On Tuesday, February 18, the US president Donald Trump talked about the negotiations with Russia about Ukraine in a press conference from his residence at Mar-a-Lago, Florida. Many of his claims have been proven false by fact-checking articles from major publications such as BBC and CNN. Many politicians, European as well as American, underlined many falsehoods in his words. The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump is «living in a disinformation space» created by Russia. Trump reacted the following day with a post on his social network, Truth Social, where he reiterated some of the lies he spread the day before and added a new one, accusing Zelensky of being an unelected dictator.

Let’s take a look at some of Trump’s false claims, starting from the most recent one.

Zelensky is not an unelected dictator

«A Dictator without Elections»

This claim is unfounded.

Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine through democratic elections held in March-April 2019. It was not possible to hold elections when his mandate should have expired, in 2024, because of the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine and the subsequent martial law declared in Ukraine.

It is also not unprecedented for a country at war to suspend the elections until the war itself has ended. The United Kingdom during the Second World War did not have elections until 1945. In Finland, during the Winter War and the Second World War, no elections were held between 1939 and 1945. Similarly, in Italy during the First World War, no elections were held between 1913 and 1919. Many other examples could be made.

In the same post on Truth Social, Trump stated also that Zelensky is very low in Ukrainian opinion polls, that Zelensky himself admits that “half of the money” the US sent him is currently missing and that the United States has spent 200 billion dollars more than Europe in support of Ukraine. These are false claims, made by Trump also the day before, during the press conference at Mar-a-Lago. Let’s see the fact-checking of that speech.

Zelensky approval rating

«The leader of Ukraine, I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating»

This claim is unsupported by evidence and most likely false.

Having official and reliable polling is extremely difficult during a time of war, with significant parts of the population that have fled and one fifth of the country occupied by Russia. But the most recent polls – carried out via telephone by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology – give Zelensky an approval rating of 57%.

It is not clear where the figure of 4 percent may come from. A possible explanation is that it may come from a poll carried out by Ukrainian MP and Zelensky critic, Oleksandr Dubinsky, on Telegram. As the BBC reports, Dubinsky has been charged with treason in Ukraine, and is accused of “operating at the behest of Russian intelligence” – an accusation he denies.

US money given to Ukraine and then vanished?

«Zelensky said last week that he doesn’t know where half of the money» that the US gave them is.

This is a misleading reconstruction of what Zelenesky said and conveys a false message.

As CNN reports in its fact-checking article, Zelensky has made no such admission. «Rather, he has taken issue with inflated claims about how much US cash Ukraine has received», the US news organization writes.

In particular, it is possible that Trump misinterpreted a statement made by Zelensky in a  February 1 interview with the Associated Press. The Ukrainian president said, according to a translation by the news outlet Ukrainska Pravda, «when it’s said that Ukraine received US$200 billion to support the army during the war – that’s not true. I don’t know where all that money went. Perhaps it’s true on paper with hundreds of different programmes – I won’t argue, and we’re immensely grateful for everything. But in reality, we received about US$76 billion. It’s significant aid, but it’s not US$200 billion».

CNN then concludes that «contrary to some viral social media posts this month, that was not a confession that “half of the cash” that the US sent to Ukraine had vanished. In reality, Zelensky was saying exactly what experts in the US and elsewhere have repeatedly pointed out – that a large chunk of the total US budgetary “response” to the Ukraine war is not in the form of money handed to the Ukrainian government».

US aid to Ukraine vs Europe aid to Ukraine

«I believe 350 billion dollars, but let’s say it’s something less than that, but it’s a lot. And we have to equalize with Europe because Europe has given a very much smaller percent, I think Europe has given a 100 billion and we have given let’s say 300 plus».

These numbers are wrong and, on the wider point, the opposite is true: Europe has both committed and allocated more money for Ukraine than the US.

According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank closely tracking wartime aid to Ukraine, the US committed, between late January 2022 and December 2024, a total of about $124 billion in military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine and had actually allocated about $119 billion.

Europe, considering single States and the EU as an institution, committed more money ($258 billion) and allocated more money ($138 billion) than the US during the same period of time.

The only category where the US gave more money than Europe is military aid, and the difference is thin: Washington allocated 67 billion dollars and Europe 65 billion dollars.

Who started the war?

«You should have never started [the war]»

This is historically false and it is one of the main points of Kremlin’s disinformation: shifting the blame for the war.

Responsibility for the large-scale invasion of February 2022 lies entirely on the shoulders of Russia. In the years before the 2022 full invasion, the situation in Donbas was improving, with lowering numbers of military and civilian victims as well as lowering numbers of violations of the ceasefire granted by the Minsk agreements.

Quoting a fact-checking article from BBC, «Putin launched the invasion on 24 February 2022, stating that the aim of the operation was to “demilitarise and denazify” the pro-Western government of Volodymyr Zelensky and prevent the country from joining NATO». These arguments have been debunked many times in the past. The far-right parties performed poorly in Ukrainian elections (around 2%), Zelenesky is Jewish, his Defence Minister Rustem Umierov is Muslim, and Ukraine’s chief Rabbi consistently supported Zelensky and the defensive war against Russia, he even lost an adoptive son in the battlefield. About NATO membership, quoting again the BBC article, «while NATO officials said in 2021 that Ukraine was a candidate to join the Western alliance in the future, this was not part of any formal process».

Tommaso Canetta, Coordinator of the EDMO fact-checking activities