Sharansky: I was shocked to hear Trump say Zelensky started the war

Sharansky wrote that he could only imagine what the political prisoners and dissidents in Russian jails are feeling today.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF FEBRUARY 24, 2025 15:41

NATAN SHARANSKY on the Haas Promenade in Jerusalem. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)

Former Prisoner of Zion and Israeli government minister Natan Sharansky slammed US President Donald Trump for blaming Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for being the aggressor in the war with Russia.

“I was absolutely shocked,” wrote Sharansky in an article for The Free Press, the Bari Weiss-led news site.

After offering muted praise to Trump for his stance supporting Israel, Sharansky said that the president’s remarks about Zelensky adopted the rhetoric of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

“He repeated a line from the Kremlin that sounded like Soviet-style propaganda: that Zelensky is not a legitimate leader. When Putin, the seemingly eternal leader of Russia, says it, it is laughable. When the president of the United States says it, it’s alarming, tragic, and does not comply with common sense,” wrote Sharansky.

“When the free world was paralyzed by Putin and his threats of nuclear war, and Putin invaded Ukraine in order to conquer it in one week, Zelensky united the country and stopped the invasion. Today, Ukraine’s struggle against Russia’s imperial ambitions protects the future of the free world.”

EX-SOVIET dissident Natan Sharansky smiles in 1997 as he points at his former apartment in Moscow, which he last saw through the window of a KGB car on his way from jail in 1986 during the Soviet era. (credit: REUTERS)

Sharansky, who spent over a decade in various Soviet prisons for being a Jewish dissident before being released in 1986 and immigrating to Israel, wrote that he could only imagine what the political prisoners and dissidents in Russian jails are feeling today.

Russian political prisoners are even worse off today than under the Soviet Union

“Only a year ago Alexei Navalny was killed by Putin in one of his prisons. Before he died, Navalny wrote me a few letters in which he said that what he saw in Russia’s prisons was the same world that I once experienced as a prisoner in the Soviet Union,” Sharansky wrote.

“But I think that in some ways it is worse for the political prisoners in Russia today. We had the advantage of knowing that President Reagan was on our side. But what should the hundreds sent to Russian prisons for many years for daring to call out Putin’s aggression feel today?”

Sharansky concluded his article by calling on Trump to make it clear that he’s against Russian aggression. “Because a world where an American president supports Vladimir Putin is a dangerous place.”