Volodymyr Zelenskyy moves to appease Donald Trump – what happens now?

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is conceding ground to secure the least-worst deal possible, says Emily Hohler

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, meets US President Donald Trump
(Image credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Donald Trump may have been a bully, but he has “achieved the change of tone he demanded from Ukraine in short order”, says Owen Matthews in The Spectator. His acrimonious public clash with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last Friday, followed by the suspension of military aid to Kyiv, apparently prompted a rapid change of heart.

Just three days after Zelenskyy was defiantly stating that a peace deal was “very, very far away”, he announced that Ukraine was ready to “work fast to end the war”, describing the meeting with Trump as “regrettable” and saying that Ukraine was willing to sign a rare-earths mineral deal “at any time”. Trump has also managed to get Europe to increase its spending on defence, says Tim Stanley in The Telegraph.

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.