After Donald Trump’s capitulation to Vladimir Putin’s demand for Ukraine to cede the entire eastern Donbas region to Moscow, the stage is set for an historic transatlantic showdown at the White House on Monday. The scale of the President’s treachery is unprecedented in the modern era, and means the White House meeting will now serve as the most consequential event in the history of the postwar alliance that has kept the peace in Europe for 80 years.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary General Marc Rutte, are racing to Washington in order to protect President Volodymyr Zelensky from receiving another made-for-TV mugging at the hands of Trump. They will also make a last-ditch effort to salvage the agreement they claimed to have struck with Trump last week to protect Ukraine’s interests in discussions with Putin, and not sell Kyiv down the river.
On Friday night, Zelensky’s European allies may have hoped Trump would spend the weekend in calm reflection about his disastrous decision to invite Putin to Alaska in the first place, Instead, by Saturday afternoon, after a round of golf with US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, the President adhered himself entirely to Putin’s position.
Throughout last week, the more that European leaders talked up the five-point strategic plan they thought they had sealed with Trump before the summit, the less the US leader was willing to acknowledge the existence of any deal with them. Even on Friday morning, as he flew to Alaska aboard Air Force One, Trump rang alarm bells by telling reporters that his call for a truce was “nothing to do with Europe. Europe is not telling me what to do”.
That position runs counter to the deal that Merz heralded last Wednesday, after what he described as “truly, exceptionally constructive” talks with Trump. Then, European leaders believed they had won the American president over, securing his pledge to demand an immediate Russian truce and promising not to negotiate away Ukrainian territory without Zelensky’s consent. But by Saturday morning, Trump was binning the entire concept of a ceasefire (“often times they do not hold up”, he wrote dismissively on social media) and backing the dismemberment of Ukraine via rapid peace talks that he indicated would begin with Zelensky’s trek to Washington on Monday.
Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump in a tense meeting in the Oval Office in February (Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty)Putin’s success bending Trump to his will has once again revealed the American president’s susceptibility to being influenced by the most recent voice in his ear. Ukraine is now back in his crosshairs, after Putin on Friday spoke of his eagerness to “turn the page” in the relationship between Washington and the Kremlin and usher in a new era of bilateral economic co-operation.
“Vladimir said…’I’ve never seen anybody do so much, so fast’”, Trump gushed to Sean Hannity of Fox News in a post-summit interview. “He said ‘your country is hot as a pistol’, and a year ago he thought it was dead”.
One month before Trump is poised to make his historic and controversial second state visit to the UK, his entire relationship with Starmer and Zelensky’s other allies is now on the line. While Ukraine remains the central irritant, a growing transatlantic rift is also developing over Gaza, with Trump dismissing European plans to recognise a Palestinian state. The US trade war causes continuing angst in Europe’s corridors of power, with governments wondering what further tariffs the White House will unleash upon them.
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If there is any limited daylight for Zelensky and his entourage to exploit in Washington, it may emanate from Republicans in the US Senate. Many of them continue to threaten Putin with fresh sanctions over his ongoing aggression towards Ukraine. But Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an influential Trump ally, is indicating that Putin could now be given until Christmas to cooperate. Only then would his failure trigger “severe consequences” in order to “end the war honourably and justly”.
After spending months bending over backwards to avoid a total breach with Trump, and praising him for – in the Prime Minister’s words on Saturday – an Alaska summit that “brought us closer than ever before to ending Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine”, the threat of an angry divorce draws ever closer. Trump’s European visitors can only wonder how long anything they say on Monday will echo in the U.S. leader’s mind, or whether one more beguiling phone call with Putin will persuade Trump to halt all assistance for Kyiv and seal Ukraine’s fate.
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