On Monday it will be three years since Russia invaded Ukraine. During that time, only the Russians have made the kind of savage attacks on Volodymyr Zelensky that Donald Trump made during the past week.
Of course there have been differences with other leaders, frustrations at times - but they have been pretty much kept under wraps. They were nowhere close to what Donald Trump exploded on the Ukrainian leader's head.
At peace talks in Saudi Arabia, only the US and Russia were present - not Ukraine, where the war rages, nor the EU, which is paying a huge price for its own strategic security.
But not huge enough, according to President Trump. He wants Europe to pay more, not just for its own defence (a long running US bugbear), but also for the future security of Ukraine.
The US argument - not without merit - is that the EU has three times the population and ten times the economic power of Russia and should be easily be able to contain Russian expansionism with a relatively modest increase in defence and security spending.
The money demand from the Ukrainians is that US taxpayers should see a return on their "investment in the war" - the very words used by National Security Advisior Mike Waltz. Hence the minerals and rare metals mining rights deal that seems to be the cause of Trump's anti-Zelensky explosion.
On stage at the CPAC Conservative convention near Washington this week, Waltz said the demand for a sharing of mineral wealth was originally Zelensky’s idea.
"So first, and this is the part that the media just wants to ignore, it was Zelensky, last September, as part of his victory plan, it was Zelensky that proposed, hey, let's go into a partnership together. If the United States will invest in us, we have aluminum, we have gallium, we have tritium, we have all of these rare earth minerals that the modern economy needs. A lot of them are not fully developed, they need investment.
"President Trump's a deal maker and so now President Trump proposes the deal and sent our treasury secretary all the way out to Kyiv to propose it. And then we get this rhetoric in the media?"
"Look, here's the bottom line: President Zelensky is going to sign that deal, and you will see that in the very short term. And that is good for Ukraine. What better could you have for Ukraine than to be in an economic partnership with the United States - number one? What better could you have for Ukraine to stop the killing - number two?
"And you know what? We have an obligation to you all, the American taxpayer, to recoup the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been invested in this war. Because you know what? Europe's contributions are in the form of loans, and they're often paid back by the interest on Russian assets that have been frozen. So, Europe gets paid back, but the American people don't? I don't think so."
According to the EU, only a part of the assistance to Ukraine is in the form of loans: "In October 2024, the EU and G7 partners agreed to collectively provide loans of $50 billion (€48 billion) to support Ukraine's budgetary, military and reconstruction needs, financed by extraordinary revenues from immobilised Russian sovereign assets. The EU will contribute $20 billion (€19.4 billion), the first $3.2 billion (€2.8 billion) of which was disbursed in January 2025", according to the EU’s mission to the United States here in Washington.
Indeed, in December the US Treasury department issued a press note on the same G7 facility for Ukraine, noting the US's $20 billion (€19.4 billion) contribution was in fact seized Russian earnings on frozen assets, routed through a facility at the World Bank. In other words, a bank loan, by which those ultimately on the hook for the advanced funds - the Russian oligarchs - will never be paid back.
At the same time, another, a far more influential CPAC guest was unloading his own negative views about Zelensky on his 215 million followers on X, his own social media platform.
Elon Musk wrote in defence of Trump's claim that Zelensky only enjoys 4% support among Ukrainian voters. A Ukrainian poll taken last month said Zelensky has a 57% approval rating (higher than Trump’s 48%).
Musk claimed the poll was "controlled" by Zelensky and paid for by USAID - the agency Musk had shut down the week before.
"If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election. He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of ALL Ukranian media, so he cancelled the election. In reality he is despised by the people of Ukraine, which is why he has refused to hold an election. I challenge Zelensky to hold an election and refute this. He will not", wrote a man who has never stood for election to anything.
Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025
Working to fix this …
It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!
If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he… https://t.co/gy0NjtPwiq
Musk added: "President Trump is right to ignore him and solve for peace independent of the disgusting massive graft machine feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers".
Just to be clear, Musk was writing about Zelensky, not Putin.
But that is by-the-by. There are other, more rational and strategic reasons for having a mining deal between the US and Ukraine. And Mike Waltz is correct in saying Ukraine needs investment to develop its mining industry (though a significant part of its deposits lie in Russian-occupied territory).
And tying the US into a long-term commercial arrangement on minerals and metals in high demand by the US high tech industry would give the US a stake in Ukraine’s defence - a security guarantee in its own right. This also makes sense from a Ukrainian point of view, and it may well have been presented as part of Zelensky's peace plan.
The trouble seems to have set in when Trump sent his Treasury Secretary to Kyiv ten days ago with an actual, worked out deal on mining rights, which he wanted Zelensky to sign there and then - at the same time that direct talks between the Russians and the Americans were being set up. Talks that Ukraine was excluded from.
To the entire world, it looks like peace-making by beating up the weakest party - the one that was assaulted in the first place.
This was compounded on Tuesday, when Trump said Ukraine "should never have started the war" and could have made a deal at any time over the past three years. It got worse on Wednesday when Trump called Zelensky a "dictator" - something he has never called Putin - apparently because Ukraine did not hold presidential elections last year, at the normal expiry of Zelensky’s five-year term.
