The United State President, Donald Trump heaped blames on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for the ongoing war with Russia, called him a “dictator without elections”.

Speaking at a Saudi-backed investment in Florida, Trump said Zelensky: “refuses to have elections. He’s low in the real Ukrainian polls. How can you be high with every city being demolished?”

The attack on Ukraine after Zelensky, reacted to US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia from which Kyiv was excluded, said the U.S. president was “living in a disinformation space” governed by Moscow.

“The only thing he was really good at was playing Joe Biden like a fiddle,” Trump said of Zelenskyy, adding that the Ukrainian leader wants the war to continue “to keep the gravy train going.”

He repeated his claim that Ukraine has misused U.S. money and pushed for Europe to take on a greater role.

“I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job,” Trump said. “His country is shattered, and millions and millions of people have died.”

However, the “dictator” description raised eyebrow from European leaders including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said “it is simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelensky his democratic legitimacy”.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson also criticized Trump’s use of the word “dictator” while German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called the comments “absurd”.

“If you look at the real world instead of just firing off a tweet, then you know who in Europe has to live in the conditions of a dictatorship: people in Russia, people in Belarus,” she told broadcaster ZDF.

The former prime minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, told the BBC that Russia was “popping champagne right now” in response to Trump’s comments.

“Volodymyr Zelensky is a completely legitimate president,” he said. “We cannot hold elections under martial law.”

The war of words began with comments made by Trump on Tuesday at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, when he blamed Ukraine for the war.

Trump was asked by BBC News what his message was to Ukrainians who might feel betrayed, to which he replied: “I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat, well, they’ve had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily.”

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump added.

Trump did not mention that President Vladimir Putin took the decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022.

Then on Wednesday, Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv: “We are seeing a lot of disinformation and it’s coming from Russia. With all due respect to President Donald Trump as a leader… he is living in this disinformation space.”

He added that he believed “the United States helped Putin to break out of years of isolation”.

Later in the day, the Ukrainian leader said the world faced the choice to be “with Putin or with peace” and announced he would be meeting Washington’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, on Thursday.