The Ukrainian leader is “completely out of his mind,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said
Vladimir Zelensky’s claim that he told US President-elect Donald Trump that Kiev could use frozen Russian assets to buy American weapons is proof of “deep-rooted corrupt ties” between the Ukrainian leader and the West, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has claimed.
During his three-hour-long interview with podcaster Lex Fridman on Sunday, Zelensky said he had proposed that Trump give Ukraine the $300 billion in Russian central bank funds that had been frozen by the US and EU after the escalation of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022. The money would serve as one of the security guarantees to Ukraine during a possible diplomatic settlement of the conflict, he explained.
According to Zelensky, he told Trump to “take the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets. We will take it. Take money, what we need for our domestic production, and we will buy all the weapons from the US.” Such an arrangement “will be very good for your industry, for the US,” he added.
Zakharova reacted to the claim in a post on Telegram on Monday, insisting that the fact that the Ukrainian leader “offered Trump ‘other people’s money in exchange for weapons’ testifies to Zelensky’s deep-rooted corrupt ties with the Anglo-Americans [the US and UK].”
US President Joe Biden has “firmly hooked the Kiev regime on: steal and kill, and then steal again – a bloody scheme in place since the time of Burisma,” a Ukrainian firm which employed the elderly politician’s son Hunter as a highly-paid director in the 2010s, she wrote.
As for Zelensky’s interview as a whole, the spokeswoman described it as a “hellish mixture of neo-Nazism and terrorism with drug delirium.” The Ukrainian leader is “completely out of his mind,” Zakharova suggested.
During his conversation with Fridman, Zelensky, among other things, said that it was “bad” that Ukraine did not have nuclear weapons and confessed that he “despises” the Russian people.
In late December, exiled Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk claimed that the “corrupt nature” of Zelensky’s rule is the reason why his country is now ruined.
Medvedchuk also suggested that the whole conflict between Moscow and Kiev is “based on one large corrupt scheme that involves leading parties and politicians in Europe and the US.” The Western politicians that support Ukraine are afraid of losing power because it could lead to the new leaders finding out “that they had been robbing their own people under the guise of helping Zelensky,” he said.
