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According to five Western officials familiar with the matter, the United States opposed Russia’s G7 statement on the third anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not yet agreed to attend the virtual G7 summit on Monday, officials said.
The disagreement comes as Ukraine, President Donald Trump blamed the war on Ukraine, who called Zelenskyy a “no election dictator” and suggested Russia should be invited to return to the G7.
Western officials say U.S. envoys oppose the term “Russian aggression” and similar descriptions used by G7 leaders since 2022 to describe the conflict.
Traditionally, the world’s leading economies issued a statement of support on February 24 (the full invasion began three years ago).
“We insist that Russia and Ukraine have to be different. They are different.
“Americans are blocking this language, but we are still working and hoping to reach an agreement,” the official added.
The U.S. Embassy of Kiev in the U.S. declined to comment.
Last year, Russia’s aggressiveness was mentioned five times in a statement from the G7 leader. The 2024 statement said: “We call on Russia to immediately cease its war of aggression and to withdraw its military forces from internationally recognized Ukrainian territory completely and unconditionally.”
Two people familiar with the matter said the Trump administration insisted on softening the language, reflecting a broad shift in U.S. policy that describes war as “the Ukrainian conflict.”
The latest U.S. Department of State’s latest statement uses similar words, including readings from Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Riyadh, mentioned twice “The conflict in Ukraine”.
This change marks the language used by the Biden administration, which often uses phrases such as “Russian aggression”, referring to Europe’s largest land war since World War II.
The dispute over the statement comes a week after Trump was flattered, agreeing to his many demands on Russia’s war in Ukraine and willing to normalize Washington’s relations with Moscow, and sending senior U.S. officials to meet with senior Russian officials on Tuesday. In Riyadh.
Trump also wrongly claimed that Zelenskyy’s approval rate in Ukraine was only 4%. A poll published this week showed the president received 57% support at home, up from 52% in December, according to data from the Kiev Institute for International Sociology.
Putin responded enthusiastically to the Trump administration’s proposal. “The American negotiators are completely different – they open up the negotiation process without any bias or judgment about what they have done in the past,” Putin said after the Riyadh meeting. “They intend to work together.”
