President Trump called on Ukraine to replace President Volodymyr Zelensky and to halt its strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, saying in remarks broadcast by OANN that Kyiv had missed repeated chances to negotiate an end to the war with Russia.
“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal, because he could have made many deals that for some reason he'd ever does,” Trump said. “And let me go step further. If I were president, you wouldn't have ever had that war. That war would have never started.”
Trump continued: “There was no reason that that war with Ukraine and Russia started. It started due to incompetence. It should have never started. You wouldn't have lost 30% of your country already. You've lost 30% of your country and you've had over a million people killed between the two of them, over two million people killed. That's a war that should have never started. And I think it's time for Ukraine to get a new president. That war would have never started.”
Trump also requested that Ukraine cease its strikes on Russian oil infrastructure and allow Russia to resume its lucrative fuel exports, according to the open-source intelligence account @Osinttechnical, which reported the remarks earlier in the day.
The call for a leadership change was carried by Axios, which reported under the headline “Trump tells Ukraine to replace Zelensky over Russia fuel deal,” and by OANN, which framed the president's argument as a claim that Zelenskyy “has missed multiple opportunities to negotiate an end to the war with Russia.” OANN also reported that Trump “says the conflict should never have started and claims that millions have been killed in the fighting.”
The comments landed the same day Ukraine launched a new major drone swarm attack against Russia, according to a breaking report from @visegrad24, which described the operation as a “new major drone swarm attack against Russia.” That account is among the earliest to carry word of the strike, which arrived as Trump was making his appeal for Kyiv to stand down on Russian oil.
Within hours, the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War weighed in on a related development, posting from @TheStudyofWar that “the US decision to grant Russia a waiver to export diesel also represents a unilateral US concession in its negotiation posture with Russia, when Russia has offered the US no concessions in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.” The institute's assessment portrays the waiver as a one-sided move, characterized in its post as coming without reciprocal Russian offers at the negotiating table.
The sequence drew together two tracks of the administration's Russia policy — a push for Ukraine to change course militarily and politically, and a decision on Russian fuel exports that critics describe as a concession. Trump's remarks, as relayed by @Osinttechnical, paired the demand for new leadership in Kyiv with a request that Ukrainian forces stop targeting Russian oil infrastructure and permit Russia to restart fuel exports.
The posts carrying the story span the ideological range of war coverage: @visegrad24 broke the drone swarm report, @Osinttechnical relayed the president's request on oil strikes, @axios reported the Zelensky replacement call, and OANN broadcast the remarks in full. @TheStudyofWar, which produces daily analysis of the conflict, published its assessment of the diesel waiver and also posted a hiring notice for a Russia researcher on its Russia & Ukraine team, seeking a candidate with a bachelor's degree in a related field and preferably a master's, though that notice was unrelated to the day's events.
Two days before the exchange, Russian drones threatened Kyiv and Odesa overnight while Moscow's aircraft launched guided bombs toward three eastern regions, according to earlier coverage of overnight drone and bomb attacks across Ukraine.
Next News Network could not independently verify the claims or characterizations described in the social media posts cited above.
Our Take
President Trump's message to Kyiv amounts to a demand that Ukraine accept a weaker hand while Russia gives up nothing — and the diesel waiver his administration granted Moscow makes that imbalance concrete. Trump says the war should never have started and that Zelensky has squandered chances to end it. Perhaps. But the president's frustration with the Ukrainian leader is not the same thing as a negotiation, and telling Ukraine to stop hitting Russian oil while letting Russia export diesel on a U.S. waiver is not a peace plan — it is leverage handed to Moscow at no cost. Republicans should be clear-eyed: Ukraine does not need a new leader chosen under pressure from Washington, and it does not need to unilaterally disarm its most effective weapon against the Russian war machine while the Kremlin keeps every missile and drone it has aimed at Ukrainian cities. Trump promised to end the war, not to tilt it. If he wants a deal, the pressure should run both ways.
