LONDON — Russia's Vladimir Putin has for years unsuccessfully tried to oust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Now, those efforts are being entertained by senior officials in Ukraine’s single most important backer, the United States.
Either Zelenskyy “needs to come to his senses and come back to the table in gratitude or someone else needs to lead the country to do that,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday. Two days after the Ukrainian president was publicly berated by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, and asked to leave the White House without signing an important deal, Johnson said it was “up to the Ukrainians to figure that out.”
National security adviser Mike Waltz said Washington needed “a leader that can deal with us, eventually deal with the Russians, and end this war.” He told CNN that “if it becomes apparent that President Zelenskyy’s either personal motivations or political motivations are divergent from ending the fighting in this country, then I think we have a real issue.”
Meanwhile Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he wasn’t sure if the U.S. “can ever do business with Zelenskyy again.” He said that Ukraine’s leader “either needs to resign and send somebody over that we can do business with, or he needs to change.”
Critics say this plays into the hands of Russia, aiding Moscow’s yearslong bid to oust Ukraine’s pro-Western leader, while fanning Kyiv’s domestic political divisions during wartime.
Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov on Monday called the White House clash an “unprecedented event” that showed “Zelenskyy largely demonstrated a complete lack of diplomatic skills.” The exchange was part of Ukraine’s “refusal to acknowledge the real situation on the ground,” he said. “Only a blind person could fail to see this, and only a deaf person would refuse to hear it.”
Still, the Ukrainian leader has remained defiant and popular among European leaders. There is also evidence that last week’s clash in the Oval Office may have even boosted his domestic support.
“If they replace me, given what is going on, given the support, simply replacing me will not be simple,” Zelenskyy told British media. “It’s not enough to just hold an election. You need to also not let me run. This will be a bit more difficult. Looks like you will have to negotiate with me.”
Trump and his advisers such as Elon Musk have criticized Ukraine’s indefinite postponement of elections scheduled for 2024, delayed because the country is under martial law following its invasion by Russia. That led to Trump calling democratically elected Zelenskyy “a dictator without elections.”
More and more Ukrainians are in favor of this pause, with support up to 58% from 52% last week, Ukrainian pollster Gradus found in data published Sunday.
Other polling suggests that, while certainly more politically fallible than he was during the early days of the war, Zelenskyy remains widely popular and could well win a democratic ballot. In fact, another Gradus survey suggested that the Oval Office bust-up has coincided with a boost in Zelenskyy’s domestic approval rising to 49% as of Saturday.
Meanwhile, trust in Zelenskyy appears to be increasing, up to 65% from 57% in January, a poll by the Ukrainian research organization Rating Group found.
Zelenskyy “was elected in 2019 with the large margin,” said Yevhen Mahda, director of the Kyiv think tank Institute of World Policy, adding that there isn’t a serious risk to his leadership inside the country. Although Zelenskyy has offered to resign if Ukraine gets NATO membership, these statements are “a bit populistic” because of how unlikely that is, Mahda said.
One man possibly more popular than him is Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s former top military commander — known as the Iron General — whom Zelenskyy fired in a February 2024 shakeup. Zaluzhniy, since posted to the United Kingdom as ambassador, was trusted by 76% of respondents in the Rating Group survey — higher than his boss, the president.
But in informal conversations over the weekend, political, military and diplomatic figures in Kyiv, even those who did not personally support the Ukrainian leader, unanimously told NBC News that replacing Zelenskyy now would only benefit Russia. Rather than seeing a humiliation of their leader, they saw it as an example of Ukraine standing up to the U.S. and saying “no.”
Still, many in Ukraine are under no illusions at the leverage Washington still holds over them.
One soldier in Kramatorsk, Volodymyr Chystyi, whose nickname is clean guy, laid it out in stark terms: “The only international pressure that could possibly force Zelenslyi to resign is a pressure from America.”
Yevheniia Kravchuk, a lawmaker with Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party, said her leader has “made it clear he’s not in politics for power. His aim is to ensure real, lasting peace to Ukraine and to achieve some security guarantees.”
“Honestly, I do not understand calls for President Zelenskyy to resign in the middle of an existential genocidal war,” she added. “Our defense heavily depends on President Zelenskyy’s leadership. Even the critics in Ukraine acknowledge that the discussion about replacing him is absurd and premature.”
Trump has wrongly claimed that Zelenskyy’s approval rating is 4%, and Musk said the Ukrainian leader was avoiding a vote because he would “lose in a landslide.”
There doesn’t appear to be much evidence for either of these assertions. Trump appears to have gotten his statistic from an unscientific poll on the Telegram messaging service by one of Zelenskyy’s political rivals.
Alexander Smith reported from London, and Victor Sema and Daryna Meyer from Kyiv.
