Trump humiliated by breathtaking attack after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky challenged him on world stage
Ukraine’s long-suffering leader is fed up with Trump’s romantic relationship with Vladimir Putin.
Photo illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/Reuters
The Ukrainian leader launched an extraordinary attack on Donald Trump by announcing that he would no longer respect the US president’s “energy ceasefire”.
In a furious interview published Thursday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would not give in to Washington’s demands that he end drone strikes on Russian oil refineries.
“We are done,” Zelensky told the Financial Times after three days of attacks on Russia’s energy sector. He kept his promise hours later by carrying out major work on an energy facility in the Ryazan region of western Russia.
Zelensky said he would no longer respect Trump’s “energy ceasefire.”
Zelensky, 48, personally criticized his 80-year-old American counterpart for misleading authoritarian leaders. “He says openly and loudly that he loves these people and he respects them,” he told the newspaper. “Because for him, people who can be leaders for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, that means they can be very strong.”
The Ukrainian president’s remarks are a scathing rebuke of the White House’s push to halt attacks on Moscow’s oil infrastructure after Trump signed a deal to buy more than 1.8 million tons of diesel from Russia last week. Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Moscow’s energy sector in an effort to suppress revenues for Putin’s war machine.
Zelensky said people were killed in Tuesday’s attacks.
Trump, who called for Zelensky’s resignation over the weekend, reached the deal as the White House struggles to lower sky-high fuel prices driven by its own war with Iran. Voters ranked this conflict and its impact on affordability among their top concerns ahead of the Nov. 3 race for control of the House and Senate, with Democrats holding a 9-point lead overall over Republicans.
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Zelensky initially complied with Trump’s unilaterally proclaimed “energy ceasefire” in a social media post on Sunday, without any apparent consultation with kyiv or Moscow. It has now reversed course after Russia continued to hit power plants and other facilities with attacks that killed more than 100 civilians and left 600,000 people without power in the past week alone.
Zelensky announced an overnight strike Thursday that destroyed four Russian warplanes and hit two others, vowing to continue operations on targets in Russia.
The Trump administration pushed kyiv to accept Trump’s ceasefire by threatening to suspend intelligence sharing if it didn’t, Zelensky said. He added that Ukraine’s military forces lacked warning systems for missile strikes and suffered from slow coverage of Elon Musk’s Starlink service, essential to front-line operations.
Trump has denied cutting off intelligence supplies to Ukraine, while officials in Washington DC told the Ukrainians that warning system failures were a problem and that Starlink was likely also suffering an outage. Zelensky disputed this version. “It wasn’t a technical problem, it was the will,” he said.
Musk himself also wrote on
Zelensky accused Trump of misleading authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
This represents the deepest divide between the United States and its nominal ally in the Russia-Ukraine war since Trump took Zelensky for a vicious vilification from the Oval Office in February last year. Vice President JD Vance then accused the Ukrainian leader of not being “grateful” enough for American support since Putin launched his full-scale invasion in 2022.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
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