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Republican presidential candidate says even ‘worst deal’ would be better than current level of death and destruction.

Donald Trump has hit out at Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not negotiating with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, claiming that even the “worst deal” would be better than the current level of death and destruction.

Speaking at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump said that Ukraine would never be able to replace its “many dead people” and towns and cities destroyed in the war.

“Those cities are gone. They’re gone, and we continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refused to make a deal, Zelenskyy. There was no deal that he could have made that wouldn’t have been better than the situation you have right now,” Trump told supporters.

“You have a country that has been obliterated, not possible to be rebuilt. It’ll take hundreds of years to rebuild it, there’s not enough money to rebuild it if the whole world got together.”

“If they made a bad deal, it would have been much better,” Trump said.

“They would have given up a little bit, and everybody would be living and every building would be built and every tower would be ageing for another 2,000 years.”

Trump also accused Zelenskyy of “making nasty little dispersions toward” him, an apparent reference to an interview published in The New Yorker on Sunday in which the Ukrainian leader said the Republican candidate “doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how”.

Zelenskyy also described Trump’s running mate JD Vance as “too radical” after the Ohio Senator said last week that “everything is going to be on the table” when asked during a news conference whether Kyiv should cede land in exchange for a ceasefire.

Trump’s comments, which marked his most explicit criticism of the Ukrainian leader and his handling of the war yet, came hours after Zelenskyy urged world leaders not to settle for “a lull” in the conflict instead of a “real, just peace”.

Zelenskyy delivered the call for solidarity at the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday as he sought to rally support for his 2022 “peace formula” that demands the expulsion of all Russian forces from Ukraine.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he would bring an end to the war almost immediately while providing little in the way of specifics.

During an interview on the Lex Friedman Podcast earlier this month, Trump said he had a “very exacting plan” for resolving the conflict but he could not disclose the details before putting it into action.