Zelenskyy brings back up to White House as Trump aligns more closely with Putin

By David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON — This time, when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine arrives in the Oval Office, he will come with backup.

An array of European prime ministers and presidents are flying in for the meeting on Monday (18) to make sure that a viable, defensible Ukraine survives whatever carving up of its territory is about to happen at the negotiating table.

But they are also there to make certain that the trans-Atlantic alliance emerges intact. President Donald Trump’s instant reversal on the crucial issue of obtaining a ceasefire before negotiating over land or security guarantees has left many of them shaken and wondering whether Trump had once again been swayed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

By most accounts, the European officials want to ensure that Trump has not pivoted too close to the Russian side and does not try to strong-arm Zelenskyy into a deal that will ultimately sow the seeds of Ukraine’s dissolution. And they want to safeguard against the risk of the United States, the linchpin of European security since NATO’s creation in 1949, undermining that interest.

In a call with Zelenskyy on Saturday (16), Trump offered support for US security assurance for Ukraine after the war, a shift from his stance that Europe should bear the burden of protecting the country, though the specifics were unclear.

At a news conference Sunday (17) in Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Union’s executive arm, stressed the importance of security guarantees for Ukraine and respect for its territory. But she also said it was paramount to “stop the killing” and urged talks among the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and the United States “as soon as possible”.

One senior European diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of angering Trump, described a sense of panic among European allies. The diplomat had not seen a meeting like the one set for Monday come together so quickly since just before the Iraq War.

The foremost concern, the diplomat said, was to avoid another scene like the one that took place in February when Zelenskyy met with Trump in front of the television cameras at the White House.

At that meeting, Trump berated the Ukrainian president, saying “you don’t have the cards” in the war — essentially telling a weak foreign power to bend to the demands of a far more powerful one. The president did so again Friday night, after Putin flew back to the Russian Far East, telling a Fox News interviewer that Ukraine was going to have to realize that Russia was a more “powerful” country, and that power meant Zelenskyy was going to have to make concessions.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who sat in on the meetings with Putin at the US air base outside Anchorage, Alaska, disputed the idea that the Europeans were coming as a posse to protect Zelenskyy from a repeat of the February shouting match.

“They’re not coming here to keep Zelenskyy from getting bullied,” Rubio insisted to Margaret Brennan on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’.

“They are coming here tomorrow because we’ve been working with the Europeans,” he said, listing the many meetings the United States had engaged in before and after the Putin visit. “We invited them to come.”

European officials said Saturday that Trump told Zelenskyy he was free to bring guests to the meeting, and later the White House extended invitations to several European leaders.

Whatever the motive for the leaders to upend their schedules on short notice, there is little question that elements of the negotiation will test the cohesiveness of the Atlantic alliance. Putin’s agenda is larger than just seizing part or all of Ukraine. For nearly a quarter-century, his grandest ambition has been to split NATO, dividing European allies from the United States.

As Europe and Ukraine struggle to navigate Trump’s sudden reversal of strategy for ending a war that has stretched well past three years, Putin has a renewed opportunity to realize his dream. The United States and its European allies now appear to be pursuing different negotiating strategies.

The differences have long been brewing. But in the weeks before the Putin meeting, they broke out into the open. “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,” Vice President JD Vance said flatly a week ago.

The Europeans, however, have promised continued support through a grouping of countries operating outside of the NATO alliance. They got Trump to promise to supply weapons, as long as the United States was paid for them from European coffers.

The message was clear: Defending Ukraine was Europe’s problem, not Washington’s. The Trump administration is happy to serve as a for-profit arms supplier but otherwise appears to see no responsibility to defend the country, which is not a NATO member.

That was a wedge that Putin sought to exploit in Anchorage, and he did it skilfully.

Trump has adopted many of Putin’s talking points and few of the West’s. Even before he met face to face with Putin, he assured the Russian leader that Ukraine’s application to join NATO would be put on long-term hold — a position that his predecessor, Joe Biden, also took. At various moments, he hinted that Ukraine invited invasion by applying to the alliance and to membership in the European Union.

