Trump's meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky was really painful to watch at times. Some commentators saw it as a trap set up by Trump and his vice president JD Vance for the leader of a country that has been at war with Russia for three years. Some characterized the meeting as a disaster for Ukraine, and there are also those who say that the era of mandatory applause for the neoliberal mascot in the form of Zelensky is definitely over. Most, however, agree that diplomacy in the interpretation of the current American administration has lost its meaning. It is an understatement to say that the unsuccessful conversation between Trump and Zelensky resulted in the complete suspension of US aid to Ukraine a few days later.
NO SUITS AND AMERICAN SUPPORT
Immediately upon his arrival at the White House, Zelensky was instead greeted with a sarcastic remark about his clothes. "You are fixed today," Trump said, alluding to Volodymyr Zelensky's military outfit, which he says he wears as a sign of solidarity with Ukrainian soldiers at the front. A little later, during the meeting in the Oval Office, one of the journalists present, who could be classified as a group of sycophants and occasional winners of Trump's reality show, accused Zelensky of disrespect because he did not wear a suit for the meeting with the American president.
In an even more aggressive tone, Vice President JD Vance attacked him for being ungrateful for not once thanking America for its support. If Trump is to be believed, that support amounts to between 300 and 350 billion dollars, but fact-checkers, including the BBC's verification team, cannot confirm the truth of the information presented. The German Kiel Institute, which monitors aid to Ukraine, has calculated that the United States of America (USA) has sent about 120 billion dollars to Ukraine by the end of 2024. The US Department of Defense has a figure of 128,8 billion spent on Operation Atlantic Resolve, launched in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The narrative that the US invested much more than Europe was also demolished when French President Emmanuel Macron confronted him in front of the cameras in the Oval Office, with a smile and a friendly touch on Trump's knee.
"No, actually, to be honest, we paid. We paid 60 percent of the total effort; it was through, as in the USA, loans, guarantees, grants. And we provided real money, to be clear," Macron corrected the American leader.
Can Europe fill the holes left by the end of US military aid? This week's interruption or pause in military aid, as described by official Washington, is not the first. In the summer of 2023, the Republicans in the US Congress blocked the then President Biden's intention to send the largest tranche of military aid to Ukraine up to that time. A few months later, $60 billion worth of aid did arrive.
Although it produces its own weapons, Ukraine depends on American and European military aid. In the last three years, the United States has been the single largest donor and its share is 49 percent of the total aid sent to Ukraine. The countries of the European Union, plus Great Britain, Switzerland and Iceland covered the remaining 51 percent, which means that each of them must now double their payments to Kyiv. If this does not happen, military analysts predict a strong Russian offensive and an uncertain outcome of the conflict.
HUG EUROPE
At the summit of European leaders in London, to which Zelensky traveled immediately after a stormy and at times humiliating conversation with the American head of state, the host, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and others made an effort to make it clear to him that they were on the side of Ukraine and that he was among friends on European soil. Hugs, words of support and calls for European unity, however, are not enough, because the unpredictable and not at all diplomatic Donald Trump is making moves to which Europe is only responding for now, without its own initiative. Just a few hours after Starmer said from the summit in London that the aid of all allies of Ukraine, including America, must continue to arrive, Trump responded by canceling it.
However, Trump is first and foremost a businessman. He claims that he only paused military aid to Ukraine until Zelensky showed that he was ready to discuss a ceasefire and a peace solution. He also says he is still interested in a deal on Ukrainian ores.
The demand that Ukraine hand over half of its mineral wealth to America is just one of the astonishing demands that Trump made to Panama, Denmark, and Canada at the beginning of his second term. Ukraine agreed to hand over 51 percent of its mineral wealth to him, and that was supposed to be the subject of discussions and even the signing of an agreement in the White House, but it all ended with something resembling the expulsion of Zelensky from it.
In a conversation with Kenneth Roth, the former director of the respected organization Human Rights Watch, the American journalist Amy Goodman asked whether the agreement on the transfer of rare ores to America actually represents a greater threat to Putin because they are located in the part of Ukrainian territory controlled by Russia.
"Ores can be sold by anyone who owns them. What is really at stake here is the question of whether Ukraine can maintain its democracy or not. And that is what Putin wants to stifle. And without European security guarantees, which need American support, he will succeed. And that's why the conflict in the White House was not just a juvenile charade that Vance and Trump turned it into; this was really a matter of life and death for Ukrainian democracy", Roth believes.
WORLD WAR THIRD
The Trump administration dealt a blow not only to Ukraine but also to Europe, whose leaders from the summit in London, although with the unequivocal support of Zelensky, still sent conciliatory tones to Washington.
The American president, like a real but also dangerous showman, organized a show in front of carefully selected journalists and TV cameras in the White House. In a fiery debate with the Ukrainian leader, he even accused him of wanting to start the Third World War.
Although it is strange, writes the British "Guardian", to talk about the resistance as if it were a Nazi-style wartime occupation, world leaders must resist Trump. American democracy has been hijacked by the ultra-right clique embodied in Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, while European neo-fascists admire them from afar, warned British columnist Simon Tisdall.
Drawing parallels with the fascists and the world wars of the last century inevitably brings to mind the historic meeting between Hitler and Czechoslovak President Emil Haha on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the Czech Republic. Almost a century later, the world once again finds itself in a danger embodied in more than just a transatlantic, unpredictable freak. Or as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk would say, opening the meeting this week, "fasten your seat belts, we are entering a zone of turbulence".
