Chicago – December 08, 2025
In a lengthy tirade against the purpose of continued fighting in Ukraine, Donald Trump Jr also said Ukraine’s “corrupt” rich had fled their country leaving “what they believed to be the peasant class” to fight the war.
Trump Jr has no formal role inside his father’s administration, but is a key figure in the Maga movement. His intervention reflects the antipathy among some inside the Trump team towards the Ukrainian government, and comes as Trump’s negotiating team is putting pressure on Kyiv to give up territory.
Trump Jr said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was prolonging the war because he knew he would never win an election if it ended. He said Zelenskyy was a borderline deity on the left, but argued that Ukraine was far more corrupt than Russia.
He also railed at the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, saying European sanctions were not working since they had simply increased the price of oil, from which Russia could pay for its war. He described the European plan as “we are going to wait for Russia to go bankrupt – that is not a plan”.
He said he had only encountered three people during his canvassing of voters in the 2022 election campaign who thought the Ukraine war was a top-10 issue. The risk of Venezuelan boats bringing the drug fentanyl into the US was, he said, “far more a clear and present danger than anything that is going on in Ukraine or Russia”.
