In comments that stunned America’s allies in Europe and angered Ukraine’s government, President Trump on Tuesday appeared to blame Ukraine’s leaders for Russia’s invasion.
He also suggested that they do not deserve a seat at the table for the peace talks that he has initiated with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukraine’s leaders. “You could have made a deal.” He followed up on Wednesday in a post on social media, calling Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections” and saying he had “done a terrible job” in office.
Here’s a look at how the war began, the state of the peace talks and Ukraine’s election record.
What caused the war in Ukraine?
There is no doubt that Russia started the war by invading Ukraine. Russian troops stormed over the border almost exactly three years ago, with the explicit aim of toppling the pro-Western government of Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv, the capital. Russia’s military attacked from the east and north, including from Belarus, as well as from the Russian-occupied southern province of Crimea. That attack started the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II.
Leaders around the world, including former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., denounced Russia’s invasion as an act of unprovoked aggression against a sovereign state, and the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Russia’s immediate withdrawal. Since then, Russian firepower has leveled whole cities and killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the United Nations.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have also been killed and wounded, and Russian soldiers have committed a series of atrocities, not least in the city of Bucha, north of Kyiv. The Kremlin has said its soldiers do not commit war crimes.
The International Criminal Court has also accused Mr. Putin of war crimes in Ukraine and issued a warrant for his arrest, along with another senior Russian official. Last year it also issued warrants for the arrest of two Russian commanders.
Mr. Putin and the Kremlin have referred to the invasion as a “special military operation,” avoiding the term “war,” and he has said he sought to demilitarize but not occupy Ukraine. He put forward several explanations for the move, saying that in part he was acting to protect civilians in Ukraine’s east.
He also characterized the invasion as a last-ditch effort to thwart what he called the West’s expansion toward Russia’s borders. The enlargement of the NATO military alliance to incorporate countries in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War, he claimed, was effectively a plot to destroy Russia.
And Mr. Putin said that Russia, and specifically the Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, created modern Ukraine, a position historians deride as false. Ukrainians voted in 1991 in a democratic referendum to leave the Soviet Union. Mr. Putin also said that the invasion aimed to demilitarize Ukraine and combat “Nazis,” an apparent reference to far-right parties and elements of the Ukrainian Army. Far-right parties won about 2 percent of the vote in the country’s 2019 election. Mr. Zelensky, who is Jewish, signed a law several months before the invasion combating antisemitism.
In a speech on the war’s first day, Mr. Zelensky vowed that his country would resist Russian aggression and framed Moscow’s invasion as an attack on freedom itself. “Putin began a war against Ukraine, and against the entire democratic world,” he said. Since then, Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly said that Ukraine stood as Europe’s first line of defense against Russian encroachment.
Before the full-scale invasion, Russia seized the Ukrainian province of Crimea, which it annexed illegally in 2014, and also took territory in the eastern Donbas region, including the provincial capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk.
What is happening on the battlefield?
In all, Russia now occupies around 20 percent of Ukraine, but so far it has failed in its key objectives of breaking Ukraine’s military and securing Kyiv. The fighting is largely confined to a front line in the east and south of the country, with Russian forces creeping forward amid heavy losses.
Last August, Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into the Russian region of Kursk, where Russian forces assisted by soldiers from North Korea have been fighting back.
Military experts say that in the immediate term, Ukraine has little chance of recapturing its lost territory, particularly if the United States slows or stops the flow of military aid.
What has happened in the peace talks so far?
Representatives of Ukraine and Russia held talks in the weeks after the start of the war in 2022 but failed to reach a cease-fire agreement. Since then, Ukraine has tried to gain international support for its own 10-point Peace Formula, which demands a full withdrawal of Russian forces, the prosecution of war crimes and the payment of reparations.
The prospect of peace talks, however, has gathered pace since President Trump’s inauguration last month. Mr. Trump held a lengthy call with Mr. Putin last week, which blindsided Ukraine’s government and allies in Europe and suggested that the two men intended to negotiate Ukraine’s fate directly without their involvement, a priority for the Kremlin.
In a major change from former President Biden’s policy that Ukraine would decide whether to make concessions in exchange for peace, the U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said that it was unrealistic for Ukraine to regain the territory it held before Russia’s 2014 invasion, and that Mr. Trump did not support Ukraine’s entry into NATO. In a further blow to Ukraine, Mr. Hegseth said that after a peace deal, the responsibility for guaranteeing the country’s security would fall mainly on European countries rather than on NATO.
At a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, agreed to reset their countries’ relationship and to work on a peace plan for Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky, who was not invited to the meeting, sharply criticized it and said his country would “never” accept a peace deal if Ukraine did not have a seat at the negotiating table.
Why haven’t elections been held in Ukraine?
The Kremlin has called Mr. Zelensky an illegitimate leader because his five-year term has elapsed. Elections in Ukraine were suspended under martial law after Russia’s invasion, with frontline towns and cities governed solely by military administrations.
Mr. Trump also appeared to cast doubt on Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy as president on Tuesday, and appeared to use that doubt to justify not inviting the Ukrainian leader to peace talks. “I would say that when they want a seat at the table, you could say the people have to — wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have to say, like, you know, it’s been a long time since we had an election?” Mr. Trump said. “That’s not a Russia thing. That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries also.”
Mr. Trump also said Mr. Zelensky was “down at 4 percent in approval rating.” Although Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating has fallen from once-lofty heights, it is at around 50 percent in recent polls, not too far from Mr. Trump’s rating.
Mr. Zelensky became president after winning an election in 2019 by a landslide. A fresh election was due in 2024, but under the country’s constitution, it cannot be held while martial law is in force. Holding an election would also be a logistical nightmare, as Russian missiles rain down on the country and fighting rages.
Election experts say that any vote held during wartime would effectively disenfranchise citizens living in Russian-occupied areas, those who have fled the country as refugees and soldiers in combat.
However, internal political tensions over the use of martial law have been rising, and the mayor of Kyiv is among the officials who have accused the president’s office of abusing its powers. At the same time, Ukraine’s leaders have been under pressure from their allies over the issue, not least as part of wider efforts to demonstrate good governance.
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