White House press conference debacle: what does it mean and what happens next?
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Things are moving incredibly fast. The world order appears to have been turned on its head by US President Donald Trump. However, like other unpredictable leaders, such as Boris Yeltsin, who was also prone to making grand and outrageous statements, the key to understanding these changes is to watch what these leaders do, rather than listen to their headline grabbing statements. Trump has talked a lot about imposing tariffs and annexing Greenland and Canada, but he hasn’t actually done much yet.
The weekend’s notorious press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Trump that ended up as a shouting match between the two presidents will clearly have far reaching consequence for both Ukraine and the EU. But what has actually changed?
US Vice President JD Vance accused Zelenskiy of being “ungrateful’ and accused him of never thanking the US for its aid – something that is demonstrably not true.
Relations between Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) and the new Trump administration got off to a rocky start in the first weeks in January thanks to missing money, delayed arms deliveries and demand for mining deals. Then they got worse when the two presidents traded verbal barbs after Zelenskiy rejected two versions of a harsh minerals deal that some have called little more than a demand for reparations. The February 28 press conference descended into a shouting match between two presidents and seems to have ended all hope of US support for Ukraine going forward.
Vance went on an inflammatory attack that some claim was an ambush designed to give the White House grounds to withdraw from any commitment to supporting Ukraine. Former US ambassador Mike McFaul pointed out that Zelenskiy has repeatedly thanked the US from the bottom of his heart, including in an address to Congress last Christmas.
The event has unleashed a torrent of commentary. But what has actually changed?
Are US-Ukraine relations dead?
Zelenskiy left the White House early, skipping a planned lunch, and flew to the UK. Notably, he did not sign the proposed mineral deal that is central to the White House’s conditions for continued support.
After his departure, several senior US officials called on Zelenskiy to apologise, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, who has been a long time and vocal supporter of Kyiv.
Trump’s entire team supports halting talks with Zelensky, US national security adviser Mike Waltz said on March 2, adding that productive negotiations and a minerals deal would have been a "positive moment for Ukraine".
“We had a meeting after that exchange, after the press was asked to leave, and we advised the president pretty much unanimously that after that insult in the Oval Office we just do not see how that could move forward, that any further engagement would only go backwards from this moment on,” he told Fox News.
Trump suggested the relations are not completely dead, saying that Zelenskiy was welcome back “when he is ready to make peace”, in a post on his Truth Media. But on March 1, a senior White House official said Trump is not interested in revisiting or reviving the Ukraine minerals deal at the moment.
How important is the minerals deal? As bne IntelliNews reported, Ukraine doesn’t have any rare earth metals (REMs), but the point of the deal was not to get the $500bn Trump was hoping to earn. More important was Trump’s desire to portray himself to the American people as a great dealmaker to “get our money back” plus a $150bn profit on top. If the mineral deal collapses completely, Trump foregoes that PR win and his interest in Ukraine will dimmish dramatically as a result.
And right on cue, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt announced shortly after the meeting broke up that military and financial aid to Ukraine was being cut off.
Leavitt told reporters that the US is “stopping military aid to Ukraine, prioritising peace talks”.
“We are no longer going to write blank checks for a war in a very distant country without real lasting peace,” she added.
Is the Trans-Atlantic alliance dead?
US-European relations are in crisis too. Vance put the cat amongst the pigeons when he berated the EU for falling short on its commitment to democracy during his Munich Security Conference (MSC) speech and has become a key player in winding down the White House’s support for both Ukraine and the EU. The “special” trans-Atlantic relation has come to an end as Trump puts “America First”.
Europe is committed to supporting Ukraine, but that has put it in conflict with Trump as the efforts of French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer have been rebuffed. Trump is not only pulling back from supporting Ukraine, he is also pulling back from supporting the EU.
Macron returned from his visit to the White House last week in a despondent mood. He said that it was unlikely that the EU could avoid Trump’s proposed 25% tariff on European imports that will fundamentally change the nature of commercial trade between the partners.
The report from former Italian prime minister and ex-European Central Bank boss Mario Draghi has already pointed out that Europe is now badly trailing the US in terms of innovation and productivity, but Europe is also dependent on the US for security in the face of an increasingly hostile Russia.
Trump has already made it clear is going to follow much more isolationist foreign policy that will leave the under-armed EU exposed and post-Brexit Britain particularly exposed to this change.
Is Nato dead?
Trump said last week that Ukraine can “forget about Nato membership”, the US will not provide security guarantees and military aid will be limited. All of these task will now fall to Europe.
Nato should be the backstop for EU security, but confidence that the US will come to the aid of an EU member if attacked, triggering the Article 5 collective security clause, has also been dramatically undermined.
Trump has already said that the US will not come to the aid of any country that spends less than 5% of GDP on defence, and also promised to draw down the US overseas military presence. As bne IntelliNews reported in the Real Game of Risk, the US has some 1,000 foreign military bases with the largest concentrations in Europe and Japan – either side of Russia and China. Withdrawing the US forces from Europe will make the EU much more dependent on their national armies, which have been drastically reduced in size over the last 20 years.
