The Oval Office was already seething with resentment when Vance lit the match

For the first 40 minutes of their high-stakes meeting on Friday, US President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, managed to keep a lid on their tempers. But as their disagreements over the Ukraine conflict added up, the air in the Oval Office grew thick with resentment. And that’s when Vice President J.D. Vance lit the match.

In what felt like a deliberately provocative interjection before the world’s media, Vance broke in on a question about Vladimir Putin that Trump had already answered. The US had tried “thumping our chest” under Joe Biden, Vance said – now it was time to try diplomacy.

Vice President J.D. Vance (right) speaks to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (left) as President Donald Trump listens.Credit: AP/Mystyslav Chernov

With Trump’s blessing to respond, Zelensky hit back, directly challenging Vance on whether Putin was the kind of leader you could negotiate with in good faith, reminding the vice president of the Russian autocrat’s repeated ceasefire violations.

This cut to the heart of the matter. Zelensky was visibly aggrieved by the Trump-Vance view of the war as an expensive fight between two morally equivalent countries on the other side of the world. He could no longer truck Trump’s insistence that he was simply a mediator who was not on anyone’s side and was doing Ukraine a favour by getting involved.

It did not go down well.

“I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance said, elevating the tense meeting into full-blown animosity.

The gloves were off. “What you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country,” Trump said in a raised voice, at a point where it seemed possible there would be a walkout or even a physical confrontation. The Ukrainian ambassador to the US had her head in her hands.

Vance served as the attack dog on Friday – and it was certainly the defining moment of his time in office so far. But he was operating with the full permission and backup of his boss, who has long shared the view Zelensky is insufficiently grateful for America’s help.

While it felt at times like an ambush from Vance, who has long wished to admonish the Ukrainian president, Zelensky played his part too. He was determined to put forth his view at every opportunity, and spoke just as much as Trump. He was strident about Putin in a way that was bound to make Trump bristle.

He showed he was not content to sit in silence and let lies go through to the keeper. And he was emphatic on what Ukraine needed and implicitly deserved in terms of security guarantees from the US – something Trump clearly viewed as petulant.

Vance was explicitly irked by Zelensky saying all this on-camera, and one wonders if it might have been better left for behind closed doors. But it is Trump’s practice to invite the media into the Oval Office for the start of these bilateral meetings, and Zelensky was not going to shy away – as other world leaders have done in that position. Trump even hinted he kept proceedings going for longer, so the American people could see what Zelensky was like.

Afterwards, Trump summed it up in a way only he could. “This is going to be great television,” he remarked. “I will say that.”

The way the White House and Trump’s cabinet members then launched a full-throated assault on Zelensky after the aborted meeting, declaring the event a great win for America First, indicated that even if the confrontation wasn’t planned, it was warmly welcomed.

But at the end of the day, no one came out looking brilliant and nobody got what they needed. Zelensky must now turn to Europe for protection. Trump didn’t get the deal to access rare earth (or “raw earth” as he called it several times) minerals, which he desperately wanted to recoup US taxpayers’ money.

When things were going spectacularly off the rails, no one tried to stop the chaos by suggesting they move on, or put things to one side, or refocus on common ground. In a room full of healthy male egos, nobody thought to be the bigger man.

with AP

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.