The embattled Ukraine president, believing his own propaganda, was dressed down before the cameras in the Oval Office Friday by a fed-up president and vice president of the United States, reports Joe Lauria.

Volodymyr Zelensky has become accustomed to being feted in Western cities as the second-coming of Churchill, appearing before awards ceremonies, film festivals, the New York Stock Exchange and various national parliaments, (though the Academy Awards twice turned him down.)

All that came crashing down on him Friday in the 102-foot circumference, 816 sq. foot office at the epicenter of still the most powerful nation on earth, as he was met by a buzzsaw of resistance from the president and vice president of the United States. Zelensky was dressed down, even about his dress, being told he was ungrateful, disrespectful, had lost to Russia and was risking “World War III.”

It’s still hard to register that a factual alternative to the West’s propaganda story on Ukraine has largely been accepted by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in a dramatic reversal from the office’s last occupant.

While there are members of Trump’s national security team, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, who previously swallowed whole the fantasy of Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of an “innocent” Ukraine, there were two officials who during Trump’s campaign likely filled him in on the facts.

One was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in numerous speeches when he ran his own campaign for president, displayed an intimate knowledge of the causes of the Ukraine war — NATO expansion, the 2014 U.S. backed coup in Kiev, the beginning of the war by Ukraine against coup resistors in Eastern Ukraine and the U.S. rejection of Russian diplomacy to avoid war.

The other was Tulsi Gabbard, who likewise made clear her profound understanding of the realities of the war. Kennedy is out of the sphere of foreign policy as health and human resources secretary, but Gabbard gives the presidential brief to Trump everyday at 11:15 am.

No doubt she prepped him for Zelensky’s now infamous Oval Office encounter on Friday.

Zelenksy’s Humiliation

Trump humiliated Zelensky from the moment he greeted him on arrival at the front door of the White House. Trump sarcastically remarked, “Oh, you’re all dressed up,” referring to Zelenksy, who wore a black T-shirt with Ukraine’s trident symbol in the guise of a military uniform.

The blogger known as Simplicius the Thinker weighed in on the significance of Zelensky’s humiliation over his attire after a reporter later asked him if he even owns a suit.

“This exchange highlights precisely the main takeaway—which is that the artificially constructed image of Zelensky is no longer useful, and has been tossed away like a used rag. All the false bravado and olive drab khakis—it all served a purpose for the past three years, with Zelensky built up like some kind of John Rambo-Churchill; the ‘sacred’ attire would have never been questioned before, because it represented the theater of it all, the carefully stage-managed production. Now that the play has run its course, failing to turn a profit, the ‘act’ has grown old and we’re immediately allowed a view under the costume.”

The meeting began calmly enough with Trump praising Ukraine’s “very brave fighters.” Trump said:

“So I give tremendous credit to your generals and your soldiers and yourself in the sense that, it’s been very hard fighting, very tough fighting, great fighters. And, you have to be very proud of them from. That’s terrible. But now we want to get it over with. It’s enough.”

Trump said he had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin “and we’re going to try to bring this to a close. It’s something that you want and that he wants. We have to negotiate a deal.” Zelensky widened his eyes at “something that you want.”

“We’ve started the confines of a deal and I think something can happen,” Trump said. “I will say, until we came along, the Biden administration didn’t speak to Russia whatsoever. They didn’t speak to anybody. They just allowed this to continue.”

Trump said: “It’s a somewhat of an exciting moment, but the really exciting moment is when … they stop the shooting or we end up with the deal, and I think we’re fairly close to getting that.”

Zelensky said he counted on Trump “to stop Putin.” He said “enough with the war” should have been said at the beginning because “he [Putin] is a killer and a terrorist.” Zelenksy, acting as if he was unaware of the radical change in U.S. policy under Trump, said, “I hope together we can stop him of course with no compromises of our territory with a killer.”

Zelenksy then made a plea for U.S. air defense systems, “the best in the world,” at which Trump scrunched his face. Zelensky made a pitch for U.S. participation with Britain and France on a peacekeeping force after a ceasefire, which Russia has rejected and which Trump said the U.S. would not take part in.

“Everyone is talking about security, but we have to make a deal first,” Trump said, adding that too many soldiers on both sides were still dying.

When Trump decried both sides’ deaths, Zelensky interjected, “They came to our territory.”

Asked before the Oval Office fireworks erupted whether he would continue sending military aid to Ukraine, Trump said, “We are going to send arms, sure. Hopefully I won’t have to send very much because hopefully we will have it finished quickly. We are not looking forward to sending a lot of arms.”

A reporter asked Zelensky whether he considers the U.S. to be on his side. “I think that the United States is on our side from the very beginning of the occupation and I think President Trump is on our side and I’m sure the United States will not stop support.”

