Trump escalates attacks on Zelensky

Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency, believes a ceasefire with Russia could happen this year.

“I think it is going to happen. There are most of the components for it to happen,” Budanov said in a YouTube interview with the journalist Eynulla Fatullayev.

Ukrainian officials had largely dismissed the idea of a ceasefire, warning that it would only give Russia time to rearm and prepare for further aggression.

Budanov added: “How long it will be, how effective it will be — is another question.”

The Russian parliament has approved a law making it punishable by up to five years in prison to vandalise property displaying pro-war symbols such as Z and V, which have been used by Russian civilians to indicate support for the invasion.

The move came after MPs noted a rise in attacks on buildings and vehicles with “visual information” in support of the war.

The punishment for vandalising property without the symbols is two years in prison.

There have been more than 60 arson attacks on military recruitment offices and other government buildings across Russia since 2022, according to official figures.

The Spanish prime minister plans to travel to Ukraine next week to show support for President Zelensky.

“I’ll be in Kyiv on Monday to reaffirm Spain’s support for the Ukrainian democracy and President Zelensky,” Pedro Sanchez wrote on X.

After the emergency Ukraine summit in Paris on Monday, Sanchez said the EU was facing a “defining moment”, adding: “We need to stop underestimating ourselves. Europe is a powerful political project and the world’s largest trading bloc. Together, we form the biggest economy in the world. We have capabilities, we have strengths, and we must continue expanding and reinforcing this great project for Europe and humanity — the EU.”

Almost eight in ten UK adults in a YouGov survey believed it was unacceptable for Ukraine to be excluded from US-Russia peace talks.

A poll of more than 2,000 people found 65 per cent thought it was completely unacceptable not to include Kyiv while 13 per cent said it was somewhat unacceptable, making 78 per cent in total.

The survey revealed just 10 per cent believed it was acceptable.

British troops will deploy to key cities, ports and critical national infrastructure sites across Ukraine under plans being discussed by allies, western officials have disclosed.

European military chiefs are considering a “reassurance” force for Kyiv, which will include fewer than 30,000 British and European troops positioned away from the front line in the east.

It is understood that an “air policing” mission — which could involve Typhoons — could be deployed to protect Ukraine’s airspace and enable commercial flights to the capital.

Russia says it has recaptured two thirds of the territory in its Kursk region that was seized by Ukraine during a surprise offensive last summer.

Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top general, also said last week that Kyiv’s forces had been forced to withdraw from swathes of the region in western Russia.

Ukraine is estimated to control between 400 and 500 sq km out of the 1,200 sq km that it took control of in Kursk in August. North Korean troops have assisted Russia in its counteroffensive.

President Zelensky has said that Kyiv would be willing to swap the territory it holds in Russia for occupied Ukrainian territories.

EU foreign ministers will discuss “a new vehicle of financial and military aid” for Ukraine worth up to €6 billion on Monday.

The plan is to bolster Kyiv, in the wake of political attacks by President Trump, “to be an equal part of any potential peace talks with an aim to achieve a just and lasting peace”.

However, during confidential talks between ambassadors on Wednesday night, Hungary “clearly stated that the EU should adjust to new realities and that it will support no new actions that could undermine the peace talks launched by the US”.

Any British plan to send troops to Ukraine as part of a potential peacekeeping mission would be unacceptable to Russia, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has said.

Moscow said it was monitoring statements by Sir Keir Starmer with concern.

• British Typhoons may help keep peace in Ukraine — if Russia drops objections

Peskov said the suggestion was unacceptable because it would involve forces from a Nato member state and have ramifications for Russia’s security.

“This causes concern for us, because we’re talking about sending military contingents — about the possible, eventual sending of military contingents from Nato countries to Ukraine,” Peskov said.

President Putin has instructed his envoys to flatter President Trump at peace talks on Ukraine, according to a Russian diplomatic source.

