Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys says that US President Donald Trump’s statements about Ukraine are not “Russian narrative”, even though they are false and should be corrected.
“I wouldn’t call it [Trump’s rhetoric] a Russian narrative. We have seen tougher rhetoric in the past. Yes, some of the statements do not correspond to reality, obviously, and there’s room for correcting that information,” Budrys told the radio Žinių Radijas on Thursday.
His comment came after Trump attacked Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, effectively blaming him for Moscow’s invasion and calling the Ukrainian leader a “dictator without elections”.
According to the Lithuanian foreign minister, one of the inaccurate statements made by Trump is that the US is providing much more support to Ukraine than Europe.
“This is simply factually untrue, we have all the statistics, we know that Europe has provided some 30 percent more in aid,” Budrys said.
In his words, Washington has provided more military support to Kyiv, but overall Europe has provided more support to Ukraine.
According to Budrys, the US president also made incorrect statements about Zelensky’s popularity and who was to blame for the war in Ukraine.
“The US itself started imposing sanctions on Russia for its aggression against Ukraine in 2014, not yesterday and not the day before yesterday. We have misinformation in some places and it really needs to be corrected and pointed out,” Budrys said.
“But I certainly wouldn’t rush into judging every stage, every post on social media and talk about the US posture shifting one way or the other. What we are hearing from our American colleagues is that this is just about initiating contact and the negotiations will start later. Let’s wait and see what they will enter it with,” he said.
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