By the end of the hour-long meeting, that certainty changed.  Zelensky said the important question was whether the U.S. and its allies can get Russia to withdraw from Ukraine.

Trump said no deal was possible without compromises. “He’s going to have to make compromises but hopefully not as big as some people think he will have to make. That’s all we can do. I’m here as a mediator between two parties that have been very hostile, to put it mildly. This has been a vicious war.”

“This could lead to a third world war,” Trump went on. “This was headed in the wrong direction. If we didn’t win this election … this could have very well ended up in a third world war.” [See: On Way Out, Reckless Biden Allows Deep Russia Strikes]

Zelensky claimed Putin broke ceasefires 25 times since 2014, during the period of the Minsk accords designed to end the Ukrainian civil war. “He broke his signature,” Zelensky said.

“But he never broke to me,” Trump said.

Zelenksy contradicted Trump. “Since 2016 you’ve been the president.”

What Zelensky failed to mention is that Angela Merkel, former French President Francois Hollande and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko all admitted they never took the Minsk accords seriously and strung Russia along to buy time for NATO to arm and train Ukraine.

Trump said more than once that he didn’t want to talk about security guarantees until there was a peace settlement. “That’s two percent of the problem,” Trump said. The tension between the two men starting building as Zelensky again contradicted him saying there could be no ceasefire without a security guarantee.

“Putin’s soldiers are afraid of our soldiers when we are strong enough,” Zelensky said. “We will never accept just a ceasefire.” He then said the Europeans would need a U.S. backstop when they deploy to Ukraine to secure a ceasefire.

“Putin will never stop,” Zelensky went on. “He hates Ukrainians. He thinks we are not a nation. He wants to destroy us. Putin began this war. He has to pay.” Ukraine can use $300 billion in frozen Russia assets in Europe, he said.

“It’s wonderful to talk badly about someone else,” Trump said in relation to what Zelensky said about Putin. “But I’m in the middle. I’m on both sides. I want to see this end. If we can’t solve it they are going to have to fight it out and who knows what’s going to happen.”

A ‘Threat’ to Europe

Zelensky then began pushing the patently bogus and dangerous idea that Ukraine is the line of defense for Europe and even the United States from Russian aggression.

The overarching U.S.-led aggression against Russia, which led to this conflict, is wiped away with this fairytale, leaving the insidious and ridiculous projection that Russia wants to conquer the world. Western leaders ridicule Russia for taking three years to seize only Donbass and yet say Russia will be at the gates of Paris by summer.

“Like the president said, you have big, nice ocean between us, but if we will not stay, Russia will go further to Baltics and to Poland,” Zelensky said. “It’s understandable to them because they have been the U.S.S.R. … and Putin wants to bring them back to his empire.”

“It’s a fact,” Zelensky lied, “and when he will go there, if we will not stay, you will fight. American soldiers. It doesn’t matter you have ocean or not, your soldiers will fight.”

It’s impossible to know whether Zelensky is stupid enough to believe such rubbish, or smart and cynical enough to utter what he knows are baseless falsehoods to dupe Western publics into continuing to support military aid to his country to keep fighting a lost cause.

Even if this were Putin’s grand design, and there is zero indication it is, he does not have the military capability to carry it out. He has never taken the lightly  the and has sought to avoid the prospect of attacking a NATO nation — which the Baltics and Poland are — triggering an Article 5 response and possible world and nuclear war.

Though Zelensky began this desperate, scaremongering lecture of the U.S. president in the Oval Office, Trump already made clear a couple of weeks ago that he does not buy the B.S. story of Putin threatening the entire Western world.

What people like Zelenksy who push this nonsense fail to mention is that there’s been no coup in the Baltics with the government then attacking Russian speaking enclaves in their countries, though giving no reason for Russia to intervene.  Zelensky and his backers completely remove the history preceding Russia’s intervention into Ukraine, portraying Putin simply as a bloodthirsty madman bent on world conquest — a veritable villain out of a James Bond movie.

Ignoring this, Trump then pressed on with the need for a peace deal. He spoke of many destroyed Ukrainian cities. Zelensky, rose the temperature between them by interrupting him.

“No, no, no Mr. President you have to come and to look. We have very good cities. Yes a lot of things have been destroyed but mostly cities alive. And people work. And children go to school. .. Ukrainian is fighting and it lives.”

Zelensky then indirectly accused Trump of being duped by Russian disinformation. “Maybe it is Putin who is sharing that he has destroyed us,” he said.

“He has lost 700,000 soldiers,” Zelensky lied.

