At least twelve cases are known in which Russian services tried to kill Volodymyr Zelensky after the new stage of the war in Ukraine, which began with Moscow's conventional military aggression in February 2022.
But what Vladimir Putin failed to do in the shadows, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump accomplished in front of the cameras in the heart of the strongest democracy: murder in the White House. And the victim was Zelensky, whose fault turned out to be that he did not agree to be addressed edifyingly by his American hosts. Did the Oval Office really think that the Ukrainian president, who lives with a target on his back and has been at war with Vladimir Putin for years, would be startled by J.D. Vance's didactic finger-wagging?
The meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump was supposed to solve a problem, not create one. Moreover, it came as a kind of gradation of the diplomatic efforts earlier this week by French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who tried to translate the war in Ukraine into "European language" for their host in the White House. Macron managed to convince his American counterpart that Europe could not be bypassed in the negotiations; Starmer - that for it to be lasting, peace must be just. The fiasco of the meeting between Zelensky and Trump, however, threatens the fragile progress that the Europeans managed to achieve with the Americans this week, and risks reopening still unhealed wounds.
And it's not so much that the prepared agreement between Ukraine and the US on rare earth metals was not signed. It was already more of an advertising effect than filled with meaningful concreteness; the document in question was supposed to enter Trump's portfolio as a "deal-maker", and not to provide any timely and direct American guarantees for Ukraine's security. This agreement was just a straw that only a drowning country could have grasped.
The issue here is different: Ukraine, instead of being an occasion for consolidation between Europe and the United States, is becoming an occasion for further straining relations between them.
After Zelensky's ill-fated meeting with Trump and Vance, Europe has demonstrated exceptional solidarity with the Ukrainian president. Your dignity honors the courage of the Ukrainians, said Ursula von der Leyen. Today it became clear that the free world needs a new leader, wrote the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaia Kallas, who was supposed to have a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week, but was canceled by the American diplomat. A number of European heads of state also came out with clear and unequivocal support for Zelensky and Ukraine after what happened in the Oval Office. This is also expected to be stated at the upcoming meeting of European NATO member states in London this Sunday, organized by British Prime Minister Starmer.
And even before this sad episode in the Oval Office for the political future of Ukraine and for US diplomacy, at the beginning of the week, future German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated that "the Americans, or at least this administration, are indifferent to the fate of Europe", which is why the Old Continent must become independent of the US in ensuring its security and defense as soon as possible. The other day, French President Macron said that Europe must give up its "happy vassalage" to Washington. If Vladimir Putin managed to wake up Europeans with his aggression against Ukraine, then it was Donald Trump who pulled the mattress out of the Old Continent's bed so that it could no longer lie on bare beams. From now on, the EU simply has no choice: a war is being waged outside its window, which could break through at any moment. And here it doesn't matter whether the American president will break the European glass with his own hands or simply watch Putin do it. Europe must stand on its feet and stand tall. It is already awake anyway, and there is no mattress on the bed.
And how did Trump's party allies react to his meeting with Zelensky? Senator Lindsey Graham said that the Ukrainian president should either resign or change. The topic of Zelensky's resignation from the presidency is naturally popular among the Russian authorities. The first reaction from Moscow to the meeting between the Ukrainian and American heads of state came from Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev, who wrote: "Trump for the first time told the truth to the cocaine clown in the eyes: the Kiev regime is playing with World War III... Military aid to the Nazi war machine must be stopped". Medvedev is not a mandatory criterion, but in this case it is indicative that in their public speaking Moscow and Washington are increasingly converging, to the extent that the thesis of Russian propaganda about the Third World War has found fertile ground in the American president since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine.
All this is happening against the backdrop of the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth year of the war in the Old Continent. For two weeks now, however, the biggest breakthrough towards Ukraine has not come from Russia, but from the United States, behind the backs of the Ukrainians. It was Washington that made a number of concessions to Moscow - it ruled out the possibility of Ukraine's membership in NATO as a kind of security instrument for the country, refused to physically participate in ensuring such security and began to hold talks with Russia on the normalization of their bilateral relations, excluding Ukraine from them (unlike the previous American administration, which tied its diplomacy with the Russian side to the issue of Ukraine). In fact, the United States has redefined its role altogether - from an ally of Kiev, it has become a mediator between Ukraine and Russia. Although this role is increasingly controversial, since Trump has neither called Putin a "dictator without elections", as he did with his Ukrainian counterpart, nor has the American president been manipulating Russian strongholds (the latter was shared by Trump a few hours after their meeting with Zelensky, when the head of the White House stated that the Russian president wanted peace, and his Ukrainian counterpart - to continue the war). Moscow took advantage of the circumstances thus created: once, it carried out its heaviest strike with drones against Ukraine since the beginning of the war, a second time, it declared that it would not allow any European peacekeeping forces in Ukraine. And despite the White House chief's efforts to get closer to the Russian president, the latter has held two talks with Xi Jinping since the beginning of the year (even a few hours before the fair in the Oval Office, the Secretary of the Russian Security Council, Sergei Shoigu, was in China meeting with the president of the Celestial Empire).
Donald Trump promised peace between Ukraine and Russia, but in fact, since the Republican returned to the White House, the conflict has intensified, and talk of war has escalated - this time concerning not only Ukraine, but also Europe.
The situation in front of the fireplace in the Oval Office was surreal, unparalleled, and will go down in history as a byword for the devaluation of the presidential institution in the United States. The White House has become a Patilan kingdom of Trumpsheviks, who are edifying towards the weak victim and scolding towards the strong aggressor. And it was Ukrainian President Zelensky's fault that he reacted like a man of dignity.