Volodymyr Zelensky will sit down with Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. The meeting was confirmed over the weekend by a White House official, and it comes at a moment when the politics of Ukraine aid in Washington are shifting in unpredictable ways.
Zelensky will be in Washington anyway. He is attending the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham, who died two weeks ago at 71. Graham was one of Ukraine’s most vocal supporters in Congress, visiting the country ten times since the Russian invasion and pushing hard for sanctions on Moscow and weapons for Kyiv. His death removed a pillar of the Republican establishment’s Ukraine policy.
Trump and Zelensky have met before, most recently at the NATO summit in Ankara in July. But the political weather has changed since then. Some voices in Trump’s MAGA coalition have grown more openly skeptical of continued support for Ukraine, and the White House meeting will test whether the president’s personal rapport with Zelensky can overcome that pressure.
For Zelensky, the timing is as bad as it gets. Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities continue daily. A strike on a supermarket in Chernihiv on Saturday killed two people, including a nine-year-old girl. Kyiv is pushing for permission to strike deeper into Russian territory with Western weapons. Zelensky claimed on Saturday that Ukraine has developed a list of “priority targets” at ranges over 3,000 kilometers and is sharing intelligence with Washington about Russian satellite surveillance of U.S. military facilities in the Gulf region.
Trump has shown little appetite for expanding the war in Ukraine. His administration has pursued direct talks with Russia, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio met his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov earlier this month. But the White House has not publicly endorsed Ukraine’s deep-strike ambitions.
The meeting comes as the war enters its fifth year with no end in sight. Zelensky will argue that Ukraine’s fight is also America’s, a line that worked with Graham and the old Republican establishment. Whether it works with Trump’s new Republican Party is the open question.