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      Shocked by Trump Meeting, Zelensky and Ukraine Try to Forge a Path Forward

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      For months leading into the American elections last fall, the prospect of a second Trump presidency deepened uncertainty among Ukrainians over how enduring American support would prove in a war threatening their national survival.After President Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous meeting with President Trump in the White House on Friday, many Ukrainians were moving toward a conclusion that seemed perfectly clear: Mr. Trump has chosen a side, and it is not Ukraine’s.In one jaw-dropping meeting, the once unthinkable fear that Ukraine would be forced to engage in a long war against a stronger opponent without U.S. support appeared to move exponentially closer to reality.“For Ukraine, it is clarifying, though not in a great way,” Phillips O’Brien, an international relations professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said in an interview. “Ukraine can now only count on European states for the support it needs to fight.”An immediate result was that Ukrainians, including opposition politicians, were generally supportive of Mr. Zelensky on Saturday for not bending to Mr. Trump despite tremendous pressure.Maryna Schomak, a civilian whose son’s cancer diagnosis has been complicated by the destruction of Ukraine’s largest children’s cancer hospital by a Russian missile strike, said that Mr. Zelensky had conducted himself with dignity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Dressing Down of Zelensky Plays Into Putin’s War Aims

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      President Trump says he wants a quick cease-fire in Ukraine. But President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appears to be in no rush, and the blowup on Friday between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president may give Russia’s leader the kind of ammunition he needs to prolong the fight.With the American alliance with Ukraine suffering a dramatic, public rupture, Mr. Putin now seems even more likely to hold out for a deal on his terms — and he could even be tempted to expand his push on the battlefield.The extraordinary scene in Washington — in which Mr. Trump lambasted President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — was broadcast as the top story on state television in Russia on Saturday morning. It played into three years of Kremlin propaganda casting Mr. Zelensky as a foolhardy ruler who would sooner or later exhaust the patience of his Western backers.For the Kremlin, perhaps the most important message came in later remarks by Mr. Trump, who suggested that if Ukraine did not agree to a “cease-fire now,” the war-torn country would have to “fight it out” without American help.That could set up an outcome that Mr. Putin has long sought, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives: a dominant position over Ukraine and wide-ranging concessions from the West.In fact, Mr. Trump’s professed attempts to end the war quickly could intensify and prolong it, experts warned. If the United States is really ready to abandon Ukraine, Mr. Putin could try to seize more Ukrainian territory and end up with more leverage if and when peace talks ultimately take place.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy

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      The journalist Fareed Zakaria discusses the worldview emerging from Trump’s foreign policy decisions regarding Ukraine, Gaza, China and beyond.The New York TimesThe Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign PolicyThe journalist Fareed Zakaria discusses the worldview emerging from Trump’s foreign policy decisions regarding Ukraine, Gaza, China and beyond.This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.What is the Donald Trump doctrine? What is Donald Trump’s foreign policy?I think the place to begin to try to untangle what we’ve actually seen is to listen to the way Trump and Vice President JD Vance speak about our allies.Archived clip of Donald Trump: I’ve had very good talks with Putin, and I’ve had not such good talks with Ukraine. They don’t have any cards, but they play it tough.Archived clip of JD Vance: The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.Archived clip of Donald Trump: I mean, look, let’s be honest: The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it, but now I’m president.Something is new here. The Trump doctrine that we’ve seen in the first month of this presidency is going to reshape the world much more fundamentally than Trump did in the four years of his first term. That’s in part because of who is around him now — JD Vance and Elon Musk, instead of the foreign policy establishment.So I wanted to have a bigger picture conversation about what this Trump doctrine is. I’m joined today by Fareed Zakaria, the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN, a Washington Post columnist and the author of the best-selling book, “Age of Revolutions.”This episode contains strong language.Ezra Klein: Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show.Fareed Zakaria: Always a pleasure, Ezra.To the extent you feel you can define it, what’s the Trump doctrine?Part of the problem with Trump is that he is so mercurial. He’s so idiosyncratic that, just when you think you figured out the Trump doctrine, he goes and says something that kind of sounds like the opposite of the Trump doctrine.But I do think that there is one coherent worldview that Trump seems to espouse and has espoused for a long time. The first ad he took out when he was a real estate developer was in 1987. It was an ad about how Japan was ripping us off economically and Europe was ripping us off by free-riding on security. And what that represents, fundamentally, is a rejection of the open international system that the United States and Europe have built over the last eight decades.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Sums Up His Zelensky Showdown: ‘This Is Going to Be Great Television’

