President Zelensky is getting bad advice

It was truly painful viewing. Following a very public falling out in a live press conference in the Oval Office, President Zelensky was all but ordered to leave the White House by Marco Rubio.  

According to Rubio, the meeting itself had been insisted on by the Ukrainian side, apparently to demonstrate their willingness to cooperate with Trump’s peace process, although that was not the impression that Zelensky ended up sending out.  However, the decision to hold a full televised Q&A session with reporters asking unvetted questions was presumably Trump’s, and therefore the onus was surely on him not to blow up at his guest on live international TV, regardless of any perceived provocation. 

The cameras were there for a reason; for both presidents. For Zelensky they were there to reassure his people, and to remind the Russians, that no matter what unguarded comments his American counterpart may come out with about him, that Ukraine still enjoys the support of the world’s preeminent superpower. He was there to sign, and to be seen to have signed, an economic deal of Zelensky’s own suggestion that would formalise US economic investment in Ukraine’s sovereignty, and create an implicit but still very real American tripwire should the Russians invade again in the future. 

For Trump, the purpose of such a visible meeting was to demonstrate to the Russians that he had the authority to order Ukraine to fall into line with whatever proposals he was ultimately going to ask each side to base a ceasefire agreement on. Much of Trump’s recent behaviour on Ukraine, such as his earlier outburst in February calling Zelensky a dictator, must be understood in the context of Trump preparing the mood music and lighting for the occasion when he finally sits opposite Putin and eyeballs him over the table.  

Trump cannot afford the Russians being able to suggest plausibly that the Ukrainians will simply ignore him, or that either the Europeans or elements of the American permanent state will come to separate terms with the Ukrainians behind his back. His antics have been designed to demonstrate that he and he alone is the master of the scene, and that nothing will be allowed to get in his way; neither Zelensky’s ego nor centuries of Western diplomatic norms. 

Seen in this context, Trump’s outburst makes a good deal more sense. He cannot be seen to brook any dissent from Ukraine’s president; certainly not in-person and on live TV in his own office. Yet, might Zelensky himself not be engaged in a similar Art of the Deal style of posturing?  The less meekly he is seen to be led to whatever miserable compromise Trump has in store for Ukraine, the better terms he might be able to hold out for. And failing that, the more honourably he might be regarded in the immediate aftermath of the deal.  Are we merely the audience for a carefully staged piece of role play? After all, neither of the two men are strangers to the screen, and as Trump himself said “this will make great television”. 

That would certainly be a more comforting proposition than the live on air bust-up that it appeared we had all witnessed. Alas, it seemed a little too raw to have been planned, at least wholly. If it was, the Ukrainian ambassador deserved some kind of academy award for her despondent performance.  

One part of Zelensky’s act seems noteworthy though, and might explain how he managed to get himself into such difficulty. On various occasions, and particularly after he embarked on his reminders of Russian perfidy and aggression, he appeared to be talking past the men in the room and speaking directly to the cameras and to his global audience. Not necessarily a surprise for somebody who was a professional entertainer until only a few years ago, and who has personally led the very direct, emotional appeal to the hearts and minds of the West that has so far sustained Ukraine’s war effort. Did Zelensky think that he could isolate Trump from Middle America through their TV screens, by out-doing him in some kind of impromptu debate? 

If he did, it was a terrible misjudgement, but Zelensky seems so poorly advised in terms of how to handle Trump that it must be a plausible explanation. He doesn’t seem to have any appreciation for the new administration’s sheer ruthlessness, or for the President’s lack of sentimentality. He appeared to have identified Vance as a foil whom he could belittle as a proxy for Trump, rather than somebody requiring especially cautious handling. There doesn’t seem to be any grasp within the Ukrainian government of the political driving forces within the United States that have shaped Trump’s foreign policy, or for the manner in which the President goes about preparing people to accept agreements that they mightn’t otherwise have acquiesced to — and frankly, this isn’t a surprise given the shallowness and narrowness of the international experience available in Zelensky’s inner circle. 

Ukraine’s intelligentsia was comprehensively gutted by the period of chaos and economic depression that followed the Soviet collapse, which went on for far longer in Ukraine than it did in Russia. Many of the ethnic Ukrainians in the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other elite parts of the state stuck with Russia after the breakup, depriving the new nation of critical expertise and particularly of experience handling the Americans. Ukraine’s resources were cannibalised by three distinct rent-seeking cliques of oligarchs based in Kharkiv, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, who formed the basis of Ukraine’s political factions for the 20 years until 2014. Ukraine’s best and brightest during those years had the choice of going to work for one of those groups, or of going abroad. Unsurprisingly, many chose the latter.

