Last spring, the Kremlin added a new rhetorical weapon to its regular barrages against President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
“We are aware that the legitimacy of the current head of state has expired,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said of the Ukrainian leader in May 2024, two months after orchestrating his own latest rubber-stamp re-election at home.
Those stilted words kicked off a concerted campaign by Moscow to tarnish Mr. Zelensky as an impostor incapable of signing a peace deal unless presidential elections were held in Ukraine.
Mr. Zelensky had remained in power when his term expired because Ukraine prohibits elections under martial law. No matter. By Wednesday, President Trump had picked up Mr. Putin’s message.
“A Dictator without Elections,” Mr. Trump said in a post on his Truth Social account, in a scathing attack on the Ukrainian leader. It came a day after Mr. Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war.
Dmitri A. Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian security council and a former president of Russia, said he agreed with Mr. Trump about the Ukrainian leader “200 percent.” He suggested that Moscow could not believe its luck with Washington’s about-face, throwing into stark relief how completely Mr. Trump had adopted the Kremlin’s messaging.
“If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” Mr. Medvedev wrote on X.
It was not the first time that Mr. Trump had picked up and repeated a questionable talking point of a strongman leader who had won his sympathies. During Mr. Trump’s first term, such interlocutors sometimes guided the president handily toward taking up their positions, even if those stances contradicted Mr. Trump’s own advisers and intelligence agencies.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, for example, regularly steered Mr. Trump toward his positions in calls and interactions, ultimately getting the U.S. president to move American forces out of the way while Turkey attacked the Kurds in northern Syria. The Kurds had been Washington’s main partners in the campaign against the Islamic State.
After the murder of the columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Mr. Trump publicly repeated Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s assertion that he had no knowledge of the crime, and said that the truth about what really happened might never be known. That was at odds with the C.I.A.’s conclusion at the time that Prince Mohammed, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, ordered the killing.
Mr. Trump also caused an uproar in 2019 when he said he took the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “at his word” that he did not know about the harsh treatment of Otto Warmbier, an American in North Korean custody. Mr. Trump said North Korean prisons were “rough places.” Mr. Warmbier was released to the United States in a vegetative state and died soon afterward.
Perhaps none of Mr. Trump’s relationships with other world leaders have received more scrutiny than the one with Mr. Putin, whom the U.S. president has long praised and admired.
In 2018, the Justice Department named and charged 12 officers from Russia’s military intelligence agency with hacking emails from Democratic Party systems and releasing them online. The effort damaged the party’s 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Days later, after a two-hour private meeting with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Mr. Trump repeated the Russian leader’s assertion that Moscow had not interfered in Mr. Trump’s favor in the election.
“I have President Putin. He just said it is not Russia,” Mr. Trump said. “I will say this: I do not see any reason why it would be.”
Mr. Trump expressed “great confidence” in his intelligence agencies, which concluded that Russia had interfered, but said, “I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
His decision to take Mr. Putin’s word over that of his own intelligence agencies outraged even Republicans, with the late Senator John McCain calling it a “disgraceful performance.”
A three-year study by a bipartisan U.S. Senate committee concluded that the Russian government “engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”
Constraints during his first term, including a special counsel investigation into Russian interference, a coterie of Russia hawks within his administration and overwhelming bipartisan contempt for the Kremlin in Congress, largely prevented Mr. Trump from acting on his impulse to develop close ties with Mr. Putin.
In his second term, with those restrictions gone, Mr. Trump has set about pursuing a rapid rapprochement with Moscow, to the shock of both European allies and Ukraine. At the same time, he has taken actions cheered by the Kremlin, including the dismantlement of the American government foreign aid agency, U.S.A.I.D., while also repeating some of the Kremlin’s main anti-Ukrainian talking points.
Mr. Trump’s pattern of repeating what Mr. Putin says and being steered toward policy decisions by foreign strongmen has caused grave worry in both Europe and Ukraine about what the American president might agree to during impending talks with Mr. Putin, who has long sought to destroy NATO and unity between the United States and its European allies.
Mr. Trump adopted the Russian president’s line of attack against Mr. Zelensky a week after the two leaders held a phone call, during which Mr. Putin may have raised the matter.
Mr. Zelensky’s five-year presidential term would have expired in May of last year, was extended under martial law rules in place since Russia’s invasion in 2022.
Mr. Putin told Russian state television in January that peace negotiations could be conducted with whomever, but that “due to his illegitimacy” Mr. Zelensky “has no right to sign anything.”
Mr. Zelensky hit back at Mr. Putin’s line of attack in June of last year, saying the Ukrainian people were the only ones who would determine the legitimacy of their president.
“Our people are free. To be honest, we’re fighting precisely for this,” Mr. Zelensky said. “The legitimacy of comrade Putin is recognized only by comrade Putin himself. Only Putin elects Putin. Russians are the scenery, with only one performer on stage.”
During an appearance on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida estate, the president not only supported Mr. Putin’s argument about Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy. He co-opted it.
Mr. Trump said it was the United States, not Russia, pushing for elections in Ukraine, though Mr. Putin for months has been saying that Mr. Zelensky cannot sign a peace deal unless presidential elections take place.
“That’s not a Russia thing,” Mr. Trump said of elections in Ukraine. “That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries also.”
It was unclear what countries, apart from Russia, Mr. Trump had in mind.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It is unclear exactly what the Kremlin intends to gain from its rhetoric, but questions about Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy and the timing of future elections could weaken Ukraine’s negotiating position in potential peace talks or form a pretext for sidelining Mr. Zelensky — especially if Mr. Trump amplifies the message.
Stefan Meister, a Russia expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said the Kremlin is trying to delegitimize Mr. Zelensky with the hope of destabilizing Ukraine and ultimately setting in motion a process to install a new, more Moscow-friendly leader in Kyiv.
He called the false narrative about Mr. Zelensky an important tool in Russia’s “toolbox for how they want to destroy Ukraine as a state.”
“This is ongoing and evergreen in the Russian disinformation campaign — that there were no elections in Ukraine and Zelensky is an illegitimate president,” Mr. Meister said. “As we understand, Trump is taking over the elements of Russian disinformation.”
Beyond Ukraine’s clear prohibition on elections during martial law, active warfare in the country would also make holding a fair election incredibly difficult, with thousands of men stationed at the front, fears about going to polls during fighting and worries about a distracting political sweepstakes at a moment of existential crisis for the Ukrainian state.
Republican members of Congress who back Ukraine have hit out at the idea that elections should be held before or during any peace process and have highlighted the irony of such a demand by Mr. Putin, who years ago ended fair elections in Russia and changed the rules to stay in power past his term limits.
Rep. Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, wrote on X that while Russia was demanding elections in Ukraine, “we should remind ourselves that Putin has murdered or exiled all his political rivals.” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, told Mr. Putin, also in a post on X, that he should try holding a free and fair election in his own country first.
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