President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had meticulously laid the groundwork for his White House visit on Friday.
For days, he hammered one message — that Kyiv needed U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles to strike deep inside Russia. Then, he nudged President Trump toward selling the weapons in back-to-back calls last weekend. Finally, before his arrival, he sent top aides to Washington this week to meet with the missile’s manufacturer.
But when Mr. Zelensky landed in Washington, the landscape had changed. Mr. Trump had taken a phone call from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who appeared to steer him away from selling the weapons and toward reviving peace talks with an in-person meeting.
As Mr. Zelensky sat in front of Mr. Trump on Friday, the American leader’s shift was apparent. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to get the war over without thinking about Tomahawks,” Mr. Trump told him. Mr. Putin, he added, “wants to make a deal.”
“It’s a déjà vu,” Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian Parliament, said in an interview after Friday’s meeting. “Mr. Trump fell again for Putin’s old trick.”
The sequence of events was all too familiar to Ukrainians. For months, they have watched efforts to rally the mercurial American president to their side being repeatedly undercut by Russia dangling the promise of more peace talks.
Ukrainians now worry they have lost the momentum they had built in recent weeks by playing on Mr. Trump’s frustration with Moscow’s refusal to settle the war. Instead of its preferred strategy — hitting Russia hard with long-range strikes to force genuine negotiations — Kyiv finds itself back to a cycle of talks it believes has already proved futile.
The situation leaves Ukraine in an uneasy position, forced to wait for the Trump-Putin meeting to take place before deciding its next move. If the talks yield nothing, Kyiv is expected to try again to steer Mr. Trump toward providing more weapons.
Still, Mr. Zelensky can take some satisfaction in Moscow’s proposal for new peace talks, which supports his longtime argument that Russia will only negotiate when faced with a military threat. “It shows the power of the Tomahawks,” said Harry Nedelcu, a senior director at Rasmussen Global, a research organization. “The weapons do not necessarily have to be deployed in order to be effective and to get Putin to react. So, clearly, the pressure is working.”
Mr. Putin’s agreement to a new meeting with Mr. Trump may also offer Ukraine a temporary reprieve from Russian air attacks, because Moscow will want to show Washington that it is ready to lay down arms, Mr. Nedelcu noted. Kyiv needs the pause to repair energy facilities severely damaged by weeks of strikes. Emergency blackouts have been imposed across the country in recent days, and experts warn the situation could worsen as winter sets in.
In a sign that Kyiv and Moscow could still find common ground, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced on Saturday that both sides had agreed to a local cease-fire near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in southern Ukraine, which Russia controls. The cease-fire will allow repairs to damaged power lines that supply the facility and help cool its reactors. The plant had been without external power for four weeks, operating on backup diesel power.
The question is whether Mr. Putin will negotiate in earnest in his meeting with Mr. Trump, tentatively scheduled in Budapest in the coming weeks.
Mr. Merezhko, the Ukrainian lawmaker, said he doubted it, adding that Mr. Putin, if he actually went to Budapest, would try to “deceive Trump again.”
Asked on Friday whether he was concerned that the Russian leader was trying to buy himself more time, Mr. Trump responded, “I am.”
“But I’ve been played all my life by the best of them, and I came out really well,” he added.
Mr. Nedelcu, the analyst, said Mr. Trump would want to avoid a repeat of his previous meeting with Mr. Putin in Alaska in August, which produced no results after Russia repeated demands for extensive territorial concessions by Ukraine, a non-starter in Kyiv. “Trump wants Budapest to be a summit with substance,” Mr. Nedelcu said. “He wants the opposite of Alaska.”
Analysts say that if a new round of talks gets underway, Ukraine is in a relatively stronger position that in previous negotiation attempts.
While concerns ran high this spring and summer that Russia might capture crucial cities in the eastern Donetsk region, Ukraine has held firm and retained control of the cities. Russian progress has slowed in recent weeks, and Ukrainian counterattacks have regained some territory. Analysts expect the front to stabilize over the winter, with sparse vegetation limiting cover for troops and cold complicating logistics.
Russia’s limited advances on the battlefield have helped Ukrainian officials talk Mr. Trump out of his initial belief that Russia was bound to win the war and that Ukraine would be better off striking a deal, even if it meant ceding land. They are now less concerned that Mr. Trump might undercut Kyiv in future negotiations.
“I think we began to understand each other,” Mr. Zelensky said of Mr. Trump on Friday, noting that the American leader was regularly briefed on the battlefield situation.
A monthslong Ukrainian campaign targeting Russian oil infrastructure has also given Kyiv new leverage by putting Moscow under economic pressure. By last month, Ukraine had destroyed or damaged about 20 percent of Russia’s refining capacity, causing severe gasoline shortages in several regions and bringing the pain of war home to Russians.
While Mr. Trump’s decision earlier this year to end military and financial aid to Ukraine raised fears that Kyiv’s ability to fight would be severely curtailed, European funds have partly filled the gap and European capitals are now exploring ways to channel large sums to support the war effort on the long term.
European leaders are discussing a proposal to lend $160 billion to Ukraine based on frozen Russian sovereign assets in Europe, about three times Ukraine’s annual defense budget. The International Monetary Fund also appears likely to approve a new multibillion-dollar financial aid program for Ukraine, according to officials from the fund and Ukraine who met this week in Washington and requested anonymity to discuss closed-door meetings.
After the White House meeting, Mr. Zelensky told reporters that he backed Mr. Trump’s renewed push to stop the fighting, though he doubted Moscow shared the sentiment.
But he appeared frustrated at losing the leverage of the Tomahawks, saying he would no longer discuss the matter because the United States wanted to avoid “escalation” with Russia. He also said he hadn’t had a chance to push for additional economic sanctions, another tool Kyiv had hoped to use to pressure Moscow.
Asked if he was more optimistic or pessimistic about eventually getting the Tomahawks, Mr. Zelensky responded, “I’m realistic.”
Constant Méheut reports on the war in Ukraine, including battlefield developments, attacks on civilian centers and how the war is affecting its people.
The post Ukraine Braces for New Talks Without the Leverage of New Missiles appeared first on New York Times.