Much of the new international elite that has taken over Ukraine’s understandably comms-heavy approach to foreign relations since 2019 are people who had earlier sought refuge in European and American academia. A number of them moved into journalism in those places, others going into careers in NGOs. As is typical for self-conscious new arrivals into places that offered a fresh chance at a better life, many of these people absorbed, internalised and projected the values and traits of their new environments.  Additionally, internationally funded programmes sought to bolster Ukraine’s state capacity — and particularly its government’s approach to global public communications and diplomacy. Britain’s FCDO and its predecessors played a big part in this. 

The result was that by 2022, Ukraine was expertly placed and well prepared to tell its story to the world. The story was a naturally compelling one with a very simple good-guy bad-guy, David and Goliath distinction, and Zelensky himself was perfectly cast to play the heroic underdog, leading his people against all odds. The rhetoric was couched in the most accessible liberal terms, with the emphasis placed at all times on Ukraine’s (very real) status as the victim of the situation. It was all very much in line with the spirit of the time, and with the ideological predispositions of the ruling classes across the West.  

And then all of that changed. 

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was not an unforeseeable event; in fact it had been the most likely outcome for most of the 12 months leading up to the election.  There were ample political strategists, public relations and other advisory people being paid generous sums of money by western aid agencies to advise the Ukrainian government. Yet when it came to preparing for Trump, Zelensky’s government appears to have been on its own. The eventuality of a second Trump administration was not one that the international NGO ecosystem wanted contemplate, let alone make a success of — and the Ukrainians in any case lacked the experience or the instincts to ask for that kind of help. 

Zelensky’s government has now become the victim of its earlier successes in winning friends and influencing the West. Working with other western leaders, particularly Boris Johnson, Zelensky had successfully embarrassed the Biden Administration into providing the level of support to Ukraine that it eventually, grudgingly did. If that experience had led Zelensky to believe that he could repeat the same trick with Trump, it was distinctly unhelpful.

There were times during the Biden administration when it felt as if the US were merely one particularly bright star in the constellation of international support for Ukraine. The readjustment to a world in which Donald Trump alone controls Zelensky’s political fate is therefore a painful one. On Friday we could see Zelensky almost physically try to extricate himself from it, as he talked to the camera in the desperate hope that someone on the other end might come to his rescue. 

Trump knows as well as Zelensky does that there isn’t a permanent fix to the Russia problem

The Trump administration is clearly preparing Ukraine to accept losses that were inflicted unjustly. For the last few years, Ukraine’s diplomacy has been based on the fact that what has been done to them is not fair; an assessment that most people in the West have shared. “Well, life’s not fair” comes the response from the Trump administration, along with the hard-hearted suggestion that Ukraine learn to get used to the fact. As far as Trump sees it, Ukraine needs a break from the fighting more than Russia does. It irritated him that Zelensky seemed to be pointing out that Putin frequently breaks agreements if he thinks he can get away with it; this is a fact that Trump understands perfectly well. He regards it as his responsibility to provide sufficient deterrent while he remains in office that Putin doesn’t think he can get away with anything, and that seems more than anybody else is offering them at this point in time. 

Trump knows as well as Zelensky does that there isn’t a permanent fix to the Russia problem, but he doesn’t regard that as being a justification to continue what he sees as a fruitless attempt to regain lost territory in Donbas. Yes, Russia might invade them again and try to destroy Ukraine, but that is in fact what they are doing right now anyway. As he sees it, he isn’t asking Ukraine to concede anything that hasn’t already been lost, or to risk anything that isn’t already happening. And it yanks his chain that the Ukrainians don’t seem to get this. 

The problem of course is that almost nobody else thinks through risks and benefits in the clinical manner with which Trump is approaching this conflict. Particularly not when the soil of their own country is concerned, upon which the blood of their countrymen has been spilled.  

Most people instead think about justice, and what is right. A lot of our implicit ideas about foreign policy are contingent on some cosmic authority balancing the scales of justice. It’s perhaps why some are so quick to ascribe authority and competences to international courts that they don’t actually have. This implicit belief in justice is why so many in the West get so furious about the Trump administration’s apparent lack of interest in who actually started the war in Ukraine. It’s also why many of Trump’s supporters naturally try to find ways of blaming Ukraine for what has happened, and looking for moral shortcomings in Ukraine’s leaders that makes it less uncomfortable watching him back Zelensky into a corner. 

But to Trump, just deserts do not come into it. As far as he is concerned, Ukraine’s victim status is a barrier to a deal; one that the president intends to blast through as remorselessly as he will any other. The Ukrainians had been led to believe that the depth of the international support and goodwill they won at the start of the war would eventually see justice done, and wrongs righted. European talk of an alternative to Trump’s plan is currently keeping those Ukrainian hopes alive. Ukrainians see Western Europe as a group of advanced countries led by serious people, and do not imagine that they would engage in unfulfillable fantasy about matters of life and death. 

It occasionally falls to lawyers to deliver sobering, disappointing advice to a client who is desperately seeking some alternative to a suboptimal reality. If he’s worth his salt, we can only hope that Keir Starmer did something like that when he met Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday.