Donald Trump made clear that his personal grudge with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky hasn’t abated during a phone interview with NBC News.
Speaking with Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker on Saturday, the president knocked Zelensky for offering assistance to the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries, the latter of which the Ukrainian president said on Friday were seeking his aid in sharing drone detection technology.
The “last person we need help from is Zelensky,” Trump told Welker.
Iran continues to bombard neighboring countries with drone and missile attacks, targeting U.S. and Israeli military assets, as the war stretches into its third week. The Trump administration has repeatedly declared victory while the U.S. and Israel continue to launch attacks in recent days. Iranian forces, in response, have largely closed off the Strait of Hormuz, choking global shipping traffic.
The lengthening conflict threatens to become a focal point of Trump’s second year in office as Republicans, including some within his own administration, call for the president to find an off-ramp and conclude the war before the effects on the American economy get any worse. Democrats continue to blast the war as illegal, even as some conservative members of the party have signaled support for its aims.
Trump and the Ukrainian leader have always had a rocky relationship due to Zelensky’s perceived closeness with former President Joe Biden and Zelensky’s refusal to aid the first Trump administration in efforts to besmirch Biden’s name as part of an effort to sabotage Biden’s 2020 election campaign.
The president lost to his Democratic opponent that year, and the episode led to his first of two impeachments by the House of Representatives.
That relationship exploded early last year, when the president and Vice President JD Vance appeared to engineer a confrontation with the Ukrainian leader at the White House. The two blamed him for gambling with “World War Three” as the conversation devolved into a shouting match in front of the cameras that stunned reporters in the room.
On Saturday, Trump told NBC News that Zelensky remained the obstacle preventing a peace deal from being reached between his country and Russia, which have been actively at war for four years. Trump administration officials pursued a peace agreement last year and claimed it was close at hand, but the efforts did not appear to amount to anything.
“I’m surprised that Zelensky doesn’t want to make a deal. Tell Zelensky to make a deal because Putin’s willing to make a deal,” Trump said, reiterating his long-stated belief that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is opposed to the war he started in Ukraine.
“Zelensky is far more difficult to make a deal with,” the U.S. president continued.
Trump and his team looked at Ukraine with frustration last year as the conflict there stubbornly resisted his attempts to broker a peace deal, part of the president’s public campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize. Among the sticking points pushing a deal out of reach according to news reports include Russia’s demand for Ukraine to stay out of NATO and not be linked to any European security force, as well as Moscow’s territorial demands. Some of the territory demanded by Russian negotiators is currently occupied by Ukrainian troops.
The U.S. president, at times, has pointed to those territorial demands in particular as prizes for which Russian soldiers had sacrificed.
“Well, he’s going to take something,” Trump told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo last year. “I mean, they fought and uh, he has a lot of property. I mean, you know, he’s won certain property, if you say that, he’s won certain property.”
Ukraine, under Zelensky, has rejected the idea of surrendering any land its forces hold to Russian demands as part of a peace agreement.
