Zelensky Brings Backup to the White House as Trump Aligns More Closely With Putin

This time, when President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine arrives in the Oval Office on Monday, he will come with backup.

An array of European prime ministers and presidents are flying in to make sure that a viable, defensible Ukraine survives whatever carving up of its territory is about to happen at the negotiating table.

But they are also there to make certain that the trans-Atlantic alliance emerges intact. President Trump’s instant reversal on the critical issue of obtaining a cease-fire before negotiating over land or security guarantees has left many of them shaken, and wondering whether Mr. Trump had once again been swayed by President Vladimir V. Putin.

By most accounts, they are there to make sure that Mr. Trump has not pivoted too close to the Russian side, and does not try to strong-arm Mr. Zelensky into a deal that will ultimately sow the seeds of Ukraine’s dissolution. But they are also there to make sure that the United States, the linchpin of NATO and European security since its creation in 1949, is not undermining Ukrainian and European interests.

At a news conference on Sunday in Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, stressed the importance of security guarantees for Ukraine and respect for its territory. But she also said it was paramount to “stop the killing” and urged talks among the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and the United States “as soon as possible.”

One senior European diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of angering Mr. Trump, described a sense of panic among European allies. The diplomat had not seen a meeting like the one set for Monday come together so quickly since just before the Iraq War.

The foremost concern, the diplomat said, was to avoid another scene like the one that took place in February when Mr. Zelensky met with Mr. Trump in front of the television cameras at the White House.

At that meeting, Mr. Trump berated the Ukrainian president, saying “you don’t have the cards” in the war — essentially telling a weak foreign power to bend to the demands of a far more powerful one. The president did so again on Friday night, after Mr. Putin flew back to the Russian Far East, telling a Fox News interviewer that Ukraine was going to have to realize that Russia was a more “powerful” country, and that power meant Mr. Zelensky was going to have to make concessions.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who sat in on the meetings with Mr. Putin at the American air base outside of Anchorage, disputed the idea that the Europeans were coming as a posse to protect Mr. Zelensky from a repeat of the February shouting match.

“They’re not coming here to keep Zelensky from getting bullied,” he insisted to Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“They are coming here tomorrow because we’ve been working with the Europeans,” he said, listing the many meetings the United States has engaged in before and after the Putin visit. “We invited them to come.”

European officials said on Saturday that Mr. Trump told Mr. Zelensky he was free to bring guests to the meeting, and later the White House extended invitations to several European leaders.

Whatever the motive for the leaders to upend their schedules on short notice, there is little question that elements of the negotiation will test the cohesiveness of the Atlantic alliance. Mr. Putin’s agenda is larger than just seizing part or all of Ukraine. For nearly a quarter-century, his grandest ambition has been to split NATO, dividing the European allies from the United States.

Now, as Europe and Ukraine struggle to navigate Mr. Trump’s sudden reversal of strategy for ending a war that has stretched well past three years, Mr. Putin suddenly has a renewed opportunity to realize his dream. Once Mr. Trump abandoned the position all the major NATO allies agreed upon last Wednesday — that a cease-fire must come first, before trying to negotiate a true peace agreement — the United States and its European allies have appeared to be pursuing a different negotiating strategies.

The differences have been long brewing. In the weeks before the Putin meeting, they broke out into the open. “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,” Vice President JD Vance said flatly a week ago.

But the Europeans have promised continued support, through a grouping of countries operating outside of the NATO alliance, and got Mr. Trump to promise to supply weapons, as long as the United States was paid for them from European coffers.

The message was clear: Defending Ukraine was Europe’s problem, not Washington’s. The Trump administration is happy to serve as a for-profit arms supplier, but otherwise appears to see no responsibility to defend the country, which is not a NATO member.

That was a wedge that Mr. Putin sought to exploit in Anchorage, and he did it skillfully.

Mr. Trump has already adopted many of Mr. Putin’s talking points, and few of the West’s. Even before he met face to face with Mr. Putin, he assured the Russian leader that Ukraine’s application to join NATO would be put on long-term hold — a position that his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., also took. At various moments, he hinted that Ukraine invited invasion by applying to the alliance and to membership in the European Union.

