Date: 2025-08-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028086
TRUMP
WRONG QUESTION ... CAN AMERICA DEFANG A STUPID TRUMP?
WP: Can Zelensky salvage his relationship with Trump and save Ukraine?
WRONG QUESTION ... CAN AMERICA DEFANG A STUPID TRUMP?
WP: Can Zelensky salvage his relationship with Trump and save Ukraine?
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky watches as Donald Trump, then president-elect, waves to journalists in Paris after a trilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in December. (Amaury Cornu/AFP/Getty Images)
Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/22/ukraine-russia-zelensky-trump-anniversary/
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
Three years into the war with Russia, President Zelensky appears to have become embroiled in a personal feud with the leader of Ukraine’s most powerful ally.
February 22, 2025 at 6:06 a.m. EST
By Robyn Dixon, Siobhán O'Grady, Mary Ilyushina and Catherine Belton
To save his country, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hopes to salvage his relationship with President Donald Trump after it blew up very publicly this week, Ukrainian lawmakers and experts say.
In three years of war, Ukraine has seen tens of thousands killed, millions displaced, cities destroyed and large swaths of land seized by Russia. But now Zelensky is grappling with a U.S. president who blames him for the war and seeks half of Ukraine’s mineral wealth in exchange for further support.
The feud may be Zelensky’s most consequential challenge since his decision to stay and fight after Russia invaded in February 2022. In Trump, he must deal with a thin-skinned ally known for nursing grudges — complicating Kyiv’s struggle to secure a peace deal that doesn’t compromise its security, sovereignty or economic capacity to rebuild, even as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appetite to crush Ukraine’s autonomy remains undiminished.
Trump’s momentous foreign policy shift toward Russia, with talk of a peace deal that appears to give Putin much of what he wants, has alarmed Ukraine and its other Western allies. His attack on a U.S. ally defending itself against an invasion was unprecedented in modern U.S. diplomacy and threatens to upend decades of bipartisan alignment with Europe to counter Russia.
Trump’s description of Zelensky as a “dictator” who “started” the war and his avoidance of any criticism of Putin for turning Ukraine into what the U.S. president himself called “a demolition site,” has frayed Kyiv’s trust in the peace process. Zelensky’s rejoinder that Trump is trapped in a Russian-created “disinformation bubble” only intensified the quarrel. Trump’s riposte seemed ominous, not just for Zelensky but his country.
“Zelensky better move faster. He’s not going to have a country left,” he warned.
Ukraine’s partners say “that they all see the disinformation bubble too, but nobody wanted to be first to [say] it publicly,” said a person taking part in the negotiations and speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic.
Both sides shouldn’t argue, the person said, but “no nation could say it’s okay when someone treats [you] with no respect.”
Whether Zelensky can repair this relationship with his country’s most powerful ally will dictate the future of Ukraine, analysts and Ukrainian lawmakers emphasized.
“Regardless of the circumstances, we are not in a position to quarrel with Trump. We need to be wiser,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of the Ukrainian parliamentary committee on foreign policy. “We need to earn Trump’s trust and respect, and this is extremely difficult now, but not impossible.”
Working with Trump
Zelensky with candidate Trump in September while the former was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. (Alex Kent/Getty Images) Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy appears to suit Putin’s own worldview: a global order where a few great powers divide the world into spheres of influence, pressing less powerful nations into unfavorable economic and territorial concessions.
“There is a kind of a natural kind of affinity almost there,” said Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. “And I think that what Trump is offering is precisely a thorough, comprehensive redrafting of the relationship between Russia and United States.”
“I think the problem is that what’s happening has become overlaid by what is increasingly looking like a personal grudge match between Trump and Zelensky,” he added.
Trump’s shift followed Zelensky’s rejection of a demand for 50 percent of Ukraine’s mineral wealth. National security adviser Michael Waltz on Thursday vented the administration’s “frustration” with Zelensky for publicly criticizing the deal and demanded that he sign it immediately.
Had Zelensky signed the resources deal, Trump might have warmed to him, said former Ukrainian deputy foreign minister Lana Zerkal. His decision instead to lash out at Trump was “definitely a mistake.”
“And of course it’s difficult to cope with your emotions, but it is a necessity to do this from this position, because he’s not an ordinary person: He’s a president.”
European officials advised Zelensky to ignore Trump’s gibes about his popularity and cautioned him not to reject the resources deal too quickly, according to a European official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The official said Zelensky may have acted too hastily in his response to Trump’s false claims.
“I think that in some ways, there is an increasing risk of this becoming a case of the Americans trying to throw Ukraine under the bus, precisely because Zelensky is taking this personally,” Galeotti said.
By Friday, it appeared that negotiations for the deal over mineral resources were back on track.
