Key points
- Trump, Zelensky openly clash in White House
- US, Ukraine were due to sign minerals deal
- Zelensky gambling with World War III: Trump
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Friday for Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to apologise for an earlier clash with President Donald Trump.
Zelensky should “apologise for wasting our time for a meeting that was going to end the way it did,” Rubio said on CNN after Oval Office talks devolved into argument and raised voices.
Rubio also questioned whether Zelensky – the president of a country that has endured more than three years of war following Russia’s February 2022 invasion – wanted it to end.
“You start to perceive that maybe Zelensky doesn’t want a peace deal. He says he does, but maybe he doesn’t, and that active, open, undermining of efforts to bring about peace is deeply frustrating for everyone who’s been involved,” the top US diplomat said.
“Gambling with World War III”
US President Donald Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday that he is “gambling with World War III” amid ongoing talks over the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Both leaders openly clashed in the White House at a meeting where they were due to sign a deal on sharing Ukraine’s minerals. “You’re not acting at all thankful. It’s not a nice thing,” the US president said.
Following the heated arguments the joint press conference of the US and Ukrainian presidents has been cancelled.
Trump gets furious
“It’s going to be very hard to do business like this,” he added. “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out,” a furious Trump told Zelensky.
“You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with World War Three, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to this country,” Trump added.
“You can’t do any deals without compromises. So certainly he’s going to have to make some compromises, but hopefully they won’t be as big as some people think,” Trump said at a White House meeting.
But showing Trump pictures of war atrocities and referring to President Vladimir Putin, Zelensky said there should be “no compromises with a killer on our territory.”
“Crazy Russians,” he said, had deported Ukrainian children and committed war crimes during their three-year invasion of his country.
Zelensky declines to apologise
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declined to apologise Friday evening for an extraordinary clash with President Donald Trump at the White House earlier in the day.
“I think that we have to be very open and very honest, and I’m not sure that we did something bad,” Zelensky said when asked by Fox News’s Brett Baier about apologizing to Trump.
He then said he believed Kyiv’s relationship with the United States could be salvaged despite the dramatic clash.
“Of course” the relationship between the wartime allies can be fixed, he told Fox News.
He added that he does not want to lose the United States as a partner — while saying he wants Trump to be “really more on our side.”
