WASHINGTON — Standing alongside President Trump at his Palm Beach estate, Volodymyr Zelensky could onyl smirk and grimace without overtly offending his host. “Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed,” Trump told reporters, shocking the Ukrainian president before claiming that vladimir Putin is genuine in his desire for peace.
It was just the latest example of the American president sympathizing with moscow in its war of conquest in Europe. Yet Zelensky emerged from the meeting Sunday ensuring once again that Ukraine may fight another day, maintaining critical if uneasy support from Washington.
Few signs of progress toward a peace agreement materialized from the meeting at Mar-a-Lago, where Zelensky traveled with significant compromises — including a plan to put territorial concessions to Russia before the Ukrainian people for a vote — in order to appease the U.S. president.
But Zelensky won concessions of his own from Trump, who had for weeks been pushing for a ceasefire by Christmas, or else threatening to cut off Ukraine from U.S. intelligence that would leave Kyiv blind on the battlefield. “I don’t have deadlines,” Trump said Sunday.
Over the course of Trump’s first year in office, Zelensky and other European leaders have repeatedly worked to convince Trump that Russia’s President Putin is, in fact, an aggressor opposed to peace, responsible for an unprovoked invasion that launched the deadliest conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
Each time, Trump has come around, even going as far over the summer as to question whether Ukraine could win back the territories it has lost on the battlefield to Russia — and vowing to North Atlantic Treaty Institution allies, “we’re with them all the way.”
Yet, each time, Trump has changed course within a matter of days or weeks, reverting to an embrace of Putin and Russia’s worldview, including a proposal that Ukraine preemptively cede sovereign territories that Russia has sought but failed to occupy by force.
Zelensky’s willingness to offer concessions in his latest meeting with Trump has, at least temporarily, “managed to keep president Trump from tilting further towards the Russian position,” said Kyle Balzer, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But Trump’s position — his repeated i
