The last time Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House, President Donald Trump began the meeting by poking fun at Zelensky’s refusal to wear a suit, sarcastically calling him “all dressed up.” The meeting ended with Trump throwing out an ungrateful foreign leader.
“I’ve changed. You have not,” Zelensky told a reporter who remarked that he wore a suit this time. As for Vice President JD Vance’s charge at that February meeting that Zelensky wasn’t grateful, that, too, has changed. “Thank you very much,” Zelensky said 11 times regarding several things. The Ukrainian leader said his people “will always be grateful to President Trump, everyone in America, and every partner and ally for their support and invaluable assistance.”
Whether Zelensky took February’s lesson to heart or he’s just play-acting is almost irrelevant. He’s clearly learning something about working with Trump: Don’t show up looking and acting like an entitled schlub.
The White House powwow — which included European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte — came just days after Trump met President Vladimir Putin in Alaska in an attempt to negotiate an end to the horrific war Putin started in 2022. Trump didn’t come out of Friday’s meeting triumphantly having forced Putin into submission, but neither did he fail in his objective. Yet.
“At the conclusion of the meetings,” Trump said on Monday afternoon, “I called President Putin, and began the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelensky.” He added that he would join an ensuing meeting and continue to work for an end to the war.
A settlement to end the war will almost certainly involve Ukraine giving up land to Russia — specifically, the Donbas region. Understandably, Zelensky doesn’t want that, even saying it’s “impossible” under the nation’s constitution, though conceding that it could only be discussed during a trilateral meeting with the U.S. The real question is how much Ukraine will give up to stop the war.
For the first time, President Trump publicly stated his willingness to provide U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine. “There’s going to be a lot of help,” Trump said. “They are first line of defense because they’re there. They’re Europe. But we’re going to help them out also. We’ll be involved.” The Europeans “want to give protection” to Ukraine, he added. “They feel very strongly about it, and we’ll help them out with that.”
Trump gave no specifics, but Zelensky rightly noted that it’s “a significant change” in Trump’s position.
On Sunday, however, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff offered something a bit more concrete, saying that “the United States and other European nations could effectively offer [NATO] Article 5-like language to cover a security guarantee” for Ukraine. (I.e., if any nation is attacked, NATO treats it as if every nation was attacked.) He argued that since “Putin has said that a red flag is NATO admission,” any agreement would stop short of that.
This morning, Trump gave “my assurance” that no U.S. troops would be deployed to Ukraine.
If Putin is to make and keep an agreement, he must be convinced that the West means to defend Ukraine. Trump already made significant progress on that front this summer, working a masterful deal with NATO for its member nations to increase defense spending. Still, there’s a long way to go.
As he is famous for doing, the president took a totally justified shot at the Leftmedia for prematurely hitting him for failure. If he crafted an agreement in which Ukraine acquired “Moscow, St. Petersburg, and thousands of miles around them,” Trump said, the media “would say I made a bad deal.” He added, “The level of hatred and animosity is incredible.”
Indeed it is.
“No matter what I do, no matter what deal I make,” he lamented, “they’ll say, ‘Trump was absolutely horrible.’” That’s the story of the last decade.
