Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday, Feb. 18, applauded US President Donald Trump for criticizing Volodymyr Zelensky, with the Russia’s top diplomat calling the Ukrainian president “pathetic.”

“Trump is a completely independent politician. Besides that, he is a person who is used to talking directly. Such people typically do not hide their opinions about pathetic individuals like Mr. Zelensky,” state-run TASS news agency quoted Lavrov as saying, a day after Trump delivered another blow to Ukraine and a boost to Putin by claiming that Zelensky has a “4% approval rating” in the country and that presidential elections in Ukraine are necessary.

His comments echo Putin’s claims and are false. Zelensky’s rating as of early February stood at 57%, according to a survey released by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) on Wednesday. The rating marks a slight increase from the KIIS’s December 2024 poll‘s 52%, conducted before Trump’s return to the Oval Office in January.

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Lavrov also hailed the US President for attributing the war in Ukraine to NATO’s push to integrate Kyiv into the military alliance.

“He is the first, and so far, the only Western leader who has publicly and loudly said that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the previous administration’s pushy line of dragging Ukraine into NATO,” Lavrov said during a session with Russian lawmakers in the State Duma, multiple state-run Russian media outlets reported.

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Zelensky dismissed Trump’s claim about his low approval rating, calling it Russian disinformation, and warned that the US is helping Putin break out of isolation.

In a press conference on Jan. 7, Trump directly blamed Biden for “provoking Russia” by supporting Ukraine’s NATO ambitions.

“Russia, for many, many years – long before Putin – said, ‘You could never have NATO involved with Ukraine,’” Trump told reporters. “And somewhere along the line, Biden said, ‘No, they should be able to join NATO.’ Well, then, Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feeling about that.”

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This narrative aligns closely with Russia’s justification for its invasion – an argument widely rejected by Ukraine and its allies, who maintain that Moscow’s war is an unprovoked act of aggression aimed at subjugating an independent nation. 

The remarks came just several hours after senior US and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia for their first high-level diplomatic talks since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine - without Ukraine’s president, Zelensky, even being invited.

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