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US President Donald Trump says it is time for Ukraine to have a new president, suggesting that the current Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has not done enough to end his country's war against Russia and blaming him for high diesel prices in the United States.
In remarks made on Saturday at the White House, Trump stated: “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does.”
The president, who on Friday closed a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Russia in an attempt to address high fuel prices ahead of the US midterm elections, has urged Zelenskyy for weeks to stop attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. He has also sought to blame Ukraine for record-high diesel prices in the US rather than the US-led war in Iran, which has driven up global energy prices.
“He wants to create problems for the world. He wants to create problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel,” Trump said, before leaving for Tennessee, where he planned to hold a rally to mobilize Republican voters.
A poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted last month and published on October 1 found that Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of Iran and blame him for the rise in prices.
Trump also argued that if he had been president of the United States in 2022, “that war would never have started. There was no reason for that war between Ukraine and Russia to start. It started because of incompetence.”
Zelenskyy has “lost 30% of your country and there have been more than a million people displaced between both sides, and more than 2 million dead. That is a war that should never have started. And I think it is time for Ukraine to have a new president,” Trump said.
Independent estimates indicate that about 20% of Ukraine's territory is under Russian control. British defense officials recently estimated that nearly half a million Russian soldiers have died in the war; there are no reliable recent estimates on how many Ukrainians have died.
[Publicidad]