Zelenskyy
faces daunting trip to the White House – but this time he won’t be alone
Julian
Borger
Senior
international correspondent
Dream
team of European leaders will be with the Ukrainian president, seeking to show
a united front when they meet Donald Trump
Sun 17
Aug 2025 18.37 BST
Volodymyr
Zelenskyy will make his second visit to the White House on Monday with the
daunting task of reversing the damage done to Ukraine’s security prospects by
Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.
Zelenskyy
will not, however, be alone as he was on his first trip to the White House in
February when he was ambushed and humiliated by Donald Trump and the
vice-president, JD Vance, who sought to bully him into capitulation to Moscow’s
demands.
This time
the Ukrainian leader comes to Washington flanked by a dream team of European
leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Germany’s Friedrich Merz and
France’s Emmanuel Macron, who combine economic and military clout with proven
rapport with Trump.
Their
mission will be to use their individual and combined influence to coax the
president out of the pro-Russian positions he adopted after just a couple of
hours under Putin’s sway in the sub-Arctic on Friday.
To do
that, they will have to project a more convincing sense of resolve and common
purpose than they have managed hitherto, argued Ben Rhodes, a former adviser to
Barack Obama.
“My
advice would be to not capitulate to Trump,” Rhodes said. “He has grown all too
accustomed to people he perceives as weaker bending to his will, which is
something that Putin does not do … Zelenskyy cannot be expected to do this
alone, as that’s what got him into that last mess in the Oval Office. Zelenskyy
needs Europe. And the Europeans need to show a strength to stand up to Trump
which they have not really shown yet.”
Macron
and Merz will accompany Zelenskyy on Monday as embodiments of the two pillars
of Europe, the French-German axis that is at the core of the EU. Ursula von der
Leyen, the European Commission president, will be a reminder of Europe’s
combined importance as an economic juggernaut. Trump struck a EU-US trade deal
with her just three weeks ago in Scotland, and hailed the relationship as “the
biggest trading partnership in the world”.
Brett
Bruen, a former White House director of global engagement, said the European
leaders should focus on economics and use the White House meeting “as a chance
to remind Trump how small Russia’s economy is vis-a-vis the EU and the UK and
other western partners”.
Italy’s
prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, will be a useful bridge: a European
far-rightwinger who Trump counts as a friend but who also supports Ukrainian
sovereignty.
The
Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, represents a small European state but he is
on Team Zelenskyy because he managed to establish an unexpectedly warm
relationship with Trump. The Finn cultivated his access to the president by
hastily polishing up his rusty golfing skills for an impromptu trip to Florida
in March for a round with Trump, on the recommendation of the Republican
senator Lindsey Graham. Stubb used the occasion to offer the perspective of
Russia’s closest European neighbour, urging Trump not to trust Vladimir Putin.
Starmer
combines national clout and personal rapport in some measure. Trump has gone
out of his way to emphasise their good relations, despite Starmer’s “liberal”
outlook, and the president arguably has an incentive not to sour relations
ahead of a state visit to the UK next month, an extravaganza in which Trump
sets high store.
Mark
Rutte also brings the influence of high office, as Nato secretary general, with
a proven track record of corralling Trump with honeyed words, at one point
appointing him the “daddy” among world leaders, helping avoid any disastrous
outbursts at the Nato summit in June.
“A lot of
people have learned the lessons of Trump, in terms of how you handle him,” said
Kim Darroch, who was the UK ambassador to Washington in Trump’s first term.
“There will be a lot of flattery. It’s tiresome but it’s necessary: it gets you
to first base. You tell him how well he’s doing, how glad everyone is that he
is leading the west to find a solution to the war. But then you get on to the
substance.”
The fact
that all these leaders have cleared their diaries to fly to Washington at short
notice is a measure of how alarmed they were by Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in
Anchorage. The Russian president, wanted by the international criminal court
for war crimes after his unprovoked full invasion of Ukraine, was feted with a
red carpet and a personal round of applause from Trump, who allowed him to
speak first after the truncated abortive meeting and abruptly dropped his
previous insistence on a ceasefire.
Instead,
the US president uncritically accepted Putin’s preference to move straight to a
comprehensive peace deal, putting the onus on Ukraine to make territorial
concessions.
One
diplomatic observer likened the prospect of Monday’s White House showdown to a
football team coming out for a second half trailing 0-3 but with a raft of
super-substitutes on the field.
The first
challenge will be staying together and sticking to the same talking points.
“Put up a
united front and speak from one set of points,” advised Ivo Daalder, a former
US ambassador to Nato. “The goal is to get Trump to agree and side with them.
But the message must be that their position is real, won’t change, and if Trump
doesn’t agree they will pursue their path on their own.”
“Trump
won’t have the patience to listen to the same pitch a dozen times,” Darroch
said. “So for the initial round they probably need to select a couple of
European speakers alongside Zelenskyy: perhaps Rutte as secretary general of
Nato and Macron as the senior European national leader.
“My
advice to Starmer would be to wait and see how the conversation goes,” Darroch
added. “If it goes badly off-track, or gets a bit spiky, he can intervene to
pull it back on course, or calm it down, or just try to build some bridges.
Because the risk is that if Trump thinks that the whole exercise is basically
about telling him he’s got it wrong, he could react badly or just close the
discussion down.”
On the
way into the White House, Zelenskyy and his European backers can steel
themselves with knowledge that not all is lost. The worst fear was that Trump
would strike a deal with Putin in Alaska that would be presented as a fait
accompli to Kyiv. That did not happen. Furthermore, they have potential allies
inside the Trump administration.
Marco
Rubio, the US secretary of state, is a traditional Republican whose instincts
towards Russia are hawkish, although he has a record of going along with the
flow of the president’s impulses.
On
Sunday, Rubio gave the arriving delegation some hope, insisting to NBC that a
ceasefire is “not off the table” and confirming that the US is interested in
contributing to western security guarantees to Ukraine in the event of a peace
deal, acknowledging “it’s one of their fundamental demands is that if this war
were to end, they have to make sure this never happens again”.
The
arrival of so many European luminaries in Washington is a sign of panic, in
part, but also of united resolve. Arguably the only way the delegation could be
strengthened would be with the inclusion of a Norwegian. Last week, Trump is
reported to have cold-called the Norwegian foreign minister (and former Nato
secretary general) Jens Stoltenberg, catching him by surprise on his mobile
while he was out on the street.
The
president is said to have pressed Stoltenberg on his obsession with winning a
Nobel peace prize, an award decided by a Norwegian parliamentary-appointed
committee. One of the cards Trump’s visitors will have in their hands on Monday
is a reminder that cosying up to Putin is unlikely to get him the Nobel he
craves.
“Second-term
Trump has his eye on his place in the history books,” Darroch said. “This is a
point which needs to be put across delicately, but history will be kind to him
if he delivers a fair peace in Ukraine; less so if he presses for a
capitulation.”
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