Key Points and Summary – Ukrainian President Zelenskiy’s latest White House visit to secure Tomahawk missiles reportedly devolved into a contentious “shouting match” with President Trump.
-According to anonymous sources, Trump, fresh off a phone call with Vladimir Putin, made a stunning reversal.
T-72 Like Those Fighting in Ukraine.
-He allegedly pressured Zelenskiy to surrender the entire Donbas region, warning that Putin would “destroy” Ukraine otherwise.
-Trump was said to have cursed, tossed aside battlefield maps, and repeated Russian talking points verbatim, including calling the conflict a “special military operation.”
-The incident has left Ukrainian and European officials questioning Washington’s strategy and commitment.
The Ukraine War Zig-Zag
WARAW, POLAND – “Mr. Zelenskiy goes to Washington,” was the news last Thursday as the Ukrainian president headed to the American capital to see US President Donald Trump at the White House. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss, among other subjects, the US providing the beleaguered Eastern European nation with long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The missile system would be an answer to a long-repeated prayer by the Ukrainians for this class of weapon. The earliest versions of the ground-launched version of the weapon, the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM), have a range of 1,000 miles. A later Block II variant, which is also nuclear-capable, can hit targets over 1,500 miles away.
The most up-to-date versions, such as the Block V, have an even greater operational range, but the precise performance numbers for these models are still classified.
Ukraine has sought this weapon from the US not just for its accuracy, but also because its range would allow Ukraine to threaten hundreds of armed forces installations, command centers, airbases, industrial sites, and other military-related targets inside of Russia.
The meeting of the two presidents was their fourth face-to-face encounter since Trump’s re-election to the office last November and his inauguration in January 2025, and their second in less than a month.
But if accounts of the meeting reported in outlets like the London Financial Times are accurate, it is probably a meeting Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy wishes he had given a pass.
Ukraine Meeting: Worse Than Last February?
Before the meeting even commenced, Trump began backpedaling on his earlier inclination, which was to accede to Ukraine’s eagerness to acquire the Tomahawks. It is not “easy” for Washington to provide the munitions, he explained.
“It’s not easy for us to give … you’re talking about massive numbers of very powerful weapons,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “So, that’s one of the things we’ll be talking about. Hopefully, they won’t need it. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get the war over with, without thinking about Tomahawks,” Trump stated.
Transferring the Tomahawks to Ukraine seemed to be a decision that the US President had already taken. They became an active agenda item for discussion after last weekend, when Trump appeared to be open to providing the weapons to Ukraine.
Descriptions by individuals who were familiar with what transpired and who spoke to the London daily on terms of anonymity describe the conversation as having been contentious, if not worse. It’s possible it might have been a near-repeat of the infamous encounter Zelenskiy had in the Oval Office this past February, in which the Ukrainian president took a double-team verbal broadside from both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in front of a room full of media.
Ukraine Drone. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Trump reportedly tried to persuade Zelenskyy to accept Russia’s conditions for ending its war. He warned that Vladimir Putin had told him in a phone call the day before that the former KGB Lt. Col. would “destroy” Ukraine if Zelenskiy did not agree to terms. The tone of the meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents began to deteriorate quickly and “almost descended many times” into a “shouting match”, according to several reports.
Trump was reported to have been “cursing all the time,” said individuals with knowledge of the encounter. The US president reportedly “tossed aside maps of the frontline in Ukraine and insisted that Zelenskyy surrender the entire Donbas region to Putin.” Trump then “repeatedly echoed talking points the Russian leader had made in their call a day earlier.”
Turning 180 Degrees on Ukraine War
A few days before last Thursday’s call with Putin, Trump had expressed his mounting frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He had also stated that he was confident that Ukraine could eventually take back all the territory currently occupied by Russia.
But the call with Putin 24 hours earlier apparently caused the US president to again turn his opinion about the war back around 180 degrees from the previous weekend. In addition to having completely changed his view on the potential outcome of the war, Trump repeated some of Putin’s talking points verbatim.
These talking points included Trump telling Zelenskyy that Putin had told him the Ukraine conflict was a “special [military] operation, not even a war,” using the Russian president’s long-ridiculed, dishonest description for the invasion he launched in February 2022.
Trump also seemed to forget his recent statements about the Russian military’s and the nation’s economic weaknesses, said European officials who were later briefed on the meeting. The US president also told Zelenskiy he needed to make an agreement with Putin or face destruction.
One European official relayed that Trump told Zelenskyy he was losing the war and told the Ukrainian leader, “If [Putin] wants it, he will destroy you.” The US president then threw Ukraine’s maps of the battlefield to one side, said the official who was familiar with other details of their meeting.
Putin Reading a Statement. Image Credit: Russian Government.
According to him, Trump said he was “sick” of looking at the map of the frontline in Ukraine for days on end. “This red line, I don’t even know where this is. I’ve never been there,” Trump said, according to this official.
Trump also said that Russia’s economy is “doing great,” the official said, which was another turnaround from his public statements just days before, when he said Putin should negotiate a deal because his “economy is going to collapse.”
What transpired in Washington has not gone down well back home in Ukraine and has the country’s leaders once again asking just whose side Washington is on.
“To give [the Donbas] to Russia without a fight is unacceptable for Ukrainian society, and Putin knows that,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in Ukraine’s parliament.
His interpretation is that Putin is trying to force the entirety of the Donbas to be given to Russia to “cause division within Ukraine and undermine our unity. It’s not about getting more territory for Russia, it’s about how to destroy us from within,” he said.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of the Asia Research Centre at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
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