make a deal

Trump had already been busy at rallies that week praising Russia’s historic military record, while lambasting the current US administration for giving "billions of dollars" to Zelensky who he claimed had "refused to make a deal" to end the conflict.

Trump said he believed he would be able to "make a deal" between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelensky "quite quickly".

Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his criticism of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, claiming that the Ukrainian president "refuses to make a deal" with Moscow some 31 months after the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

“Those cities are gone, they’re gone, and we continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refused to make a deal, Zelensky. There was no deal that he could have made that wouldn’t have been better than the situation you have right now. You have a country that has been obliterated, not possible to be rebuilt,” Trump said in a campaign speech in Mint Hill, North Carolina Wednesday, suggesting that Russia would not have destroyed so much of Ukraine had the latter been more accommodating.

At a campaign event on Wednesday he mocked Zelensky as the "greatest salesman on Earth" and accused the Ukrainian leader of refusing to "make a deal" with Moscow.