Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky blew it again. Having proven himself an ungrateful recipient of U.S. aid during a meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance last week, in London he claimed that peace with Russia is “far, far away.”
The imprudent statement invited a rebuke from Trump, who bluntly said that the United States won’t put up with much more from the former comedian.
The shot from Trump on Truth Social followed a brutal scolding from Trump and Vance last week, when Zelensky foolishly challenged the two in front of reporters.
Meanwhile, U.S. financing for weapons sales to Ukraine has ended.
All of which means, as commentator Victor Davis Hanson said, Zelensky’s agenda is not identical to that of the United States. No wonder an opposition member of Ukraine’s parliament demands Zelensky’s impeachment.
Recap of Friday’s Meeting
During the tense meeting in Washington on Friday, Vance said that four years of “chest thumping” from former President Joe Biden had accomplished nothing, and that the time had come for diplomacy to end the killing in the U.S.-provoked war between Russia and Ukraine. Zelensky demanded to know what kind of diplomacy Vance had in mind.
“I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country,” Vance replied. “It’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance said:
Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.
The meeting went downhill from there, notably after Zelensky said, preposterously enough, that the United States would “feel” what Ukraine has felt.
“You don’t tell us what we’re going to feel,” Trump said. “We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel … because you’re in no position to dictate.”
Trump told Zelensky he doesn’t “have the cards” to make demands of the United States, and that he is “gambling with World War III.”
After more arguing, Trump dismissed Zelensky and White House advisors told him to leave.
Zelensky in London
Zelensky then flew to London to lick his wounds and beg for handouts from European leaders.
A reporter asked Zelensky “about the outlines of a new European initiative to end Russia’s war,” The Associated Press reported.
“We are talking about the first steps today, and therefore, until they are on paper, I would not like to talk about them in great detail,” the diminutive dictator said:
An agreement to end the war is still very, very far away, and no one has started all these steps yet. The peace that we foresee in the future must be just, honest, and most importantly, sustainable.
Thus did Zelensky invite another smack from Trump.
“This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelenskyy, and America will not put up with it for much longer!” Trump fumed on Truth Social:
It is what I was saying, this guy doesn’t want there to be Peace as long as he has America’s backing and, Europe, in the meeting they had with Zelenskyy, stated flatly that they cannot do the job without the U.S. — Probably not a great statement to have been made in terms of a show of strength against Russia. What are they thinking?
Worse still for Zelensky, The Wall Street Journal reported today that financing for weapons to Ukraine is over:
The Trump administration has stopped financing new weapons sales to Ukraine and is considering freezing weapons shipments from U.S. stockpiles, moves that threaten Kyiv’s ability to fight at a critical time in its battle against Russian forces, current and former U.S. officials said.
The financing was halted in recent weeks amid the administration’s freeze on foreign aid. But the move to potentially shut down the main pipeline for arms transfers to Ukraine comes days after a contentious meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House. The tense exchange Friday raised fears across Europe that the U.S. could be moving away from the wider Western alliance.
Hanson’s Analysis
Zelensky’s behavior last week and his statement today, commentator Victor Davis Hanson wrote, clearly show “he does not grasp — or deliberately ignores — the bitter truth: Those with whom he feels most affinity (Western globalists, the American Left, the Europeans) have little power in 2025 to help him.”
“And those whom he obviously does not like or seeks to embarrass (as with his Scranton, Penn. campaign-like visit in September 2024) alone have the power to save him,” Hanson continued in his commentary:
For his own sake, I hope he is not being “briefed” by the Obama-Clinton-Biden gang to confront Trump, given their interests are not really Ukraine’s as they feign.
Zelenskyy acts as if his agenda and ours are identical. So, he keeps insisting that he is fighting for us despite our two-ocean-distance that he mocks. We do have many shared interests with Ukraine, but not all by any means: Trump wants to “reset” with Russia and triangulate it against China. He seeks to avoid a 1962 DEFCON 2-like crisis over a proxy showdown in proximity to a nuclear rival. And he sincerely wants to end the deadlocked Stalingrad slaughterhouse for everyone’s sake.
Hanson also explained that Europe and Canada are discussing striking out on their own militarily, which would require a total overhaul of their societies and economies: cutting back the welfare state, fracking and using nuclear energy, and spending three to five percent of their gross domestic product on defense.
But Europe and Canada are entirely dependent on U.S. power projection:
The U.S. does not just pay 16% of NATO’s budget, but also puts up with asymmetrical tariffs that result in a European Union trade surplus of $160 billion, plays the world cop, patrolling sea-lanes and deterring terrorists and rogue states that otherwise might interrupt Europe’s commercial networks abroad, as well as de facto including Europe under a nuclear umbrella of 6,500 nukes.
After detailing the global geopolitics involved, Hanson explained that not only did Zelensky come across as naïve, but also that he is no longer the wonder boy of the globalist elites and instead is nothing more than a ruthless little dictator.
“By Ukraine-splaining to his hosts, and by his gestures, tone, and interruptions, he made it clear that he assumed that Trump was just more of the same compliant, clueless moneybags Biden waxen effigy,” Hanson wrote:
And that was naïve for such a supposedly worldly leader.
March 2025 is not March 2022, after the heroic saving of Kyiv — but three years and 1.5 million dead and wounded later. Zelenskyy is no longer the international heartthrob with the glamorous entourage. He has postponed elections, outlawed opposition media and parties, suspended habeas corpus and walked out of negotiations when he had an even hand in spring 2022 and apparently even now when he does not in spring 2025.
Upshot: Time runs short for Zelensky to come out on top.
Call for Impeachment
Worse still for Zelensky, Oleksandr Dubinskyi, a Trump-supporting member of Ukraine’s parliament who says Zelensky imprisoned him for criticizing Hungarian communist billionaire George Soros, has introduced impeachment proceedings against Zelensky.
“The basis for this is his diplomatic failure in the White House, which resulted in Ukraine losing unconditional support from the United States,” he wrote today on X:
This failure is a consequence of incompetent governance, destructive foreign policy, repression against the opposition, and the usurpation of power.
