He wore the right clothes. He treated President Trump with the deference he likes. And President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine agreed to sit down with Russia’s president to talk about settling their war, one of Mr. Trump’s main wishes.
Mr. Zelensky, backed by his European allies, emerged unscathed from his Monday meeting at the White House with Mr. Trump, unlike the situation after their disastrous last meeting in the Oval Office in February.
Ukrainians collectively breathed a sigh of relief.
“Overall, I’m more optimistic after these meetings than before,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian Parliament. “My nightmare of Trump presenting Zelensky with an unacceptable ultimatum in front of correspondents in the Oval Office did not materialize. The atmosphere was friendly enough.”
Mr. Zelensky also avoided, at least publicly, a tricky conversation on any possible territorial concessions — what Mr. Trump has described as land swaps. On Monday, even the land that Russia controls in Ukraine was in dispute, with Mr. Zelensky saying the map shown in the White House was not accurate.
“There was no — at least from what we can tell — aggressive pressure from Trump demanding that Ukraine immediately agree to territorial concessions to Russia or make unilateral concessions in favor of a peace deal” on Monday, said Volodymyr Fesenko, a leading political analyst in Ukraine. “That did not happen, and many were deeply worried it would.”
The Ukrainian president also appeared to put the onus on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to either come to the negotiating table or risk again alienating Mr. Trump, whose opinions on how to settle this war seem to shift depending on the last person he met.
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The post Relief in Ukraine as Zelensky Avoids Disaster in Washington appeared first on New York Times.