The fiercely anti-Putin Pussy Riot, in partnership with the fiercely anti-Putin BBC Russia service, runs a project to keep track of Russian war casualties and their figure of Russia’s war dead stands at 95,000.

If Russia had lost 750,000 men as Zelensky claims, how has it conquered and held so much territory?

It is Zelensky who is running out of men, being forced by the Biden administration to lower the recruiting age to 18 to send even younger men to the front to die.

Asked about Putin, Trump said he’d known him a long time. “He had to suffer through the Russia hoax, you know, Russia, Russia, Russia. It was all Biden. It was nothing to do with him,” Trump said.

Later he added: “Putin respects me. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. He had to go through that. And we didn’t end up in a war. He was accused of all that stuff and he had nothing to do with it.”

Democrats have themselves to blame, in other words, for making them both the targets of their operation and perhaps driving them closer together.  That of course is not a bad thing if it leads to a resolution of the war and cooperation between the two largest nuclear weapons powers.

“All I’ve done my whole life is make deals and I’m in the middle of a real mess,” Trump said. “And it’s a dangerous one.”

Asked about being too aligned with Putin, Trump said, “I’m not aligned with Putin. I’m not aligned with anybody. I’m aligned with the United States of America and for the good of the world. I’m aligned with the world. And I want to get this thing over with.”

Pointing to Zelensky, he said: “Look at the hatred he’s got for Putin. It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate. The other side isn’t exactly in love with him either.”

Enter Vance

The vice president then entered the fray. Like Trump, Vance  failed to give historical context to the conflict. It would be easy for them politically, because they could blame a Democrat, Barack Obama, for letting this “mess” happen.

The Obama administration was in power when the U.S. backed the 2014 coup that toppled the democratically elected Ukrainian president. It was the Obama administration that greenlighted the coup government starting the war that still rages today by attacking the Russian-speaking Donbass region, which defended its democratic rights by rejecting the coup.

It was the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, as well as Germany and France, that did not press Ukraine to abide by the Minsk accords.  Kennedy and Gabbard know this history in great detail and no doubt have shared it with Trump and Vance.

For example, Gabbard said this on the day before Russia’s intervention into the war, Feb. 23, 2022:

“This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border.”

Gabbard showed that she knows about the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, saying on her podcast, Oct. 18, 2022:

“This regime-change war that the United States and NATO are waging via their proxy in Ukraine didn’t begin when Putin invaded Ukraine. They had their eyes set on this objective long before that.”

But Vance started the history with blaming Joe Biden, saying he was all talk and no action and had let Russia invade.  Trump on the other hand was “engaging in diplomacy. That’s what President Trump is doing.”

By not knowing the history Trump and Vance left the door open for Zelensky to peddle his fake version of the history’s conflict in fractured English:

“Big parts of Ukraine, parts of East and Crimea. So he occupied it in 2014. So during a lot of years, I’m not speaking about just Biden, but …  President Obama, then President Trump, then President Biden, and now President Trump, and God bless, now President Trump will stop him. But during 2014, nobody stopped him. He just occupied and took, he killed people, you know on the contact line —“

Here Trump interrupted, “2015.”

“2014,” said Zelensky.

“Oh, 2014,” said a befuddled Trump, as if this was the first time he was hearing about any of this. “I was not here.” he said.

“During 2104 to 2022 the situation was the same,” Zelensky continued. “People are been dying on the contact line [separating the breakaway Donbass regions with the rest of Ukraine.]

“Nobody stopped him,” he said, completely omitting that Ukraine had begun the war with military attacks against the breakaway regions in April 2014 in an attempt not “to stop him,” but to stop the ethnic Russians from seceding from Ukraine. Here Zelensky engages in the mythmaking of reducing a complex military conflict by two sides to the behavior of just one man.

Zelensky said he signed “the deal” in 2019 with Putin, Merkel and Macron, “ceasefire, ceasefire” and “all of them told me that he would never go … and after that he broken the ceasefire. He killed our people. We signed exchange of prisoners, but he didn’t do it.”

(But according to Zelensky’s former chief of staff, Andriy Bohdan, Zelensky is lying because Ukraine “screwed” Putin by not keeping its end of the 2019 deal with Russia.)

“What kind of diplomacy, J.D. are you speaking about?” Zelensky asked.

“I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that is going to end the destruction of your country,” Vance replied.

Vance then snapped, cutting off Zelensky:

“Mr. President, Mr. president, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”

“Have you ever been to Ukraine that you say, what problems we have?” Zelensky responded as if a vice president with access to classified U.S. information cannot learn about the military and political situation of a country without having visited it.

“Come once,” Zelensky said,

His voice rising, Vance said:

“I know that what happens is you bring people, you bring them on a propaganda tour. Mr. President. Do you disagree that you’ve had problems like bringing people into your military? And do you think that it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?”