The Russian leader told his negotiators to “demonstrate the most amicable and, in some aspects, complimentary attitude toward their American counterparts and to President Trump personally”, the source told The Moscow Times.

The source said this approach was designed to extract maximum benefits for Russia.

Russia attacked Ukrainian gas infrastructure and damaged gas production facilities overnight, Ukraine’s energy minister, German Galushchenko, said on Thursday.

“The purpose of these criminal attacks is to stop the production of gas needed to meet the domestic needs of citizens and central heating,” Galushchenko wrote on Facebook.

President Zelensky said on Wednesday that a Russian strike on Odesa, on the Black Sea, had left 160,000 residents without heating and power.

President Trump’s Russia-friendly comments about the war in Ukraine have prompted such euphoria among Moscow’s political class that a television presenter has suggested, only half in jest, that the two powers should form a military alliance and “divide Europe” between themselves.

“It’s a great idea — bring in Russian and American troops and Europe won’t have to defend itself from anyone,” Vladimir Solovyov said on his talk show as pro-Kremlin pundits nodded with glee.

• Russian pundits are revelling in Trump’s Putinist rhetoric

Elon Musk joined Donald Trump in attacking President Zelensky, criticising him for posing for a Vogue photoshoot during the war.

“He did this while kid are dying in trenches on the war front,” Musk said in a post on X, referring to a photoshoot in July 2022.

He also said Zelensky “cannot claim to represent the will of the people of Ukraine” unless he holds an election.

Halfway through President Trump’s attack on President Zelensky at Mar-a-Lago this week, the US president paused for a second and said: “I like him personally, he’s fine.”

Even for the man who wrote The Art of the Deal, it was a hard sell: Trump had just falsely accused Zelensky of starting the war with Russia that has brought widespread suffering to Ukraine.

Hours later, he described the Ukrainian president as a “dictator” and suggested he was prolonging the conflict for financial gain. It was an anti-Ukraine tirade that echoed the Kremlin’s false narrative.

• ‘Trump hates Ukraine’: inside the president’s obsession with Kyiv

Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative MP for Tonbridge, has told Times Radio that President Putin is “evil”.

He said: “Putin is a genuinely evil man who has launched wars in Ukraine, Georgia, and Estonia. He’s tried to murder people in Montenegro. He’s tried to murder people here in London and, of course, in Salisbury. So standing up against Putin, I think that’s exactly what Kemi’s doing.”

The former security minister praised how the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, had handled Trump’s remarks on Russia-Ukraine and lambasted the Reform UK Leader, Nigel Farage, for his “long history of dancing on the head of a pin on his admiration for Vladimir Putin”.

The British government does not agree with Donald Trump that Ukraine’s president is a dictator, a cabinet minister has said.

Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, also suggested the US president was wrong to have claimed overnight that the Russians “have the cards” in negotiations.

“We don’t agree with him … [Zelensky] is a democratically elected leader,” she told Times Radio, adding: “I don’t think anybody holds all the cards in this negotiation.”

President Trump claimed the Ukrainian president had treated the US Treasury secretary “rather rudely”.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, travelled to Kyiv last week with an agreement giving the US rights over Ukrainian minerals — which Zelensky has yet to sign, noting that it provided no future security guarantees and offered Washington far more than the cost of military aid thus far.

“Scott Bessent actually went there and was treated rather rudely, because essentially, they told him ‘no’,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “And Zelensky was sleeping and unavailable to meet him.”

Zelensky in fact received Bessent in the presidential palace where both addressed reporters.

Bessent “travelled many hours on the train, which is a dangerous trip, and we’re talking about the secretary of the Treasury,” Trump said. “He went there to get a document signed, and when he got there, he came back empty. They wouldn’t sign the document.”

Bernie Sanders, the veteran US senator, said President Trump was “aligning himself with the dictator of Russia”.

Sanders, who contested the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, said that on Wednesday “we witnessed a sad moment in American history”.