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      One of the most surreal moments of Friday’s Oval Office showdown between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine came at the very end.After all the shouting and the saber-rattling and the lecturing and the pleading and the politicking had ceased, the American president shifted a little in his seat and shared an observation.“This is going to be great television,” he remarked. “I will say that.”It was a conclusion as startling as it was fundamentally Trumpian.This was not a season finale boardroom scene of “The Apprentice” that had just taken place. It was the highest of high-stakes talks — one that could determine the fate of millions, the existence of a sovereign nation and the security of a continent — going wildly off the rails.But for Mr. Trump, one thing that was on his mind, as always, was the ratings. He sounded almost excited by the drama of the spectacle, as though he could feel the front pages of the world’s newspapers being written in real time.This is a man who spent years yelling at people on TV as a way to make a living. He is wired to think about things in terms of “great television.” He is a highly conscious performer. But playacting as a tough guy on NBC on Thursday nights between 9 and 10 p.m. is not the same thing as bossing around an ally before the eyes of the world, even if Mr. Trump uses the same language to describe one performance as he would the other.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World. Trump Just Handed Him the Knife.

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      Washington and Moscow have been repairing relations at breakneck speed, comparable only to the speed at which the Trump administration is breaking things at home. After meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the two sides had resolved to “eliminate impediments” to improving bilateral relations, a phrasing that sent chills down the spines of Russian exiles — myself included — who have sought what at the time seemed like safe harbor in the United States.Of course, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has his sights set on much more than a bunch of political exiles. And his negotiations with President Trump about Ukraine are not just about Ukraine. Putin wants nothing less than to reorganize the world, the way Joseph Stalin did with the accords he reached with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945. Putin has wanted to carve the globe up for a long time. Now, at last, Trump is handing him the knife.How do I know Putin wants this? Because he has said so. In fact, he, Lavrov and a cadre of Kremlin propagandists and revisionist historians haven’t shut up about Yalta for more than a decade. After illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, Putin addressed a gathering celebrating the 70th anniversary of the accords; it culminated in the unveiling of a monument to the three Allied leaders.His reverence for the Yalta accords goes beyond the glorification of the once-mighty Soviet Union and its leader Stalin; he believes that the agreement those three heads of state struck — with the Soviet Union keeping three Baltic States it had annexed as well as parts of Poland and Romania, and later securing domination over six Eastern and Central European countries and part of Germany — remains the only legitimate framework for European borders and security. In February, as Russia celebrated the accords’ 80th anniversary, and prepared to sit down with the Trump administration, Lavrov and the official Russia historians reiterated this message in article after article.This week, Alexander Dugin, a self-styled philosopher who has consistently supplied Putin with the ideological language to back up his policies, sat down for a long interview with Glenn Greenwald, the formerly leftist American journalist. Dugin affably explained why Russia invaded Ukraine: because it wanted and needed to reclaim its former European holdings but realistically could attempt to occupy only Ukraine. He also laid out potential pathways to ending the war. At the very least, he said, Russia would require a partition, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. He was purposefully using the language the Allies applied to Germany in Yalta.On X, where Dugin has been hyperactive in the last weeks, he is even bolder. In the lead-up to elections last week in Germany, he posted, “Vote AfD or we will occupy Germany once more and divide it between Russia and USA.” (A German journalist friend sent me a screenshot asking if the post was real — German journalists are less accustomed to the unimaginable than Russian ones.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ukrainians Blindsided by Deal’s Breakdown and by Trump’s Actions

