Trump-Zelensky spat shows who wants peace and who doesn’t – Hungarian FM
The public clash between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has made it clear that, unlike Washington, Kiev is not interested in ending its conflict with Moscow, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said.
Zelensky’s trip to the White House on Friday was abruptly cut short after his meeting with the US president and vice president devolved into a shouting match in front of the media. Trump and J.D. Vance accused the Ukrainian leader of “gambling with World War III” due to his reluctance to negotiate peace with Russia, and of being disrespectful and ungrateful for the substantial military aid provided to Kiev by Washington.
The visit was intended to finalize a minerals agreement between the US and Ukraine, but it was never signed as Zelensky demanded security guarantees and greater involvement in the conflict from the Trump administration.
“It became clearer to everyone than ever before who wants peace and who wants war; who wants to stop the killing and who wants to continue it; who stands on the grounds of common sense and who does not care for either human lives or billions of wasted euros,” Szijjarto wrote in a post on Facebook on Saturday about the heated exchange at the Oval Office, which US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as a “fiasco.”
The foreign minister made it clear in his message that it is Zelensky, who wants “the war to just continue.”
“Trump’s stand for peace was the greatest moment of the past three years,” he insisted.
The US president told Zelensky on Friday that Ukraine was “running out of soldiers” and had no cards to play in the standoff with Russia. “Look, if you could get a ceasefire right now, I tell you, you take it, so the bullets stop flying and your men stop getting killed,” Trump said.
Szijjarto stressed in his post that the authorities in Budapest, who had been consistently calling for a diplomatic settlement of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, “hope that… Trump will make the US-Russian negotiations a success, because only a US-Russian agreement can bring peace back to our beloved Central Europe.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described Zelensky’s trip to the US as “a diplomatic and political failure” of the Kiev government. “With his outrageously boorish behavior” at the White House, the Ukrainian leader confirmed that he is “an irresponsible instigator of a major war” and “a most dangerous threat to the international community,” she wrote on Telegram on Saturday.
Zakharova also reiterated Moscow’s stance that a lasting peace can only be achieved “when the root causes of the conflict are fully eliminated.”
