It was the best day Ukraine has had in a very long time. But it’s still hard to see how the war unleashed by Russia’s brutal invasion ends any time soon.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House on Monday and, unlike last time, there wasn’t a blow-up in the Oval Office.
President Donald Trump offered tantalizing glimpses of how he could approach presidential greatness by saving Ukraine, securing Europe and genuinely deserving the Nobel Peace Prize.
A phalanx of European leaders who came to support Zelensky were impressive and unusually unified despite their wide ideological divergences. They took turns in on-camera remarks to try to invest Trump with a political and emotional rationale for standing with Ukraine.
A historic day echoed great political gatherings that ended World War II and built the modern world. This is how the West is supposed to work, with an American president leading powerful Europeans who share common goals.
But is it too good to last?
It is a measure of the fracture in the transatlantic alliance and Trump’s brittle temperament that avoiding disasters is seen as serious progress, especially after the president’s concessions to Russian President Vladimir Putin at their unctuous summit in Alaska last week.
Everyone at the remarkable meetings in the White House, Trump included, was ostentatiously doing everything to stress possibilities and to avoid specific discussions of issues that could blow the day apart.
By evening, Trump was posting on social media about a potential three-way summit he’d host soon that would also include Zelensky and Putin that could be preceded by a one-on-one between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said such a meeting could happen within two weeks, suggesting accelerating diplomatic momentum.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb told Trump that “in the past two weeks, we’ve probably had more progress in ending this war than we have in the past three and a half years.” For once, this wasn’t a foreign leader indulging in self-abasement to ingratiate themselves with a US president who craves adulation.
It was the truth.
It will get harder from here
Monday’s meetings were the most compelling sign yet that the president really means it when he says he wants to stop the killing in Ukraine. He may deserve more credit than he gets for his energy and commitment so far.
But the day also served to expose the questions that will become increasingly evident in the coming weeks that could scupper Trump’s push for peace and shatter Western unity — in a way that would delight Putin.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni speaks as President Donald Trump listens during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders on Monday in Washington, DC. – Alex Brandon/AP
There was a lot of happy talk over the need to give Ukraine security guarantees after any peace deal. Trump even signaled he’d send support from the US military. But no one has yet explained how this would work — and, more importantly, what Russia would stomach as part of a deal.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni raised one proposal for a set of guarantees by Western nations modeled on NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense pledge. This would be outside formal alliance structures but might work the same way. But, despite Trump’s assurance after Alaska that Putin is open to security guarantees for Ukraine, this is a long shot. The Russian leader is fighting a war to crush his neighbor’s NATO aspirations. Why would he accept an arrangement that would offer pseudo-alliance status to Ukraine?
And how strong would such guarantees be anyway? Would European nations who put troops into a Ukraine “reassurance force’ really fight a war against Russia, to save Ukraine from a new Russian invasion? The subtext of the current war has been the anxiety of both the Biden and Trump administrations over potentially being dragged into a war with nuclear-armed Russia.
And how would Trump’s MAGA base view such a new foreign commitment?
The cruel fallacy of ‘land swaps’
Then there’s the issue of territory.
The buzzword in the president’s nascent peace process is “land swaps” — to create a new demarcation between an expanded Russia and a newly diminished Ukraine. Trump even gave Zelensky a map, for which he was suitably grateful, as if he doesn’t already realize the tough choices ahead over land soaked in Ukrainian blood.
According to officials briefed on Trump’s summit with Putin, the Russian leader seeks to capture land through negotiations that his troops have failed to seize, including in the economic and industrial powerhouse region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine. This area is also the line of steel, concrete and heavily defended cities that Ukraine has built to hold Russia at bay and that it would need to deter future attacks.
The term “land swap” is the kind of phrase that conceals its true meaning. Ukraine would, under the Russian plan, essentially be engaging in bargaining for different parts of its own territory. Putin would get valuable strategic areas and offer, other less critical districts he’s already seized elsewhere inside Ukraine. It doesn’t seem much of a deal.
Land swaps create epochal upheaval and seed future feuds — as the Middle East shows. In this case, they would mean telling thousands of Ukrainians they have must leave home or become Russians. And Zelensky would have to explain to parents of fallen young Ukrainians why they died for territory to be given to Putin.
There are some formulations that could withhold official recognition over disputed areas to postpone the critical decisions on sovereignty and freeze the war in place. This would create a situation like the one between North and South Korea or in the divided Germany during the Cold War. But these are still choices that may be impossible for Zelensky to sell to his people.
This explains why Monday’s discussions were surreal.
“I think everybody is in a happy mood, and I think that is better than not being in a happy mood, I suppose,” former Trump first-term national security adviser John Bolton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I think the focus on meetings underscores the lack of substance on all this.”
Every major peace effort looks hopeless at the start. Sometimes the only way to push past intractable issues is to create an inner impetus. So Trump’s rush to hold summits may make sense. Perhaps he can quickly drive everyone so far along the road to peace, it will be impossible to go back.
But, at some point, impossible gaps must be bridged.
“I don’t think what we are living through at this moment, where everybody seems a party to fantasy diplomacy, — I don’t think it is sustainable,” the Wilson Center’s Michael Kimmage, author of the book “Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability,” told Richard Quest on CNN International.
Trump has changed his tune on Ukraine
When Trump returned to office, many supporters of Ukraine feared he’d leave it to its fate. The president still balks at the kind of massive US military aid packages that saved the country after Putin’s vicious invasion in 2022.
But Trump has now invested significant personal credibility and political capital into his push to end a war he now admits is far more complex than he’d understood when he vowed to quiet the guns within 24 hours. Underscoring the point, air raid sirens wailed over Kyiv while the diplomacy got going in the White House.
President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on Monday in Washington, DC. – Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
On Monday, Trump mostly restrained his temper in an Oval Office press event with Zelensky when reporters from conservative networks seemed to be goading him into an outburst. Then, he played the traditional convening role of a US president surrounded by transatlantic allies. He often treats friends like foes, but seems to have genuine respect for allied leaders. For once, he was squarely in the internationalist tradition of presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush.
“We’re all working for the same goal, very simple goal — we want to stop the killing, get this settled,” Trump said.
Still appeasing Putin
Several jarring moments, however, fueled concerns about Trump’s true loyalties in the peace process. He was caught on a hot mic telling French President Emmanuel Macron that Putin “wants to make a deal for me.” This shows a dangerous naivete about a Russian leader who launched a murderous unprovoked war and is bent on reviving a myth of Russian greatness.
Trump then suspended talks with European leaders to go off to speak to Putin on the phone.
This kind of behavior was exactly why Trump’s European counterparts rushed across the Atlantic at a weekend’s notice. Suspicion lingers about his capabilities and his commitment to Western security.
Still, no one else can position himself between Zelensky and the leaders of Europe and Putin. If there’s ever a peace deal, it will probably be because Trump wielded his charisma and America’s power.
It’s a highly unorthodox approach that may not work.
Kimmage, for example, warned that Trump’s strategy could shatter over its inner contradictions. Trump is “trying to be all things to all people, he is meeting with Putin and welcoming him with open arms and seeming to come to some agreement. He is speaking about security commitments to Ukraine; he is praising European leaders for supporting Ukraine.”
“There are no details to what is happening. It’s all promises, and the promises on the surface contradict each other.”
“You just wonder how long President Trump can juggle all these balls.”
Thousands of lives depend on the answer.
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