Pres. Zelensky For a Second Time Sat By Trump and Listened to His Outrageous Praising The Enemy, Putin

 

By Jonathan SwanSimon J. LevienConstant Méheut and David E. Sanger

The New York Times

President Volodymyr Zelensky wore a grim expression as he stood next to former President Donald J. Trump. The two leaders were appearing on Fox News after their meeting on Friday in Trump Tower, their first in five years.

As Mr. Zelensky stood silently beside him, Mr. Trump presented the Russia-Ukraine war as one that both sides wanted to end, including its instigator, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Mr. Trump did not fault the Russian leader for the invasion or for the illegal seizure of territory or for the thousands of Ukrainians he has bombed out of existence. Instead, the former president described the situation as if it were a dispute between two parties operating in good faith that could be resolved in a “fair deal,” but only if he returns to the White House.

“I’ve been saying that I believe if I win, we’re going to have a very fair, and I think, actually rather rapid deal,” Mr. Trump said. The war, he added, “should stop, and the president wants it to stop. I’m sure President Putin wants it to stop. And that’s a good combination. So we want to have a fair deal for  

Mr. Zelensky is in a difficult position with Mr. Trump. He knows Mr. Trump has a solid chance of winning in November, and that if he does, he will immediately face a decision over how much support to give to Ukraine and what posture the United States will take in the conflict. Earlier this week, Mr. Zelensky made mildly critical comments about Mr. Trump that almost scuttled their meeting.

As he stood alongside Mr. Trump on Fox News on Friday, Mr. Zelensky was diplomatic but struggled to make clear where he thought the blame resided.

“This war shouldn’t be started, and I think that the problem that Putin killed so many people and, of course, we need to do everything to pressure him to stop this war,” Mr. Zelensky said. “He is on our territory, that’s the most important to understand. He is on our territory, and how to stop the war to pressure him as we can. As we can — we have to do it.”

The two leaders had just spent roughly an hour together in the conference room on the 25th floor of Trump Tower on Friday morning. They were both in uniform. Mr. Trump wore shiny dress shoes, a blue suit and a long red tie. Mr. Zelensky was in work boots, cargo pants and an olive-green sweatshirt.

The last time they were together, in September 2019, Mr. Trump was in the middle of a scandal — one of the biggest of his presidency — over a phone call he had made to Mr. Zelensky in which he pressured the Ukrainian leader to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden. 

Now, only six weeks before Election Day, Mr. Zelensky had arrived as a wartime leader to shore up a shaky relationship.

Before the meeting, as they emerged from double doors together, Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky paused at the head of a large conference table to deliver brief remarks to reporters.

“I think that we can work out something that’s good for both sides,” Mr. Trump said, insisting that if he won the election, he would be able to end the war even before taking office on Jan. 20.

Mr. Zelensky has previously expressed skepticism over Mr. Trump’s claims that he could rapidly end the war. And Mr. Trump’s public statements over the past two years have given the Ukrainians plenty of reasons to be concerned. He initially described the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Mr. Putin as an act of “genius.” And he has repeatedly insisted that he could resolve the conflict within 24 hours — a message that some in Ukraine take to mean that he would pressure them to capitulate to Russia.

“We have common view that the war in Ukraine has to be stopped,” Mr. Zelensky said on Friday as he stood beside Mr. Trump. He added: “And Putin can’t win, and Ukraine has to prevail.” 

Mr. Trump’s assertion that both sides want a deal sidesteps a core question: Whether leaving Russia with a part of Ukraine — it now controls around 20 percent — rewards aggression, and would only lead in time to another Russian invasion, perhaps in Ukraine, perhaps elsewhere. It takes no moral position on whether invading sovereign nations is a fundamental violation of international law.

Despite Mr. Trump’s statement, “there is zero indication that President Putin is interested in a peace deal that would — or should — be acceptable to Ukraine or NATO,” said Seth Jones, a former Defense Department official who is now a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mr. Jones said that Mr. Putin “wants to hold onto Ukrainian territory that he has conquered by brute force, neuter Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and make Ukraine a Russian client state. This type of ‘deal’ would put countries on NATO’s eastern flank, such as Poland and the Baltic States, in grave danger of future Russian aggression.”

Richard N. Haass, a former national security official and senior diplomat who is the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Russian leader “has made clear he wants a deal that is one-sided and gives him territory permanently.” He noted that making diplomacy work will require “keeping the pressure on Russia by keeping the U.S. support going, and it’s not clear Donald Trump wants to continue that.”

Morgan Finkelstein, a campaign spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, said in a statement, “The only Ukraine deal Trump wants is one that benefits Putin, not Ukraine.” 

Mr. Trump has not directly answered whether he wants Ukraine to win the war, and it’s unclear what any such victory would look like. Mr. Zelensky wants more American weapons, and his plan is to strike back harder at Russia, with continued attacks inside Russia’s borders. While it seems unlikely Ukraine will be able to remove Russia entirely from its territory, Mr. Zelensky wants to put pressure on Mr. Putin to build up a stronger negotiating position for a peace deal with security guarantees for Ukraine.

Mr. Zelensky told reporters at Trump Tower that he was there to discuss his plan to bring about a “just peace.” He was careful to remain apolitical in his remarks. Mr. Zelensky has tried to maintain good relations with both Republicans and Democrats, given that the Ukrainian military relies on bipartisan support from Congress for the continuing supply of high-powered weapons. Mr. Zelensky emphasized that he had met with both presidential candidates this week.

