US President Donald Trump once again promoted his fictitious account of events in the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, erroneously blaming Zelensky for the death of “millions of people.”
He also warned US media outlets that they would be punished for broadcasting interviews with world leaders that didn’t fit his narrative.
When asked about the situation in Ukraine by reporters gathered in the White House on Monday, Trump attacked Zelensky, who sat in that same room six weeks ago and received a dressing-down from the US president and his cabinet.
“He’s always looking to purchase missiles,” Trump said of Zelensky, whom he repeatedly called “the greatest salesman on Earth” during his presidential campaign, “because every time he comes to the US, he goes home with $100 billion.”
In 2024, under President Joe Biden, the US government allocated $61 billion for Ukraine, the great majority of which went to American weapons-makers to replace older US military stocks sent to Kyiv.
“When you start a war, you got to know that you can win the war,” he continued. “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size, and then hope that people give you some missiles.”
Trump made the comments at a White House meeting with El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele on Monday, April 14, when a reporter asked Trump to elaborate on the “mistake” he had referred to a day prior in the context of a question about Moscow’s Palm Sunday attack on Ukraine’s Sumy that killed dozens, and whether Trump has given Putin a “deadline to actually move toward a ceasefire.”
In that meeting, Trump said this of his predecessor: “All you had to do is lower oil prices. If you lowered oil prices… Biden kept the prices so high because he made it impossible to get it,” Trump said, without elaborating on how lowering oil prices could have prevented the invasion, nor how a sitting US president could reduce the global price of crude.
(Trump, however, inadvertently managed to do just that this month by launching a global trade war, devastating the world economy, thereby reducing the oil demand, the number-one factor in prices.)
Specifically, Trump said there were “millions of people dead” because of three people:
“Let’s say [Russian autocrat Vladimir] Putin number one, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, number two, and Zelensky.”
Trump’s comments came a day after a deadly Russian strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday killed at least 35 people, and also, incidentally, a day after CBS News program “60 Minutes” aired an interview with Zelensky, which apparently Trump didn’t like.
The interview was held in the Ukrainian president’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, where a Russian strike earlier in the month killed 18 people, including 9 children.
“Putin can’t be trusted. I told that to President Trump many times. So when you ask why the ceasefire isn’t working, this is why,” Zelensky said.
“Putin never wanted an end to the war. Putin never wanted us to be independent. Putin wants to destroy us completely, our sovereignty and our people,” he added.
On Monday, Trump wrote on his personally owned social media platform, Truth Social, that his hand-picked Federal Communications Commission chief, Brendan Carr, should slap fines on CBS’s parent company, Paramount, as a result of the interview.
He said hopefully Carr “will impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.”
While there was no evidence of any illegal behavior on the part of CBS, Trump has a long-standing feud with the public airwaves broadcaster, much as he has had with the cable news outlet CNN, whose reporter he also berated in Monday’s press conference, calling her a “low-rated anchor.”
“The question was asked by CNN, and they always ask it with a slant,” Trump said. “Because they’re totally slanted and they don’t know what’s happening. That’s why nobody’s watching them.”