At a high-stakes meeting at the White House on August 18, the US president, Donald Trump, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, tried to hammer out the broad contours of a potential peace agreement with Russia. The tone of their encounter was in marked contrast to their last joint press conference in Washington back in February which ended with Zelensky’s humiliation by Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance.
The outcomes of the presidential get-together, and the subsequent, expanded meeting with leaders of the European coalition of the willing, were also a much more professional affair than Trump’s summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on August 15. The results of the meetings in the White House were still far from perfect. But they are a much better response to the reality in which Ukrainians have lived for the past more than three-and-a-half years than what transpired during and after the brief press conference held by the two leaders after their meeting in Alaska.
This relatively positive outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Over the weekend, Trump had put out a statement on his Truth Social platform that: “President Zelenskyy (sic) of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately”. But this came with the proviso that Zelensky would need to accept Ukraine’s loss of Crimea to Russia and forego his country’s future Nato membership. This, and similar ideas of land swaps between Russia and Ukraine, have already been roundly rejected by the Ukrainian president.
