Earlier this year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sat in the Oval Office and endured a brutal dressing-down. President Donald Trump told Zelensky he had “disrespected the United States,” Vice President JD Vance scolded him for a lack of gratitude, and Trump told the Ukrainian leader, “You don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards, but without us, you don’t have any cards.”
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Bad as it was, imagine if Zelensky had gone into the Oval Office that February morning and said, I’d like you to give me some of your best cruise missiles, along with intelligence as to where I should use them against Russian territory. And while we’re at it, we’d like billions of dollars in U.S. weapons, in exchange for some of our amazing drone technology.
Zelensky might have been marched off the White House grounds even more quickly than he was.
And yet here we are, seven months later, and all those Ukrainian wish-list items are on the agenda for Friday’s Trump-Zelensky meeting at the White House. Even by Trump standards of geopolitical volatility, it’s a dizzying reversal of fortune.
Now Zelensky arrives less as a supplicant and more like a friend and partner, while Russian President Vladimir Putin stews in the Kremlin, frozen—for the moment—from the diplomatic conversations.
The Tomahawk missiles are in play, along with a multi-billion-dollar “megadeal” that includes an exchange of Ukrainian drone innovation for U.S. military aid, and the feeling—however tenuous—that Zelensky holds an edge over Putin in the competition for Trump’s attention and sympathies.
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It’s a remarkable turnaround. To put it in Trumpian terms, suddenly it’s Zelensky who’s holding the cards.
A Trump pivot—seven months in the making
How did this happen?
For one thing, Zelensky learned a lesson—the hard way—about dealing with the 47th American President. Immediately after the Oval Office debacle, Zelensky offered profuse expressions of gratitude (he had actually done so before). “Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit,” he wrote in a social media post hours after leaving the White House that day. Still stinging from the Trump-Vance rebuke, Zelensky couldn’t quite bring himself to apologize, but in the weeks and months that followed he took to leavening his asks for U.S. support with appreciative messages, and praise for Trump’s “vision” and “peace through strength” diplomacy.
Another shift came at the NATO summit in June, when Trump moved from NATO skeptic to cheerleader after the alliance agreed to pay up—a change that carried significant import for aspiring member Ukraine. Trump left the gathering at The Hague glowing—“a tremendous summit,” he said—and signed onto an alliance statement that Russia was “a profound security threat.” When it came to Trump’s view of Zelensky, all seemed forgiven; Trump acknowledged Ukraine’s “brave battle,” and on the heels of the summit, the U.S. announced an arrangement under which Washington would sell billions of dollars worth of weaponry to Europe for transshipment to Ukraine.
The other big change followed soon after: Trump began to sour on Putin.
Trump had long boasted of his warm relationship with Putin—called him a “genius” and “savvy” statesman—and said their friendship would help him end the war. But in midsummer, Trump appeared to recognize certain truths that other global leaders had understood for years: Putin had no problem talking about peace while pummelling Ukrainian civilians, and his war aims left little or no room for concessions. “I’m disappointed in President Putin,” Trump told reporters in early July, and then he went further.
“We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said at a July 8 cabinet meeting.
Policy shifts followed. Trump lifted a freeze on defensive weapons for Kyiv, and began voicing support for long-range Ukrainian strikes against targets inside Russia. “It is very hard, if not impossible,” he wrote on social media in August, “to win a war without attacking an invaders country.” As for the “cards” held by the two sides, he said for the first time that Ukraine might win the war.
Now Trump has come as far as to suggest sending Kyiv a U.S. weapons system—the Tomahawks—that even the Biden Administration never openly considered.
“If this war doesn’t get settled, I may send Tomahawks,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. The Tomahawk can evade air defenses and has a range of 1,000 mi.—five times that of the ATACMS that the Biden Administration provided Ukraine in 2023. Among other things, the Tomahawk would give Ukraine an ability to hit military installations in the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions.
Lastly, there’s what you might call the Gaza ceasefire effect.
Until last week, assessments of Trump’s Nobel-pursuing diplomacy were appropriately cynical: He was clamoring for the prize in an unseemly way, and making dubious or overstated claims of peacemaking in smaller-bore conflicts. Now he’s garnering global praise for the Gaza ceasefire-for-hostages deal—gushing or grudging, depending where you look—and he’s clearly set on resolving the world’s other major war.
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“We have to get Russia done,” he said in Israel this week. “We gotta get that one done.”
This dynamic may favor Zelensky as well; any true peace will require Putin to make concessions that he has shown no interest in making.
A very different summit
All this changes utterly the dynamic of Friday’s meeting.
Zelensky will come with a wish list, as he always does, along with reminders of the Kremlin’s latest aggressions. But the odds that he gets some of those wishes look far higher now. The two leaders spoke twice last weekend, and a delegation led by Ukraine’s Prime Minister is already here working on the landmark drone-tech-for-aid deal, and shoring up support from American policymakers and defense and energy companies. Meanwhile, under the new agreement negotiated earlier this year, NATO members have purchased four packages of U.S. weapons and military equipment totaling roughly $2 billion and shipped those to Ukraine.
Zelensky will also note recent battlefield gains—particularly the long-range strikes against Russian oil targets that have caused gasoline shortages in some regions of Russia. Part of the U.S. reluctance to aid Ukraine—even during the Biden Administration—has been a feeling that the country had no chance in the long war against Russia. It’s been a doom loop for the Ukrainians: the U.S. wavers on military aid; Ukraine loses ground as a result, and pleads for more weapons; and lawmakers say, Why bother—it’s a lost cause.
It would be one more hard-to-fathom shift were Trump to be the one to change that paradigm.
Trump says he has “sort of made a decision” about the Tomahawks, and suggested that the mere mention of sending the missiles to Ukraine could bring Putin to the negotiating table. For his part, Putin has warned that the delivery of Tomahawks to Kyiv would open a “qualitatively new stage of escalation” in the war.
It’s possible that the pendulum swings back—that the Tomahawks are a Trump bluff, the other arrangements fizzle, and that the glow Zelensky is feeling now proves fleeting. Trump may be so hungry for another global peace bonanza that he’ll press Zelensky for concessions that no Ukrainian leader can accept—formal recognition of Russian control of Crimea, for example, or an agreement with only the vaguest security guarantees from the West. Even in the Gaza example, Trump has shown an affinity for grand mission-accomplished statements, with crucial finer points such as the disarming of Hamas, reconstruction of Gaza, and the long-term governance of the territory left to be sorted later.
But for the moment, in the head-spinning world of Trump 2.0 diplomacy, score one for the Ukrainians and for their leader, who has clearly learned a thing or two since that disastrous morning in February.
I thought about that when I heard the interview Zelensky gave to Fox News on Sunday, in which he said that if Trump followed the Gaza ceasefire agreement with a deal that forced Putin “to stop his war,” he would nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“If he will do it,” Zelensky said, “of course in this case we will nominate him, and we will be proud to congratulate him.”
That statement suggested that Zelensky had learned well the lesson of how to flatter the American President. Put differently, not only does the Ukrainian leader hold some cards—he’s also gotten wiser about how to use them.