Volodymyr Zelenskyy has had some tough weeks in the past three years, but this past one may be up there with the worst of them.
Back on Monday, in an hour-long interview with the Guardian at his Kyiv offices, the Ukrainian president was in a cautiously optimistic frame of mind. He said he had received “positive signals from the Americans” over upcoming negotiations. His team was working to fix a date for a meeting with Donald Trump, he said, and he was sure that the US president understood the importance of coordinating his position with Kyiv before talking to Russia.
Zelenskyy’s main message, which he returned to several times in the interview, was that it was vital for the US to play a key role in enforcing any potential peace settlement. If Ukraine was to be denied Nato membership, it at least required Nato-style guarantees that would deter Vladimir Putin from coming back to bite off more chunks of the country in a year or five. “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees,” he said, unequivocally.
But the reality of Trump’s second term can come at you fast. By Wednesday, the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, had ruled out both Nato membership for Ukraine and any US role in enforcing a peace deal. Later that day, in a surprise announcement, Trump said he had conducted a 90-minute phone call with Putin, and gave a press conference afterwards during which he proceeded to rip up three years of US rhetoric on supporting Ukraine.
In Kyiv, the announcements hit with a shock as jarring as the wall-shaking booms from Iskander missiles that had been shot down on the outskirts of the city in the early hours of that morning.
It had been a “bad war to get into” for Ukraine, said Trump, suggesting it was Kyiv’s choice to be invaded. He declined to say that Ukraine would be an equal partner in future negotiations, disparaged Zelenskyy’s poll ratings and repeatedly emphasised that his priority was regaining the money the US had spent on aid to Ukraine over the past few years, bandying around figures that appeared to have been plucked from thin air.
He doubled down on Hegseth’s insistence that Ukraine restoring its territorial integrity was unlikely, and even suggested that Russia might in some way deserve to keep the occupied territory because “they took a lot of land and they fought for that land”. The readout of the call said Trump and Putin had talked about the “great history” of their respective nations and discussed the second world war, all of which will have been music to Putin’s ears.
Perhaps the Trump comment that caused the most anger in Ukraine was the casual remark in a television interview that “they may be Russian some day, they may not be Russian some day, but we’re gonna have all this money in there and I said I want it back.” It was a flippant dismissal of Ukraine’s existential fight to defend itself from Russian occupation, wrapped up in a demand for cash.
In response, Zelenskyy has been walking an unenviable diplomatic tightrope. He knows that if he starts even to gently criticise the US president, it could make things worse for his country. On Monday, he offered careful compliments, tipping his hat to Trump’s “decisiveness”. He repeated the description on Friday at the Munich Security Conference, when JD Vance, the US vice-president, made the keynote speech and hardly mentioned Ukraine, and when there were surely many different words in Zelenskyy’s private thoughts.
There is a depressing sense of deja vu to the situation. In the early months of Zelenskyy’s presidency, back in 2019, he got dragged into an impeachment drama after Trump tried to pressure him to investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. When Trump released a memo of the call, Zelenskyy appeared to be trying to sidestep entering a criminal conspiracy by flattering Trump. (“You are absolutely right. Not only 100%, but actually 1,000%,” he said, when Trump criticised European support for Ukraine.)
This time, with the stakes even higher and Ukraine’s survival as a state on the line, Zelenskyy’s team has come up with a “victory plan” designed to catch Trump’s eye. Instead of appealing to shared values or European security, neither of which get Trump excited, they instead suggested joint exploitation of Ukraine’s “rare earths” and potentially lucrative contracts for US companies in the reconstruction of postwar Ukraine.
“Those who are helping us to save Ukraine will [have the chance to] renovate it, with their businesses together with Ukrainian businesses. All these things we are ready to speak about in detail,” Zelenskyy said on Monday.
The pitch worked, and on Wednesday, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, arrived in Kyiv with a draft agreement on natural resources. But reports of the contents suggest it requires Ukraine to hand over 50% of its mineral wealth without being provided with any security guarantees in return. “It made people quite upset,” said one source in Kyiv. Zelenskyy has so far declined to sign.
For some officials from other allied nations, many of whom have become deeply personally invested in Ukraine’s fight to throw off Russian domination, the crumbling of US support over the last week has felt like a betrayal.
