Former president Donald Trump said Thursday that he plans to meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday.
“As you know, President Zelensky has asked to meet with me, and I will be meeting with him tomorrow morning at around 9:45 in Trump Tower,” Trump said during a press conference in New York.
“And it’s a shame what’s happening in Ukraine, so many deaths, so much destruction. It’s a horrible thing,” he said.
On Thursday, Zelensky met with Trump’s political rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden.
Earlier this week, the possibility of a Trump-Zelensky meeting appeared uncertain, after Zelensky said he would most likely meet with the former president during his trip to the U.S., but NBC News reported that Trump had decided not to meet with the Ukrainian president.
And Trump publicly criticized Zelensky on Wednesday, accusing him of “making little nasty aspersions toward your favorite president, me.” He also said the Ukrainian president is “a man who refuses to make a deal” to end the war against Russia.
Zelensky had upset Republicans this week when he called Senator J. D. Vance “too radical” in his opposition to U.S. aid to Ukraine during an interview with the New Yorker.
The meeting on Friday will be the first time the pair has met since Trump was impeached in 2019 over allegations that the then-president withheld hundreds of millions in congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine to put pressure on the Ukrainian government to investigate his potential rival, Joe Biden, and Biden’s son, Hunter.
Zelensky and Trump held a call in July — their first in five years — in which the former president reportedly said he is “very supportive” of Ukraine and would do “everything to strengthen” the country if elected president.
Zelensky is in the U.S. for the United Nations General Assembly this week. Earlier this week, before meeting with Biden and Harris at the White House, he traveled to Pennsylvania on an Air Force jet courtesy of the Biden-Harris administration and visited an ammunition plant in Biden’s hometown. He also met with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.
The trip led Republicans on the House Oversight Committee to open an investigation into whether the Biden administration misused taxpayer dollars to fly Zelensky to Pennsylvania to benefit Harris’s presidential campaign.
Committee chairman James Comer sent letters to top Biden-administration officials that noted Democrats accused Trump of trying to use Zelensky to benefit his campaign in 2019 “despite a lack of any evidence of wrongdoing.”
“Now, the Biden-Harris Administration is flying the same foreign leader on an American-taxpayer-funded flight to Pennsylvania, a battleground state for Harris’s campaign,” Comer wrote.