It started in the spring of last year.
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 latest rubber-stamp re-election at home.
Those stilted words, uttered after Ukraine extended Mr. Zelensky’s term because of a legal prohibition on elections under martial law, 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.
By Wednesday, the White House had picked up the message.
“A Dictator without Elections,” President 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.
