WASHINGTON — Standing next to President Trump at his Palm Beach estate, Vladimir Zelensky could only grin and grimace without openly insulting his host. “Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed,” Trump told reporters, shocking the Ukrainian president, before declaring that Vladimir Putin was sincere in his desire for peace.
This was just the latest example of how the American president sympathized with Moscow in its war of conquest in Europe. However, Zelensky left the meeting on Sunday with renewed assurances that Ukraine can fight another day while maintaining critical, if uneasy, support from Washington.
Since then there have been few signs of progress towards a peace agreement. meeting at Mar-a-Lagowhere Zelensky arrived with significant compromises – including a plan to put territorial concessions to Russia ahead of the Ukrainian people's vote – to appease the US president.
But Zelensky extracted his own concessions from Trump, who for weeks had pushed for a ceasefire by Christmas or threatened to cut Ukraine off from U.S. intelligence, which would have left Kyiv blind on the battlefield. “I don’t have a timeline,” Trump said Sunday.
During Trump's first year in office, Zelensky and other European leaders repeatedly tried to convince Trump that Russian President Putin was in fact an anti-peace aggressor responsible for an unprovoked invasion that launched Europe's deadliest conflict since World War II.
Each time, Trump came to his senses, even going so far in the summer as to wonder whether Ukraine could regain the territory it lost on the battlefield with Russia – and oath to North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies“We are with them all the way.”
Yet each time, Trump reversed course within days or weeks, returning to embrace Putin and the Russian worldview, including a proposal that Ukraine preemptively cede sovereign territories that Russia sought but failed to occupy by force.
Zelensky's willingness to make concessions during his last meeting with Trump, at least temporarily, “managed to keep President Trump from bowing further to the Russian position,” said Kyle Balzer, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But Trump’s position—his repeated insistence that a deal is needed now because time is not on Ukraine’s side—continues to favor Putin’s line and negotiating tactics.”
US intelligence agencies have calculated that the goals of Putin's revanchist war – to conquer all of Ukraine and, beyond its borders, to retake parts of Europe that were once part of the Soviet empire – remain unchanged.
However, Trump's Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whose own Russia sympathies have been studied for years, recently dismissed these assessments as the product of “deep state” warmongers in the intelligence community.
On Monday, hours after speaking with Trump, Putin ordered the Russian military to advance toward Zaporozhye, a city of 700,000 people before the war. The city is located far outside the Donbass region, which Moscow claims will satisfy its military goals through a negotiated settlement to the conflict.
“Trump’s instinct is to favor Putin and Russia,” said Brian Taylor, director of the Moynihan Institute for Global Affairs at Syracuse University. “Ukraine and its European partners are still hoping to convince Trump of the obvious fact that Putin is not interested in a deal that does not amount to a capitulation of Ukraine.
“If Trump were convinced that Putin was intransigent, he could tighten sanctions on Russia even further and provide more aid to Ukraine to try to force Putin to make a deal,” Taylor added. “It's an uphill battle, one might even say Sisyphean, but Zelensky and European leaders will have to keep trying. At this point, almost a year into Trump's second term, it has been worth it.”
Moscow claims on Monday that Ukraine staged a massive drone attack on Putin's residence, forcing it to reconsider its negotiating position. Kyiv denies the attack.
“Given the final degeneration of the criminal Kyiv regime, which has switched to a policy of state terrorism, Russia’s negotiating position will be revised,” Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister since 2004, said in a Telegram.
Another senior Russian official said the report of the attack shocked and angered Trump. But Zelensky, responding on social media, said Russia was “at it again, using dangerous rhetoric to undermine the gains of our overall diplomatic efforts with President Trump’s team.”
“We continue to work together to bring peace closer,” Zelensky said. “This story of a supposed ‘tenants’ strike’ is a complete fabrication designed to justify additional attacks on Ukraine, including Kyiv, as well as Russia’s own refusal to take the necessary steps to end the war.”
“Ukraine does not take steps that could undermine diplomacy. On the contrary, Russia always takes such steps,” he added. “It is critical that the world does not remain silent now. We cannot allow Russia to undermine the work to achieve lasting peace.”
Frederick Kagan, director Critical Threat Projectwhich partners with the Institute for the Study of War to produce daily assessments of the battlefield conflict, said the meeting did not appear to fundamentally change Trump's position on the conflict, which in itself is a potential victory for Kyiv, he said.
“Negotiations between the U.S. and Ukraine appear to be continuing as before, which is positive because these talks appear to be getting into the real details of what will be needed for a meaningful set of security guarantees and long-term agreements to ensure that any peace settlement is durable,” Kagan said.
There are still differences between Kiev and the Trump administration in negotiations over security guarantees. Although Trump suggested 15 year agreementUkraine is seeking 50-year guarantees, Zelensky said on Monday.
“As Trump keeps saying, there will be no deal until there is a deal,” Kagan added. “We’ll have to see how things go.”
