In the free-to-cheapskates portion of his latest post, eugyppius considers the most newsworthy press conference in living memory between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky that went theatrically wrong:
tfw you have no cards.
Since 2022, the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has been running about the globe in his weird focus-grouped jumpers and combat boots, lecturing all of our parliaments on the unity and mutual interests of Europe, the goodness of democracy, the genocidal evils of Vladimir Putin and the importance of ever more weapons deliveries to his country’s armed forces. In the process, he has become one of the more obnoxious political phenomena in recent memory, and I hope I would be able to see this even if I were firmly convinced that German interests aligned perfectly with Ukrainian interests and that we should do nothing but give the AFU all of our tanks and all of our Taurus missiles and possibly even all of our soldiers to defend our shiny wonderful and deeply liberal European democracy, where we are so free that riot police will bash your head in for protesting Covid restrictions and if you call the wrong cabinet minister a moron the speech crimes battalion will raid your house.
Here in Europe, our political leaders have treated the shouting, remonstrating Zelensky with nothing but egregious reverence, and the man has grown accustomed to his noxious political celebrity. Nothing else can explain the amazing press conference Zelensky and Trump held yesterday, ahead of afternoon plans to sign an agreement concerning Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals. We got to witness nothing less than the near-total meltdown of American and Ukrainian relations, live and in colour. Historians of the Ukraine war will be writing about this press conference for years and decades to come.
The meeting almost didn’t happen at all. Zelensky has been publicly irritated that Trump reversed the American policy of isolating Russia, after the American president opened talks with Vladimir Putin to end the war. Two weeks ago, Trump suggested that Ukraine was at fault for the hostilities, Zelensky said Trump was “living in a [Russian] disinformation space“, and Trump said Zelensky was “a dictator without elections“. Trump’s administration initially planned to cancel Zelensky’s visit to Washington this week, but French President Emmanuel Macron persuaded the Americans to go ahead with it. Imagine how much the man regrets that now. After receiving his verbal beat-down in the Oval Office, Zelensky and the rest of the Ukrainian delegation decamped to the Roosevelt Room, while Trump and his advisers decided that the President of Ukraine “was in no position to negotiate“. White House officials told them to leave before they could even eat lunch.
Foreign relations are typically pounded out in back rooms, out of sight, and that was also the intent here. Somewhere in the midst of the journalists’ questions and Trump’s banter, however, yesterday’s event ceased being a press conference and became at first a subtle unacknowledged negotiation and then a hostile disagreement – one which Zelensky got the worst of.
Mark Steyn examines what was said both before and during the Zelensky-Trump slap fight:
The Beltway rumour is that, on his flight to DC, Zelenskyyyy was telephoned by Victoria Nuland, She-Wolf of the Donbass, plus Susan Rice and Anthony Blinken and advised to get tough with Trump. If true, that’s gotta be the worst episode of “Phone-a-Friend” since the plucky little Ukrainian started playing Who Wants to Be a Billionaire (in Euros)? For all you nuanced diplomatists out there, there is now a rather arcane dispute as to whether Z called the Vice President of the United States a “bitch” or merely interjected “f**king hell”:
He literally didn’t. He said “suka blyat“, which, like “kurwa mać” in Polish, is an expression of annoyance equivalent to “fucking hell”. Not ideal politics, granted, but not the same.https://t.co/mOgGZN9iwh
— Ben Sixsmith (@BDSixsmith) March 1, 2025
UPDATE! From Leonid in our comments section:
If the audio is not altered, it does sound like ‘suka, blyad‘ which is akin to ‘f**king piece of sh*t’. It is not necessarily directed at Vance personally, but I specifically translated this as ‘f**king piece of sh*t’, not ‘f**king hell’ because it can indeed be taken as directed at Vance, too. Obviously, even the milder reading doesn’t absolve Z of being an a**hole.
The Ukrainian ambassador seemed to be the only member of Z’s delegation who grasped how badly things were degenerating: the cameras captured her at one point with her head in her hands. The President booted the guy from the White House and gave the Ukrainian’s lunch to the Oval Office interns. I have always found the American vernacular “oh, the guy totally ate my lunch” incredibly lame, but, if Trump is now proposing to make it literal, I wish he’d started with Keir Starmer. Fortunately, America’s wanker media could be relied upon to agree that, when it comes to Z vs T, “the world” sides with Ukraine.
World opinion has been swift, loud and mostly unanimous against the childish behavior today of Trump and Vance. The only question now is if other countries realize that the USA they’ve long known, loved and respected is no longer a reliable ally.
— Aaron Astor (@AstorAaron) February 28, 2025
By “world opinion”, Mr Astor means not China, India, South Africa, Brazil or Saudi Arabia, but the Prime Minister of Luxembourg:
Luxembourg stands with Ukraine. You are fighting for your freedom and a rules based international order.
— Luc Frieden (@LucFrieden) February 28, 2025
From the blissful ignorance of a California congressman:
My grandfather and the Greatest Generation didn’t fight in World War II to see our country side with murderous thugs like Putin. This is a disgrace. https://t.co/3ZrB8ur2Au
— Mike Levin (@MikeLevin) February 28, 2025
Er, in your extensive researches into World War Two, did you ever happen to come across a photograph of, say, the Yalta summit?
Churchill, FDR, and Stalin at Yalta
Still, if Luxembourgish prime ministers are going through one of their periodic butch phases, I prefer the words of Mr Frieden’s predecessor, Jacques Poos, who a third-of-a-century back, as Yugoslavia was disintegrating, told the Yanks to butt out and declared “The hour of Europe has come!” He was right, kind of: shortly thereafter, Bosnian Serbs began tying Continental peacekeepers to trees.
Mr Frieden, like many other politicians and geopolitical experts, has failed to grasp the essential dynamic of yesterday’s meeting – which is very simple:
Zelenskyyyy needs Trump far more than Trump needs Zelenskyyyy.
