Photo: Bernd Elmenthaler/IMAGO
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has strongly rejected US President Donald Trump's claim that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator. "It is simply wrong and dangerous to say that President Zelensky has no democratic legitimacy," Scholz said in an interview with the weekly Der Spiegel on Wednesday, February 19.
"The truth is that Volodymyr Zelensky is the legitimately elected head of state of Ukraine. The impossibility of holding fair elections in wartime is consistent with the provisions of the Ukrainian constitution and electoral laws. And no one has the right to claim otherwise," the German leader stressed.
He recalled that it was Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, that started the war against Ukraine. “Ukraine has been defending itself against Russia’s brutal aggression for almost three years. Every day,” Scholz said.
Trump’s statements about Zelensky were also criticized by German Foreign Minister Annalena Berbock and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, head of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs. “If you don’t write hasty posts on social media, but look carefully at the real world, it becomes clear who in Europe is forced to live under a dictatorship: these are the people in Russia, the people in Belarus,” Berbock said in an interview with the public television channel ZDF. “The Ukrainians fight every day for their free democracy, and we, Europeans, support them on their path to the European Union in order to strengthen our democratic states together,” the German Foreign Minister added.
“The statement by the US president is shocking. This is an unprecedented distortion of reality and extremely dangerous rhetoric. The truth is that Putin attacked democratic Ukraine,” Robert Habeck wrote on the X social network.
Trump says Zelensky's approval rating in Ukraine is just 4 percent
A day earlier, Donald Trump called on Zelensky to hold presidential elections in Ukraine, claiming that the Ukrainian leader's approval rating had fallen to four percent. Zelensky responded by calling Trump's statement "disinformation from Russia." During a press conference, the Ukrainian president cited a poll conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, which showed that 57 percent of citizens trust him as of February 2025.
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