Trump calls Ukraine’s Zelenskyy a ‘dictator’ as China set to benefit from US pivot

China hawks in Washington seem to believe they can work with Russia to isolate Beijing, if countries with close ties to Moscow like Vietnam and India also turn away from the Asian giant, an Asia expert wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations. But leveraging these links to bring parts of South and Southeast Asia into the US’ orbit won’t match the “enormous influence” China already wields in these regions, he added. The US offering concessions to Russia could benefit China geopolitically, given those countries’ “quasi-alliance,” a columnist argued in Foreign Policy. Trump’s pandering to Putin also gives China a chance to present itself as an alternate guarantor of European security, The Atlantic wrote: Foreign Minister Wang Li recently said China could be a “factor of certainty in a newly multipolar system.”

The US president’s attacks have “unleashed a firestorm of support” for Zelenskyy at home — even among his fiercest domestic critics, with talk of holding elections widely seen as a Kremlin-style ploy to destabilize Ukraine from within, The Washington Post reported. The Ukrainian leader’s domestic approval rating reached 57% at the beginning of February, according to polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology — significantly higher than Trump’s claim, for which he provided no evidence, that Zelenskyy’s approval had sunk to 4%. Washington and Moscow’s alignment on wanting him gone is likely to prompt the wartime leader to “do everything to cling to power” a former Ukrainian minister told Politico, adding that this could harm Kyiv diplomatically.