In a telling sign last week, Trump called Putin about ending the war before he called Zelensky, bringing to a close nearly three years of Western isolation for Putin. He then called for elections in Ukraine — a common Kremlin talking point — and deprecated Zelensky’s poll ratings.
Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a lawmaker and the chair of the Committee on Ukraine’s Integration into the European Union, said Zelensky should not have responded to Trump’s taunt about his popularity because “when your country is at stake, you don’t think about your ratings.”
Awkward history
Zelensky, just months in office, sits down with President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in 2019. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Zelensky and Trump share an awkward history: When Trump asked the Ukrainian president in 2019 to dig up dirt on the Biden family as a condition for military aid, the scandal led to Trump’s first impeachment.
When Putin invaded Ukraine, Trump immediately called it “genius.” Trump also loomed large in the months-long delay by congressional Republicans to approve $61 billion in vital assistance to Ukraine — a delay that many attribute to the start of last year’s Russian advance.
In September, Zelensky infuriated Republicans during the U.S. election campaign when he visited an ammunition plant in President Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Several days later, meeting with Trump, Zelensky said he hoped the two would have good relations.
“Oh, I see. It takes two to tango, you know,” Trump responded.
After Trump’s election, Zelensky tried to rebuild bridges. He declared his willingness to negotiate an end to the war and, after meeting with Trump in Paris in December, flattered him as being resolute, “as always.” Days later, he posted on X that he had told Trump that “Putin fears only him and, perhaps, China.”
Putin, however, seems to have more of a knack for stroking Trump’s ego. In comments to journalists on Nov. 7, he said he had been impressed after the July assassination attempt against Trump because he had behaved “in a very correct way, courageously, like a man.”
“It was very clear that Russia started this influence operation right as Trump was elected. Putin has said publicly a lot of complimentary things about Trump, basically even voicing Trump’s talking points,” said Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adding that as a former KGB agent, Putin excelled at influence operations.
In late January, Putin echoed Trump’s false claim that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen, and described him as a pragmatic dealmaker thwarted by the Democratic “deep state.”
“I cannot but agree with him that if he had been president — if his victory had not been stolen from him in 2020 — then perhaps the crisis in Ukraine that arose in 2022 would not have happened,” Putin said at the time.
After groundbreaking talks over the Ukraine war in the Saudi capital between the top diplomats of Russia and the United States, Putin extolled Wednesday the “friendly atmosphere” between the delegations, adding with a rare chuckle that he “would love to meet Donald.”
Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, part of the Russian delegation in Riyadh, also hinted that Moscow was offering Trump access to Russia’s oil reserves, in a clear nod to the president’s transactional approach.
It is widely suspected in Kyiv that Moscow — with its long history of election interference in Ukraine, Europe, the United States, Britain and elsewhere — pushed the issue of Ukrainian elections as part of initial talks with U.S. officials, in part to sow instability in Ukraine.
Inside Ukraine, even those opposed to Zelensky agree that the middle of a war is not the right time to hold elections.
Unprepared for Trump
Zelensky during a meeting this month in Kyiv with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The meeting came days after Trump said he wanted a mineral resources deal with Ukraine. (Andrew Kravchenko/Bloomberg News/Getty Images)
Several Ukrainian lawmakers have accused Zelensky of failing to prepare for Trump’s return to power. Kyiv should have connected with MAGA leaders early on, they said, earned their trust and pleaded Ukraine’s case with them.
“It will be almost impossible for Zelensky’s office to catch up with the failure of communication now,” said Volodymyr Ariev, a lawmaker from the opposition European Solidarity party. “Any verbal attack on Trump is absolutely counterproductive now.”
Some doubt that Zelensky can undo this week’s damage, given the personal nature of the feud. Many also fear that Putin may bend Trump to a deal that leaves Ukraine vulnerable to a renewed invasion in the future.
“I think we would be dumb not to be worried,” said lawmaker Klympush-Tsintsadze. “And I think we are not the only ones who are worried. But again, I think that a lot also still depends on us.”
Merezhko, of the foreign policy committee, said Ukrainian officials must plead their case in Trump’s circles — from religious groups, including evangelicals, to the military-industrial complex.
“The more such channels — formal and informal — targeting Trump and his voters, the better,” he said.
European officials said the situation was not irrevocably damaged: Zelensky could still agree to a resources deal but ask for security guarantees before signing.
A Ukrainian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said it was natural that Kyiv would need more security guarantees as part of a resources deal with Washington, because “Russia has been very clear that they are not going to stop.”
David Stern, Kostiantyn Khudov, Serhiy Morgunov and Serhii Korolchuk in Kyiv contributed to this report.
What readers are saying The comments overwhelmingly criticize the notion that Ukrainian President Zelensky should be responsible for salvaging a relationship with former President Trump. Many commenters argue that Trump is untrustworthy, a Russian asset, and has no genuine interest in supporting... Show more This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.