But his efforts on Friday morning to stay out of U.S. domestic politics lasted about three minutes.

Mr. Trump immediately dragged the Ukrainian leader back into an episode that tested the relationship between the two countries when he was president. Mr. Trump said, admiringly, that Mr. Zelensky was “like a piece of steel” for the way he had handled the aftermath of the phone call between the leaders in 2019 that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.

At the time, Mr. Trump was holding up aid to Ukraine to increase his leverage over Mr. Zelensky, whom he was pressing to open a corruption investigation into the Biden family. Mr. Zelensky said publicly that he had felt no pressure on the call — a statement Mr. Trump emphasized as the basis for his warm feelings toward the Ukrainian president.

“He said, ‘President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong,’” Mr. Trump recalled, misquoting Mr. Zelensky, who stood beside him awkwardly. “He said it loud and clear, and the impeachment hoax died right there.” 

Mr. Zelensky has said multiple times that he is ready to work with whoever wins the U.S. presidential election in November. “If Mr. Donald Trump becomes president, then we will work with him,” he said at a news conference this summer. “I am not afraid of it.”

Ukrainian officials started building bridges with Mr. Trump’s camp this year, hoping to shape his views on Ukraine in case he is elected. A group of Ukrainian lawmakers met with former Trump administration officials in March.

But as the U.S. election nears, Ukrainian officials have grown increasingly concerned about Mr. Trump’s claims that he would end the war swiftly if re-elected, fearing this could result in Ukraine being forced to cede significant territory to Russia.

Breaking with his self-professed neutrality, Mr. Zelensky questioned Mr. Trump’s plan to end the war in a recent interview with The New Yorker. He also described Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who has been deeply critical of previous U.S. aid packages for Ukraine, as “too radical.”

“My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how,” Mr. Zelensky said in the interview. “With this war, oftentimes, the deeper you look at it, the less you understand.” 

Mr. Zelensky’s comments to the magazine infuriated the Trump team — so much that the Trump Tower meeting almost didn’t happen.

Trump allies were also angry about a visit Mr. Zelensky made on Tuesday to a factory in Pennsylvania that supplies munitions for the war. Some close to Mr. Trump claimed that the appearance was “election interference” because Mr. Zelensky had posed for photos with prominent Democrats in the battleground state.

The fury in Mr. Trump’s orbit became so hot that Representative James Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, began an inquiry on Wednesday into Mr. Zelensky’s trip to Pennsylvania, implying that it was an improper campaign stop on behalf of Ms. Harris.

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, released an extraordinary public statement calling on Mr. Zelensky to fire his ambassador to the United States. The ambassador, Oksana Markarova, did not attend Friday’s meeting.

At a campaign event on Wednesday, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Zelensky for being someone who “refuses to make a deal” with Russia despite the devastation in the country. Mr. Trump said that Mr. Zelensky was “making little nasty aspersions” toward him. 

Still, Mr. Trump did not go as far in attacking Mr. Zelensky as some of his more anti-Ukraine allies had wanted. At least one adviser tried to rile up Mr. Trump about how Mr. Zelensky was effectively campaigning for Democrats, but the former president dismissed the suggestion, saying that he didn’t want to talk about it, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Zelensky sent a warm personal note to Mr. Trump to try to get the relationship back on track, telling him it was “important for us to have a personal contact and to understand each other 100 percent.”

After receiving the note, Mr. Trump agreed to meet with Mr. Zelensky, but he also posted the private message on his social media website, Truth Social, on Thursday. The former president has a history of publicizing private communications when he thinks they are politically advantageous. In this case, the message showed that it was Mr. Zelensky who sought the meeting.

Analysts in Ukraine say the Zelensky administration has been developing strategies to appeal to Mr. Trump’s key stated interests, such as shoring up the American economy. Some analysts there take comfort in the fact that after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, Mr. Trump reversed President Barack Obama’s policy of not providing lethal weapons to Ukraine. They were also encouraged to see Mr. Trump soft-pedal his opposition to additional American aid to Ukraine, giving Republican members of Congress the breathing room to vote in favor of the military package after months of holding back.

At the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump sat at the center of the table, framed by American flags. There was no Ukrainian flag, an exclusion that would be out of the norm if it were an official state visit. 

Several critical Trump advisers were also present. Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, attended. Mr. Trump’s top political advisers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, sat at the conference table to Mr. Trump’s left. Mr. Zelensky brought his closest aide, his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.

Mr. Trump said in the Fox News interview that he “learned a lot” in the meeting. He said he was open to meeting again, and Mr. Zelensky took the opportunity to invite Mr. Trump to visit Ukraine.

“I will,” Mr. Trump said.

In a post on X, Mr. Zelensky described the meeting as “very productive.”

“I presented him our Victory Plan, and we thoroughly reviewed the situation in Ukraine and the consequences of the war for our people,” Mr. Zelensky wrote in the post. “Many details were discussed. I am grateful for this meeting. A just peace is needed. We share the common view that the war in Ukraine must be stopped. Putin cannot win. Ukrainians must prevail.”

Mr. Zelensky’s final assertion — that Ukraine must prevail and Mr. Putin must be denied a victory — goes further than anything Mr. Trump has said in public.

Michael Gold contributed reporting.