Elon Musk enflamed the escalating feud between Donald Trump’s administration and Volodymyr Zelensky this week, launching an extraordinary barrage of controversial and inaccurate barbs at the Ukrainian leader.
The Tesla and X boss, who also serves as a senior White House adviser and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, claimed Zelensky was “despised” by those in the war-torn country, calling him a “disgusting, massive graft machine feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers”.
The unfounded comments from the billionaire appear to show a growing distance between Kyiv and Washington, coming in the same week that Trump labelled Zelensky a “dictator” followed by the sudden cancellation of a joint US-Ukraine press conference.
It comes as Trump’s team this week commenced negotiations over the war with Russia but refused to include Zelensky in the formal talks in Riyadh whilst demanding rare raw earth materials from Ukraine.
Musk’s claims will probably add to growing fears among allies that the Trump administration is playing into the Kremlin’s heavily distorted narrative of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Here are the claims the world’s richest man is making – and the facts.
What Musk said: The Ukrainian president is “despised by the people of Ukraine” and was relying on a “Zelensky-controlled poll” to prove his popularity, Musk wrote on his social media platform X on Thursday.
Fact check: Musk doubled down on Trump’s claims earlier in the week that Zelensky was “down at 4 per cent approval rating”. It’s not clear where this supposed figure appeared and the suggestion that Zelensky is “despised by the people of Ukraine” is completely unfounded.
The Ukrainian leader’s popularity has fallen since the initial breakout of the war, when it stood at 90 per cent, but he still enjoys significant support.
A poll released Wednesday by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology put public trust in Zelensky at 57 per cent. The survey was conducted among 1,000 people living across Ukraine in regions and territories controlled by the Ukrainian government.
Official polling is still limited within the country and almost impossible to carry out during wartime while millions of citizens are displaced and others are caught up in the fighting.
What Musk said: “If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election. He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of ALL Ukrainian media, so he cancelled the election,” Musk claimed on Thursday.
Accusing him of being unpopular across the war-torn country, Musk said: “I challenge Zelensky to hold an election and refute this. He will not. President Trump is right to ignore him and solve for peace independent of the disgusting, massive graft machine feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers.”
Fact check: Ukraine’s government has maintained that elections cannot legally be held while the country is under martial law – which is a direct result of the war. Zelensky comfortably won Ukraine’s last election in 2019, and a new poll had been scheduled for 2024 before it was postponed by the invasion.
During a call on Wednesday, Sir Keir Starmer told Zelensky it was “perfectly reasonable” to suspended election as the UK had done during the Second World War.
If a vote was held, it would likely be disrupted by a high risk of Russia targetting Ukrainian cities. New elections in Ukraine have been a key demand for Russia.
The idea of holding a poll has little traction within Ukraine – even among opposition politicians, who recognise Zelensky’s right to postpone elections during wartime.
“Elections are not needed right now because they should only take place when we understand the framework of (a peace) agreement with Russia,” said Volodymyr Ariev, a lawmaker from the opposition European Solidarity party.
“Holding elections now would only benefit the Kremlin, further dividing Ukrainians and installing a new president who could sign a deal favourable to Moscow.”
If elections were to be held, millions of displaced Ukrainians living abroad would struggle to participate, Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied territories would find it virtually impossible to vote, and the 800,000 Ukrainians currently serving in the armed forces would struggle to cast ballots without weakening the military.
What Musk said: Ukraine is beset with “graft and bribery — guys are being fed into the meatgrinder for money – that needs to stop,” Musk told the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington on Thursday. “I think we should have empathy for the people dying on the front line,” he added, “we’re trying to end the war”.
Fact check: Ukraine has battled economic corruption since it first became independent in 1991, inheriting the issue when the Soviet Union dissolved. Amid the war, the government set up the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.
While issues have persisted, the move has had some successes. Anti-corruption organisation Transparency International last year ranked Ukraine at its highest level since 2006 in its Corruption Perceptions Index: 104th out of 180 countries.
The crackdown has led to prominent arrests, including the then-supreme court head Vsevolod Knyazev, agriculture minister Mykola Solsky and an officer with the SBU intelligence service, Artem Shylo.
Iryna Kormyshkina, an MP from Zelensky’s party, resigned on Friday amid corruption charges against her, accusing her of illicit enrichment worth more than £380,000.
“This is a no-stakes issue for Elon at this point,” Dr Nikhil Kalyanpur, from the London School of Economics’ international relations department, said.
“He doesn’t have very many clear material interests in Ukraine, or even with Russia, for that matter. But what he does have right now is incredibly strong material stakes in the Trump administration.”
Kalyanpur said Musk was “fully latched on to Trump” and both their “values were increasingly correlated”.
“I think this is quite a natural move for someone who needs to show continual support at this point for the President,” he said, suggesting that Musk needed to parrot Trump’s comments earlier in the week to maintain his place within the administration.
Kalyanpur explained that Trump needed “regime change” in Ukraine to drive through his priorities – including the $500bn deal for Ukraine’s rare earth resources – and the easiest way to do this was to “reduce the legitimacy of the leader”.
“Right now, Elon is taking the easiest step to do that which is to blasphemously libel Zelensky on the internet.”
Dr Mark Hilborne, a researcher from King’s College London’s defence studies department, said it was “hard to fathom why Musk is making such unfounded comments about Zelensky”, adding that they were “completely baseless”.
He suggested the personal attack may have been stoked off the back of Trump’s own comments amid the “pressure in the administration to make a quick agreement with Putin”.
Hilborne said: “It is not clear who actually believes these comments. A recent survey in the US showed that approximately 80 per cent of Americans distrust Putin.
“While the Maga camp might believe anything that they’re told by Trump or Musk, this surely must be quite a narrow section of opinion.”
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