U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin this month, launching a strong statement that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is responsible for Moscow’s invasion.

Speaking to reporters after U.S. and Russian officials met for their first round of talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Trump rejected complaints that Kiev had been denied a seat in talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well. But today I heard, ‘Oh, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. “You should have ended it…” Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

“You should have never started it. You should have made a deal. I should have made a deal for Ukraine.”

Trump said he was “very confident” that an agreement would be reached after talks in Riyadh led by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

“They’re very good people. Russia wants to do something, they want to stop the brutality,” he said.

When asked whether his administration would support Russia’s demands for elections in Ukraine as part of any peace deal, Trump said without evidence that Zelensky has an approval rating of just 4 percent and that the country’s elections have been suspended under martial law.

In a December poll by the International Institute of Sociology in Kyiv, 52 percent of respondents said they trusted Zelensky, down 12 percentage points from February.

“Yeah, I mean, when you want a seat at the table … shouldn’t you tell the people of Ukraine, ‘It’s been a long time since we had an election,’” Trump said.

“That’s not Russia, that’s coming from me, that’s coming from a lot of other countries.”