Zelensky meets Trump as he tries to revive faltering ‘victory plan’
The president of Ukraine tried to patch a rift with Republicans by meeting the party’s nominee after attending a Democratic Party event in Pennsylvania.
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Washington on Friday was framed by many as a disappointment, but analysts say it may yet bear fruit.
The Ukrainian leader met Donald Trump as he sought to shore up a rift with Republicans angry that Zelensky attended an event with a Democratic governor in Pennsylvania, a swing state in the coming US presidential election.
Ukraine’s leader had arrived in the capital with a shopping list of requests that together are known as his “victory plan”. Principal among them was for the White House to approve use of US and British long-range weapons in Russia.
Zelensky was also forcefully seeking security guarantees – if not an accelerated path towards NATO membership, at least some kind of mutual defence promise akin to that the members of the alliance provide to each other.
Lastly, he wanted support for Ukraine’s continuing incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, and more economic aid.
No approval appears to have been given on the use of the missiles and no explicit security guarantees offered. Zelensky’s “star power in Washington has noticeably faded”, The New York Times concluded on Thursday, with his visit to Capitol Hill prompting “a quieter welcome” from senators and house members than on previous visits.
Yet while Zelensky has spoken of needing to secure backing for specific tasks in his victory plan that must be fulfilled by the end of the year, he may still have some room for manoeuvre.
While it stopped short of the Ukrainian’s requests, an $US8 billion ($11.6bn) weapons package announced by President Joe Biden is not insignificant. It will include new air defence capabilities, among them an additional Patriot anti-aircraft battery, more training of Ukrainian F-16 pilots, plus drones, air-to-ground munitions and a new air-fired long-range glide bomb, which should help strike Russian targets more accurately.
Professor Michael Clarke, of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, said Zelensky’s trip had gone “as well as it could have done” even as Washington shied away from a firm timetable for entry to NATO.
Kyiv was hoping that between the US election in November and the inauguration of the new president in January, Biden would “try to lock in his legacy over the Ukraine war and give them a lot more support and materiel”.
US media reports this week said America’s intelligence agencies were circumspect about granting use of the long-range missiles, because it could prompt direct retaliation against the US, while not giving significant advantage on the battlefield. But Prof Clarke predicted that “we will see them used relatively soon for strikes inside Russia”.
Orysia Lutsevych, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, took a more sceptical view.
“The Kremlin’s ‘victory plan’ is working,” rather than Kyiv’s, she said in a written commentary on the visit. President Putin’s tactic of nuclear sabre-rattling had forced “risk management” on the administration, which had procrastinated over weapons supplies.”
She added: “Winning the war will be up to the next occupant of the White House.”
The Times
More Coverage
‘Anti-Christian bias’ to be tackled by new taskforce
US President Donald Trump has unveiled a taskforce to root out ‘anti-Christian bias’ in government.
Musk’s mass resignation hopes hit legal roadblock
Elon Musk’s mass redundancy scheme for federal workers has been put on hold by a judge hours before a deadline to quit.