How JD Vance and an old Trump grudge led to disaster for Zelensky
As an Oval Office press conference imploded, how much were the vice-president’s isolationist views to blame and what price will Ukraine pay?
President Trump, the Vice President JD Vance and President Zelensky of Ukraine were nearly 40 minutes into a tense but cordial press conference in the Oval Office, preparing to sign a deal that would unlock Ukraine’s mineral wealth for the US and lay the groundwork for peace negotiations.
Then Vance accused Zelensky of being insufficiently grateful for US support during the full-scale Russian invasion, and of showing disrespect by defending the Ukrainian view of the war in public. Zelensky, who has led his country through three years of war, crossed his arms and argued back.
What happened next, with Trump raising his voice and appearing to get genuinely offended by Zelensky’s hostility towards Putin, the man trying to wipe out his nation, astonished the world.
Trump’s supporters claimed it as a watershed moment. Within an hour Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief White House strategist and still one of his top political outriders, was calling the meeting “10 minutes that changed the world”. The podcaster, who has long been critical of US aid to Ukraine, urged rapprochement with Russia, who he described to me as America’s “WWII ally”.
Republican politicians, even those who had supported Ukraine in the past, were soon posting in praise of Trump and Vance’s stance against Zelensky – until now, an important US ally but also a man who Trump has resented for years.
‘Ten minutes that changed the world’
There had been concerns that the meeting could be derailed.
Zelensky has reportedly ignored a suggestion that he should break his own wartime protocol and wear a suit.
Earlier that morning, a group of US senators had met with Zelensky and told him that he could not be emotional or confrontational with Trump.
He failed to heed them.
Two people close to Trump said they did not believe that there was a way back for Zelensky.
A third, Mike Davis, a lawyer in Trump’s circle, articulated the contempt that much of the president’s camp have for the Ukrainian leader. “Trump is tired of freeloaders,” he said. “Especially those who are entitled and ungrateful.”
The confrontation appears to have been an unmitigated disaster for Ukraine.
Already, barely a month into the administration, the flow of US weapons to the front lines has slowed to a trickle, and on Sunday White House officials were briefing that aid committed under the Biden administration but not yet delivered could be cancelled.
Yulia Klymenko, a Ukrainian MP and vice chair of the parliament’s infrastructure and transport committee, said: “This is a personal conflict. And the whole country will struggle and pay. It’s a disaster. Worst case scenario.”
It could have unfolded differently.
Trump has a history of developing relationships with people he once disliked – including the vice president, who once compared him to Adolf Hitler.
Now Vance, an American isolationist and longtime critic of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policies, is integral to the president’s view on the war.
“Vance feeds (him) this stuff,” said a Trump ally.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, said the meeting had been “a 180-degree switch of the US position on Ukraine”.
“In terms of what actually happened yesterday (Sunday) in the Oval Office, I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t think there is anything like it,” he added.
Bad blood stretching back to Hunter Biden
The roots of the Oval Office clash are deep.
The bad blood between the US president and his Ukrainian counterpart goes back to 2019, when Trump appeared to pressure the Ukrainian president in a phone call to investigate Joe Biden – then his potential rival in the upcoming elections – and his son, Hunter, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy company.
Trump then allegedly withheld military aid to Ukraine as leverage. When a whistleblower brought the call to light, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump, despite the fact that Zelensky publicly denied feeling pressured by the president. The Senate later acquitted him of both charges.
In contrast, Trump’s first term saw him establish a warm view of Putin.
In the final moments of Friday’s meeting Trump talked about how the Russian had earned his trust during the long federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, and links between Russian intelligence and Trump associates.
“He had to suffer through the Russia hoax,” Trump said, referring to the probe.
After losing the 2020 election Trump watched Zelensky form a close bond with Biden, his arch-enemy, who rallied NATO allies to support Ukraine after the Kremlin’s full scale invasion in 2022.
In opposition, Trump’s inner circle united around the idea that Biden and the Europeans needlessly prolonged the war by refusing to negotiate with Moscow and that Zelensky was an ungrateful wastrel who squandered the US’s largesse.
European officials said this argument was a cynical oversimplification of their calls to hold negotiations only when Kyiv is given a seat at the table – and a clear opening for Putin to abuse peace talks to seize more territory and manipulate negotiators.
Trump boasted during the 2024 election campaign that he would easily end the war, stoking alarm in Ukraine and across Europe that he was preparing to impose a settlement that strongly favoured Russia.
On February 12, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent arrived in Kyiv for a meeting with Zelensky expecting a warm welcome – and to emerge with a deal to compensate America for its military support to date.
Instead, he got a lecture. According to one of Trump’s informal advisers, Zelensky was “brutal” in his criticism of the Trump administration’s statements on Ukraine, and his view that the US president had been turned by Russian propaganda.
‘Zelensky acted like he was running an empire, not cutting a deal’
When Bessent brought out an agreement that would have given the US rights to half the country’s mineral and natural resources revenues, Zelensky did not sign.
“[Zelensky] acted as if he were running an empire, not cutting a deal,” said the adviser. “Bessent was totally shaken by his visit to [Kyiv] and how he was received.”
That was not how the Ukrainians saw the encounter. A source briefed on the meeting said that Bessent had urged Zelensky to sign a deal that was purely extractive, and that the president had declined to commit to it, saying that he would consult with his team.
