KYIV, Ukraine—President Volodymyr Zelensky said President Trump was repeating Russian propaganda points after the U.S. leader said Ukraine started the war and that Zelensky had lost Ukrainians’ support.
“Unfortunately, he is living in this disinformation space,” Zelensky told reporters here Wednesday. “I want there to be more truth in Trump’s team.”
Zelensky’s defiant comments—his sharpest yet in response to Trump’s criticisms of his leadership and courting of Russian President Vladimir Putin — highlighted a widening gap between Ukraine and the U.S., the country that has been Kyiv’s most important backer.
Trump has said he wants to quickly settle the war in Ukraine, which started when Putin ordered a large-scale invasion of Russia’s smaller neighbor three years ago. He has increasingly blamed Ukraine—and Zelensky personally—for the invasion while engaging with Putin about ways to end it.
Zelensky’s tone reflected a darkening mood toward the Trump administration in Ukraine, which has for three years fought off Russian expansionism at the cost of tens of thousands of troops and civilians killed, and dozens of cities destroyed.
Ukrainian Army Sgt. Oleksandr Solonko, a soldier in a drone unit fighting near the embattled eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, said Trump’s comments showed “a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the war, its real causes and the mentality of the Ukrainian people.”
At the same time, Trump’s position drew praise from Russia on Wednesday. Putin said talks had been “friendly” and covered a range of topics from Ukraine to restoring diplomatic ties as well as the Middle East.
“From the American side it was completely different people who were open for the negotiating process without any prejudice,” Putin told reporters.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Trump “is the first, and so far only Western leader to publicly and loudly say that one of the root causes of the Ukraine situation is the impudent line of the previous administration to draw Ukraine into NATO.”
“It’s a signal that he understands our position,” Lavrov told the Russian parliament.
Trump’s Ukraine envoy, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, arrived in Ukraine on Wednesday for his first official visit. At the train station in Kyiv, he said he looked forward to “good, substantial talks.” His mission was to listen, then talk to Trump to “ensure we get this thing right,” he said.
Senior U.S. and Russian officials met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday and agreed to appoint teams to negotiate a settlement to the war in Ukraine, marking an end to three years of U.S. policy that focused on isolating Moscow and supporting Kyiv for as long as it was willing to keep fighting.
Zelensky has expressed frustration about not being included in talks and said Kyiv wouldn’t recognize agreements reached without his country. He said he hoped European countries would continue supporting Ukraine if the U.S. didn’t. “Our strength is that this deal is impossible without us,” he said Wednesday.
Trump indicated Zelensky should hold elections if he wanted a seat at the table, claiming the Ukrainian president’s approval rating had fallen to 4%. He also criticized Zelensky for wanting to take part in talks, saying: “You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it.”
Zelensky hit back Wednesday noting a fresh poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology that put his approval rating at 57% in February, a rise of 5 percentage points from December.
“We saw this disinformation. We understand that it is coming from Russia,” Zelensky said. “We understand this and have proof that these figures are being discussed between America and Russia.”
Trump’s comments Tuesday echo Putin’s calls for Ukraine to hold elections, something that is barred under Ukrainian law during wartime. Putin has called Zelensky illegitimate as his term expired in 2024.
Zelensky also pushed back at Trump’s claims that the U.S. had given Ukraine around $350 billion in support. The Ukrainian president, repeatedly stressing Ukraine’s gratitude, said the U.S. had given $67 billion in military aid and $31.5 billion in support for Ukraine’s budget.
He criticized a U.S. proposal presented to him last week that would have seen Ukraine hand over hundreds of billions of dollars in future revenue from natural-resource extraction, with no security guarantees offered in return.
“That’s not a serious conversation,” he said. “I can’t sell our state.”
He said, however, that he was prepared to continue discussing the proposal.
Soldiers and civilians expressed anger Wednesday over Trump’s comments and attempts to seal a peace deal with Putin. On social media, Ukrainians posted images of corpses and mass graves discovered in parts of Ukraine after they were retaken from Russian control, with the words: “Russian occupation is not peace, it is a death camp.”
“Russia doesn’t want to negotiate with Ukraine, it wants to destroy it,” said Ukrainian Army Maj. Arislav Pasternak. “So negotiations with them are impossible unless victory on the battlefield becomes impossible for them.”
Lt. Dmytro Ianok urged Americans not to abandon Ukraine, recalling support he had felt on visits to the U.S. “Right now, we need you,” he said.
Ianok, an artillery officer, said Ukrainians were peaceful and were fighting only to defend against an invader. “When authoritarian terror faces no resistance, it doesn’t stop—it spreads, like mold. Let it consume Ukraine, and the entire free world will suffocate in distrust and drown in fear,” he said.
Ukraine’s military-intelligence chief, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov , summed up the mood in a laconic post on his social-media channels: “We will endure.”
As the U.S. president chided Ukraine, 167 Russian attack drones arrowed into Ukrainian skies overnight. Some of them struck power infrastructure in the southern port city of Odesa, leaving more than 160,000 people, as well as schools, kindergartens and hospitals, without heat or electricity as temperatures dipped well below freezing, Zelensky said.
Zelensky said the attack proved that Russia can’t be trusted. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said Tuesday in Riyadh that Russia didn’t attack Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s power stations and electricity grid with missiles and explosive drones, and knocked out heat for 100,000 people in the southern city of Mykolaiv last week.
“Russia’s claims are outrageous and patently false,” said Pavlo Bilodid, a spokesman for Ukrainian energy company DTEK. He said Russia had targeted the company’s power plants 204 times with drones and missiles.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister under Zelensky, said the Ukrainian leader was doing the right thing by pushing back on Trump with facts and noting Russian disinformation while not criticizing the U.S. president personally.
“It’s a tough balancing act,” Mylovanov wrote on Twitter.
Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com
