On February 28, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky got the meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump that he had been hoping for. It was an opportunity to sign their agreement on minerals and, more importantly, to improve relations and heal their recent fight.
Instead, another fight erupted.
Much has been written on the tone of what was said by both sides, but not enough attention has been paid to the content of what was said.
Much of what Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance said publicly had been said privately before. This was not the first time the United States or its allies have accused Zelensky of always asking for more without expressing gratitude. Vance pressed Zelensky that he “should be thanking the president.” In July 2023, then-British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said that the U.S. and United Kingdom “want to see a bit of gratitude.” And he said that he had previously told Ukraine, “when I drove 11 hours to be given a list, that I’m not like Amazon.” Then-U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that “the American people do deserve a degree of gratitude.”
The complaint is not entirely fair. It is cruel to berate a country being defeated in war for asking for what you promised them if they would continue fighting that war. In the first weeks after invasion, Zelensky was exploring a negotiated peace with Russia when the United States and United Kingdom discouraged him from following that path and promised whatever aid he needed for as long as he needed it as long as he abandoned negotiating with Russia. If you don’t want to be treated like Amazon, you shouldn’t advertise that you provide services like Amazon.
As Vance demanded a thank you from Zelensky, Trump told him that “you don’t have the cards.” But that, too, had been forcefully pointed out before. On February 24, in round one of their fight, Trump said, “I’ve been watching this man for years now, as his cities get demolished, as his people get killed, as the soldiers get decimated. I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards. He has no cards, and you get sick of it. You just get sick of it. And I’ve had it.”
Even Vance’s complaint that “it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media” had been issued before. Vance used the same words in a February 19 interview, when he complained that Zelensky tried “to litigate his disagreements with the president in the public square.”
Trump was also not being original with his firm refusal to commit to a security guarantee that included U.S. troops in Ukraine or to court the risk of World War III. President Joe Biden, too, had insisted that “We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. Direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War Three, something we must strive to prevent.” The Biden administration, too, sometimes recklessly, attempted to calibrate its escalations to avoid confrontation with Russia.
What seemed to irritate Trump and Vance were two comments Zelensky made, one to each of them. Trump’s goal can be summarized as wanting to negotiate a quick end to the war in a way that does not involve U.S. security guarantees that could lead to World War III. Zelensky publicly challenged both those points.
Zelensky implied that without security guarantees that involved American support, Russian President Vladimir Putin would continue his expansionist agenda and, despite the ocean between them, Russia would threaten the United States: “You have nice ocean and don’t feel now. But you will feel it in the future.” The New York Times reports that, according to “three people with knowledge of what took place beforehand,” neither the president nor the vice president “had been looking to blow up a deal for Ukraine’s mineral rights.” But, they say, Zelensky “seemingly triggered the two American leaders” in part “by pressing for commitments to protect Ukraine from Russian aggression going forward.”
Trump told Zelensky that he did not know that the United States would feel threatened by Russia. He told him that he was “not in a good position” and that he did not “have the cards.” Trump confronted Zelensky because he publicly demanded U.S. security guarantees that would be “gambling with World War III.”
Zelensky also fundamentally challenged the very possibility of negotiating. Vance suggested that “the path to peace and the path to prosperity” was not the path of war taken by President Biden, but instead the path of “engaging in diplomacy” as “President Trump is doing.” When Zelensky challenged Vance by laying out his case that negotiation with Putin is impossible, Vance objected to his “litigating” a case against negotiations when everyone had agreed on the need for negotiations. Concluding that Putin could not be trusted in negotiations, Zelensky asked Vance, “What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about? What do you mean?” With the only alternative being continued war, Vance shot back, “I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.”
Zelensky’s case against negotiations was that negotiations with Putin are dangerous and naïve because Putin can’t be trusted to do what he signed that he would do. As evidence, Zelensky cites 2019 negotiations with Putin in which he, Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron and then-German Chancellor Angela Markel signed a ceasefire. But “he broke the ceasefire, he killed our people, and he didn’t exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners. But he didn’t do it.”
Zelensky does not identify the negotiations. But given that he says they took place in 2019 and that it involved a prisoner exchange, he is likely talking about the December 2019 meeting in Paris of the Normandy Format, which was a meeting of the heads of the Minsk Agreement states. As suggested by Zelensky, the agreement involved a ceasefire in additional areas, a prisoner exchange, and progress toward local elections in an autonomous Donbas. Nicolai Petro, the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, told me that the mechanism for implementing these goals was the Trilateral Contact Group {TCG). Its delegates were asked to implement the Steinmeier Formula, the latest incarnation of the Minsk Agreements.
Zelensky is accurate about the diplomatic agreement, but he is less accurate about who broke it. “What was not known publicly at the time,” Petro told me, “was that [the Ukrainian delegates to the TCG] were told not to move forward on any of these points. Their job, as they saw it, was to delay negotiations until the Ukrainian army could launch a blitzkrieg into Donbas.” Sergei Garmash, a Ukrainian delegate to the Minsk TCG admitted that “Minsk serves to weaken Russia. It is only useful to Ukraine if it is not implemented; as soon as it is implemented, it is no longer to our advantage.” He was allegedly told by a Western diplomat that “Victors are never judged” and said that “nobody will say anything to you” if they “enter Donetsk militarily and liberate the territory.”
It was not Putin, but Zelensky who signed the agreement with no intention of honoring it.
Zelensky is also accurate that they “signed the exchange of prisoners.” But he is not accurate that Putin “didn’t do it.” On December 29, Zelensky’s office announced that “The mutual release of detainees has been completed. 76 of our people are safe in Ukrainian-controlled territory.” That this prisoner exchange was a fulfillment of the negotiations Zelensky is referring to is shown by mainstream Western media who reported at the time that “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed on the exchange during peace talks in Paris this month.”
Worse is that the 2019 discussions were just a part of the larger Minks Agreement discussions. It is now known that it was not only Kiev’s instructions to use the 2019 talks to “delay negotiations until the Ukrainian army could launch a blitzkrieg into Donbas,” but that it was also Ukraine, Germany, and France’s intention for the entire Minsk Agreements, as has now been verified by statements by each of Putin’s partners in signing the Agreement: Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President François Hollande. Zelensky has also reportedly said that he told Merkel and Macron that “as for Minsk as a whole…We cannot implement it like this.”
And Minsk was not the first time that Ukraine, and not Putin, broke an agreement. After the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Donbas voted in favor of sovereignty, Pyotr Poroshenko was elected president of Ukraine. He initiated negotiations for a peaceful settlement with rebel leaders in the Donbas. The talks were promising, and, by the end of the next month, a formula for peacefully keeping Donbas in Ukraine had been found. At this point, on June 24, the Russian parliament rescinded the authority to use troops abroad. A peace was possible. But instead, Nicolai Petro reports, the government in Kiev decided that Putin’s decision to withdraw troops put the Ukrainian military in a new advantage, and, instead of pursuing the peace, Poroshenko ordered the launch of attacks to recapture Donbas militarily.
Though much of the media focus has been on the tone of what was said, not enough attention has been paid to what was said, which included key ideas going forward, including negotiating an end to the war or going on fighting it and offering Ukraine a security guarantee that does not risk a Russian-American war and the risk of World War III.
