Volodymyr Zelensky's massive blunder

On Friday, the President of Ukraine had one job; keeping Donald Trump happy. He failed, and the consequences are enormous.

You may not be surprised that when I first heard on Friday about Volodymyr Zelensky's disastrous White House trip, I wanted to feel for him.

After all, Vladimir Putin, Zelensky’s foe, is a venomous dictator - and a coward, as his sad fear of Covid proved. His insistence that Russia remains a great power, rather than what it is — a third-world country with a nuclear arsenal¹ — would be comic if it weren’t so dangerous.

Yet Russia does have nukes. And Putin runs Russia and will for the foreseeable future. He kills the naughty and the nice too. In June 2023, the mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin moved against him. Two months later Prigozhin was dead, someone tried to teach him to fly by blowing up his plane. The lawyer Alexei Navalny lasted longer. In 2021, he returned to Russia after being poisoned, daring Putin to kill him. Challenge accepted! Navalny died in a Siberian prison in February 2024. Cause of death: Putin.

So it doesn’t matter that I think Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was wrong. His men rule Ukraine’s east. Kiev cannot evict them even with American aid. Without it Ukraine will face a slow losing war that will end only when Putin decides it should.

This is reality, and no one should be more aware of reality than the Volodymyr Zelensky. His country’s future depends on it. Zelensky isn’t a coward. He stayed in Kiev in 2022, when everyone thought Putin’s men would take it in days.

But Zelensky is deeply in love with himself, and on Friday his narcissism did not serve his country.

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(Unreported truths. And hard truths. For less than 20 cents a day.)

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As you already know by now, on Friday, Zelensky visited the White House to sign an agreement to allow the United States to extract valuable minerals from Ukraine.

The deal had two purposes. It would help Ukraine repay some of the hundreds of billions of dollars in American military aid it has received since 2022, when Russia invaded. It would also give the United States a tangible economic interest in Ukraine’s independence, binding the two countries closer together.

It’s not the deal I would have made. We are a rich country and Ukraine is not, we don’t need to demand they pay us back for our help, and we should do what’s in our strategic interest without commercial considerations.

Nonetheless, Donald Trump was elected to make deals like this.

He clearly stood and stands for the principle that Western Europe in particular has taken advantage of trillions of dollars in American military spending. He and his advisors believe that relationship needs to change — in part because in the long run European dependency doesn’t help Europe either, it has led to a creeping rigidity in European culture, politics, and business that is hollowing out the continent. And this view, sadly, is closer to right than wrong. Where is Europe’s Google or Amazon or Tesla? Where is Europe’s DoorDash, for Pete’s sake?

Even more seriously, where are Europe’s children? Italy and Spain are in demographic free-fall, and northern Europe is hardly better off. It is impossible not to visit the great cities of Europe and not have the unsettling feeling they’ve become open-air museums built around luxury shopping.

So the deal was done, and Zelensky came to Washington to sign it.

He almost did, too.

Until the 50-minute press conference from hell.

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(Vladimir Putin, hero for our time)

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When I first saw Trump’s loyalists claiming that you need to watch the whole press conference to understand what happened, I assumed they were making excuses.

I was wrong about that too.

You do need to watch the whole conference to understand what happened. Zelensky was wrong-footed from the start. For him, it’s always 2022, and he is always the hero telling the world, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

The fact that the world just does not care that much about a New Jersey-sized patch of dirt in eastern Ukraine has not registered with him. He wants to be Trump’s equal throughout the press conference, and he wants Trump to understand how terrible Putin really is. As for Trump, he just wants to get through the press conference so he can get back to hanging with Elon Musk.

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(You ain’t getting this anywhere else.)

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And what exactly does Donald Trump think of Putin?

I cannot begin to guess. But here’s what I know. As far as Trump is concerned, Putin has not lied to him about Ukraine. So he is willing to accept Putin’s assurances that a ceasefire will hold. If Putin breaks that deal and starts the war again, Trump wll worry about it when the time comes. He doesn’t view the loss of some Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine provinces to Russia as a strategic catastrophe. If Zelensky does, too bad for Zelensky.

Now, you can view Trump’s version of events as a credulous capitulation to Putin that is only going to lead to more Russian expansionism, or you can view it as realpolitik at its toughest, even a 0.1 percent chance that New York gets turned to glass for the Donbas² is 0.1 percent too much. I suppose history will decide who’s right, though, again, I lean toward the former.

But it doesn’t matter what I think. I’m not in charge. And Zelensky’s not in charge either. Donald Trump is.

Zelensky forgot that fact on Friday. He forgot a couple of other facts too.

First, arguing in public with Trump is a major mistake. Trump is very much a more-flies-with-honey guy. The Western Europeans have learned this lesson well, thus the British invitation for him to dine with the king.

Second, Trump does not like anyone he perceives is taking advantage of his or American generosity.

And third, a lot of what Trump does is performative, sometimes because he thinks tossing verbal bombs is a way to burnish his reputation as a guy who will tell hard truths and shake things up, sometimes to own the libs, sometimes merely for his own amusement (his weird sense of humor is clearly an underrated strength)

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To wit:

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It’s strange that Zelensky, who is a comedian by trade, cannot understand this crucial fact about Trump. But he cannot. The vibe at the press conference is very much that of a student who thinks — knows — he’s smarter than his teacher, and is just desperate to get the teacher to understand: Putin’s bad, Mr. Trump! He’s really bad. The Russians are bad too. Don’t you get it!

Zelensky cannot seem to see the irony: he’s right, of course. Putin is bad. He’s Dr. Evil, only without the nuance. He’s so absurdly bad that Trump would have to be a fool not to understand he’s bad, and Trump is not a fool.

Trump just does not care. At least not when it comes to the Donbas.

Zelensky should have shut his mouth, told Trump how grateful he was for all the American help, signed the mineral deal, and let his negotiators figure out a cease-fire that had enough Western European soldiers on the front lines to matter, and if he were lucky a few American observers too.

But he couldn’t.

Now he and the Europeans have to face the reality that without the United States there will be no ceasefire at all. And he’s either going to have to quit or come back and take even less.

Congrats, Volodymyr.

1. Or in John McCain’s famous putdown, “a gas station masquerading as a country.”

2. The eastern Ukraine region they’re fighting over.