If there's a theme to the second Trump administration, it's when after a question and answer session with Ukrainian President Zelensky and the press which went spectacularly off the rails Trump turned to the cameras and said, "This is going to make great television." If the attention economy were real dollars, Trump might stand some real chance of balancing the budget with all his extra clicks and eyeballs.
Having watched the entire 50 minutes of the Zelensky Q&A in the Oval Office, and then Zelensky's subsequent 20 minutes Fox News interview, I think it's worth taking a step back here and examining what really happened and why. There's a great deal of spin coming out of various sides, but with a bit of time and context it's not hard to see the different things going on.
First, it's important to set the stage, because there have been a lot of claims flying around.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the expectation was that Ukraine would be quickly overwhelmed by Russia's larger army. However, rather than collapsing into chaos, the Ukrainian government and military pulled itself together and put up an organized resistance while Russian attacks bogged down amid poor logistics, including tank columns that ran out of gas and provided sitting-duck targets for Ukrainian drones and anti-tank missiles.
Ukraine completely pushed out Russian incursions from the north, both the decapitation stab towards Kyiv and the Russian advance towards Kharkiv. However, Russia was successful in occupying the southeastern portions of the country, establishing a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula which Russia had occupied back in 2014.
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| Current state of war in Ukraine from Institute of War map: Blue areas are those re-captured by Ukraine while red areas are those occupied by Russia |
There was a period of optimism among some Ukraine supporters during this period of pushing the Russians back in the north that it would be possible for Ukraine, with the support of military hardware from the West, to full reclaim their territory from Russia. This remains Ukraine's stated war aim, but for two years now things have remained bogged down in mostly static positional warfare which is reminiscent of World War One, with entrenched positions and heavy use of artillery.
Throughout this time, Ukraine has received financial and military aid from the US, Europe, and other countries. The US is the largest single supporter, though the total aid from the EU is greater than that from the US. Other countries aside from the US and EU have also contributed, including $29B from the UK (which is no longer a member of the EU), $18M from Japan, and $13B from Canada. (source)
President Trump has stated repeatedly that he believes the war would never have happened if he had been president in 2022, and he has expressed ambitions to end the war through negotiations quickly. Vice President Vance has famously said that he "doesn't care" about Ukraine and has been at pains to reinforce that impression whenever he's given the chance.
With all that said, let's look at where things stand in the wake of the disastrous White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky, which ended with Trump and Vance berating Zelensky in response to what they described as disrespect from him.
About that meeting
The press Q&A with Zelensky and Trump was 50 minutes long, and during the first 40 minutes it was relatively cordial though it was clear that there were repeatedly stated areas of difference.
During that first period, Trump indicated repeatedly (with his usual self-congratulation) that he saw himself as a neutral intermediary, making peace between Putin and Zelensky. This created a clear difference of opinion, as Zelensky stated repeatedly that he hoped to see the US stand with Ukraine against Russia and its aggression.
The purpose of the day was to sign a mineral deal which would grant the United States rights to develop "rare earth" mineral deposits in Ukraine. There did not seem to be much disagreement about that. Indeed, Zelensky did not seem particularly concerned about the rate earths deal one way or the other. However, Zelensky kept coming back to the point that if Ukraine was to agree to a peace, it would have to involve security guarantees from the US as well as Europe, because Putin has repeatedly broken past agreements he signed with Ukraine.
In other words, Zelensky was using the opportunity of this public event to establish his negotiating position for the upcoming peace talks in which Trump wants to broker a deal between Ukraine and Russia.
Trump and particularly Vance clearly tired of this, and so around 40 minutes into the meeting, first Vance and then Trump aggressively turned on Zelensky and delivered a rhetorical beat-down which filled the remainder of the meeting. It's this beat-down which has generated the clips and quotes which have been so much discussed.
I think civilized people will generally agree that Trump's and Vance's behavior was poor, and their fans will think it was bracing. To an extent, those preferences as so much determined by taste as not to be particularly interesting.
A more important question is perhaps whether Zelensky was wise to attempt both to emphasize Ukraine's position in regards to upcoming peace talks (that they are only willing to stop fighting if there are some guarantees this isn't just a way to have the Ukrainians stand down so the Russians can stage a surprise attack at their leisure) and also to repeat the basic truth that Russia is the aggressor in this war and has repeatedly violated agreements for more than ten years.
I think it's reasonable to think that, given the relative positions of Ukraine and the US, it was not actually wise to use an occasion such as this as a chance to state his negotiating position and the accurate history of recent events in that part of the world.
I'm not adamant that it was unwise, but I can see why one might argue that this wasn't the time to make clear what the sticking points in the next round of negotiations would be.
On the other hand, there's reasonable question as to whether getting through this mineral deal without drama would actually be any benefit if Trump continued in his belief that he could steamroll Ukraine into signing a ceasefire without guarantees.
A situation in which the US wants to stop providing aid to Ukraine is necessarily a pretty poor situation for Ukraine, which despite the justice of their cause is low on resources compared to Russia (and far more so compared to the US and even Western European countries.) So all of this ends up being a question of how Ukraine should best navigate a situation which is genuinely bad for them.