Yet the US source was adamant: “you don’t back Trump into a corner without paying a price.”
A few days after the meeting with Bessent, and an hour before Zelensky was due to meet Vance at the Munich Security Conference, the Ukrainian president received another draft of the deal via the US embassy in Kyiv.
Again, he refused to sign.
Trump was furious. In a post on Truth Social on February 19, Trump called the Ukrainian president a “dictator without elections” (elections have been suspended while the war is in progress) and said that he was doing a “terrible job”. Then he falsely suggested that Ukraine had started the war with Russia.
That week at CPAC, America’s most prominent conservative gathering, Trump allies repeatedly and derisively referred to the Ukrainian leadership as being “Dem-coded”, meaning that they were allied with the Democrats – and thus anathema to Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
“I don’t think there’s any coming back from bad-mouthing President Trump unless Zelensky has a plan to refund the US,” Laura Loomer, a far right activist and close Trump ally, told me then.
Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s senior director for counter-terrorism, said: “We saved Europe again and again and again, and to have the temerity to say the one man who’s going to bring peace to Ukraine is the problem, it means you’re not serious and you still suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
The relationship was souring, and rapidly
Behind closed doors there was real concern about the speed at which US-Ukraine relations were disintegrating. After the meeting with Bessent, said two European officials with knowledge of the situation, Zelensky was advised that his relationship with the US leadership was at a critical juncture.
The day after Trump called Zelensky a dictator, Keith Kellogg, the US envoy to Ukraine, travelled to Kyiv and met with Zelensky.
Yet the person, aside from the president, who Zelensky really needed to convince was Steven Witkoff, Trump’s pugnacious Middle East envoy and close friend. He had met Putin at the beginning of February, and they had developed what he called a “friendship”.
In subsequent interviews, Witkoff suggested that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had been provoked by the West – a falsehood propagated by the Kremlin.
Zelensky knew he had make a personal appeal to Trump, sign the minerals deal and get European leaders to promise to commit more to defence spending, a key US demand. After visits from Starmer and Macron to Washington DC this week, that plan appeared to be working.
Before the meeting in the Oval Office, Ukrainian officials were positive about Zelensky’s trip to Washington DC. Their confidence proved misplaced.
After the meeting exploded, Ukrainian officials and some Trump allies said that they thought Vance had deliberately provoked Zelensky, while the president had been aiming to make a deal.
“Vance is to regular foreign policy as Musk is to USAID,” said an informal Trump adviser, later adding: “it was an ambush. Trump doesn’t like doing that face to face.”
JD Vance was the fire that lit the fuse
Several sources said that by accusing Zelensky of “disrespect” and of being ungrateful, Vance brought simmering hostility into the open – and guaranteed a furious reaction from Trump.
“Whether he planned it or not, that was the result,” said one European diplomat. “And we know that [these are] the VP’s views. He doesn’t support Zelensky. He wants to end aid to Ukraine. He [believes in] America First.”
Administration officials, including Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, strongly denied that the conflagration was planned.
Bannon told The Sunday Times that both Trump and Vance had wanted the meeting to succeed.
“Against the advice of folks close to them, including me, they actually wanted this to work – Zelensky Committed Seppeku [ritual suicide] on a Global Stage,” he said in a message. “They wanted a sign deal, checked box, on to Rapprochement.”
He also added that Zelensky was an “entitled punk”.
On Saturday, Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, said Zelensky had “not gotten the memo that this is a new sheriff in town”.
Speaking on Fox News, he said Trump was “frustrated and frankly angry” at Zelensky because it was unclear that he “truly wants to stop the fighting”.
Zelensky’s allies divided on his stand
The Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski was one of few Republican politicians to speak out against Trump, and in support of Ukraine, in the wake of the meeting.
“I am sick to my stomach as the administration appears to be walking away from our allies and embracing Putin, a threat to democracy and US values around the world,” she wrote on X on Saturday.
In Ukraine, and among the leadership of most European nations, there was a groundswell of support for Zelensky, including from the leaders of France, Sweden and Germany.
Friedrich Merz, likely to become Germany’s next chancellor, wrote on X that “we stand with #Ukraine in good and in testing times. We must never confuse aggressor and victim in this terrible war”.
Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Saturday that Zelensky should return to negotiations with the US, and that America was the only world power that could stop Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine.
Solomiia Bobrovska, a Ukrainian MP, said Zelensky “represents the nation”. Ukrainian social media was filled with people across the country – many of whom do not align with Zelensky politically – praising him for not bending the knee to Trump, and standing up for Ukrainian interests.
Yet other Ukrainian and European officials criticised the Ukrainian president for arguing with Trump and Vance. The leaders of Slovakia and Hungary issued statements supporting the US president and calling for peace.
Klymenko, the Ukrainian MP, said that Zelensky should have “found a way out diplomatically”.
“That’s how all leaders have done it, including Macron and Starmer. No public arguments,” she said, later adding that Zelensky: “ … just doesn’t tolerate any critics. He surrounded himself with people who are saying only good things and compliments.”
Former Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, a conservative who left office in 2023, said he had “great concerns” about what came next, and criticised Zelensky for rising to the bait from Vance.
“Everything was going well up to a certain point. The Ukrainian president should not [have] commented on what JD Vance said,” he said. “Europe does not have the strength to support Ukraine on its own.”
The Sunday Times
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