President Trump sharply criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a Thursday television interview, after Zelensky declared that Kyiv would no longer follow Trump’s request to refrain from attacking Russian energy facilities.
“If you tell me that Zelensky is again shooting at refineries, all he’s doing is making the world oil price higher,” Trump told Newsmax host Rob Finnerty. “I think that’s a disgrace. There’s plenty of other targets.”
As the White House works to revive negotiations aimed at ending Russian President Vladimir Putin’s four-and-a-half-year invasion of eastern Europe, Trump said Zelensky was “not a good guy for us to deal with.”
Trump said he believed both sides ultimately wanted the conflict to end, but added that Zelensky had been more challenging to negotiate with than Putin.
Trump announced Sunday that Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to avoid attacks on one another’s energy infrastructure as winter approached. Zelensky, however, said Ukraine had honored the arrangement on its own while Russia carried out more than 100 strikes against Ukrainian energy sites over the previous week.
“The block is out,” Zelensky told the Financial Times on Thursday during a visit to London. “We’re done.”
Soon afterward, Pavel Malkov, governor of Russia’s Ryazan province, said Ukrainian drones had struck a building belonging to a state oil company, triggering a fire.
The latest disagreement came after a brief thaw in relations between Trump and Zelensky. On Friday, Zelensky joined European leaders at a summit in Brussels, where he thanked what he described as “real leaders” for standing with Ukraine.
“We want to end this war as [quickly] as possible,” Zelensky told journalists in the Belgian capital. But he said Kyiv had seen no indication that Russia was prepared to reach a settlement, making it necessary for Ukraine to prepare for the winter.
Responding to Trump’s remarks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitriy Peskov said Friday that Zelensky did not want to accept responsibility or take steps toward a peaceful resolution.
Russian attacks were reported across nine Ukrainian regions on Friday, killing no one according to the report but injuring at least 15 people and cutting electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes. Russia’s Defense Ministry separately claimed its air defenses had intercepted 644 Ukrainian drones overnight across several regions, Crimea and the Black Sea.
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The latest Trump-Zelensky dispute follows a confrontation that began last week, when Trump announced an agreement to buy more than 2.25 million barrels of diesel from Russia in an effort to lower fuel costs that had risen amid the war with Iran.
Zelensky criticized the arrangement in an interview with Axios, calling it a deal that “looks like a happy birthday present” for Putin. He also alleged that US military officials had warned Ukraine it could lose access to intelligence on Russian airstrikes if Kyiv rejected Trump’s proposed moratorium.
White House sources, however, told The Post that Putin understood the cease-fire to cover oil refineries only, not power plants that Russian forces had been attacking.
Those sources accused Zelensky of deliberately broadening the agreement’s scope so he could argue that Russia violated it first, a move they said weakened both the cease-fire and Trump’s diplomatic effort.
Trump has rejected claims that the United States ever stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine. Tensions nevertheless increased Tuesday when Kyiv suddenly lost access to the Starshield military satellite network.
Starshield, a secure military version of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite system, helps Ukrainian forces detect and intercept fast-moving threats while also supporting the targeting of long-range strikes against Russia.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk blamed the Pentagon and the White House for the disruption on Wednesday. A senior US official told The Post on Thursday that Trump had not ordered any restrictions on Ukraine’s Starshield access. The Pentagon did not comment on the allegation.
Ukrainian officials said by Thursday morning that access to Starshield had been restored.
Despite Zelensky’s objections, the Trump administration continues to argue that its current strategy—including the agreement to purchase Russian diesel—offers the strongest path toward peace in Ukraine.
Officials claimed the deal would effectively serve as a carrot to get Putin back to the negotiating table and lay the groundwork for a lasting peace.
With Post wires
