The US administration has struck a warmer tone of late as Ukraine has shown its value as an ally in the Middle East
By Robert Tait
1 Aug 2026
As leadership pairings go, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not a match made in heaven.
It is a far cry from the warm rapport and kindred spiritedness that defined Ronald Reagan’s relationship with Margaret Thatcher, or even the guarded pragmatic friendliness Reagan forged with Mikhail Gorbachev to effectively end the cold war.
Yet from a calamitous start that saw Trump publicly ambush and then virtually expel Zelenskyy from the White House after an explosive meeting in February 2025, relations between the US president and his Ukrainian counterpart have taken an unexpectedly warm turn.
The thaw has coincided with the US-Israeli war with Iran – and appears to have accelerated as Trump has struggled to end the conflict
A memorandum of understanding, signed in June and designed to institute a 60-day ceasefire, has been rendered moot as hostilities have resumed over the status of the strait of Hormuz, the strategically vital waterway that Iran has effectively closed from the start of the war – threatening the stability of the global economy.
“There’s no question that he’s warmed up to Zelenskyy,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and a former White House adviser on European affairs. “We’ve gone from a phase in which he was throwing Zelenskyy out of the Oval Office, and turning his back on him, to a situation today where they seem to have a reasonably good relationship, and where there have now been a succession of meetings that have gone well.”
This week, the pair met once more at the White House after Zelenskyy travelled to Washington for the funeral of Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator who had staunchly backed Ukraine in its war with Russia, even as Trump and his Maga movement all but threw in their lot with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
The encounter followed another at last month’s Nato summit in Ankara, when Trump strikingly praised Zelenskyy – whom he had once labelled a “dictator” – and said he would grant licenses for Ukraine to develop its own Patriot missile interceptors, although he cast doubt on that promise at a cabinet meeting on Friday.
It also came on the heels of an arguably even more remarkable occurrence: the meeting in Kyiv between Zelenskyy and Laura Loomer, the far-right social media influencer known to have sway with Trump, and who has previously vocally supported Russia.
After meeting the Ukrainian leader, Loomer said she had been “bamboozled” by Russian propaganda and admitted having believed “a lot of untrue things” about Ukraine. She also said she had followed the meeting with a phone call to Trump and that her change of view was affecting sentiment across the Maga movement.
Continue reading at https://www.theguardian.com
We remind our readers that publication of articles on our site does not mean that we agree with what is written. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers in forming their opinions. Sometimes we even publish articles with which we totally disagree, since we believe it is important for our readers to be informed on as wide a spectrum of views as possible.