The disgraceful humiliation of Zelensky

Friday’s televised summit between US president Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, was meant to culminate in the pair signing a minerals deal. Instead, it ended with Trump and vice-president JD Vance berating Zelensky for not thanking Trump enough for his putative peace-making efforts. ‘You’re not acting at all thankful, and that’s not a nice thing’, said Trump, before Zelensky was promptly turfed out of the White House.

It made for an unpleasant spectacle. The leader of a nation devastated by Russian aggression was wilfully humiliated by Trump and Vance for standing up for himself and his homeland. He was told, in no uncertain terms, that Ukraine ought to be grateful for whatever deal the US and Russia cook up between themselves. And if Zelensky doesn’t like it, then the US will cast him and the people he leads to the Russian wind.

At one point, Vance demanded Zelensky ‘offer some words of gratitude to the president who’s trying to save your country’. When Zelensky tried to respond, Trump silenced him. ‘No, you’ve done a lot of talking… You’ve got to be thankful, because with us you have the cards, without us, you don’t have any cards.’ It was a brutal ultimatum – Ukraine either accepts what the US and Russia offer, or the US will abandon it.

No doubt, Zelensky played a bad hand badly. This was an important diplomatic opportunity for the Ukrainian leader to strengthen and formalise a relationship with the Trump administration as it intensifies negotiations with Moscow over ending the war. And he did blow it, to an extent.

Having seen French president Emmanuel Macron and British prime minister Keir Starmer kiss Trump’s ring in their own meetings in the Oval Office last week, Zelensky must have known that he would be expected to flatter and at least appear to agree with Trump. But he didn’t do that. Over the course of the 50-minute long confab, he raised his eyebrows, shook his head and challenged some of Trump’s and Vance’s questionable statements. Zelensky may have been in the right, but it didn’t help his cause.

Above all, he kept drawing attention to one of the key points of contention between the US and Ukraine. That is, Trump can talk of the necessity of agreeing a ceasefire and striking a peace deal, but Zelensky argues that any agreement would be worthless without Ukraine having the military force – so-called security guarantees – to ensure Russia won’t simply attack again in the future. Trump dismissed Zelensky’s concerns: ‘Your people are dying, you’re running low on soldiers… and yet you’re saying, “I don’t want a ceasefire, I don’t want a ceasefire”.’

On a human level, you can understand why Zelensky became riled. Throughout, Trump talked of the war as if it was a natural disaster, with tragic loss of life on both sides, rather than the invasion of a sovereign nation by its much larger and more powerful neighbour. There was no indication that Trump recognised that Russia was the aggressor, the occupying force. Instead, he attributed equal culpability to ‘two parties who’ve been very hostile’ towards one another. He even warned Zelensky that his ‘tremendous hatred’ towards Putin was making a deal very difficult, and that ‘the other side isn’t exactly in love with him, either’. He made it sound like the war in Ukraine was a case of six of one, and half a dozen of the other.

Both Trump and Vance were very keen to talk themselves up as calm, neutral diplomats. When asked why he wasn’t more critical of Russia, Trump responded, ‘You want me to say really terrible things about Putin?… It doesn’t work that way.’ All of which would be reasonable if Team Trump hadn’t been saying so many ‘really terrible things’ about Zelensky and Ukraine of late, from Trump calling the Ukrainian president a ‘dictator’ to Vance’s admission in 2022 that he doesn’t ‘really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other’. Their version of diplomacy only seems to be applied one way – towards Moscow, not Kyiv.

The Trump administration may pose as a neutral peacebroker. But a strong scepticism – and even animus – in the White House towards Ukraine and its leadership is now undeniable. Zelensky experienced it from the moment he stepped out of his motorcade, when Trump, seeing Zelensky outfitted in his trademark military attire (to symbolise he is leading a nation at war), said, sarcastically, ‘You’re all dressed up today’.

Trump, Vance and others aren’t striking this attitude because they’re ‘Putin’s puppets’ or ‘Russian assets’, as the hysterical liberal media have it. The problem is subtler than that. It’s because they have come to see the war through the prism of domestic politics and are heavily influenced by an almost conspiratorial view of Ukraine, propagated by the Very Online anti-Ukraine right.

From 2022 onwards, many on the right witnessed liberal, Democratic elites zealously championing Ukraine and especially Zelensky himself. They saw the right-thinking classes frame Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression as a war for their values and worldview, not Ukraine’s self-defence. And they swung wildly in the other direction. Their irritation with Ukraine’s Democratic champions has, over the past three years, morphed into an animus towards Ukraine and Zelensky himself.

What’s more, the Russiagate fiasco – in which Trump was smeared and investigated as a Kremlin stooge – seems to have reinforced his already personally warm feelings towards Putin. ‘Putin went through a hell of a lot with me’, he said on Friday. ‘He went through a phoney witch-hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia.’

Zelensky hasn’t helped himself. Alongside his justifiable, though impolitic, response to Vance and Trump’s musings in the Oval Office, he was lambasted by Republicans in September when he visited a munitions plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania – a key battleground state – with Democratic lawmakers. Though it wasn’t a Harris campaign event, it wasn’t hard for Republicans to present it as one. During Friday’s blowout, Vance attacked Zelensky for going ‘to Pennsylvania and campaign[ing] for the opposition’.

On Friday, Zelensky seemed unable to resist pushing back against Trump and Vance. Starmer and Macron had done so, in a more light-touch way, last week, countering the White House’s claims about European aid to Ukraine (which aren’t strictly true) and its claims about Britain’s descent into woke censorship (which regrettably are).

Zelensky clearly lost his cool. His much improved – though still basic – English also probably made him sound blunter than he intended. Still, performing the high-wire routine required to keep Trump onside while maintaining a modicum of national self-respect – flattering him while occasionally, lightly, correcting him – was always going to be a taller order for Zelensky, given the US president spent the other week accusing him of being a dictator and heavily implying he was responsible for his own invasion.

The fact is, senior parts of the Trump administration don’t see Zelensky as the leader of a nation under attack from an aggressive neoimperial neighbour. They see him as an ally of the previous administration, an ungrateful grifter and perhaps even a sinister authoritarian. The White House’s Zelensky Derangement Syndrome is now impossible to ignore or downplay – and could prove to be a serious obstacle to the prospects of a just peace.

After Friday’s contretemps, the White House is now demanding a public apology from Zelensky. He now has the chance to show them what diplomacy really looks like.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.