US President Donald Trump has branded his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky a "dictator holding power without elections". Trump's statement came amid rising tensions between Kiev and Washington.
The United States had been providing funding and weapons to Ukraine, but after coming to power Trump abruptly changed his policy and began negotiations with Moscow.
"A dictator without elections, Zelensky better move fast or he will have no country left," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform about the Ukrainian leader, whose five-year term expired last year.
Ukrainian law does not require elections to be held during wartime.
On February 18, Trump held a press conference where he criticized Zelensky, repeated several of the Kremlin's key claims about the conflict and called for an end to the war.
Zelensky in turn accused Trump of falling for Russian "disinformation," including that Trump had accused Kiev of "starting" the war, and repeated the Kremlin's questions about Zelensky's legitimacy.
"He refuses to have elections, is very low in Ukrainian polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing (Joe) Biden 'like a fiddle,'" Trump said in his post about Zelensky, as quoted by AFP.
"In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia, something everyone acknowledges only Trump and the Trump administration can do," Trump wrote in the post.
Zelensky was elected in 2019 to a five-year term but remained leader under martial law imposed after the Russian invasion.
His popularity has dropped, but the percentage of Ukrainians who trust him has never fallen below 50% since the conflict began, according to the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS). | BGNES