Finnish MPs from four parties have condemned US President Donald Trump's false accusation that Ukraine started the ongoing war.
Trump made the false statement on Tuesday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to media reports. Trump appeared to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for having "started" the war, according to news agency AFP.
"Today I heard, 'oh, well, we weren't invited.' Well, you've been there for three years... You should have never started it. You could have made a deal," Trump told reporters.
Earlier that day, top diplomats from the US and Russia met in Saudi Arabia for talks that did not include Ukrainian or European representatives.
Zelensky had criticised those discussions, saying that efforts to end the war must be "fair and involve European countries", according to AFP.
Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine began just under three years ago, when it invaded the country in what it called a "special military operation" in February 2022. It quickly grew into Europe's biggest conflict since the Second World War.
On Wednesday morning, a group of Finnish MPs reacted to Trump's false statement on Yle TV1's breakfast show.
Those rejecting Trump's false statement included MPs Veronika Honka (Left), Jarno Limnéll (NCP) and Tytti Tuppurainen (SDP).
"It would be good to keep in mind that the war in Ukraine would end today if Russia stops its attack. I really don't want to reinforce such a false narrative that Ukraine was behind the war," Limnéll said.
Election talk
However, MP Jani Mäkelä (Finns) said he would not interpret Trump's words literally, noting the US president is known to have made untrue statements in the past.
"Instead of thinking about what Trump says, we should consider what he means. He has had strange interpretations about history before, for example related to the second World War, which are not actually true," Mäkelä noted.
US conservative news outlet Fox News reported on Tuesday that during their meeting in Saudi Arabia, US and Russian top diplomats had discussed new elections in Ukraine.
In a post on X, Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich said the US and Russian diplomats had discussed a three-phase plan, including a cease-fire, new elections in Ukraine and the signing of a peace treaty after the elections.
According to MPs Honka, Limnéll, Mäkelä and Tuppurainen, elections should not be part of the peace negotiations.
"The Kremlin's goal has always been to remove [President] Zelensky, and change Ukraine's leadership, so we should approach this with much criticism," MP Tuppurainen said.
MP Honka said that Ukraine is an independent state that should decide its own affairs.
"Ukraine also should decide on what terms it will negotiate peace, no one else can decide that," Honka said on Yle's morning show on Wednesday.
'Disinformation space'
Later on Wednesday, news agency AP reported that Zelensky said Donald Trump was living in a Russian "disinformation space", regarding Trump's suggestions, including one insinuating the Ukrainian president's approval rating stood at four percent.
"We have seen this disinformation. We understand that it is coming from Russia," Zelensky said, adding that Trump "lives in this disinformation space", according to AP.
The news agency also noted that Zelensky has cancelled plans to head to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday "in what some analysts saw as an attempt to deny legitimacy to the US-Russia talks about the future of his country".
