The relationship between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump resembles an agonizing tennis match. After months of hitting, the president of Ukraine plays with his back against the wall at the back of the pitch, saving points at the last gasp. The Republican president wants to claim victory for being the one who sealed the peace between Moscow and Kiev. And their strategy is to subdue the weakest rival so that he ends up surrendering. While Trump accused Zelensky on his social networks on Sunday of being ungrateful and responsible for the war, the Ukrainian leader’s emissaries saved another match ball at a meeting with the Americans in Geneva.
The Ukrainian delegation in the Swiss city managed to convince the White House to temporarily reformulate the so-called “peace plan”, a document released last week and which caused an earthquake in Western chancelleries and in Kiev. The text was prepared in October by Kirill Dmitriev, businessman and confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for relations with the Kremlin. The plan was received in Ukraine as a humiliation: “losing dignity”, in Zelenskyj’s words, because it is above all a list of concessions to the invader.
The Geneva meeting allowed, for the moment, to remove from the plan some of the red lines that Kiev does not want to cross. This, by the way, according to a leak published by the Ukrainian media RBC and for him financial times, They are the point that forced Ukraine to renounce sovereignty of Crimea and the Donbass region, the point that forced the invaded country to reduce its number of troops, and the one that required the Constitution to indicate that Ukraine renounces its NATO membership.
The statement on the conclusions of the Geneva meeting indicates that the final plan and the debate on these issues left out of the script for the moment will have to be decided in the coming days between Trump and Zelensky. That is, in a new game in which the Ukrainian president must save the game.
Minerals, a rabbit out of a hat
Trump arrived at the White House in January after a campaign in which he promised that he would end the war in a matter of days and that he would end the waste that he said military assistance to Ukraine entailed. Anticipating the threat, Zelensky pulled a rabbit out of the hat in September 2024, in his first meeting with Trump, still a candidate: he proposed that if he became president, the United States would maintain its military support in exchange for managing Ukraine’s mineral wealth. In February 2025, already president, Trump took him at his word: he demanded the pact on minerals in exchange for the willingness to negotiate a plan to support the defense of the country invaded by the Russians.
The signing of the minerals deal was expected during the ill-fated meeting on February 28 at the White House, in which Zelensky, Trump and his vice president JD Vance had a heated argument in front of the media. The US president responded by temporarily blocking any military assistance to Ukraine, including something as critical to the military as intelligence information.
Zelensky saved the furniture largely, as he himself acknowledged, thanks to advice given to him by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Kiev’s strategy has changed with a campaign of appeasement and flattery towards Trump, also relativizing his mood swings. This did not prevent further crises from occurring. For example, when in July the Pentagon decided to suspend the arms transfer approved during the presidency of Joe Biden. Zelensky refocused the situation after another tense phone interview with Trump.
The Ukrainian leader has not always managed to return Trump’s poisonous balls. Zelenskyj was not informed of the meeting that the Russian Foreign Ministers, Sergei Lavrov, and the American Foreign Minister, Marco Rubio, held last February in Saudi Arabia. The Ukrainian leader was supposed to go to Riyadh, but canceled the trip after discovering that meeting between Lavrov and Rubio, the first in which Washington reopened the doors of international recognition to Moscow.
But the biggest problem Kiev and its European allies faced was the full-state summit Trump organized for Putin last August in Alaska. The Russian autocrat was welcomed as a world leader and not as a politician wanted and captured by the International Criminal Court.
Decisive autumn
Trump maintained the carrot and stick strategy with Putin and Zelensky, although the sticks were more plentiful for the Ukrainian. Relations strained again last October, again in a meeting at the White House. Witkoff and Trump made it clear to the Ukrainian leader that the time had come to assume that he would have to give up the territories conquered by Russia. The interview took place two days after Trump spoke by telephone with Putin, with the idea of holding a new summit, this time in Hungary.
The European diplomatic machine has been activated once again to protect Ukraine’s interests and convince Washington that Russia must accept that any peace negotiations must be preceded by a ceasefire. And Trump, for the first time, stood up to Putin: he suspended plans for the Budapest summit and approved the first sanctions of his mandate against the Russian economy.
A few days after this event, Dmitriev and Witkoff were negotiating the 28-point peace plan that caused a diplomatic storm in Europe. Zelensky will try to survive, once again, in another face-to-face meeting with Trump in the coming days.
