The Russians were thrilled with how it all went.
By Nahal Toosi and Amy MacKinnon
Ukraine’s supporters in Washington and abroad reacted with horror to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s verbal takedown of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, calling it a dismaying display of American bullying.
Trump supporters cast the encounter differently, saying it was a necessary show of American power toward an ungrateful ally.
The Russians, of course, were thrilled with how it all went.
The one thing most everyone could agree on was that the Oval Office back-and-forth three years into the full-scale Russia-Ukraine war was jaw-dropping.
“Frankly, I still don’t know how to process what we just saw,” one foreign diplomat in Washington said an hour after the session ended. The person, along with several others, was granted anonymity because the issue was sensitive and some feared retaliation from the White House.
At the State Department, which is already reeling from the specter of Trump administration plans to shrink the U.S. diplomatic footprint, staff expressed shock that Trump would treat another country’s leader so dismissively.
“This guy isn’t just trying to save his country — he’s the finger in the dike for the rest of Europe,” one State Department official said of Zelenskyy. “First, we extort him, then we intentionally try to embarrass him.”
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