Trump’s sudden turn against Zelensky came as a shock to many Americans. It shouldn’t have.
It’s hard to overstate the shock that Donald Trump’s recent attacks on Volodymyr Zelensky have caused among Ukraine’s supporters. In the three years since Moscow started the full-scale war, Washington has positioned itself as Kyiv’s strongest ally. The 2022 invasion initially appeared to breathe new life into the transatlantic alliance, and for a time, support for Ukraine even became a rare bipartisan issue in the United States. But judging by numerous statements from his former associates, Trump’s feelings about Zelensky were shaped long before support for Ukraine became an American political football. Meduza looks back at a key chapter of the U.S. president’s political evolution: his first impeachment trial.
On February 18, Trump called into question Zelensky’s legitimacy, echoing rhetoric that Russian officials and propagandists have been repeating since the start of the full-scale invasion. Trump even went so far as to falsely accuse Zelensky of causing the war, saying that Ukraine “should have never started it” and “could have made a deal.”
A day later, the U.S. president doubled down on his attacks, calling Zelensky a “dictator without elections” and suggesting he profited from Moscow’s invasion. The tirade was remarkable coming not only from the U.S. president but from the leader of a party whose elected officials extolled Zelensky’s heroism — and contrasted him with Putin — in the war’s early days.
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Trump’s remarks, made just a week after his warm words for Vladimir Putin following their first phone call of his new term, shocked many in both the U.S. and Ukraine. Ukrainian mayors and governors responded with coordinated statements of support for Zelensky. “No lying creature, neither in Moscow, nor in Washington, nor anywhere, has the right to open his mouth against him,” wrote Dnipro Mayor Borys Filatov.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s comments caught many Republican lawmakers “off guard,” with multiple members of Congress ignoring reporters’ questions about the topic.
Even the Kremlin was surprised by the “harsh tone” of Trump’s comments, according to Bloomberg. One source told the outlet that the U.S. president’s attacks “exceeded any expectations in Moscow that the U.S. view of the war could be turned to Russia’s advantage.”
But Trump’s animosity towards Zelensky isn’t without precedent. In fact, a closer look at their shared history suggests that the U.S. president’s public turn against Ukraine’s wartime leader was entirely predictable.
‘Trump hates Zelensky with a passion’
More than five years ago — well before the full-scale war — a newly elected Volodymyr Zelensky unwittingly became part of a scandal that could have been the end of Trump’s political career.
In October 2019, then-U.S. Acting Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor testified in impeachment inquiry hearings that Trump had pressured the Ukrainian president to launch an investigation related to Joe Biden, who was emerging as one of Trump’s main opponents in the 2020 presidential race.
Trump was seeking an investigation into Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who served on the board of directors for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma from 2014 until 2019. Trump’s team alleged that, as vice president, Joe Biden had urged Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general to thwart an investigation into Burisma that could implicate Hunter. Trump himself repeated the claim, without providing evidence, during his call with Zelensky.
A month after Taylor’s statements, Trump’s then-E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified that he had, at the president’s “express direction,” offered Zelensky a White House meeting in exchange for investigating the Biden family. He also said he believed Trump had made U.S. military aid to Ukraine — then in its fifth year of defending against Russian aggression — contingent on Zelensky announcing such an investigation.
These allegations, which surfaced after a CIA officer filed a whistleblower complaint over the call, were the basis for Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019. Though the impeachment didn’t lead to a conviction, the episode made him only the third U.S. president in history to be impeached and set the stage for him to become the first to be impeached twice. While Trump has since learned to use institutional censure against him to rally political support, the 2019 impeachment was his first experience facing official condemnation on such a large scale.
Trump reacted with predictable rage. Still, his public statements about Zelensky and Ukraine were usually fairly restrained in the years that followed. Days after Russia’s full-scale invasion, for example, he called the Ukrainian president a “brave man” who was “hanging in.” However, his private remarks reportedly painted a different picture. In 2024, Lev Parnas, a former fixer for Trump’s ex-lawyer Rudy Giuliani, told Politico that Trump “hates Ukraine” and believes it “was the cause of all [his] problems.” He also said that “Trump hates Zelensky with a passion.”
Strings attached
With Moscow occupying about a fifth of Ukraine and the Ukrainian military on the back foot, the American president’s leverage over Zelensky today is significantly greater than it was in 2019.
At the Munich Security Conference last week, Zelensky reportedly rejected an offer from the Trump administration that would have given the U.S. control over Ukraine’s mineral and oil and gas reserves, ports, and unspecified “other infrastructure,” according to The Telegraph.
The terms of the proposed deal were “worse than the financial penalties imposed on Germany and Japan after their defeat in 1945,” the newspaper noted, adding: “If this draft were accepted, Trump’s demands would amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty.”
Calling the deal “blackmail for peace,” the Ukrainian news site European Pravda argued that Trump’s “business wing” was exploiting Ukraine’s vulnerability to push an unfavorable agreement. But “when it became clear that Kyiv wouldn’t cave, they backed off,” the outlet wrote.
However, on Thursday, Reuters reported that Trump’s team may keep pursuing the deal. “We need to get this guy back to reality,” one Trump advisor reportedly told the agency, referring to the Ukrainian president.
According to Reuters’s sources, Trump wants to show the American people that the U.S. is recouping the cost of the aid it has provided to Ukraine so far. With his appetite for pressure-heavy deals, it’s unclear what else the president may be hoping to get from Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has said little about what demands they would make of Russia as part of a potential ceasefire deal. “I think the Russians want to see the war end… But I think they have the cards a little bit, because they’ve taken a lot of territory, so they have the cards,” Trump told journalists on Wednesday.
Article by Sam Breazeale