Trump’s meeting with Zelensky is said to have resulted in a “screaming duel”.

Insiders report

Suddenly Trump tears the maps off the table

Trump received the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office. According to insiders, the meeting was “pretty bad.” Accordingly, there is said to have been a violent crash.

Expectations were high when Donald Trump announced a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky early last week. Among other things, it was supposed to be about the delivery of American Tomahawk cruise missiles to the country invaded by Russia. But shortly before the Ukrainian delegation arrived in Washington on Friday, there was a phone call between Trump and Russia’s authoritarian President Vladimir Putin. Political observers already suspected that the timing could hardly be a coincidence.

In fact, the meeting between Trump and Zelensky ended with another setback for Ukraine: no tomahawks, no commitments from the USA. Instead, new demands from the White House to Kyiv. According to Trump’s wishes, Ukraine should cede certain territories in order to make a peace agreement with the Kremlin ruler possible. The focus is particularly on the Donetsk region. These are Putin’s already known maximum demands, from which he has not yet backed down at all.

The meeting was a clear disappointment for the Ukrainian delegation, two people familiar with the talks told the Reuters news agency on Sunday. As is now known, there are said to have been heated arguments during the meeting in the White House.

“It was pretty bad,” said one of the insiders. Trump’s message to Zelensky was in view of the unabated Russian bombings: “Your country will freeze and your country will be destroyed if Ukraine does not conclude an agreement with Russia.”

The “Financial Times”, among others, had previously reported that the encounter turned into a kind of “shouting duel” and that Trump cursed a considerable part of the time. At one point in the conversation, the 79-year-old Republican suddenly tore the maps showing the current front line in Ukraine off the table and insisted that Zelenskyj should agree to the proposed cessions of territory. As witnesses to the conversation told the newspaper, Trump is said to have repeated the same demands that he had received from the Russian ruler the day before in a telephone conversation with Putin.

After the meeting, a journalist asked the US President during a flight on his government plane Air Force One from Florida to Washington whether he had actually told Zelensky on Friday that Ukraine had to give up Donbass. Trump responded that this was not discussed at the meeting.