Here the meeting starts going off the rails.

Zelensky: “During the war, everybody has problems, even you. But you have nice ocean and don’t feel now, but you will feel it in the future. God bless you.”

“You don’t know that,” Trump interjected. “You don’t know that. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We are trying to solve a problem.”

“I’m not trying –” Zelensky began.

“You are in no position to dictate what we are going to feel,” snapped Trump. “We’re going to feel very good, very strong. You’re right now not in a very good position. You’ve allowed yourselves to be in a very bad position.”

Here Trump is rejecting Zelensky’s fear mongering and attempted blackmail that if the U.S. doesn’t accede to his demands Russia will attack the U.S.

This is the same kind of insanity we heard from the likes of Congressman Adam Schiff during Trump’s 2019 impeachment (for a phone call with Zelensky), when he said, “We have to fight the Russians over there [in Ukraine] so we don’t have to fight them over here [in America].”

Trump told Zelensky that “you don’t have the cards right now. With us you start having cards.”

“I’m not playing cards, I’m very serious Mr, President,” Zelensky said, not understanding the metaphor.

“You’re playing cards,” Trump insisted. “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with World War Three.”

And of course Zelensky has been, acting, with the Biden administration, as if saving his country was worth risking a nuclear holocaust.

“What you are doing is disrespectful to the country, this country that backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have,” said Trump.

After Vance angrily said Zelensky had been ungrateful for the help the U.S. has given him, Zelensky said, “Please if you think that by speaking loudly you can…”

“He’s not speaking loudly,” Trump said, “Your country is in big trouble. No, no, no, you’ve done a lot of talking.”

“Your country is in big trouble,” Trump said.

“I know,”  Zelensky replied.

“You’re not winning this,” Trump said.

Zelensky’s mouth started opening to say, “I know,” but he stopped.

“You have a damned good chance of coming out okay because of us,” Trump said.

When Zelensky tried to say Ukraine has been alone from the start of the war, Trump cut him off: “You haven’t been alone because this stupid president gave you $350 billion. We gave you military equipment. You and you men are brave, but they have to use our military money. If you didn’t have our military equipment this war would have been over in two weeks.”

“It’s gonna be very hard to do business like this,” Trump said.

After Vance said the argument that broke out should not have happened in front of the American media, Trump said: “I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on. I think it’s very important. That’s why I kept this going so long.”

He told Zelensky: “If you can get a ceasefire now I’d take it because then the bullets stop flying and your men stop getting killed.”

The public row ended with Trump saying it was “great television.” A lunch, signing ceremony on a minerals deal and a press conference was cancelled and Zelensky left the White House.

Horrified Reactions

The reactions of mainstream politicians and media was predictable.

Bernie Sanders. wrote on X: “Trump criticizes Zelenskyy, the leader of a democratic country who is courageously fighting Russian imperialism, while he aligns himself with Putin, the dictator who started the bloodiest European war in 80 years. Sorry, President Trump. We believe in democracy, not authoritarianism.”

Schiff wrote: “There was only one person acting presidential in the Oval Office today: Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He stood up to bullies in a Kremlin-style shakedown. What will it take to awaken the conscience of the country after such a shameful display?”

Former EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell wrote on X:  “Trump and Vance put on a shameful show. I am ashamed of this behavior. The United States deserves something better. The free world must support Ukraine. I was and remain with Zelensky.”

Johann David Wadepool, deputy leader of the newly elected CDU party in Germany, wrote: “How can you stab the president of an occupied country in the back like that? Free Europe will not betray Ukraine.”

A good deal of work by the media is trying to find out what is said in frank, closed door conversations between leaders.  Here it was all out in the open, incredible transparency that most journalists would die for, but instead we hear petty criticisms of Trump in the media for his frank behavior in front of the cameras.

What Will it Mean

One can assume that the U.S. will cut Zelensky loose if he does not agree to America’s terms to end the war. It might just be a matter of time before arms shipments will end and Zelensky will be solely dependent on Europe.

That Zelensky and the Europeans do not yet accept that the war is lost and they should cut the best deal possible is something to behold.

It can only get worse for Ukraine from here going forward. Russia may aim to take even more territory, including Odessa, about which Trump said he did not want to talk.

Zelensky will look back on this Oval Office meeting as yet another blown opportunity, like walking away from the March 2022 Istanbul deal, to end the suffering of his people.

It is suffering brought about by the 2014 coup and Kiev’s launching of a war, which it called an “ant-terror” operation against Ukrainian citizens who simply wanted their vote to count, that has now lead to this.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

Source: Consortium News