Joint press conferences in the Oval Office are usually calm, overly diplomatic events where the president of the United States and a foreign leader trade niceties and answer questions. That wasn’t what happened this past Friday, when an angry exchange between President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky led to
a breakdown in relations between the US and Ukraine.That fight came after a long build-up of tension between the US and Ukraine over the war with Russia.
A Peace Deal and A Mineral Deal
President Trump had repeatedly declared his interests in making a quick Russia-Ukraine peace deal during his campaign for the presidency. But Ukrainian officials viewed Trump’s position on such a deal skeptically, seeing it as too close to a pro-Russian position.
For their part, the Ukrainians have primarily been looking for one thing: continued supplies of military equipment to continue their fight with Russia. But some prominent figures on the Republican side, including Vice President Vance, have expressed their own skepticism about the continued flow of arms to the Ukrainians.
In recent weeks, Trump had come up with a deal under the terms of which he would be willing to continue supplying the Ukrainian military—if Ukraine agreed to give the US mineral rights in exchange for that support.
To Trump’s political opponents, this was an act of extortion, pulling away Ukraine’s natural resources because it had no other options.
But Trump repeatedly suggested that the US needed to get something in return for its long-term support of Ukraine, and he explained on social media that such a deal would in fact guarantee Ukraine’s security because of a practical consideration—that there would be American workers on Ukrainian soil. He said that it would provide “automatic security because nobody’s going to be messing around with our people when we’re there.”
Security and Name-Calling
That comment of Trump’s highlighted one of the major disputes between his administration and the Ukrainian government.
Zelensky, faced with demands for peace talks with Russia (some preliminaries of which have already gone on between the US and Russia without Ukraine present), wanted security guarantees from the US and the West as well. He has repeatedly mentioned the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO (something Trump has dismissed), but if not that, Zelensky has wanted the US and Europe to promise they will defend his country if Russia attacks again after any talks.
(The Ukrainians have argued that the US and UK already committed to defend Ukraine, in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, when Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal. The US, clearly, does not agree with that interpretation.)
This is something that Trump has refused to do. Support for Ukraine, predicated on a mineral deal, has been as far as he has been willing to go—but Zelensky wanted more.
The friction between the two has led to some strong words in recent weeks, with Trump at one point calling Zelensky a “dictator without elections.” But there was hope that the meeting between the two in Washington would be cordial and would lead to a mineral deal that would give Ukraine a reprieve.
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