A meeting that was supposed to bolster the flimsy trust between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US President Donald Trump descended instead into an extraordinary slanging match in the Oval Office in front of the world’s media. After a dismal couple of weeks bracketing this week’s third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the meeting in the White House opened about as badly as it could possibly have done. Instead of the world’s biggest superpower being his friend, Ukraine’s beleaguered leader now finds himself squeezed between US and Russian leaders who seem to agree more with each other than with him.
The backdrop was hardly propitious. The US had begun talks with Russia without inviting Kyiv. Trump had pressed Zelenskyy to agree an initially extortionate mineral-sharing deal, and called him a dictator. Washington had sided with Moscow to back a UN resolution on the war that did not criticise Russia. By the time the two men met, the minerals deal looked a little less like racketeering. But what is now clear is that the US has abandoned Ukraine.
The Zelenskyy team made what turned out to be several miscalculations. One was to offer the US a deal to share Ukraine’s resources, as part of a broader “victory plan”. This was meant to incentivise the White House to strengthen Kyiv’s hand before any talks with Moscow and provide a postwar security backstop to deter further Russian aggression. The second was to set too much store by Trump’s “peace through strength” campaign slogan.
Kyiv underestimated Trump’s ruthlessness in trying to extract as much as he could get from the minerals accord while giving so little of what Ukraine wanted in return. This week’s final draft was less onerous than the first, but contained no security backdrop. The US president’s assertion that the presence of US workers extracting metals and minerals in Ukraine would forestall further Russian onslaughts lacks credibility. Plenty of Americans and US companies were in Ukraine in February 2022.
Zelenskyy has learnt the hard way about the mindset and motivations of Trump 2.0. The first lesson is that — as also in the Middle East — for the president, “peace” means the absence of fighting. He appears interested in a ceasefire that takes images of bloodshed off American TV screens and saves the US from stumping up costly military support. But he is less concerned with finding a lasting solution that will prevent the return of war.
Second, Trump is driven by the pursuit of economic gain. His approach is heavily influenced, too, by personal feelings. He clearly bears a grudge towards Zelenskyy, after Trump’s 2019 effort to strong-arm Ukraine’s leader into launching an investigation into Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine in return for US aid led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Yet he retains a baffling admiration for Vladimir Putin, whose language on the causes of the Ukraine conflict Trump has largely adopted. His indulgence of the Russian leader seems bound up with his quasi-19th-century worldview that global affairs should be directed not by multilateral institutions but by a handful of large powers and their strongman leaders, each with their sphere of influence.
Zelenskyy lacks the diplomatic talent of Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer, the European leaders who managed to build some rapport with Trump in successful visits this week. But Zelenskyy also seemed to have been ambushed by a White House that ended up humiliating him. Three years since Russia invaded Ukraine, his struggle to secure the country’s sovereignty has entered its most precarious phase.