How can things end?
All of that said, I think it's important to take a realistic look at how the war in Ukraine could proceed from here regardless.
Predictions about the future are, of course, difficult. That said, some things seem fairly clear.
While both Russia and Ukraine have lost a lot of men (Russia, to all appearances, a lot more than Ukraine, but they also have 3.5x the population) neither one seems likely to experience a collapse which allows the other to roll forward. It's possible, but three years in there are few signs that such a collapse is coming soon on either side.
Russia has more military hardware to apply, in particular more artillery shells, but they are also using it at 10x the rate and still producing fairly little to show for that extra expenditure. This is very much a WW1 style war, with all the complaints about gains best measured in yards applying at least as well here as they did in the Great War.
This means that Russia is very unlikely to achieve their original goal of either completely absorbing Ukraine or turning it into a demilitarized satellite state ruled by a puppet regime. It seems pretty clear at this point that Russia simply does not have the military power to make that happen without a complete breakdown in Ukrainian will to fight.
At the same time, the Ukrainian war aim of regaining all of the territory which Russia has captured since Feb 2022 is similarly unrealistic. Given Ukrainian manpower and abilities that we've seen over the last three years, it seems clear that this would only be able to happen if there was a major deployment of European and probably also US airpower and perhaps also ground troops.
There are very good reasons why the US and Europe are hesitant to do this. Not just cowardice (though in some cases, I think this honestly is a factor) but also the fact that despite the fact Russia is clearly no longer a conventional great power, it still has a great power nuclear arsenal. No one really wants to corner the great bear to the point where it might start doing desperate things.
As someone who despises Putinism and admires the underdog courage which Ukraine has shown in a very bad spot, I wish this were not the case, but I think that in all realism we have to admit that it is. The conquered territory is not coming back to Ukraine any time soon. This is bad for the people who are suffering under Russian occupation. Not only have they kidnapped thousands of children to Russian-ize them and assassinated or imprisoned many innocent people, but Russia has also used the men from the territories they have declared to be Russian as cannon fodder in the war. And the Russian way of war requires a lot of cannon fodder.
But this is the simple truth which Ukraine supporters are often too hesitant to admit: Ukraine is not one additional weapons system away from being able to push Russia out. They are either 40-80 million population or 10 more years of military development along Western lines away from being able to push Russia out.
Poland is of similar population to Ukraine and probably could deal with a Russian invasion pretty well, but they were not nearly as close to the black hole of post-USSR collapse as Ukraine was, and they have 20 years of close collaboration with the US in Iraq and Afghanistan behind them to hone their military.
So the truth is, the kind of peace which Ukraine could get is probably not much better than what Trump is offering. However, because that would leave Ukraine vulnerable to Russia simply invading again (as they did in 2022 after the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the Donbas, and the peace agreements after that) Ukraine naturally would rather not put down their weapons without either foreign military commitments of support or very, very significant commitments of weapons which would allow them to be significantly more ready should Russia re-start the war.
However, it's understandable that absent those kinds of guarantees, Ukraine is hesitant to stand down. While loss aversion is not a strategy, it is very hard to stop fighting a war in which you have lost so much both without gaining your aims and also without some kind of guarantee that it won't simply start up again soon under even less favorable circumstances. It's arguably that faced with a neutral ceasefire with no arms and no security backing, Ukraine is honestly better off continuing to fight. Yes, they're continuing to lose men, but then, so did Afghanistan when faced with Russia, or later faced with the US, and who is in control there now?
Where is Europe?
One of the obvious questions in all this is: why does all this come down to the US?
Trump's actions in all this do not strike me as reasonable or honorable, but it does not have to be the case that the US is the only country capable of backing Ukraine to resist as long as they choose to do so, or the only country capable of forcing Russia to the negotiating table.
After all, the UK and France are both full nuclear armed powers with second strike capabilities. And while the total GDP of Europe is not as large as that of the US, they certainly have the economic and manufacturing resources to be enough of a military power to overwhelmingly outclass Russia if they chose to do so.
Moreover, this is not a problem which has come up overnight. Europe has had a whole three years of knowing that the US was one election away from disengaging from Ukraine, and they could have done a lot to ramp up military production and readiness during that time.
It is, quite frankly, disgraceful that Europe has not stepped up in the last three years. They should have been scrambling as fast as they could to make themselves energy independent from the fossil fuels that Russia exports. And they should have been ramping up their recruiting and their armaments manufacturing industries. Instead, despite some admirable spending, they have mostly ramped up their rhetoric.
It would, as of this moment, take Europe a while to step up to the plate and support Ukraine militarily independent of the US. But they should not have waited till now to have made themselves ready to do that.
Perhaps they will now pull themselves together. The natural result of the Trumpian desire to pull back from being the world's superpower is that regional powers will have more space to rise. I do not think that will, on the balance, be a good thing. But Europe is the sort of power one might not mind having more strength, and they keep refusing to do it. It's not an excuse for what Trump has done, but they too are actors and they should have acted better.
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