Most Ukrainians have been closely following President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington, where Ukraine and the US were to sign an agreement on minerals. From the American side, it was supposed to pave the way for negotiations on peace in Ukraine. But a row between Zelenskyy and US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance turned everything on its head.
Truth, weapons and security guarantees
Volodymyr Viatrovych, a deputy from the Ukrainian political party European Solidarity, believes that Zelenskyy defended the truth about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine with a clear message: Who started the war, who is to blame and who is the aggressor. However, the White House was in no mood to hear these truths.
“Trump and Vance have lied about the war and wanted Zelenskyy to publicly accept this lie,” Vjatrovych wrote on Facebook. “It is good that this did not happen, because truth is one of the most important components of war. Of course, we also need American weapons to be able to fight, but we also need the truth to understand what we are fighting for.” His party colleague, parliamentarian Oleksiy Honcharenko, on the other hand, criticized Zelenskyy’s behavior on Telegram, speaking of “horror” and an “end to relations with Trump.”
Support for Zelenskyy was expressed by his closest associates, including the head of the President’s Office Andriy Yermak, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko and head of the governing party Servants of the People David Arakhamia. They all emphasized the need for real security guarantees for Ukraine.
“Security means life, a future without sirens, without losses, without fear for those we love. Without real guarantees, war will come back. It always returns to where opportunities for a new attack are left open,” Andriy Yermak wrote on Telegram, thanking the American people for their support of Ukraine. Also on Telegram, Denys Shmyhal wrote that the Ukrainian president is right when he says that peace is impossible without security guarantees. “This is a threat to the entire European continent,” the Ukrainian prime minister said.
‘Shifts in geopolitics’
After what happened in Washington, not only the US and Russia, but also Ukraine would have to sit at the negotiating table to end the war in the future, according to Serhiy Herasymchuk from the research center Foreign Policy Council — Ukrainian Prism. “Europe will now also sit at the table, because Europe has largely sided with one side,” he told DW. With a few exceptions, European heads of state and government unanimously expressed their support for Zelenskyy. Neither the Kremlin nor the White House can ignore this, the expert believes.
At the same time, Herasymchuk expects the meeting to lead to “tectonic shifts in the perception of the United States” worldwide, though does not rule out that some European countries will take a wait-and-see attitude. Some Southeast Asian countries may conclude that Washington is a risky partner for them, “that it is better to voluntarily find common ground with China than to wait until it comes to a confrontation in which the US will not support them.”
Others, like Ukraine, would try to fight, the expert said. “I hope that the European Union and Ukraine will achieve positive results together in this fight,” he emphasized, noting that Zelenskyy’s quarrel with Trump and Vance had triggered a strong European response. Europe should soon present clear messages of support for Ukraine and concrete measures, he said. At the same time, Herasymchuk fears that the US could now refuse to provide military aid to Ukraine — though he adds that the NATO allies could prevent this.
Discussions on social media
On social media, Ukrainians are arguing about how Zelenskyy was received at the White House and whether he behaved correctly there. Nataliya Ligachova, editor-in-chief of the online newspaper “Detector Media,” defended Zelenskyy on Facebook: “You can’t talk like that to the president of a country that has already sacrificed thousands and thousands of lives not only for our freedom, but also for the freedom, peace and prosperity of the Western world.”
Ilya Neshodowskyy, director of the Institute for Socio-Economic Transformation, also believes that Ukraine was humiliated at the meeting. “It was right for Zelenskyy to defend our dignity, but it was a mistake for him to get involved in an argument,” he wrote on Facebook. “The agreement would not have guaranteed us any security, Trump did not want to supply us with more weapons before or after this agreement.” He believes Trump could now partially lift the sanctions against Russia: But then the question would arise, in exchange for what?
Sergiy Koshman of the Ukrainian “We are Europeans” movement believes that Trump and the representatives of his administration did everything they could to satisfy their voters at the meeting in front of the cameras. “There is Zelenskyy, who has received a standing ovation in parliaments across the civilized world as a representative of heroic Ukraine, and Trump openly tells him, ‘You are nothing,’ ‘Putin will only listen to me’. Of course, you can’t just accept that,” he wrote on Facebook.
‘A play performed by two actors’
Journalist Serhiy Rudenko believes that Trump has realized that he will not be able to fulfill his campaign promises to his voters regarding the end of the war in Ukraine, which is why he wants to shift the responsibility for this onto Zelenskyy. “This is a play performed by two actors, Trump and Vance. They don’t need a minerals agreement. They just need a scapegoat for their incompetence and cowardice in the face of Vladimir Putin. That is why they chose Zelenskyy,” Rudenko said.
Memes comparing the meeting between Zelenskyy and Trump to a movie scene have gone viral on social media. Ukrainians are also joking about how they would respond to the provocations of the US administration, with some ironically collecting money for their country’s nuclear rearmament. Oleh Horochowskyy, co-founder of Monobank, announced that his fundraising campaign for the production of nuclear weapons had raised two million hryvnias (around €46,000) in the first 30 minutes. That morning, he wrote on Telegram: “10 million in 10 hours!”
In 1994, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan surrendered all the nuclear weapons on their territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union to Russia, by signing the Budapest Memorandum and the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In return, the US and Russia, in particular, guaranteed their territorial integrity.
This article was originally written in Ukrainian.
