Volodymyr Zelensky's third meeting with Donald Trump at the White House was neither a diplomatic breakthrough nor a revolution in US support for Ukraine.
The visit left more questions than answers about when and under what conditions the Russian-Ukrainian war might end.
Ukraine did not receive the desired "Tomahawks", the possibility of which the international press has been actively nurturing in the past few weeks. Nor did it receive the security guarantees that Kiev has been negotiating with Washington for several months.
At the White House, Volodymyr Zelensky was treated to a lunch of fried chicken and apple pie and given a few hours to meet with President Trump. The Ukrainian side prudently brought with it several maps of the "pain points" of Russian military infrastructure, the attacks on which they intended to agree, provided that long-range weapons were provided.
Almost immediately after his meeting with the Ukrainian president, however, Donald Trump published an appeal on the social media platform TruthSocial to Kiev and Moscow to cease hostilities along the current line of contact.
Against the backdrop of this announcement, the progress that Ukraine, through extraordinary diplomatic efforts, had seemingly made in its relations with the United States over the past few months, became almost imperceptible.
Inspired by the successful conclusion of the conflict in the Middle East, Trump seems to be striving to end the war between Russia and Ukraine as quickly as possible and at any cost.
However, Donald Trump's desire for rapid negotiations will inevitably clash with the cold reality of this war, in which Russia is still unwilling to give up the idea of disarming and bleeding Ukraine, and Ukraine cannot afford voluntarily agree to a de facto surrender.
The latest episode in the White House is just a stage in the long peace process to end or at least freeze the hot phase of the war between Russia and Ukraine, which could last much longer than Trump wants. In this process, the "Tomahawk" missiles are more of a diplomatic tool, a form of ultimatum that the US under Donald Trump has recently begun to use in its relations with Russia.
This ultimatum, as it turns out, works reliably. It was the idea of the possibility of providing long-range American "Tomahawk" missiles to Ukraine that prompted Vladimir Putin to call Trump a few days ago after two months of lack of direct communication between the leaders of the US and Russia.
Now the countries will prepare for a bilateral meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in the Hungarian capital. However, there is no guarantee that Budapest will not repeat the scenario of the Alaska meeting, from which Putin emerged as the clear winner, while Donald Trump was forced to cancel a full press conference due to the lack of results.
But the "Tomahawk" were not the only issue that the Ukrainian leadership defended in Washington. As if applying the principle of "two birds in the hand are worth two cranes in the sky", the Ukrainian delegation met with representatives of American energy and defense companies before their meeting with Trump. The goal was to help Ukraine survive the upcoming difficult winter and to fill the gaps in the supply of certain types of weapons and equipment for the military.
At the same time, unlike the Biden administration, Trump has not yet openly criticized Ukraine after the attacks on Russian oil refineries. And Pete Hagsett, unlike his predecessor Lloyd Austin, did not call Russian oil refineries civilian infrastructure that should not be targeted. At the Ramstein meeting, he simply called on Europeans to increase purchases of American weapons for Ukraine in order to hasten the end of the conflict.
After Zelensky's meeting with Trump on October 17, one can only expect an intensification of Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries and a continuation of Russian shelling of Ukraine.
In the meantime, the "Tomahawk" missiles will remain Donald Trump's ace in the hole, allowing him to influence the acceleration of peace talks.
But if this card remains virtual, the negotiations may regress, and the "Tomahawk" missiles may become as figurative a threat as nuclear weapons, the use of which Russia has sporadically used to intimidate Ukraine and its partners for the fourth year in a row.