After the Friday (15) summit with Putin, he went another step. Trump and European allies had agreed last week that a ceasefire must precede a peace accord, but he abandoned that view and sided with the Russian leader.

“With Trump abandoning the ceasefire, but making no reference to the ‘severe consequences’ he threatened, we are at a dangerous moment for the alliance,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral who served as NATO’s supreme allied commander from 2009-13, when the United States still viewed Russia as a NATO partner, if a difficult one.

This is exactly the kind of split that European leaders were trying to avoid after Trump’s return to power in January. NATO’s new secretary-general, Mark Rutte, a former prime minister of the Netherlands, visited Washington frequently for quiet meetings with Trump. He was determined to avoid the kind of public breach that took place in the first term, when Trump came to the edge of withdrawing the United States from what he called an “obsolete” alliance.

Rutte helped engineer the announcement in June, at a NATO summit, that nearly all members of the alliance had committed to spend 5% of their gross domestic product on defence. (Of that, 1.5% is infrastructure spending only tangentially related to military spending.) That gave Trump an early win — and demonstrated that, even if a decade late, Europe was getting serious about taking responsibility for its own defence. Trump took credit and left the summit praising NATO’s reforms.

Then, European leaders designed the program to buy US weapons for Ukraine, recognizing its appeal to the president. The United States could remain Ukraine’s arms supplier, but at no cost to American taxpayers.

The strategy seemed to be paying off a few weeks ago, when Trump castigated Putin for holding friendly conversations while continuing to kill civilians. He set deadlines and threatened to impose secondary sanctions on countries that were buying oil from Russia.

For the first time since Trump’s inauguration, Washington’s approach, including the threat of new sanctions on Russian oil and gas if there was no ceasefire, and Europe’s continued military and economic pressure, seemed roughly aligned. Last Wednesday, European leaders talked with Trump, and he agreed to hold firm with Putin that a ceasefire must precede a longer peace negotiation.

That alignment is what blew up in Anchorage.

“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,” Trump wrote on his social media site early Saturday.

Trump’s flip-flops stand in contrast to Putin’s determination to stay the course with the war, even as the body count of Russians killed has soared. “Peace will come when we achieve our goals,” he proclaimed in late 2023.

Even then, Putin privately was sending signals that he was open to discussing a ceasefire, but only if it froze existing battle lines — meaning Ukraine would have to cede control over roughly 20% of its territory. His overtures were rebuffed at the time.

But now the Russian military is making considerable gains, so Putin no longer has interest in a ceasefire.

“They feel like they’ve got momentum on the battlefield,” Rubio said, “and frankly, don’t care, don’t seem to care very much about how many Russian soldiers die in this endeavour.”

“It’s a meat grinder,’’ he added, “and they just have more meat to grind.”

That reality would seem to suggest that the timing is hardly right for a peace agreement. Putin may calculate his best strategy is to drag out the talks.

But when European and US officials gather at the White House on Monday, they will have more to discuss than just boundaries. The Europeans have to find a way to bring Trump on board for concrete security guarantees for Ukraine — which could include a peacekeeping force that would deter Putin from restarting the war in a few years.

In his conversation with European leaders after the Putin summit, Trump suggested for the first time that he might be willing to join that effort — though the assumption is that he would contribute US intelligence, not troops.

In London on Sunday, after a virtual meeting of European countries that call themselves a “coalition of the willing” — a phrase used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer issued a statement that commended Trump for his “commitment to providing security guarantees for Ukraine”.

That phrasing seemed intended to lock him into the effort. The statement reiterated that the United Kingdom and other European nations were ready to “deploy a reassurance force once hostilities have ceased, and to help secure Ukraine’s skies and seas and regenerate Ukraine’s armed forces”.

The United States has never been that specific.

-New York Times

President Donald Trump listens to Mark Rutte, left, the NATO secretary general, during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, July 14, 2025. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine brings back up to the White House as President Donald Trump aligns more closely with Vladimir Putin; European leaders are coming to Washington to make sure the trans-Atlantic alliance emerges intact -Doug Mills/The New York Times