A consensus seems to be forming, in certain quarters, that the debacle at the White House meeting on Friday – which played out before an incredulous world – was in large part Volodymyr Zelensky’s fault. Ukraine’s president is certainly paying a heavy price: overnight, Donald Trump has halted military aid to Ukraine. “We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution,” a White House official has said.
Aside from the Republican politicians racing to side with Trump following the White House row, there have been voices nearer home. Presenter of the Triggernometry podcast Konstantin Kisin, who initially sided with the Ukrainian leader, tweeted out after watching the entire meeting that ‘Zelensky decided to attack [American Vice President J.D.] Vance unnecessarily. He totally messed this up… I hope he can see sense, apologise and get a deal for his country. This was not smart.’
Jawad Iqbal, in these very pages, has declared that ‘Ukraine’s leader put his vanity and pride before the wider interests of his country in reacting the way he did to Trump’s remarks and behaviour’. The Sun, chipping in on Zelensky’s ‘misstep’, opined that he ‘should have done a Keir and wooed Trump’, while Dr. Raj Persaud, media psychologist, has written of ‘the FIVE mistakes Zelensky made’ at the Oval Office last week.
The future for Ukraine under the Trump administration looks bleak
Many will question this take on things. They may even feel that even watching the full, fifty-minute version of the meeting, there were simply too many elephants in the room – a whole herd of them – for Zelensky to have been at his most cooperative. Elephant number one was Trump’s reaction to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine back in 2022: ‘I’d say that’s pretty smart. He’s taking over a country – really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.’
Elephant number two was Trump’s fabled love-in with the Russian President, Zelensky’s enemy – ‘a friend of mine… I got along great with him’ – and to whom, publicly, he has already suggested official visits to each other’s countries.
Elephant three was the way Trump has spoken of Ukraine and its president – a ‘dictator’ – in the last few months. ‘I love Ukraine,’ Trump has said, meaninglessly, ‘but Zelensky has done a terrible job. His country is shattered and MILLIONS have died.’ (It’s important, Trump is quoted as saying, to make your opponents seem as though they have ‘a disgusting smell.’)
Of the Ukrainian people he has remarked, ‘They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday,’ and of the occupied Donbass territories, that the Russians ‘took a lot of land, and they fought for that land and they lost a lot of soldiers’. He’s separately added admiringly that Russia ‘beat Hitler, they beat Napoleon – that’s what they do, they fight.’
Leaving aside the usual guff about the folly of taking Trump seriously, how he rarely means what he says, or the instinctive ‘genius’ of his negotiating skills, it was clear by the end of Friday that those who make these claims for Trump – none of them visibly true – are simply lost in wishful thinking. Trump’s sincerest feelings were arguably set out by his refusal – the umpteenth elephant galumphing round the Oval Office – to invite Ukraine to the Riyadh conference a fortnight ago. If Zelensky, on Friday, felt he was surrounded by enemies and going into a lion’s den, you can scarcely blame him.
Even before the famous blow-up of the last ten minutes, the talks had a queasy, off-kilter feeling. Amidst Trump’s blandishments there was disagreement on whether the ceasefire should come before or after guarantees of security were made (Trump favours the first option, Zelensky, naturally enough, the second). While Zelensky spoke about protecting ‘our values, our freedom, our democracy’, Trump seemed more concerned with getting the minerals deal done: ‘We have a lot of oil, we have a lot of gas, but we don’t have raw earth.’
Zelensky brought out photos of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, and Trump cast his eyes opaquely over them, as though forced to stare at snapshots of someone’s (tedious) extended family. When Trump’s idee fixes aired themselves about Europe’s lesser contributions or that there were ‘a lot of cities [where] there’s not a building standing’ Zelensky attempted, rather less smoothly than Macron (for obvious reasons), to correct him. This was another tricky moment: ‘You could tell [Trump] whatever you wanted,’ his former press officer Sean Spicer is reported to have said of working for him, ‘but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn’t believe you.’
Finally, there was Zelensky’s face throughout, at times staring up at the ceiling, at times slightly wincing, like a man trying to endure a torture session by sheer disassociation. To say that Trump and Zelensky are chalk and cheese is to understate things. The two presidents looked like repelling magnetic poles jammed together, making supreme efforts not to let their feelings show.
