America just demanded Ukraine replace its own president

Donald Trump just said Ukraine needs a new president.

He said it to reporters at the White House a few hours ago.

And here's the timing. It came hours after Trump announced a deal to buy diesel straight from Russia.

So what did Trump actually say? He says quote "I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal".

He didn't stop there.

Trump blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for the whole war. He said Ukraine has lost 30 per cent of its country. He said more than a million people have been killed or wounded on both sides combined. He called it a war that should never have started. And he said if he'd been president in 2022, it never would have — he says it started because of incompetence.

Now here's why he's angry at Zelensky specifically. Ukraine has kept bombing Russian oil refineries. Trump wants that stopped.

And one day before this, Trump struck a deal instead. Russia will supply the US and global markets with diesel — more than 300,000 tons straight away, 500,000 tons in November, a million tons after that, then another 3 million tons later. The US Treasury issued a licence that waives sanctions on Russian diesel until April 2027, just to make the deal possible.

So why now? A US official told Axios that Trump only agreed to this after Zelensky ignored half a dozen separate US requests to stop hitting Russian refineries. The official put it bluntly: Zelensky is misreading the room.

Zelensky says he had no idea this was coming.

He told Axios the deal was not fair and not honest. He called it a happy birthday present for Putin. He says the idea of a Russian diesel deal never once came up during eight hours of talks in Miami the day before — talks between his own negotiators and Trump's envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with European officials also in the room.

Zelensky says quote "our team is simply being used as a smoke screen".

A senior Ukrainian official told the Associated Press the Ukrainian delegation knew nothing about the deal before it was announced. They'd already left Florida and flown home. A Ukrainian official also said Witkoff and Kushner raised the idea that Trump could cut Ukraine off from US intelligence. The US official denies that was ever said.