The Oval Office showdown left Putin holding a trump card in the Ukraine War

Trump and Vance berated the leader of a nation that’s been fighting for its existence for three years. “Have you said ‘thank you’ once?" Vance asked Zelensky. In fact, Zelensky has thanked the US, as well as Trump, several times since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war of aggression against Ukraine, and he did so again after the meeting. 

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It’s just that Zelensky always adds that he needs even more support for his country to survive, and more security guarantees in any future peace negotiations to deter Putin. As Zelensky pointed out during the meeting, Putin has broken previous ceasefires.

That caveat was too much for Trump. “It’s going to be very hard to do business like this," he told Zelensky. “You’ve got to be more thankful," Trump continued. “Because let me tell you, you don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards, but without us you don’t have any cards."

That observation is manifestly true: Without US support, Ukraine really is desperate, even as other Western allies such as France and Britain (whose leaders also visited the Oval Office last week) increase their aid to Kyiv. That just makes Trump’s threat to withdraw support all the more inexcusable.

Trump’s humiliation of Zelensky didn’t just start today. It began two weeks ago, when Trump arranged for bilateral talks between the US and Russia aimed at a general reset between Washington and Moscow. Putin’s genocidal war against Ukraine is just one element of this. Trump has excluded America’s European allies and Ukraine from peace talks in a volte-face of US policy since 2022.

Trump continued his diplomatic rampage with a press conference and social-media posts in which he repeated long-standing Kremlin propaganda: that Zelensky (rather than Putin) lacks democratic legitimacy and is a “dictator"; and that Ukraine (rather than Russia) started the war and stands in the way of peace. Trump also repeated the lie that the US has given more aid to Ukraine than Europe (in fact, Europeans have sent more).

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At the United Nations last week, the US joined Russia, Belarus, Sudan and a few other autocracies in refusing to condemn the Russian invasion of February 2022.

Worse yet, both Trump and his defense secretary pre-emptively removed their best bargaining chips from any future negotiating table. The US, they said, will not let Ukraine join Nato—an option that Washington has kept open since 2008—nor will it put “boots on the ground" in Ukraine.

Nobody in Ukraine, or any other country formerly under Moscow’s boot, believes that Putin will honour the terms of a cease-fire without credible guarantees backed by US military might. That’s what Zelensky— and the French and British leaders—were trying to convey to Trump last week in the Oval Office. 

But the US president wasn’t hearing it. “I’m not worried about security," he said. “I’m worried about getting the deal done." As ever, Trump is all about making a deal, and who knows, by the time you read this, he may well have changed his tune about Zelensky to get one.

The deal that Trump wants right now includes an arrangement in which Ukraine would give the US access to much of its mineral wealth and rare earths. The details were to be announced at a joint press conference after Friday’s Oval Office meeting. That was called off, obviously.

The winner of that clash, and in all of Trump’s catastrophic missteps of the last month, is Putin. If the West had stayed united in backing Kyiv, Russia would not have been in a strong position when peace negotiations began. Its economy is in dire straits and victory on the battlefield remains elusive. But with Trump essentially defecting from the West and siding with Moscow, Putin has an opening.

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Gone is any notion that America still stands for the sovereignty of nations like Ukraine, for international rules and norms, for the right of victims of aggression to defend themselves.

“You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out," Trump told Zelensky with the cameras rolling and Putin undoubtedly watching. “And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it is going to be pretty."

No, it won’t be—and not just for Ukraine. The blow-up was remarkable not because it was “great television," as Trump called it, but because it recorded for the public and posterity one of America’s worst betrayals ever of a friendly nation. ©Bloomberg