By Lori Robertson and Robert Farley
FactCheck.org
After U.S. and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia to discuss an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, president Donald Trump made several false and misleading statements about the conflict and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Trump falsely claimed that Ukraine had “started” the war with Russia, saying the country could have made a “deal.” Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
He inflated the amount of U.S. aid for Ukraine and wrongly said the U.S. gave “$200 billion more than Europe.” Aid from Europe is higher than that from the U.S..
Trump distorted comments Zelenskyy made to claim that the Ukrainian president “admits that half of the money that we sent them is missing.” A Trump administration official has said the U.S. tracks the money.
Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator” and misleadingly said that he “refuses” to have elections. Because of the war, the country is under martial law and can’t have an election, according to Ukrainian law.
The talks between the U.S. and Russia in Saudi Arabia, led by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, were held Feb. 18. Ukraine wasn’t included in the meeting. Trump made his claims about Ukraine late in the afternoon Feb. 18 and reiterated them the following day in a post on Truth Social and remarks at a summit in Miami.
Zelenskyy told reporters on Feb. 19 that Trump was “caught in a web of disinformation.”
Russia, Not Ukraine, ‘Started’ the War
In remarks from Mar-a-Lago on Feb. 18, Trump claimed that Ukraine had “started” the war with Russia by not making a “deal.” The war started on Feb. 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion, two days after Russia recognized two separatist territories in eastern Ukraine as independent states and sent Russian troops into Ukraine’s Donbas region.
As we wrote in 2022, for months before the invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials had repeatedly denied plans to invade Ukraine even as Russia built up troops on the border.
In his remarks, Trump suggested that Ukraine could have avoided the conflict by giving up some of its land. “You should have never started it,” Trump said. “You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land and no people would have been killed and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down, but they chose not to do it that way.”
In remarks before the invasion, Putin gave “a long list of grievances” to justify the attack, Jeffrey Mankoff, a senior associate with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an April 2022 report. But the “fundamental issue” was “the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and statehood.”
“Putin has long claimed that Russians and Ukrainians comprise ‘one people’ whose common history implies that they should also share a common political fate today,” Mankoff said.
Trump’s vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, spoke out against Trump’s claim. “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war,” Pence wrote in a post on X. “Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.”
U.S./European Aid
The U.S. has allocated billions to aid Ukraine since the start of the war in February 2022, but Trump has repeatedly inflated the amount — and made false comparisons with the amount of aid from European countries.
Three times this week, Trump said that the U.S. had given Ukraine “$350 billion,” about double the actual amount of U.S. aid for the country. And he wrongly said the U.S. gave “$200 billion more than Europe.” Europe outpaces the U.S., not the other way around.
Since 2022, Congress has appropriated about $174.2 billion in aid for Ukraine, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, last updated on Jan. 13. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a budget watchdog group, similarly puts the total since the last congressional appropriation at $174.8 billion.
For a comparison with Europe, we turn to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research group that publishes the Ukraine Support Tracker. As of Dec. 31, Europe had allocated 132.3 billion euros for Ukraine, while the U.S. had allocated a bit less: 114.2 billion euros. (At today’s exchange rate a dollar is worth .95 euro.)
Misleading Claim About ‘Missing’ Aid Money
Trump also repeatedly and misleadingly claimed that Zelenskyy “admits that half of the money that we sent them is missing.”
That’s a distortion of comments Zelenskyy made to the Associated Press on Feb. 2. According to a translation from Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian online news site, Zelenskyy took issue with the idea that the U.S. had provided nearly $200 billion to support the Ukraine army.
“As the president of a nation at war, I can tell you – we’ve received more than $75 billion,” Zelenskyy said. “So, when people talk about $177 billion or even $200 billion, we’ve never received that. We’re talking about tangible things because this aid didn’t come as cash but rather as weapons, which amounted to about $70 billion.
“But when it’s said that Ukraine received $200 billion to support the army during the war – that’s not true,” Zelenskyy said. “I don’t know where all that money went. Perhaps it’s true on paper with hundreds of different programmes – I won’t argue, and we’re immensely grateful for everything. But in reality, we received about $76 billion. It’s significant aid, but it’s not $200 billion.”
Not a ‘Dictator’
On Truth Social and in Miami, Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections” and criticized the Ukrainian president, who he said “refuses to have Elections.” That’s misleading.
Zelenskyy was duly elected to serve a five-year term as president of Ukraine in 2019. He would have been due for reelection in the spring of 2024, but Feb. 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Zelenskyy imposed martial law, which has continued to the present.
“This can be expected from a country fighting for its very existence, where significant portions of its territory are occupied,” Lee Reaney and Joel Wasserman, who are based in Ukraine, wrote for Foreign Policy in July 2023. “Martial law is established as a concept in the Ukrainian Constitution and last updated by the national legislature in 2015, before Zelensky entered politics.”
“Article 19 of Ukraine’s martial law legislation specifically forbids conducting national elections,” Reaney and Wasserman, who have both observed past elections in Ukraine, wrote. “Thus, for Ukraine to conduct elections while under martial law would be a violation of legal norms that predate Zelensky and the full-scale Russian invasion.”
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