PRESIDENT Donald Trump said it was time for Ukraine to get a new President, suggesting Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not done enough to end his country’s war with Russia and blaming him for high diesel prices in the US. “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does,” Trump said. The President, who on Friday struck a deal with Russian PresidentVladimir Putin to buy diesel from Russia in an attempt to address high fuel prices ahead of the US midterm elections, has been urging Zelenskyy for weeks to stop strikes on Russian energy infrastructure.

 

He has also sought to blame record US diesel prices on Ukraine rather than the US-led war in Iran, which has elevated world energy prices. “He wants to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel,” Trump said, before departing for Tennessee where he was set to rally Republican voters. An ‘Associated Press-NORC Centre’ for Public Affairs Research poll conducted last month and published Oct 1 found that Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, and blame him for higher prices. Trump also suggested that if he had been US President in 2022, “that war would have never started. There was no reason that that war with Ukraine and Russia started. It started due to incompetence.”