent polling of Zelensky’s approval rating does not match up with Trump’s claims. The Hill has reached out to the White House to comment on the discrepancy.
About 57 percent of Ukrainians trust the country’s president, according to a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) survey that was released on Wednesday, while 37 percent don’t.
That marked a 5-point uptick in support for Zelensky, after the December iteration of the poll found that 52 percent trusted him while 39 percent did not.
Zelensky’s support, which has hovered in the 50s and 60s during last year, has declined in comparison to the initial months of the Russian invasion which started in February 2022.
Ukraine’s president’s approval rating was 90 percent in the May 2022 version of the same survey.
Prior to Russia’s invasion, Zelensky’s approval rating was at 37 percent. Over half of the respondents, 52 percent, in the Feb. 2022 iteration of the KIIS poll said they did not trust him. Some 11 percent said it was hard to say.
Zelensky shot back at Trump on Wednesday, saying that the U.S. president is living in a Russian “disinformation space.”
“Unfortunately, President Trump, I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us, unfortunately lives in this disinformation space,” Ukraine’s president told reporters on Wednesday.
Zelensky specifically addressed the 4 percent claim as well.
“We saw this disinformation. We understand it comes from Russia. We understand, and we have evidence that those figures have been discussed between the U.S. and Russia,” Zelensky said.
Trump ramped up his rhetoric against Zelensky on Wednesday, accusing him of taking advantage of the U.S.
“Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and ‘TRUMP,’ will never be able to settle,” Trump wrote Wednesday on Truth Social.
Trump also questioned why Ukraine did not hold nationwide elections. Ukraine postponed a presidential election because martial law has been in place since Russia’s invasion in 2022.
The verbal tit-for-tat comes after Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff met with their Russian counterparts to start talks about ending the war in Eastern Europe and repairing the relationship between the two nuclear-armed countries.
Zelensky said Ukraine could not accept the result of negotiations its not part of, to which Trump on Tuesday said, “You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
The newest KIIS poll was conducted from Feb. 4-9 this year among 1,000 respondents. The margin of error was 4.1 percent for indicators close to 50 percent.