But of course, there is a war on - how many countries actually hold elections in wartime? Britain didn’t during both World Wars, meaning by Trump's logic, Winston Churchill was a dictator.
Ukranian commentators made much of the fact that the country is under martial law, which itself complicates any notion of an election. And that's before looking at the practicalities of who gets to vote - the 4 million plus refugees living abroad? The people displaced from Russian-occupied territory in Eastern Ukraine?
What about the Russians who have moved into these area - do they get to vote? And any ceasefire to hold an election that would double as a referendum on a peace deal would give the Russians plenty of time to prepare a fresh assault on a divided and demoralised Ukrainian army.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Monday's talks between US and Russian delegations in Saudi Arabia saw the US concede two of Russia’s demands before any actual talks begin - the ceding of captured territory in the east, and no NATO membership for Ukraine. And the election issue is in play.
But what have the Russians conceded? Nothing, it would appear. Indeed, they have asked for more, as good negotiators tend to do.
If Trump is to live up to his own self-image as a great negotiator, he is going to have to get the Russians to make serious concessions.
Mike Froman, chairman of the US Council on Foreign Relations - a think tank - argues that Trump will have to convince Putin that time is not on his side, which he could do by supplying Ukraine with more powerful, longer range high tech weapons, stiffening sanctions on Russia, pledging long term support for Ukraine along the current lines of control - which include bits of Russia near Kursk. This would be a surprising turn against Putin, something Trump has never done.
Froman also argues that Trump would be more effective if he works with European partners - rather than insulting them - claiming it increases the chances of European troops being deployed as part of a peace settlement, higher military spending by the Europeans and thus more freedom for the US to focus on its main engagement in the 21st century, the Pacific region and China.
Which is the kind of cool-headed thinking you want from a think tank. Instead, Trump rounded out the week with more unflattering comments about Zelensky. In a telephone interview with the Brian Kilmeade podcast on Foxnews.com yesterday evening, the President said: "I've been watching him [Zelensky] negotiate with no cards. He has no cards. And you get sick of it. You just get sick of it. And I've had it.
"He then made a deal with us for rare earth and things. I mean, who knows what rare earth is worth, you know, but at least it's something. And who knows if they even have it?
"But we made a deal with rare earth and the Secretary of Treasury, a very good guy, actually went there, and they couldn't even come close to getting a good deal done. And frankly, I wish he didn't go there, waste of his time like that ... just a wasted trip, a dangerous trip to him. I didn't like it that he was doing it because, you know, he's a good man. I didn't want him to put himself under danger, because I had a feeling something like that would happen.
"And then he [Zelensky] complains that he's not in a meeting that we're having with Saudi Arabia, trying to intermediate. Well, he's been in the meetings for three years, and nothing got done. So, I don't think he's very important to be at meetings. To be honest with you, he's been there for three years. He makes it very hard to make deals. But look what's happened to his country. It's been demolished."
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Kilmeade asked if he accepted that Russia was the aggressor, not Ukraine. Trump said yes:
"When you say Russia was the attacker? Yeah, Russia attacked, but there was no reason for them to attack. It should have never happened. That war should have never happened.
"You know, every time I say, 'oh, it's not Russia's fault' I always get slammed by the fake news, but I'm telling you, Biden said the wrong things. Zelensky said the wrong things. They got attacked by somebody that's much bigger and much stronger, which is a bad thing to do, and you don't do that, but Russia could have been talked out of that so easily.
That should never have been a war, and all those dead people shouldn't be dead, and all those cities shouldn't be demolished right now. So, when Zelensky said, oh, he wasn't invited to a meeting, I mean, it wasn't a priority because he did such a bad job in negotiating so far. Number one, you shouldn't have had a war, and if you did, it should have been solved and settled immediately."
President Trump is clearly irked by the Ukrainian's refusal to sign the mineral rights deal and start to move quickly to settle the war. But moving quickly is the Trump style - it's not necessarily the way of international relations at the sharp end.
Somebody else's timetable is not always the priority. And a rushed deal on somebody else's terms is always going to be resisted by the party that fears losing out most.
Mike Froman compares this rush to do a deal by cutting out the people most affected with Trump's deal to pull the US out of Afghanistan. During his first administration Trump negotiated an initial deal with the Taliban in Doha, excluding the Afghan government as a party to the talks.
In the end the deal prioritised a swift end to the war, and a hasty US exit. The Biden administration carried out the deal, extending the withdrawal period by just four months, and precipitating a crisis that rapidly resulted in a failed state and US humiliation. Joe Biden's ratings went negative in August 2021 and never recovered.
Froman calls on Trump not to let Ukraine become his Afghanistan moment.
"If you thought the optics of the Taliban parading American Humvees through Kabul looked bad, imagine the Russians driving a convoy of Abrams tanks through Kharkiv".
It should be a troubling thought for Trump, but at the end of a week that culminated in the firing of his top military advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General CQ Brown - and the likely purging of more Generals and Admirals - there is little sign that the President of the United States is troubled.
His European allies, however, are traumatised.
