Last week on Friday 28th, 2025, there was a meeting in the oval office with President Trump & Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine.
The meeting was over a deal that was to be signed after lunch which Trump mentioned with the press while with Zelenskyy. The press began to ask questions with many being directed to Zelenskyy, one of which was, why he did not have a suit in the oval office which led to President Trump saying that Zelenskyy looked great. US Army veteran Paul Rieckhoff found the question as a way to humiliate Zelenskyy. Much later Vice President JD Vance would start to go off on Zelenskyy and say “since you been here you haven’t said thank you.” It would set the stage for the Presidents and Vice President Vance to bicker. Zelensky first says, “you have nice ocean and won’t feel now…” which allowed for Trump to say “you don’t know that…” The meeting had JD Vance implying that the US wants to end the war while Ukraine wants to fight until they have no country left with them getting conscripts and sending them to the front lines. The initial meeting was for a mineral deal which led to Zelenskyy asking about what the next steps for protection were, as his country had been invaded 25 different times according to him. This led Trump to say he (Zelenskyy) doesn’t have the cards to decide how the war ends and if gets to keep land that was stolen from his country. It is a very sticky situation and Zelenkskyy not being too fluent in English doesn’t help. To me it seems like there was a miscommunication with him asking Trump about the steps to get protection from Europe and USA. But, Trump saw him trying to negotiate the protection into the minerals deal. All in all, the meeting was a disaster, the press in the meeting allowed for questions to dictate the meeting and allowed for irrelevant information to influence JD Vance’s attack on Zelenskyy for “campaigning” with Kamala Harris which was him meeting with her as she was the VP at the time. The barrage on Zelenskyy doesn’t help America’s world view as Trump had recently called him “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” and since then he had walked it back. This meeting shows that relations with other countries and countries we call allies need to improve as the war in Ukraine has no near end and tensions with Canada and Mexico are tense. The initial deal for minerals has been called off.