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      Some said they felt the U.S. president was disrespectful and that they were proud of their leader for standing up to him.Liudmyla Shestakova has lost a lot to this war — her son, and his wife, who died together on the front lines. But she’s a realist, like many in this mining region in central Ukraine. And ever since President Trump suggested it, she has thought that her country should sign a proposed deal that would give America some profits from mining in Ukraine.Ms. Shestakova, 65, who works with an environmental group called Flora in the city of Kropyvnytskyi, had hoped a deal between the U.S. and Ukraine on critical minerals could bring much-needed investment to the region.But on Friday night, Ms. Shestakova, like many people in Ukraine, was shocked and blindsided at how the deal fell apart and how she felt that President Trump treated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, almost like a serf who didn’t bow and kiss the ring quite enough.“With a trustworthy partner, this could have been a beneficial deal for everyone,” said Ms. Shestakova, who once ran Flora and now sits on its supervisory board. “But with a partner like Trump, it could actually be dangerous.”Across Ukraine, people said they were upset Friday night. They also said they wouldn’t stop fighting, even if America walked away.“It will be hard, but we will survive,” said Iryna Tsilyk, 42, a poet and film director in the capital, Kyiv, whose husband serves in the army. “Today, I was not ashamed of my president and my country. I am not sure that the Americans can say the same.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oil Companies Wanted Trump to Lower Costs. Tariffs Are Raising Them.

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      President Trump’s promise during last year’s election to make it far easier to drill for oil and gas thrilled energy executives who believed his policies would lower their costs and help them make a lot more money.Those hopes are now fading. Thanks to Mr. Trump’s tariffs, the oil and gas industry is contending with rising prices for essential materials like steel pipes used to line new wells.That has not yet translated into a meaningful change in U.S. drilling activity or production expectations, but companies have begun revising budgets to reflect higher materials costs. Decisions made today about which wells to drill will affect production many months from now.Oil refineries are separately bracing for a tariff on Canadian oil, which some of them need to produce gasoline, diesel and other fuels.At the same time, consumers have grown jittery about the economy and the price of oil has fallen about 10 percent since just before Mr. Trump took office, to around $70 a barrel. Oil companies tend to drill less when prices fall.The combination could complicate Mr. Trump’s stated desire to juice U.S. oil and natural gas production, which are already at or near record highs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stunned U.S.A.I.D. Workers Return to Clean Out Their Desks

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      Democrats said a review mandated by executive order was “not a serious effort or attempt at reform.”Workers for the U.S. Agency for International Development who had been fired or placed on leave returned to their offices on Thursday to retrieve personal belongings, many still dumbfounded by the Trump administration’s sudden dismantlement of the 63-year-old aid delivery agency.Hundreds of workers who just one month ago never imagined that they would soon lose their jobs en masse returned to the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in downtown Washington.They were given just 15 minutes each to clear out their old desks.The somber return came a day after the Trump administration revealed in court documents that it had completed a review of all U.S. foreign aid programs and was canceling nearly 10,000 contracts and grants, eliminating about 90 percent of U.S.A.I.D.’s work.The agency’s annual budget of about $40 billion pays for the distribution of food and medicine, as well as disaster relief, disease monitoring, development work, and pro-democracy and civil society programs. Its work has been heavily concentrated in poor and developing countries in Africa and Asia.Foreign aid makes up less than 1 percent of the federal budget.Supporters offered boxes and packing supplies to help fired U.S.A.I.D. workers clean out their desks on Thursday. Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesIn a joint statement, Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee denounced the canceled funding, calling the foreign aid review — mandated by an executive order President Trump signed shortly after taking office last month — “not a serious effort or attempt at reform but rather a pretext to dismantle decades of U.S. investment that makes America safer, stronger and more prosperous.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More