In late February, newly elected US President Donald Trump hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office for a meeting that was supposed to reaffirm Washington's commitment to Kiev. Instead, it turned into a fiasco.
In front of the whole world, Trump raised his voice at Zelensky, shook his finger at him and said he was ungrateful for American military and financial aid. The Trump administration even blamed Ukraine for starting the war, and days earlier, the US president called Zelensky a “dictator“.
In an interview with the magazine TIME Zelensky returned to that moment and said that during his meeting with Trump and J.D. Vance he felt that Ukraine and the United States “were not allies“.
“Why did Ukrainians defend themselves at the beginning of the war? Because of their dignity. We do not consider ourselves some kind of superpower. But we are very emotional, and when it comes to our sense of dignity, freedom, democracy, Ukrainians rise up and unite“, Zelensky said.
TIME writes that in the Oval Office, Ukrainians hoped to see proof that the United States would continue to be their ally under the Trump administration. “But at that moment there was a feeling that we were not allies. "In this conversation, I defended the dignity of Ukraine," Zelensky said.
During the meeting at the White House, the Ukrainian leader told Trump and his vice president that the aggressor Vladimir Putin could not be trusted to reach a peace agreement because he would violate all international treaties, as he had done before.