Volodymyr Zelenskyy will make his second visit to the White House on Monday with the daunting task of reversing the damage done to Ukraine’s security prospects by Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.
Zelenskyy will not, however, be alone as he was on his first trip to the White House in February when he was ambushed and humiliated by Donald Trump and the vice-president, JD Vance, who sought to bully him into capitulation to Moscow’s demands.
This time the Ukrainian leader comes to Washington flanked by a dream team of European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron, who combine economic and military clout with proven rapport with Trump.
Their mission will be to use their individual and combined influence to coax the president out of the pro-Russian positions he adopted after just a couple of hours under Putin’s sway in the sub-Arctic on Friday.
To do that, they will have to project a more convincing sense of resolve and common purpose than they have managed hitherto, argued Ben Rhodes, a former adviser to Barack Obama.
“My advice would be to not capitulate to Trump,” Rhodes said. “He has grown all too accustomed to people he perceives as weaker bending to his will, which is something that Putin does not do … Zelenskyy cannot be expected to do this alone, as that’s what got him into that last mess in the Oval Office. Zelenskyy needs Europe. And the Europeans need to show a strength to stand up to Trump which they have not really shown yet.”
Macron and Merz will accompany Zelenskyy on Monday as embodiments of the two pillars of Europe, the French-German axis that is at the core of the EU. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, will be a reminder of Europe’s combined importance as an economic juggernaut. Trump struck a EU-US trade deal with her just three weeks ago in Scotland, and hailed the relationship as “the biggest trading partnership in the world”.
Brett Bruen, a former White House director of global engagement, said the European leaders should focus on economics and use the White House meeting “as a chance to remind Trump how small Russia’s economy is vis-a-vis the EU and the UK and other western partners”.
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, will be a useful bridge: a European far-rightwinger who Trump counts as a friend but who also supports Ukrainian sovereignty.
The Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, represents a small European state but he is on Team Zelenskyy because he managed to establish an unexpectedly warm relationship with Trump. The Finn cultivated his access to the president by hastily polishing up his rusty golfing skills for an impromptu trip to Florida in March for a round with Trump, on the recommendation of the Republican senator Lindsey Graham. Stubb used the occasion to offer the perspective of Russia’s closest European neighbour, urging Trump not to trust Vladimir Putin.
Starmer combines national clout and personal rapport in some measure. Trump has gone out of his way to emphasise their good relations, despite Starmer’s “liberal” outlook, and the president arguably has an incentive not to sour relations ahead of a state visit to the UK next month, an extravaganza in which Trump sets high store.
Mark Rutte also brings the influence of high office, as Nato secretary general, with a proven track record of corralling Trump with honeyed words, at one point appointing him the “daddy” among world leaders, helping avoid any disastrous outbursts at the Nato summit in June.
“A lot of people have learned the lessons of Trump, in terms of how you handle him,” said Kim Darroch, who was the UK ambassador to Washington in Trump’s first term. “There will be a lot of flattery. It’s tiresome but it’s necessary: it gets you to first base. You tell him how well he’s doing, how glad everyone is that he is leading the west to find a solution to the war. But then you get on to the substance.”
The fact that all these leaders have cleared their diaries to fly to Washington at short notice is a measure of how alarmed they were by Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage. The Russian president, wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes after his unprovoked full invasion of Ukraine, was feted with a red carpet and a personal round of applause from Trump, who allowed him to speak first after the truncated meeting and abruptly dropped his previous insistence on a ceasefire.
Instead, the US president uncritically accepted Putin’s preference to move straight to a comprehensive peace deal, putting the onus on Ukraine to make territorial concessions.
One diplomatic observer likened the prospect of Monday’s White House showdown to a football team coming out for a second half trailing 0-3 but with a raft of super-substitutes on the field.
The first challenge will be staying together and sticking to the same talking points.
“Put up a united front and speak from one set of points,” advised Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to Nato. “The goal is to get Trump to agree and side with them. But the message must be that their position is real, won’t change, and if Trump doesn’t agree they will pursue their path on their own.”
“Trump won’t have the patience to listen to the same pitch a dozen times,” Darroch said. “So for the initial round they probably need to select a couple of European speakers alongside Zelenskyy: perhaps Rutte as secretary general of Nato and Macron as the senior European national leader.
“My advice to Starmer would be to wait and see how the conversation goes,” Darroch added. “If it goes badly off-track, or gets a bit spiky, he can intervene to pull it back on course, or calm it down, or just try to build some bridges. Because the risk is that if Trump thinks that the whole exercise is basically about telling him he’s got it wrong, he could react badly or just close the discussion down.”
On the way into the White House, Zelenskyy and his European backers can steel themselves with knowledge that not all is lost. The worst fear was that Trump would strike a deal with Putin in Alaska that would be presented as a fait accompli to Kyiv. That did not happen. Furthermore, they have potential allies inside the Trump administration.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, is a traditional Republican whose instincts towards Russia are hawkish, although he has a record of going along with the flow of the president’s impulses.
On Sunday, Rubio gave the arriving delegation some hope, insisting to NBC that a ceasefire is “not off the table” and confirming that the US is interested in contributing to western security guarantees to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal, acknowledging “it’s one of their fundamental demands is that if this war were to end, they have to make sure this never happens again”.
The arrival of so many European luminaries in Washington is a sign of panic, in part, but also of united resolve. Arguably the only way the delegation could be strengthened would be with the inclusion of a Norwegian. Last week, Trump is reported to have cold-called the Norwegian finance minister (and former Nato secretary general) Jens Stoltenberg, catching him by surprise on his mobile while he was out on the street.
The president is said to have pressed Stoltenberg on his obsession with winning a Nobel peace prize, an award decided by a Norwegian parliamentary-appointed committee. One of the cards Trump’s visitors will have in their hands on Monday is a reminder that cosying up to Putin is unlikely to get him the Nobel he craves.
“Second-term Trump has his eye on his place in the history books,” Darroch said. “This is a point which needs to be put across delicately, but history will be kind to him if he delivers a fair peace in Ukraine; less so if he presses for a capitulation.”
