President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance moved to betray a key U.S. ally that has lost hundreds of thousands of people in fending off a Russian invasion on Friday, taunting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at an Oval Office meeting after spending weeks trying to undermine the bilateral relationship.
The Oval Office blowup, in which Trump and Vance berated Zelensky as ungrateful while dismissing the prospect that Russian President Vladimir Putin might renege on a potential ceasefire agreement, is a culmination in a weeks-long campaign to choreograph an end to U.S. support for Ukraine.
Zelensky was at the White House to sign away part of the country’s mineral reserves, after Trump spent the past several weeks trying to coerce Ukraine into handing over access to the deposits to the United States. It was a raw exercise of cynicism that appeared calculated to generate mistrust between the two countries, as revealed by the substance of the proposed agreement itself: there was none. The deal, which ultimately Zelensky did not sign on Friday, said little about where such reserves were and how they were to be extracted, and also avoided specifics about what the U.S. would provide in return.
On Friday, when the deal was to be signed, Zelensky found himself being berated by Trump, with Vance egging his boss on from the side, telling him that the Ukrainian President was being “disrespectful” and that he had “campaigned” for the “opposition,” a misleading (though perhaps telling) reference to Zelensky’s September visit to a Pennsylvania shell factory that the U.S. government expanded to keep the Ukrainian army supplied.
In the backdrop of it all is the Russian government’s stated aim of extinguishing Ukrainian sovereignty, while reasserting its control over Eastern European countries that currently belong to NATO. For Trump, as always, it’s about grievance. In this case, Trump was apparently incensed at the suggestion that Zelensky had failed to demonstrate personal gratitude and loyalty to him after the U.S., under the Biden Administration, supplied Kyiv with military hardware and intelligence to fend off invading Russian forces.
Russian officials celebrated the news. Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian President and current security council official, took to X to call Zelensky an “insolent pig” who “finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office.
Friday was an inflection point in a lengthy effort to undermine American support for Ukraine after the Russian government bit its teeth on a failed invasion of its peaceful neighbor in February 2022.
In the weeks and months after the invasion, the American public was relatively united in disgust at Russia’s unprovoked aggression towards Ukraine. Republicans voted in large numbers to supply military aid to the country; Trump himself was drowned out after calling Putin’s decision to invade “smart.”
It lasted through the end of that year, with Zelensky delivering an address to a joint session of Congress during which he said “I thank every American family which cherishes the warmth of its home and wishes the same warmth to other people. I thank President Biden and both parties, at the Senate and the House, for your invaluable assistance. I thank your cities and your citizens who supported Ukraine this year, who hosted our Ukrainians, our people, who waved our national flags, who acted to help us. Thank you all, from everyone who is now at the front line, from everyone who is awaiting victory.”
Then began the chipping away.
Over the course of 2023, with Republicans now in control of the House, Trump pushed members of Congress to withhold support for legislation that would provide further aid to Ukraine’s war effort. Right-wing media outlets cast Ukraine’s war effort as a giant scam; MAGA members of Congress used their megaphones to broadcast the same, and also portrayed Ukraine’s fight for its survival as somehow being a means for the Democratic Party to finance itself.
It all helped set the stage for the Friday ambush.
Trump and Vance began to berate Zelensky in front of the press after he pointed out that Putin has a track record of breaking agreements — a problem for an administration that believes it can bring a quick end to Russia’s bloody war of aggression.
For Zelensky, Putin’s untrustworthiness as a negotiating partner is a particularly sore point. He won Ukraine’s 2019 presidential election on a campaign of bringing peace to the country, and met with Putin afterwards in an effort to negotiate an end to what was then a comparatively small-scale war.
“We signed an exchange of prisoners, but [Putin] didn’t exchange prisoners. What kind of diplomacy are you speaking about?” Zelensky asked, adding that Putin had broken a ceasefire by launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Vance then replied that he was “talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.”
Vance then threw in some red meat for Trump, telling Zelensky: “I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media.”
Vance added that Ukraine has manpower problems, and that Zelensky should be “thanking” Trump.
After another back-and-forth, Vance repeated the point: “Do you think that its respectful to come into the Oval Office of the United States America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?”
Once Vance made it about President Trump’s ego, there was no going back.
“You’re right now not in a very good position,” the President told Zelensky at one point.
Vance continued to pour fuel on the fire:
“Have you said thank you once? This entire meeting? No,” he said. “In this entire meeting have you said thank you? You went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October.”
From there, Trump lost it.
“Your country is in big trouble,” he said, adding later: “It’s going to be a very hard thing to do business like this.”
After the meeting, Trump said on Truth Social that Zelensky had “disrespected” him and could come back to the White House once “he is ready for peace.”
If the past is any track record, that means demanding that Zelensky do the one thing he refused to do in the Oval Office on Friday: capitulate.
