US President Donald Trump walks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders at the White House. Photo / Tom Brenner, for The Washington Post
When seven European leaders joined Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House last week, the stagecraft was everything their host could have desired.
One after another, they lavished praise on United States President Donald Trump’s leadership, feeding his bottomless appetite for flattery.
Zelenskyy - determined not to have a repeat of the blow-up that occurred during his visit to the Oval Office in February - arrived in an upgraded wardrobe and expressed his gratitude no fewer than 11 times in under five minutes.
Calculating that Trump’s positions tend to be shaped by the last people he spoke to, his visitors left the White House relieved.
They had edged the US President back from some of what he had appeared ready to grant Moscow after meeting three days earlier in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
What the Europeans put on was a master class in the art of the deal - the art, that is, of dealing with Trump.
But for all the scrambling that took place around the back-to-back summits, there was no apparent progress towards Trump’s declared goal to “to end the killing and stop the war in Ukraine”.
As Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, put it in an interview: “It reminds me a little bit of when I go to the playground with my kids and I spin them around on a merry-go-round.
“There’s a lot of movement. You get a little sick. It’s dizzying. And then you end up at exactly the same place you started.”
Trump’s brand of diplomacy is indeed a disorienting one, anchored by few foundational principles and frequently upended by his shifting positions and declarations that turn out to be hollow.
Where he went into his meeting with Putin demanding a ceasefire and warning of “severe consequences” if the Russian leader did not agree to one, Trump came out of it saying that would not be necessary after all.
“It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up,” he wrote on social media, taking a posture that aligned him with Putin.
It is hard to imagine how Zelenskyy can show up at a peace table when Russian missiles and drones are still raining down on his country.
And Moscow is showing no enthusiasm or urgency for the face-to-face meeting of the two leaders that Trump has suggested is the imminent next move towards peace.
Trump also claimed that Putin had agreed to the “very significant step” of accepting security guarantees for Ukraine, including the possibility that European countries could put “boots on the ground” there.
His special envoy Steve Witkoff went so far as to call it a “game-changing” move in which Russia would allow the US and Europe to offer “Article 5-like protection” to Ukraine - a reference to Nato’s collective defence clause that stipulates an attack on one is to be treated as an attack on all.
Russia, however, does not appear to have budged from its insistence that it be allowed a veto over any such arrangement, which would render the supposed concession meaningless.
Nor has it backed down from its demand that Ukraine surrender much of the strategically important Donbas region - the kind of deal that Trump at one point appeared open to with his talk of “land swaps”.
Such a possibility has alarmed foreign policy professionals.
“Given that Putin has been unable to secure this land militarily, pressuring Ukraine to willingly hand it over would be a complete farce and outrage.
“Not only would doing so present security risks for Ukraine, it would encourage and reward aggressor nations - say, China toward Taiwan - to seize the land of others by force,” Eric Edelman, a former ambassador and counsellor at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and David Kramer, executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, wrote in a column for the Dispatch.
On Trump’s part, however, there is a disdain for the views of the foreign policy establishment, as demonstrated by his pick of Witkoff, a real estate developer and longtime friend, to be his envoy, and his purge of much of the expertise that once existed in places like the National Security Council and the intelligence agencies.
Because the President’s team lacks experience, Trump’s first-term national security adviser John Bolton told me, they have missed some of the signals that Moscow is sending.
“If you’re constantly misunderstanding what the other side is talking about, you can believe you are making progress,” he said.
Bolton, a fierce critic of the president for whom he once worked, is the latest of Trump’s enemies to find himself the target of a Justice Department investigation; his house was searched by FBI agents as part of an investigation into whether he illegally possessed or shared classified material.
The President has operated on the assumption that he can bring Putin around on the strength of their personal relationship.
At last week’s White House meeting, a hot mic captured him telling French President Emmanuel Macron: “I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand, as crazy as it sounds”.
On Saturday, Trump sounded less confident that their rapport will be enough, as he acknowledged how little progress has been made.
Trump’s approach to summits has been the opposite of the traditional one, in which lower-level officials work out the details with weeks and months of advance work before the principals meet to hash out final sticking points and sign off on the “deliverables”.
What Trump prefers, Bolton said, is to begin by seeking a headline that could win him a Nobel Peace Prize “and let the munchkins put the details together”.
As he sought a return to the White House in 2024, Trump often declared that he could bring peace to Ukraine “in 24 hours”.
On Saturday, the President described the relationship between Putin and Zelenskyy as being “like oil and vinegar a little bit” and acknowledged that making peace between them hasn’t turned out to be as simple as he expected.
“This one I felt would have been in the middle of the pack in terms of difficulty. And it’s turning out to be the most difficult,” he said.
One difference between making campaign promises and governing is having to make hard choices, noted James Lindsay, a senior fellow in US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
For Trump, he said, that will ultimately mean either committing to Ukraine’s survival or walking away and allowing Russia to grind its way to a victory on the battlefield.
“Not choosing,” Lindsay added, “eventually becomes a choice in and of itself.”
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