WASHINGTON — After Friday’s public clash between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. officials say the path to a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine is deeply uncertain — and wholly dependent the Ukrainian leader’s next steps.
Since the blowup, Trump administration officials have also discussed whether to pause U.S. military aid to Ukraine, according to two administration officials, though it’s unclear whether or when the president would take such a step.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment.
Zelenskyy was at the White House on Friday to sign a deal with Trump that would cut in the U.S. on money from mining rare earths and other critical minerals in Ukraine after the war with Russia ends. Trump has said the economic deal with the U.S. would serve as a security guarantee for Ukraine against a future Russian invasion like the one that started the war in February 2022. But the deal was never signed and remains in limbo.
Trump’s aides asked Zelenskyy to leave the White House after an Oval Office meeting featuring nearly an hour of remarks and questions from reporters devolved into a spat, which left the president angry and publicly questioning whether the Ukrainian leader wants to negotiate an end to the war.
Zelenskyy’s public statements since he left the White House on Friday, including a social media post thanking Trump for hosting him and Americans for supporting Ukraine, have done little to move the president since then, and top administration officials believe that that peace talks with Ukraine are on hold, according to multiple administration officials.
One of the administration officials said, “The ball is in President Zelenskyy’s court.”
“The president believes Zelenskyy has to come back to the table and he has to be the one to come and make it right,” the official said.
Another administration official said Zelenskyy so far has not publicly shown any regret for what the White House views as a disrespectful approach to a meeting in the Oval Office, adding that the official is “not sure” where a peace process goes from here.
Multiple administration officials pushed back on critics of how Trump handled the moment, some of whom have suggested that the tense exchange in the Oval Office between Trump and Zelenskyy was planned. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the scene “a political ambush” in a statement on Friday.
“It was not planned at all. It was the exact opposite of how most people expected the exchange to go,” said a source familiar with the meeting. An administration official added, “There was no setup.”
Ending the war in Ukraine was one of Trump’s signature campaign promises, and he said during the 2024 race that he would do it within 24 hours of taking office. Friday’s developments left the president further away from achieving that goal, a little over two weeks after Trump said he’d spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin and negotiations to end the war in Ukraine would begin “immediately.” Trump then called Zelenskyy to inform him of his conversation with Putin.
What followed was two weeks of public and private back-and-forth between U.S. and Ukrainian officials that, from the Trump administration’s view, was painstaking, according to two administration officials.
“It’s been a challenging couple of weeks,” one of the officials said.
As three Trump administration officials put it, Zelenskyy approached meetings with top Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, from a standpoint of wanting more from the U.S., and they said he came off as ungrateful and unaware of the political shift in the U.S. After Zelenskyy declined to sign an early version of a minerals deal that the U.S. put before him, Trump became frustrated and publicly referred to the elected Ukrainian leader as a dictator.
But negotiations on a minerals deal continued. In the days leading up to Zelenskyy’s meeting with Trump, Ukrainian officials pushed for language tweaks in the deal, two administration officials said.
When Zelenskyy, during his remarks in the Oval Office, raised the idea of “real” security guarantees from the U.S. beyond the economic deal on Ukrainian minerals — reiterating his longtime public posture — his comments grated on some administration officials.
“It’s been abundantly clear to Zelenskyy that there would be no security guarantees in this deal,” one of the officials said.
Administration officials said they are unsure precisely what Zelenskyy could do to convince Trump to re-engage on negotiations with him — other than to have, from their perspective, a complete attitude change toward the president. They said Trump remains unconvinced that Zelenskyy wants to negotiate an end to the war at this time.
“It has not dawned on him the reality that there was a paradigm shift with the election on Nov. 6,” an administration official said of Zelenskyy.
Asked if it’s still possible for the U.S. to work with Zelenskyy to reach a peace deal, another administration official said, “I still think so, yes.”
Zelenskyy has been in the U.K. this weekend for meetings with top European leaders trying to determine a way forward. He is set to attend a summit in London Sunday to discuss the war with more than 15 other European leaders.
