Volodymyr Zelensky has issued a response to US officials who suggested he should resign from his position. It comes after a tense exchange between the Ukrainian leader and Donald Trump
Keir Starmer quizzed on Trump and Zelenskyy by Kuenssberg
The President of Ukraine has hit back at Donald Trump’s allies who have called for him to step down from his position.
Volodymyr Zelensky issued a scathing response to the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, following his clash at the Oval Office meeting. He suggested that he apply for Ukrainian citizenship if he wanted a say on how to run his country. He added that only his citizens should have the right to question who should be in charge.
It comes after Zelensky met up with Trump, to settle the US-Ukraine relations. However, things soon turned sour when the pair began to but heads in a tense exchange. After the row, Graham and House Speaker Mike Johnson hinted that Zelensky should allow someone else to negotiate with the US on his behalf.
The president said: “I can give [Lindsay Graham] citizenship of Ukraine, and he will become a citizen of our country. And then his voice will start to gain weight, and I will hear him as a citizen of Ukraine on the topic of who must be the president. The president of Ukraine will have to be chosen not in Lindsay Graham’s home but in Ukraine.” However, Zelensky said he’d only quit his role if his resignation secured a NATO membership for his country, reports India Today. “I have said that I am exchanging for NATO membership, then it means I have fulfilled my mission,” he added.
Zelensky earlier said that he believes the chance of ending the war between Ukraine and Russia “is still very, very far away”. He added that he expects to keep receiving US support despite his bust-up with Trump. “I think our relationship (with the US) will continue because it’s more than an occasional relationship,” the Ukrainian president said, referring to Washington’s support for the past three years of war.
Zelensky was publicly upbeat despite recent diplomatic upheaval between Western countries that have been helping Ukraine with military hardware and financial aid. Europe is suspicious of the US president’s motives and strategy. Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor-elect after a recent election, said on Monday that he did not believe last Friday’s Oval Office clash was spontaneous.
He said he had watched the scene repeatedly. “My assessment is that it wasn’t a spontaneous reaction to interventions by Zelensky, but apparently an induced escalation in this meeting in the Oval Office,” Merz said. He said he was “somewhat astonished by the mutual tone”, but there has been “a certain continuity to what we are seeing from Washington at the moment”.
“I would advocate for us preparing to have to do a great, great deal more for our own security in the coming years and decades,” he said. Even so, Merz said he wanted to keep the transatlantic relationship alive. “I would also advocate doing everything to keep the Americans in Europe,” he said.
