Zelensky’s Oval Office Clash with Trump Draws Pride and Fear in Ukraine

It was evening in Kyiv when the news from the White House arrived. My dinner mate, a colonel in the Ukrainian armed forces, got a call on his phone while raising a toast, and I could hear a muffled voice urging him to watch the footage from the Oval Office. We pulled it up on the colonel’s phone and sat there, slack jawed, the fat coagulating on our plates, as my President and his President went at each other like a pair of feuding in-laws.

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A long moment passed before my companion rendered his verdict. Molodets, he said of President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Well done.” I had rarely heard the officer praise his commander-in-chief. But he seemed genuinely impressed. “He pushed back,” he said of Zelensky. “You have to respect that.” Then he paused again, looking down at the screen, and added: “But now we’re f—ed.”

Since the drama erupted on Friday, the reactions in Kyiv have mostly swung between these two emotions: pride in their leader for standing up to the most powerful man in the world, and fear of what the consequences would be for Ukraine, for its military and for its chances of surviving Russia’s invasion, which entered its fourth year last week. Among Zelensky’s aides and allies, no one seemed all that surprised by what he said to President Donald Trump, nor by the tone Zelensky took. In many ways, it was classic Zelensky—proud, stubborn, courageous to the point of recklessness, and rarely capable of bearing an insult in silence.

“What else was he supposed to do,” one of Zelensky’s advisers asked me on Friday night. “If somebody is wiping their feet on you, are you just supposed to take it?” As we spoke, the adviser kept his eyes fixed on his social media feed, where every Ukrainian with an internet connection seemed to be venting and interpreting what had happened to their leader. Plenty of them were livid with Zelensky. His clash with Trump threatens to rupture an alliance that has kept Ukraine alive during the war with an estimated $183 billion in financial and military aid and critical wartime intelligence that no other ally can replace. With the stakes that high, Zelensky’s political opponents and many independent analysts called Friday’s argument in the Oval Office a diplomatic catastrophe, unprecedented and inexcusable.

But those closest to Zelensky knew the outburst had plenty of precedents—except, in the past, they played out behind closed doors. President Joe Biden had similar clashes with Zelensky early in the war. In the summer of 2022, the U.S. agreed to provide a massive package of military aid to Ukraine, including an advanced missile system that Biden withheld for months out of fear of drawing the U.S. deeper into the war. During a phone call to talk about the aid package, which was worth about a billion dollars, Zelensky took barely a minute to thank Biden before he began asking for more assistance. Biden lost his temper in response, chastising the Ukrainian leader for seeming ungrateful.

About a year later, Zelensky received a similar dressing down from Ben Wallace, who was then the British Defense Minister. “People want to see gratitude,” Wallace said at a NATO summit in July 2023. “We’re not Amazon.” The U.K. had delivered so many de-mining vehicles to the Ukrainians, Wallace added, “that I think there’s none left.” After the spat, Wallace received so much blowback for his remarks that he issued an apology to Zelensky. 

On Friday night, it was Zelensky who faced pressure to apologize to Trump during an interview with Fox News, and he declined to offer one. “No. I respect [the] President, and I respect American people,” he said calmly. “I think we have to be very open and very honest, and I’m not sure that we did something bad.”

To many Ukrainians, Zelensky was right. In the Oval Office and on Fox News, he spoke with all the conviction and self-respect that his citizens have come to expect from their leader. He has long internalized their collective pain and anger at the Russian invasion, and he has made an art of channeling those emotions as he seeks to win the support of the world. Maybe this time he chose the wrong setting to speak so freely with such a crucial ally. But the main response among my friends in Kyiv was pride in having a leader with such a backbone. “Every time he goes abroad, he carries with him what we feel here,” one of them told me on Friday night. “That’s part of his job. To express those feelings to the world.” 

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