Ukraine seeks to redirect relationship with Trump to save US aid

Friday’s debacle in the Oval Office has opened a crisis that is far from over. Ukraine is trying to salvage the badly damaged relationship with the United States, while Donald Trump’s Administration keeps up the pressure, still outraged by what it considers to have been Volodymir Zelenskiy’s petulant attitude for trying to correct the pro-Russian views of the Republican and his vice president, J. D. Vance. It is an all-or-nothing gamble. In his rebuke to the Ukrainian on Friday, the American president made it clear: either Kyiv accepts a cease-fire —equivalent, under these conditions, to a surrender— or it will have to “fight alone” and risk disappearing as a country. Both know that any help that may come from Europe will not be enough.

This Saturday, Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, the man who notified him on Friday that he should leave the White House, reiterated it to the Ukrainian: Zelenskiy “has not realized that there is a new sheriff in town. This is a new president, and we are determined to take a new path to peace,” he said in statements to Fox News.

Trump, a former casino owner, likes gambling metaphors. With one such simile he made it clear to Zelenskiy how he sees his position: he has “bad cards,” and without the aces up America’s sleeve he is going to lose the game very quickly. His vision of the world, of what is on the table, is simple (and shared by the two great world autocrats, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping): the great powers negotiate among themselves, and the small countries —weak by definition, in this perception— must adjust to what the powerful decide. If they benefit, they must be grateful for the magnificence of the benefactor.

Faced with the need to re-establish ties, the pressure on Zelenskiy is growing. Also from his partners. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has asked him to take into account the support provided by Washington. “I have spoken on the phone twice with Zelenskiy and told him that we have to continue together to reach a lasting peace (...) I told him that we have to respect what Trump has done so far for Ukraine.”

That message seems to have reached Zelenskiy. The president’s instruction to his team and his government is to avoid at all costs to further heat up the atmosphere. “We must leave emotions aside and redirect the situation with a cool head,” a source in the Ukrainian president’s office told EL PAÍS on Saturday. Kyiv needs Washington to hold Moscow back. Without its military support, “Ukraine’s chances of survival are very low,” Zelenskiy himself admitted in February. It is this dependence that pushes the Ukrainian president to use with leaden feet the few cartridges he has left to save the situation.

“For us it is critical to have the support of President Trump,” the Ukrainian leader said in a statement on Saturday. “He wants to end the war, but no one wants peace more than us: it is we who live it; it is a battle for our freedom, for our survival.” And he again expressed his gratitude for the assistance provided by the United States.

Mutual antipathy

In the case of the clash between the Republican and the leader of the invaded country there are other aggravating factors. Trump’s and Vance’s antipathy toward Zelenskiy is a personal matter. Both perceive the Ukrainian as a lightweight, a former comedian who has bamboozled the United States, who sided with Joe Biden’s Democratic administration —one of the rebukes he hurled at him in the Oval Office— and who has no chance of winning the war. This is a considerable factor against Zelenskiy: in his second term, the Republican feels all-powerful and has no qualms about taking revenge on those he believes against him or in favor of his former political rival.

It doesn’t help that the disdain is, to some extent, reciprocated. The Ukrainian believes that Trump lives in a “disinformation bubble” of Russian propaganda, and fears that he is going to lose him the war.

Not only that: Zelenskiy’s team was ready to sign the economic cooperation agreement that was scheduled to be ratified that day, whereby Ukraine would cede 50% of future revenues from its natural resources, especially strategic minerals. Despite this willingness to maintain the dialogue, they were ordered to leave the White House.

Zelenskiy has insisted this Saturday that the minerals pact is still on the table, a message of goodwill despite the fact that it was an imposition he had to accept in only two weeks of negotiations and after receiving periodic insults from Trump.

Still, in the heat of the rebuke, senior U.S. administration officials express doubts that the relationship, vital to Kyiv, can be repaired. At least as long as Zelenskiy remains at the helm of the country. They even point to the possibility that the Republican may order the cancellation of the rest of the military aid approved by Biden and still to be delivered: ammunition and material for anti-aircraft equipment, above all. Also, for the time being, the agreement for the joint exploitation of Ukrainian natural resources that should have served to link Trump’s Washington and Kyiv is discarded.

Trump, who is spending the weekend at his private Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida, made it clear before leaving Washington that he will only resume contact with Zelenskiy if the Ukrainian “accepts peace”. Others in his government demanded that the leader of the occupied country present a public apology for having contradicted Vance in the exchange that triggered the quarrel, and for not having been sufficiently grateful to the president. In statements to CNN, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that “there was no need to show such antagonism”.

The chances of reversing what has happened are minimal, according to Dmitro Razumkov, a deputy, former confidant of Zelenskiy and former speaker of the Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament: “As they say, nothing is totally impossible, but sometimes there are things that are almost impossible. Relations between Zelenskiy and Trump today are very bad. Unfortunately, I do not see a strategy that can change this relationship in the short term.”

“Honestly, I don’t know how the relationship between Zelenskiy and Trump can be rebuilt, I also don’t know what will happen in the coming days,” pessimistically assesses Mikola Bielieskov, an expert at the National Institute for Strategic Studies of Ukraine, an agency dependent on the presidency. “But what is certain is that Europe must develop a plan b of support for Ukraine now.”

Also Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s former president and Zelenskiy’s political rival, said Saturday that he is confident that the president has “a plan b” because there is a serious risk of losing U.S. military supplies. Europe, he added, could be key to getting both sides “back to the negotiating table.”

Razumkov, who currently heads an interparliamentary group called Intelligent Politics, in which there is a majority of deputies from People’s Servant, Zelenskiy’s party, stresses that alternatives must be found: “We have to implement different working options, a way out of the crisis without talking about the relations of two politicians, but of two states”. His idea is that a union of parties in the Rada should take the lead in negotiations with the United States: “There are other ways out that should not be based on individuals, but on countries and on the future”.