Russia delights in Volodymyr Zelenskyy's dressing down in Oval Office

By Bloomberg News

 

For the Kremlin, Donald Trump is making all of Vladimir Putin’s dreams come true in Ukraine. 

The extraordinary public humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by the US leader and his vice president, JD Vance, exceeded anything Russia could have expected. Or as one senior European official put it: The only one laughing here is Putin.

 

Russian support was swift. Former President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, said Trump told Zelenskyy “the truth to his face” before adding: “But it’s not enough - military aid should be stopped.”

 

Trump and Vance “wiped their feet on Zelenskyy like a doormat,” said Alexander Dugin, a political scientist in Moscow who advocates a “Russian World” ideology to justify Kremlin expansion. “Game over.”

 

The official response may be more circumspect. One official, close to the Kremlin, said that Russia has no influence on the US. 

 

Kirill Dmitriev, the one-time Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker turned influential Putin envoy, posted something on X only to then delete it. He then went on to post a video of the heated exchange between Trump and Zelenskyy with a one-word description: “Historic.”

 

Indeed, Putin can afford to sit back and observe things go his way.

 

He repeatedly questioned Zelenskyy’s continued legitimacy as head of state because his term ended last year, even as it was Russia’s invasion that forced Ukraine to declare martial law and the suspension of elections. Now US voices close to the Trump administration are echoing that very desire for Zelenskyy to go.

 

From a Russian perspective it shows that US relations with Ukraine — and with Europe — have all but collapsed. That was a goal Putin himself laid out all the way back in 2007 in a speech at the Munich Security Conference. The same setting where he saw many of his words repeated back, in the form of Vance’s assault in 2025 on European values.

 

Even before any negotiations to end the war have started, Trump has already conceded Russia’s demand that Ukraine abandon its ambition to join the NATO alliance. His top officials have said it’s unrealistic for Ukraine to expect to regain territory occupied by Russia since 2014, and Trump has ruled out the presence of US troops as peacekeepers in support of a ceasefire.

 

Zelenskyy left the White House without signing the minerals deal that Trump had made clear was key to continued US engagement with the war-torn country, and a joint press conference was cancelled. Trump posted on social media that Zelenskyy was “not ready for peace if America is involved” and that Zelenskyy had “disrespected” the US.

 

The consequence of the showdown will be a sharp reduction in US funding for Ukraine, according to Sergei Markov, a political consultant with close ties to the Kremlin. It showed that Zelenskyy “must leave the post of president as quickly as possible,” he wrote on Telegram.

 

For stunned European leaders, the seismic implications of the White House clash were coming into stark focus. The fate of Ukraine and their own continent’s security may now rest with them as the specter of a possible US withdrawal of support looms in the confrontation with Putin.

 

“Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader,” European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas wrote on the X social media platform. “It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.”