Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected US President Donald Trump’s comparison of his war with Russia to kids fighting – but labeled Russian President Vladimir Putin a child ‘murderer’.
Zelensky strongly refuted Trump’s new analogy involving him and Putin in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
‘Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy,’ Trump said during an Oval Office meeting on Thursday.
‘They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart.
‘They don’t want to be pulled. Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.’
Zelensky was asked in an interview airing on Sunday if Trump was ‘getting the message’ on Ukraine’s suffering.
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‘We are not kids with Putin at the playground in the park,’ Zelensky said on ABC News’ This Week with George Stephanopoulos in a clip released on Friday.
‘He is a murderer who came to this park to kill the kids.’
Zelensky added that Trump ‘could not feel fully and understand this pain’ of Ukrainian parents who have lost their children in the war.
‘And it’s not about President Trump, it’s about any person who is not here in the country, who is some thousands of miles away — cannot feel fully and understand this pain,’ he said.
Zelensky remarked specifically that a Ukrainian father who lost three children and his wife in a missile attack spoke much ‘different’ than how officials discuss the war.
‘He just said, “Every morning when I wake up, I’m just looking for my family – I’m looking everywhere in the flat… I still feel that it was a nightmare… a bad dream,”‘ Zelensky relayed.
The Ukrainian leader said that 631 children in his country have died.
Zelensky has repeatedly drawn attention to the hurt associated with the bloodshed in his appeal to end the war.
Trump, meanwhile, has taken a more business-like approach in the negotiations, infamously telling Zelensky in a fiery Oval Office meeting in March: ‘You have to be thankful, you don’t have the cards.’
On Wednesday after a call with Putin, Trump said that the Russian president ‘very strongly’ said that he is planning revenge on Ukraine’s devastating drone strike on airfields.
‘It was a good conversation,’ Trump said, ‘But not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace.’
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