No. of Recommendations: 18
I'm thinking Zelenskyy really does have to try to make things right. But with a private meeting with Trump alone. Give the baby what he wants and be done with it.Seems unlikely to work.
I think
The Atlantic has the right take on it: this was the outcome that the Administration was trying to achieve:
Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/...The Administration will now be able to recharacterize our withdrawal from supporting Ukraine as storming off in righteous anger at their outrage, rather than slinking away from a weaker ally because we'd rather be friends with the ones brutalizing them.
That's such an amazing outcome for them that there's no way that Zelenskyy can undo it behind closed doors. The Administration doesn't
want it to be undone (we can tell by the tone their surrogates like Graham were striking after the fact). Which is how we know that mineral deal wasn't valuable enough to matter at all to Ukraine's security.
