Zelensky Looks to Keep Trump’s Support
The Ukrainian leader is trying to retain U.S. backing for his country’s defense without agreeing to Moscow’s territorial proposals for ending the war.
Nearly six months ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was asked to leave the White House after a televised confrontation with President Trump over “real security guarantees” the Ukrainian leader insisted upon for any peace agreement with Russia.
When Zelensky returns to the Oval Office on Monday the gap over security guarantees will have narrowed, but a chasm over Moscow’s territorial demands remains. That leaves Zelensky with a dilemma: how to sustain Trump’s support while responding to Russian territorial proposals he feels compelled to refuse.
Zelensky will have some important allies accompanying him to Washington this time, including the leaders of the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Finland and the European Union. North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who has developed a personal rapport with Trump, will also attend.
But the diplomatic terrain threatens to be just as treacherous. While Trump administration officials have expressed fresh, if still vague, support for providing security guarantees, the White House has shelved its persistent demand that Russian President Vladimir Putin agree to an immediate cease-fire or face much tougher economic sanctions.
Coming on the heels of Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin, the stakes are high for Ukraine and its European supporters who are also striving to avoid a rift in the Western alliance and keep Trump focused on Putin as the aggressor and obstacle to peace.
Demonstrating the scale of that task, ahead of Monday’s meeting Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Zelensky “can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight.”
Ukraine has long said it is ready for a cease-fire, which Russia has refused to sign on to.
A Russian drone attack struck an apartment block in the northern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Monday morning, killing four people, including a child, and injuring 17 others, according to Ukrainian emergency services.
Of all the issues Putin has set out as conditions for peace, the Russian leader’s territorial demands will be the hardest for Zelensky to accept, including the possible exchange of territory within Ukraine to adjust the front line.
“It is for the Ukrainians to decide how they might land swap,” special envoy Steve Witkoff told “Fox News Sunday.” “That’s why Zelensky and the Europeans are coming to the White House on Monday to make those decisions themselves.”
In Ukraine, many say Putin wants to drive a wedge between Kyiv and Washington by using the negotiations with Trump to try to put Zelensky in the position of losing U.S. support or facing a crisis at home if he were to make concessions to Russia.
“Putin wants all of Ukraine. It’s not about territory,” said Kostyantyn Batozsky, a political analyst in Kyiv. Ukraine would continue to fight, even if Trump walked away, Batozsky said.
Under a deal outlined by Putin on Friday, Ukraine would surrender its eastern Donbas region, including parts of Donetsk that Ukrainian forces still control. In exchange, Russia would freeze the conflict along the current contact line in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and give up some area in those regions.
A total withdrawal from Donetsk would create vulnerabilities for Ukraine militarily because some of its most robust defenses are there, former U.S. officials and experts say.
“Ceding those defenses would position Russia to reattack in the future with more of an advantage,” said David Shimer, a former National Security Council official during the Biden administration, who is now a scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Acknowledging Russia’s legal sovereignty over the region is also a political and constitutional nonstarter for Zelensky. The Ukrainian Constitution forbids trading land, Zelensky said in Brussels on Sunday, and such a matter could only be discussed in trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine and the U.S.
After more than three years of full-scale war, with tens of thousands dead and dozens of cities and towns razed, polls show a majority against even territorial concessions to Russia.
One point of pressure Zelensky won’t be able to count on is the prospect of intensified U.S. economic leverage on Moscow in the near term. Before the Alaska summit with Putin on Friday, Trump said there would be “very severe consequences” if the Russian leader didn’t agree to end the war. But after the Russian leader balked at a cease-fire, Trump said he would try to forge a finished peace agreement and might not need to think about whether to impose additional sanctions for two or three weeks.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the threat of intensified U.S. economic sanctions against Moscow wouldn’t likely come into play unless the efforts to forge a peace over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine completely broke down.
Accepting Russia’s de facto control of Ukrainian territory would be less of a bitter pill for Zelensky to swallow if it was accompanied by the U.S. security guarantees the Ukrainian leader has long demanded, and if Moscow’s authority over the region wasn’t cast as a permanent redrawing of Ukraine’s borders.
The U.K. and France have said they could deploy troops as part of a “reassurance force” in the western part of Ukraine if a peace agreement was reached to deter future Russian aggression. But they have long sought a limited U.S. role—dubbed a “backstop” by British officials—to safeguard European forces should they be in danger.
Such a role, military analysts say, wouldn’t need to involve U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine, but could include indirect support such as having U.S. Air Force fighters outside Ukraine at the ready, providing European forces with U.S.-made air-defense systems, flying drones over Ukraine from outside the country, providing military intelligence and transporting European troops and equipment on U.S. planes.
Rubio said Sunday that fleshing out the details of how security guarantees might work in practice will be one of the main subjects in the Monday meeting.
“We’re at a stage where we need to build some details on it and then ultimately, you know, obviously present that to the Russian side,” Rubio told Fox News. But first we have to have our, you know, our, our ducks in order.”
While Rubio declined to provide details, Witkoff said security guarantees would be issued by individual countries and not NATO, a gesture that seems calculated to meet Moscow’s opposition to ever incorporating Ukraine into the Western military alliance.
Witkoff suggested the guarantees could be modeled on NATO’s principle of collective defense, which is codified in Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which says that an enemy attack against one member would be viewed as an attack against all.
“It means that the United States is potentially prepared to be able to give Article 5 security guarantees but not from NATO, directly from the United States, and other European countries,” Witkoff told Fox News. “That is big.”
“Now, it’s for us to drill down on the granular details of exactly what the Ukrainians need to give them a sense of security in the future and by the way, what the Europeans need as well,” Witkoff added.
Zelensky, who has sought to repair his relationship with Trump in meetings at the Vatican and at the NATO summit, will be joined by European leaders who have generally found ways to navigate the sometimes unpredictable White House.
Thanking them for their support, Zelensky said on X: “It’s necessary to cease fire and work quickly on a final deal. We’ll talk about it in Washington, D.C. Putin does not want to stop the killings. But he must do it.”
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com
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