How Trump's Oval Office clash with Zelenskyy turned into a win for Putin

By Andreas Kluth

 

Donald Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, are already spinning today’s Oval Office clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a show of American strength toward an ungrateful supplicant. But their joint dressing down of Zelenskyy will go down in history — indeed, will live in infamy — as a shameful moment of American betrayal. 

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 Zelenskyy. In fact, Zelenskyy has thanked the US, as well as Trump, scores of times since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war of aggression against Ukraine. (And he did so again today.) It’s just that Zelenskyy always adds that he needs even more support for his nation to survive, and more security guarantees in any future peace negotiations to deter Putin. As Zelenskyy pointed out in the meeting, Putin has broken previous cease-fires.

 

 

That caveat was too much for Trump. “It’s going to be very hard to do business like this,” he told Zelenskyy, who kept his arms folded through much of the shouting. “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 came through the Oval Office this week) increase their aid to Kyiv. That just makes Trump’s threat to withdraw support all the more inexcusable.

 

Trump’s humiliation of Zelenskyy didn’t just start today. It began two weeks ago, when Trump called Putin and arranged for bilateral talks between the US and Russia. These negotiations aim at a general reset between Washington and Moscow, in which ending Putin’s genocidal war against Ukraine is just one element. Trump is excluding America’s European allies and Ukraine from the talks, in a volte-face from US policy since 2022.

 

Trump continued his diplomatic rampage with a press conference and social-media posts in which he repeated propaganda long peddled by the Kremlin: that Zelenskyy (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 a lot of aid to Ukraine and the Europeans little (in fact, the Europeans have sent more). At the United Nations this week, the US joined Russia, Belarus, Sudan and a few other autocracies in refusing to condemn the Russian invasion.

 

Worse yet, both Trump and his defense secretary preemptively removed their best bargaining chips from any future negotiating table. The US, they said, will not let Ukraine join Nato — an option 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 Zelenskyy — as well as the French and British leaders — were trying to convey to Trump this 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 Zelenskyy in order to get one. The deal 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 in a joint press conference after today’s meeting in the Oval Office. That was called off, obviously.

 

The winner of this clash, as 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 started. 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.

 

Gone is any notion that America still stands for the the sovereignty of nations such as 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 Zelenskyy 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. Today’s blow-up was remarkable not because it was “great television,” as Trump called it, but because it recorded for the public and for posterity one of the worst betrayals ever by America of a friendly nation.  (Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper)