Five months ago, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy left the Oval Office humiliated, kicked out after a tense meeting with Donald Trump. Since then, Kyiv has been working overtime to patch things up. With quiet advice from European allies, Zelenskyy’s team managed what seemed impossible; a reset. “We managed to reset communications, to find a new language to work with Trump,” one senior Ukrainian official said just last week.
It even looked like Trump was warming to Ukraine’s plight. He called Russia’s bombing of Ukrainian cities “disgusting” and warned Vladimir Putin to stop the war or face crushing sanctions. The deadline was last Friday.
Then came a twist. Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, flew to Moscow for talks with Putin. Three hours later, Putin had made no real concessions — yet walked away with an invitation to meet Trump in Alaska. It would be his first U.S. trip since 2007, aside from UN visits.
The summit announcement quickly descended into the kind of chaos that now feels familiar in Trump’s foreign policy. First, the White House hinted there could be a three-way meeting with Zelenskyy. Then Putin flatly denied agreeing to see him. A U.S. official told the press there’d be no meeting without Ukraine; hours later, Trump said he’d meet Putin anyway. To many watching, it seemed like Putin was the one setting the rules.
What really alarmed Kyiv was the reported deal on the table: Ukraine would pull its troops out of the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk it still holds — including the fortress city of Kramatorsk — while Russia simply froze the front lines elsewhere. Zelenskyy’s response was blunt: “Ukrainians will not give their land to occupiers… Any deal without Ukraine is destined to be stillborn.”
Behind the scenes, however, some Ukrainian officials admit the war has dragged on so long, and cost so much, that even a flawed ceasefire might feel like relief. The fear is that Moscow would just use the pause to rebuild its forces for another attack. European ideas for a peacekeeping mission have already been watered down into a “reassurance force” stationed far from the front.
Now, with the Alaska summit days away, Zelenskyy is rallying European leaders to present an alternative. But the fear lingers, if Trump and Putin cut a deal behind closed doors, Ukraine and Europe may wake up to a new reality they had no say in.
