The sky felt like it split over Kyiv. <\/p>\n
On a horizon where drones and airstrikes have killed 47 civilians in Ukraine in the past 10 days, superlatives rained: the most consequential moment in the war since Russia\u2019s invasion; the ugliest personality clash \u2014 between a 48-year-old comedian turned wartime leader and a septuagenarian billionaire turned US president; the most significant turning point in European history since 1989 or even 1945. <\/p>\n
After Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky found himself berated for lack of gratitude on live television by US President Donald Trump and his Vice President JD Vance on Friday, Ukraine seemed immediately unsure whether to be furious at his treatment \u2013 after their collective survival of three years of Russian bombardment and savagery \u2013 at the hands of wealthy American elites, or to panickedly seek remedy in Kyiv\u2019s relationship with the ally it likely cannot endure without. <\/p>\n
Ukrainian military channels on Telegram fumed they would rather die on their feet, than beg on their knees. Kyiv officials exuded solidarity. But the carpet under their feet was suddenly gone. <\/p>\n
There is \u201cnothing we can do to fix this,\u201d a senior US official told me \u2013 adding that the fix must come from Zelensky. Trump-whisperer Sen. Lindsey Graham speculated Zelensky should fix it fast or step aside. US politicians are used to their words having an outsized impact, but Friday they rippled across the established norms of European security and made a continent, just about recovered from the horrific whiplash of the past 10 days, suddenly check their seatbelts again. <\/p>\n
Zelensky\u2019s task on Friday had been simple and almost complete, a draft agreement on a critical minerals deal waiting to be signed. The mood in his meeting was adequately convivial \u2013 not even derailed by his tough rhetoric on Putin. The wartime leader\u2019s wardrobe choices \u2013 a black, long-sleeved shirt that he\u2019s always worn \u2013 may not have been to Trump\u2019s liking, a US official told me, but did not overturn the apple cart. It took Vance \u2013 who often attends, but rarely speaks in, Trump\u2019s international meetings \u2013 to do that. <\/p>\n
Misinformation is often the luxury of the privileged. The basic essentials of your life \u2013 electricity, food and water \u2013 must be in place to afford the privilege of propagating or believing untruths. When Zelensky was confronted with a vice-presidential lecture on Russian diplomacy \u2013 which since 2014 has openly advanced little but Moscow\u2019s military goals in Ukraine, he talked back. Well, he tried to. <\/p>\n
When Trump later told him he had \u201cno cards,\u201d Zelensky replied: \u201cI am not playing cards.\u201d Ukrainians are not playing cards but dying in a rate less than the fantastical figures Trump keeps citing, though at an adequately horrific pace of hundreds a week, that they too want peace. <\/p>\n
This is the gruesome gulf between the parties in the Oval Office. On one side, a country where the facts of war are personal as they involve relatives and friends who are never coming home, and homes that will never be returned to. On the other, America\u2019s right flank feeling scorned because its aid \u2013 given to defeat a decades-long adversary at no cost of American life \u2013 had not been received with enough gratitude. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not acting at all thankful. And that\u2019s not a nice thing,\u201d said Trump, as though the cost of tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives was not somehow a sign of appreciation. <\/p>\n
Zelensky later said in an interview with Fox News he didn\u2019t feel he owed Trump an apology, but he thought the relationship could be salvaged. <\/p>\n
Trump and Vance have never seen war up close, but are still disgusted by it. They seem to have felt Zelensky, soaked in war\u2019s horror for three years, needed a lecture about the peace anyone who had seen war would yearn for. Moneyed ignorance loudly lectured exhausted experience. <\/p>\n
Where do we go from here? Zelensky has probably endured the defining moment of his presidency. He must either magically heal this rift, somehow survive without America, or else step aside and let someone else try \u2013 the last perhaps the easiest. Yet stepping down from power, as Moscow would like, could spark a crisis on the front lines, eroding political clarity, and in the legitimacy of the government in Kyiv, where parliamentary processes or flawed wartime elections would likely stumble in producing a clean successor. <\/p>\n
There are no good choices ahead, no sure bets. Yet one thing is comforting since I came back to Kyiv. Europe\u2019s security \u2013 after three daunting weeks of the Trump administration questioning democracy and alliances across the continent \u2013 may seem in crisis from the comfortable perspective in London, or Paris, or Munich. Somehow in Kyiv after three years, the doubts feel lighter. Waves of drones come nightly here, yet the city adapts, the people endure, the lights stay on. <\/p>\n
This resilience makes Zelensky\u2019s bristling at being lectured by Vance on his nation\u2019s sacrifice and peril easier to understand. As one Ukrainian civilian summarized it last night: \u201cDignity is also a value. If Russia cannot destroy it, why does the US think it can?\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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