But on Friday he went another step. Right after he and European allies agreed that a cease-fire must precede a peace accord, he abandoned that view and sided with Mr. Putin.

“With Trump abandoning the cease-fire, but making no reference to the ‘severe consequences’ he threatened, we are at a dangerous moment for the alliance,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral who served as NATO’s supreme allied commander from 2009 to 2013, when the United States still viewed Russia as a NATO partner, if a difficult one.

This is exactly the kind of split that European leaders were trying to avoid after Mr. Trump’s return to power in January. NATO’s new secretary general, Mark Rutte, a former prime minister of the Netherlands, visited Washington frequently for quiet meetings with Mr. Trump. He was determined to avoid the kind of public breach that took place in the first term, when Mr. Trump came to the edge of withdrawing the United States from what he called an “obsolete” alliance.

Mr. Rutte helped engineer the announcement in June, at a NATO summit, that nearly all members of the alliance had committed to spend 5 percent of the gross domestic product on defense. (Of that, 1.5 percent is infrastructure spending only tangentially related to military spending.) That gave Mr. Trump an early win — and demonstrated that, even if a decade late, Europe was getting serious about taking responsibility for its own defense. Mr. Trump took credit, and left the summit praising NATO’s reforms.

Then European leaders designed the program to buy American weapons for Ukraine, recognizing its appeal to the president. The United States could remain Ukraine’s arms supplier, but at no cost to American taxpayers.

The strategy seemed to be paying off a few weeks ago, when Mr. Trump castigated Mr. Putin for holding friendly conversations while continuing to kill civilians. He set deadlines, and threatened to impose secondary sanctions on countries that were buying oil from Russia.

For the first time since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Washington’s approach, including the threat of new sanctions on Russian oil and gas if there was no cease-fire, and Europe’s continued military and economic pressure seemed roughly aligned. Last Wednesday, European leaders talked with Mr. Trump, and he agreed to hold firm with Mr. Putin that a cease-fire must precede a longer peace negotiation.

That alignment is what blew up at Anchorage.

“It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site early Saturday.

Mr. Trump’s flip-flops stand in contrast to Mr. Putin’s determination to stay the course with the war, even as the body count of Russians killed has soared. “Peace will come when we achieve our goals,” he proclaimed in late 2023.

Even then, Mr. Putin privately was sending signals that he was open to discussing a cease-fire, but only if it froze existing battle lines — meaning Ukraine would have to cede control over roughly 20 percent of its territory. His overtures were rebuffed at the time.

But now the Russian military is making considerable gains, so Mr. Putin no longer has interest in a cease-fire.

“They’re feel like they got momentum in the battlefield,” Mr. Rubio said, “and frankly, don’t care, don’t seem to care very much about how many Russian soldiers die in this endeavor.”

“It’s a meat grinder,’’ he added, “and they just have more meat to grind.”

That reality would seem to suggest that the timing is hardly right for a peace agreement. Mr. Putin may calculate his best strategy is to drag out the talks.

But when European and American officials gather at the White House on Monday, they will have more to discuss than just boundaries. The Europeans have to find a way to bring Mr. Trump on board for security guarantees for Ukraine — a fulsome peacekeeping force that would deter Mr. Putin from restarting the war in a few years.

In his phone conversation with the European leaders on Friday night, Mr. Trump suggested for the first time that he might be willing to join that effort — though the assumption is that he would contribute U.S. intelligence, not troops.

In London on Sunday, after a virtual meeting of European countries that call themselves a “coalition of the willing” — a phrase used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain’s government issued a statement that commended Mr. Trump for his “commitment to providing security guarantees for Ukraine.”

That phrasing seemed intended to lock him into the effort. The statement reiterated that the United Kingdom and other European nations were ready to “deploy a reassurance force once hostilities have ceased, and to help secure Ukraine’s skies and seas and regenerate Ukraine’s armed forces.”

The United States has never been that specific.

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from London, Jeanna Smialek from Brussels and Jim Tankersley from Berlin.

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