The EU ambassador to Ukraine, Katarína Mathernová, wrote on Facebook that she had attended the funeral of two Ukrainian soldiers in the western city of Lviv on Friday, and “cried like a child” as they were laid to rest. “How can a deal about Ukraine be made without Ukraine? How could such an agreement ever be explained to the families of the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who have fallen defending the integrity of their homeland?” she asked.
Many Ukrainians say they are willing to see concessions made for the sake of a peace deal, after three long years of disrupted lives and thousands of deaths. But the key question of what security guarantees could enforce such a deal looks even harder to answer satisfactorily for Kyiv after Trump’s comments this week.
On the other hand, if no deal is done, Ukraine will face an extremely difficult situation militarily. Late last month, the Ukrainska Pravda news outlet quoted Kyrylo Budanov, the head of military intelligence, as telling a closed parliamentary committee that if negotiations did not begin in earnest by summer “dangerous processes could unfold, threatening Ukraine’s very existence”. Budanov later denied making the remarks, and the SBU security service opened an investigation to try to discover the outlet’s sources, showing the sensitivity of the topic.
Several sources in Kyiv said that while the frontline has stabilised since late last year, by the beginning of the summer Ukrainian forces may be in trouble, particularly if US military aid deliveries cease. The army is currently dealing with a desertion problem, difficulty in mobilising new troops and intense exhaustion among those at the frontline.
However, some caution against the dangers of rushing into a quick deal, especially now that the spectrum of possibilities on offer from Trump appears to be so troubling. “The earlier we get to the table the worse the outcome will be,” said Vadym Prystaiko, a former foreign minister. “It’s counterintuitive, and I know it’s painful. But there are still ways. We don’t have to give up. There is a Ukrainian saying: ‘Don’t fall down before you’re shot,’” he said.
Prystaiko said there ought to be ways to engage Europe more forcefully in the context of a Trump retreat, notably by finally pushing through an agreement on sending Ukraine money from frozen Russian assets. And while the outcomes for Ukraine may look bleak now, many Ukrainians remind outsiders that the country has been written off before. In February 2022 many observers expected the Russian army to overrun Kyiv in days. Instead, the capital remained standing and the population launched a fightback.
“Ukraine survived for three years and Russia is still fighting for some villages in the Donbas. It’s a miracle,” said one senior security source. “I don’t believe the front will collapse, but it will get harder. We have time, but we are paying heavily for that time, first of all in the lives of our people.”
As well as the future of Ukraine, Zelenskyy has his own political future to consider in the coming weeks. Both Trump and his envoy Keith Kellogg have raised the question of elections, a topic also frequently mentioned by the Kremlin as a supposed reason why they cannot negotiate with him, after his official term ended last year.
In the interview on Monday, Zelenskyy bristled and came the closest to a direct criticism of the Trump administration when asked about these demands. “It’s an internal question… nobody, not even someone with a very serious position, can just say, ‘I want elections tomorrow.’ That’s the sovereign right of Ukraine and Ukrainians,” he said.
Zelenskyy pointed out the challenges of holding an election in the current climate. Martial law precludes it, and even if there were a ceasefire it is hard to imagine how the logistics of a countrywide vote would work, given the millions of voters living in occupied territories, frontline areas and abroad as refugees.
“Will the elections be only when we’ve solved everything in 20 years’ time? No. But we cannot just shout loudly, ‘We want elections.’ Let’s be honest, today our people would see this as something shocking,” he said.
Increasingly strident criticism of Zelenskyy can be heard from some Ukrainians, amid complaints about his leadership style and a centralisation of power in the presidential administration. There was also confusion and anger over an ill-timed move this week to place financial sanctions on former president Petro Poroshenko, in what appears to be an act of political revenge. But there are few voices who think that now is the time for a vote.
“Our position is that during a war there is no room for politics and especially not for elections,” said Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, an MP from the Fatherland party of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko and a former head of the SBU security agency. “It would be the end for Ukraine. To start political or election activity would mean Putin’s victory the next day.”
If some kind of sustainable peace deal is concluded in the coming months, elections might happen later in the year, analysts suggest. The big question will be whether Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the popular former army commander who now serves as ambassador to London, would stand. If he does, informal polls suggest he is likely to win; against other candidates, Zelenskyy has a much better chance.
It is widely assumed that Zelenskyy himself plans to stand for another term, although when asked, he claimed that – like so much else in Ukraine – that will depend on what happens in the coming months. “That’s really a rhetorical question for me… I really don’t know. I don’t know how this war will finish,” he said.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