But those feelings were obvious. A strange proxy war seemed to be taking place in the Oval Office, as each man sniped about absent parties the other considered friend or ally. Trump dismissed Biden, whose support for Zelensky could not be in greater contrast, as ‘a man who didn’t know much’, ‘incompetent, very incompetent’, a ‘stupid president’ who was ‘not a smart person’. Zelensky in turn called Putin a ‘killer and terrorist… He hates us, he hates Ukrainians, he thinks we are not a nation. He wants [to] destroy us.’ You sensed, underneath the threadbare attempts at goodwill, an immense discord in the room that would break cover before the meeting’s end.
The real touch paper, though, was lit not by Trump but Vance. Vance, who appeared such an easy, affable fellow before the 2024 election, on Friday seemed to swell with the authority of the head prefect, dressed identically to his master in dark suit, red tie and Stars and Stripes lapel badge. The Vice President, quoted in 2022 as saying ‘I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another’, lectured Zelensky on the right route for his country: ‘What makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy. That’s what President Trump is doing.’ Zelensky’s calm (under the circumstances) explanation to Vance of the number of times Putin had broken his word following such ‘diplomacy’ only made Vance more irate. Zelensky was ‘disrespectful,’ he said, adding that ‘You should be thanking the President for trying to bring [an end] to this conflict… Have you said thank you once?’
The exchange left you wondering, like ex-ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, what exactly Ukraine should be thanking the Trump administration for: being forced to give up territory, not being allowed into Nato, the US refusal to supply peacekeepers or, as McFaul reminded us, the fact that Republicans had delayed ‘the last package of assistance… for six months while Ukrainians were being slaughtered on the battlefield – and Senator Vance voted against that package’?
Has the new White House, setting these rules of courtesy, thanked Zelensky in turn for holding the line in Europe for three years, with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians wounded or dead? You suspect not – Trump has already said that ‘this war is far more important to Europe than it is to us. We have a big, beautiful ocean as separation’.
Zelensky might have pointed out – and didn’t – that peace bought at a catastrophic cost is no peace at all and deserves little gratitude. As it was, Vance’s demand for a ‘thank you’ felt like the handshake schoolboys were once expected to offer the teacher after a caning: a final touch to make the humiliation complete. ‘We are striving for democracy,’ said a Ukrainian citizen interviewed by Reuters afterwards, ‘and we are met with total disrespect toward our warriors, our soldiers, and the people of our country.’ Trump, he added, ‘doesn’t understand that people are dying, that cities are being destroyed, people are suffering, mothers, children, soldiers.’
His words rang true. Are Trump and his cohorts aware, except as the most fleeting and most inconvenient background noise, of events like the Russian bombing of the Mariupol theatre? It was there that the warning ‘Children’ was painted outside, but where an estimated 600 people – including many children – died? Do they recall the mass graves of Izyum and Bucha, the alleged gang-rapes, the torture chambers? The reports of Ukrainian women paraded naked through the snow and forced to sing the Russian national anthem or run the gauntlet? The kidnapped children (estimates as high as 20,000) taken to Russia and given, with changed names, to Russian families or sent to indoctrination camps?
‘You see, the hatred he’s [Zelensky’s] got for Putin… It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate,’ Trump said airily, before returning to his obsessive rants about Biden and his family. Finally, wagging his finger, Trump shouted to Zelensky he was ‘gambling with World War III’. They are words which may well seem, in future years, better addressed to himself.
It’s not, you might feel, that Zelensky played his cards badly – it’s a wonder this supremely stubborn, bloody-minded man made it through the event at all. ‘I would never want Ukraine to be a piece on the map, on the chessboard of big global players,’ he remarked some time ago, ‘so that someone could toss us around, use us as cover, as part of some bargain.’ Now his worst fears seem to be realised and the future for Ukraine, under the Trump administration, looks bleak.
It’s something that may yet touch us all. ‘The more people see the reality, the more they will sense that this war is not somewhere far away,’ Zelensky once said to author Simon Shuster. ‘If they devour us, the sun in your sky will get dimmer.’ Barring miracles – and there seem few on the horizon – we may soon find out if he’s right.
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