A US Senator Rand Paul has rebuked the “ungrateful” Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky for his harsh criticism of Washington and other Western backers and demanding Kiev’s speedy NATO accession.
“We’ve given them $100 billion, and he has the audacity to be so brazen as to tell us we’d better speed it up … I’d say it’s not very grateful,” Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, said on Tuesday in a Fox News interview.
“There’s an old English adage he might need to become aware of: Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” he said, adding that the Ukrainian president might need to recalibrate his complaints to avoid alienating Western allies.
Paul commented after Zelensky slammed NATO’s “absurd” lack of a timeline for Ukraine’s accession to the NATO military alliance earlier in the day.
“It’s unprecedented and absurd when a timeframe is not set, neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership,” said Zelensky on the Telegram messaging app before joining NATO leaders as a guest at the bloc’s summit in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius.
Referring to “vague wording about ‘conditions'” for Ukraine’s NATO accession, Zelensky said, “It seems there is no readiness neither to invite Ukraine to NATO nor to make it a member of the Alliance.”
The US-led NATO military alliance has backed Kyiv logistically in its war against Russia while supporting it with a raft of lethal armaments.
Paul also blasted the Western military aid to Ukraine, saying it hinders Kyiv from sitting around the negotiation table with Russia.
“As long as we continue to supply unlimited arms to Zelensky, I think he sees no reason to have any negotiations,” Paul said. “So, I think we’re putting off negotiations, but ultimately, the losers are the Ukrainian people.”
US ‘Furious’ Over Zelensky’s Remark
On the other side of the ledger, the US delegation attending the NATO summit in Vilnius expressed their “furious” stance over Zelensky’s comments, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing an unnamed official familiar with the matter.
The paper pointed out that Zelensky “blasting the alliance stood in stark contrast to the image of Western harmony that [US President Joe] Biden and his aides had been projecting” at the event.
A senior NATO official told Washington Post that the Ukrainian president’s “tweet puts pressure on the alliance,” while also helping him “to say, ‘I am fighting to the end’” to the population of Ukraine.
Furthermore, an unnamed senior diplomat from Central Europe told Politico that Zelensky “is going too far” with his criticism.
“I think that this is not a thoughtful and fair approach” from the Ukrainian leader, he added.
