Fiery Meeting with Zelenskyy Upends Trump’s Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal

The Washington Post

14:51 JST, March 1, 2025

As reaction to the Trump-Zelensky meltdown in the Oval Office on Friday turned from astonishment to concern about what happens next, there was little consensus on whether a U.S.-negotiated peace deal to the Russia-Ukraine war remains possible.

“He can come back when he is ready for Peace,” President Donald Trump said on social media after his fiery meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart. The agreement that he had prepared for President Volodymyr Zelensky, giving the United States rights to exploit Ukraine’s critical minerals in exchange for a vaguely outlined U.S. security guarantee, remained unsigned.

While Zelensky tried to get Trump to be more specific about how he would ensure that Russia would not again violate a ceasefire, Trump downplayed the importance of security, saying it amounted to “2 percent” of any deal that stopped the fighting. “I’m not worried about security,” Trump said. “I’m worried about getting the deal done.”

Top Trump national security officials rushed to congratulate him for putting Zelensky in his place. “As the President has ALWAYS done-he stood for America … America First. The world saw it today in real time,” Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, posted on X.

Vice President JD Vance, leaning forward on the sofa as the two presidents sat in armchairs before the fireplace, essentially called Zelensky an ingrate and badgered the Ukrainian president to say “thank you” to Trump.

Shocked European leaders, who have tried to stroke Trump’s ego while gently nudging him toward ongoing support for Ukraine, largely confined themselves to saying they stood with Zelensky.

“It’s too fresh to give a serious and considered opinion on it,” a European diplomat said of the Oval Office meeting. “It shifts the tone, but the fundamentals of why we need a peace settlement have not changed.” The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to state their government’s position, said that while Trump’s aggression was striking, Zelensky “hit the wrong tone” in publicly challenging him.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called European leaders to a meeting Sunday in London for what the European official called “a moment to take stock” and discuss next steps. Zelensky is expected to attend.

U.S. officials gave conflicting signals about the future. One senior administration official told The Washington Post that the Trump administration is considering ending all ongoing shipments of military aid to Ukraine in response to Zelensky’s perceived intransigence in the face of Trump’s desire to quickly solve the Ukraine conflict.

The decision, if taken, would apply to billions of dollars of radars, vehicles, ammunition and missiles awaiting shipment to Ukraine through the presidential drawdown authority, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic. Trump has said that U.S. rights to Ukraine’s mineral resources would serve as repayment for hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. aid and that the presence of U.S. engineers and miners to exploit them is security enough.

State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, speaking late Friday on Fox Business, speculated that Zelensky “is maybe having some second thoughts” about questioning Trump in the Oval Office, “but he has a chance to turn this around and he probably can.” She said that the blowup “doesn’t mean that [the deal] still can’t be done” and that Zelensky “has choices to make.”

Bruce indicated that the administration was not displeased with the spectacle of an Oval Office shouting match on live television. “This is what the American people voted for,” she said of the event that took place “in public, in the environment of the White House, where it is clear that the American people can see what the dynamic is and what the president of the United States thinks.”

What they experienced, she said, was “diplomacy in action with blunt talk and a clarity that you rarely, rarely see … part and parcel of what it means to make America great again.”

The aborted White House session with Zelensky – including a canceled luncheon and joint news conference that were to have followed the mineral deal signing – came after U.S. and Russian officials met Thursday in Istanbul to discuss restoring full ties between the two countries, including the return of a U.S. ambassador to Moscow after a 2½-year absence and Moscow’s equivalent return to a full diplomatic complement in the United States.

The Istanbul meeting, after a similar session 10 days earlier in Saudi Arabia – neither of which Ukraine was invited to participate in – and a call between Trump and Putin with plans to meet face to face, illustrated the speed with which the U.S. president has moved to end the war. But current and former diplomats worry that Trump, who described himself Friday as “the toughest human being,” is racing toward a deal that will be more favorable to Moscow than to Kyiv.

And yet it was Trump who expelled 60 Russian diplomats accused of being intelligence officers in 2018 and ordered the closure of a Russian consulate, punishing Putin for poisoning one of his own ex-spies in Britain and reducing “Russia’s ability to spy on Americans and to conduct covert operations that threaten America’s national security,” the White House said at the time.

Celeste Wallander, who had extensive dealings with the Ukrainian government as a senior Pentagon official during the Biden administration, said Friday’s Oval Office episode “changes the dynamic fundamentally” for potential diplomacy going forward.

“Until today, it felt like the White House was aiming at being a neutral arbiter to find a way for an agreement between Ukraine and Russia on an equitable resolution of the conflict,” she said. “After today, it feels like the White House has actually chosen sides, and it has chosen on the side of Putin’s Russia to force a resolution.”

Wallander, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank, said that for Zelensky, the deterioration of ties with Washington will increase the importance of European nations’ commitments to Ukraine. In recent weeks, the Europeans have sought to build American support for a scenario in which they would place peacekeeping forces within Ukraine, away from the front lines, as a bulwark in the event of an agreement to halt the fighting.

The United States, in this proposal, would provide a military “backstop” with capabilities it alone can supply in vast quantities, including long-range missiles, heavy air transport and air defense systems.

In the meantime, “the question of what happens to U.S. support has been looming over everything,” said Andrew Weiss, a Russia specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Policy. “Europe doesn’t have the resources or unity to backfill. … It doesn’t have the intelligence capability crucial to the lethality of the Ukrainian campaign.”

Now, Weiss said, a ceasefire on Russia’s terms has become more possible “because Ukraine is going to be worried that its relationship with the United States is in tatters and they better find a way to get the best deal they can before Russia’s advantages become even more stark for them.”