He added: “Trump is showing us that he sees one of the world’s most brutal dictators as his friend and our long-time democratic allies in Europe as his enemies.”

Calling out Trump’s false claim that Ukraine started the war, he said “that’s not true” and pointed to the fact that it was Russia who twice invaded Ukraine, first in 2014 and then in 2022.

On Trump calling Zelensky a dictator he added: “That’s not true either. Zelensky won 75 per cent of the vote in free elections.”

The deputy chairman of Russia’s security council has said Trump is “200 per cent right” when calling President Zelensky a dictator.

Dmitry Medvedev, who served as the Russian president from 2008 to 2012, wrote on X: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud.”

A Russian attack killed at least one person in eastern Ukraine when thecity of Kupiansk, a key logistics centre, was bombed.

The regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said the shelling had targeted a residential area of Kupiansk, east of Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv. Rescuers recovered the body of one resident from under the debris.

German leaders have lined up to condemn President Trump’s remarks, after he referred to the Ukrainian president as a “dictator without elections”.

The chancellor, Olaf Scholz, told the news magazine Der Spiegel: “It is simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelensky democratic legitimacy”.

He added: “The fact that no proper elections can be held in the middle of a war is in line with the Ukrainian constitution and electoral laws. Nobody should claim otherwise.”

The opposition leader Friedrich Merz said Trump’s statement that the government in Kyiv was partly to blame for the war and could have negotiated a peace long ago was “a classic reversal of the perpetrator and victim”.

“And to be honest, I am somewhat shocked that Donald Trump has now obviously adopted this narrative himself,” Merz told the broadcaster ARD.

President Trump has said he hopes reaching a peace deal with Russia and ending the war in Ukraine will result in him being remembered as a peacemaker.

“I hope that my greatest legacy will be as a unifier and as a peacemaker,” he said.

During his speech in Miami, Trump claimed that Zelensky “could have come [to the talks in Saudi Arabia] if he wanted to”.

Trump also repeated many of the criticisms he had levelled at Zelensky in his Truth Social post claiming he has done a “terrible job” and that he should have worked out a deal earlier.

He said the Ukrainian leader must “move fast because that war is going in the wrong direction. In the meantime, we’re successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia, something all admit only Trump is going to be able to do”.

He added: “I love Ukraine, but Zelensky has done a terrible job. His country is shattered.”

Donald Trump falsely claimed again on Wednesday that Zelensky was a “dictator” and had single-digit polling numbers.

“How can you be up [in the polls] if every city is being demolished?” Trump said during an address before a meeting in Miami of business executives hosted by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

The Ukrainian president’s approval rating sits at 57 per cent, according to a poll released hours after Trump first claimed Zelensky’s rating was just 4 per cent.

Ukraine’s last presidential election took place in 2019, which Zelensky, a former comedian, comfortably won. Fresh elections, due in March or April last year, were suspended because of the imposition of martial law.

• Will Ukraine hold elections? Putin and Trump turn up the pressure

Donald Trump has said the Russians “have the cards” in any peace talks to end the war because they have “taken a lot of territory”.

“I think the Russians want to see the war end, I really do. I think they have the cards a little bit, because, you know, they’ve taken a lot of territory. They have the cards,” the US president told reporters on Air Force One.

When asked by the BBC if he trusts Russia wants peace, Trump replied “I do”.

Sir Keir Starmer has rebuked President Trump for calling President Zelensky a “dictator”, before talks in Washington next week.

Downing Street was initially reluctant to criticise Trump but No 10 released a pointed statement describing Zelensky as “Ukraine’s democratically elected leader”.

“The prime minister expressed his support for President Zelensky as Ukraine’s democratically elected leader and said that it was perfectly reasonable to suspend elections during war time as the UK did during World War Two,” the statement said.

“The prime minister reiterated his support for the US-led efforts to get a lasting peace in Ukraine that deterred Russia from any future aggression.”

• Zelensky is no dictator, Starmer tells Trump