Currently the only European country that comes close to Trump’s spending demands is Poland that has budged for 4.7% of GDP for defence this year as part of a programme to create the largest conventional army in Europe. If the US military exits Europe, then Turkey’s importance will also increase as it has one of the largest armies in Europe, but that is a prospect that Brussels does not cherish.
Europe has been freeloading on the US by ignoring its defence sector since the fall of the Soviet Union, and European leaders are scrambling to start rebuilding its security arrangements. France has already offered to share its nuclear weapons with its neighbours, and all the major players are talking about increasing defence spending. But it is too little too late and the EU is not currently in the position to step into the US’ shoes to continue to arm Ukraine in its fight with Russia.
Just on nuclear deterrence, the EU has only an estimated 100 nuclear missiles. As of the start of this year, Russia had 5,580 nuclear warheads, with around 1,710 of these actively deployed across its strategic delivery systems.
The war in Ukraine has drained Europe’s military stockpile and just Germany, one of Ukraine’s most generous supporters, will take decades to rebuild its military might. A new war is unlikely in the short-term as Russia is in the same position. It also needs to rebuild its military, but unlike the EU, Putin has already put his economy onto a full war footing and Russia is already outproducing Ukraine combined with all of Europe.
Will Trump do business deals with Putin?
Zelenskiy left the White House meeting with Trump without signing off on the third version of the harsh minerals deal the White House has been pushing for and central to Trump’s willingness to continue support for Ukraine. The full text of the minerals deal contains no security guarantees for Ukraine nor promises of continued military or financial support post-war, but Trump insisted it was "a great deal for Ukraine too".
Without the deal it is now likely Trump will cut a “quick and dirty” deal with Putin to end the conflict that will not be to Ukraine’s advantage.
Abandoning the Ukraine minerals deal also makes it more likely that Trump will sign off on the bigger and better mineral and hydrocarbon deals offered to the White House by Putin in the last week. Putin has also offered to open the doors to the return of Western businesses to the Russian market.
Rubio, who led the delegation in Riyadh, has made it plain that the US intends to do business with Putin. He said at the meeting there is an opportunity to “unlock a historic US-Russia economic alliance” and repeated many of the Kremlin’s talking points in the last week.
It has been suggested that the White House is cleverly trying to do a “reverse Nixon” and “peel off” Russia from its alliance with China. By going into business with Putin, Trump will move the Kremlin away from Beijing in the same way that Richard Nixon weakened the ties between Chairman Mao and Stalin in the 1970s.
However, the alternative scenario is that by throwing Ukraine under the bus and weakening the US support for Europe and Nato, Trump will only embolden Putin to recoup and re-launch his invasion of Ukraine after he has rebuilt his forces, and possibly act further afield. “I trust Putin. He won’t break the deal,” Trump said last week. No one else trusts Putin to keep his word.
Will EU peacekeepers be deployed in Ukraine?
Trump has made it abundantly clear he has no intention of offering Zelenskiy any sort of security guarantee at all. He has taken the line that simply having US companies invest into Ukraine's mineral sector will be enough as Russia won’t “mess with our guys”. Zelenskiy has made it equally clear that he insists on Western security guarantees, which he sees as essential to Ukraine’s long-term prosperity.
Likewise, the EU is also asking the US for security guarantees above and beyond Nato. As Europe has also made it abundantly clear that it will not offer Ukraine meaningful guarantees, beyond the “security assurances” already in place, the EU – led by France – and the UK are proposing to put peacekeepers in place in a post-war Ukraine. But for this to work, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has lobbied Trump for a US “backstop” in case the peacekeepers come to blows with the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR). Trump has refused this request too.
Supplying peacekeepers to Ukraine was always going to be hard. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made it categorically clear that the Kremlin will not accept foreign troops on Ukrainian soil under any conditions. There is also a big question mark over if Europe is able to mobilise the mooted 30,000-strong force being suggested.
What are Zelenskiy's options now?
Without either US or European security guarantees, Zelenskiy has few other choices than to revert to Ukraine’s pre-2014 neutrality and build up the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) as the only way to improve Ukraine’s security – in effect the Finlandisation of Ukraine.
The Kremlin continues to insist on “ironclad guarantees” that Ukraine will never join Nato and would welcome Ukraine’s return to neutrality. However, Putin – and last week US national security adviser Waltz, echoing the Kremlin – have said any ceasefire deal should be built on the basis of the failed 2022 Istanbul peace deal, and a central tenet of that is for Ukraine to dramatically reduce the size of its army. Zelenskiy has already ruled out any talk of downsizing the AFU as “childish talk”.
Initially the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul agreed to this demand, as it assumed it would receive security deals from its Western partners. As none of these deals will be forthcoming, the admissible size of the AFU will be a key sticking point in the upcoming talks: Zelenskiy will insist on a large army of around 1.5mn men; the Kremlin will insist on demilitarising Ukraine.
Europe picks up the burden
It is already clear that Trump will exit the Ukraine conflict and intends to hand the burden of supporting Kyiv over to the EU in its entirety. Trump stripped what veneer was left away and laid out harsh terms for continued US support for Ukraine at his first cabinet meeting on February 26.
"I’m not going to make security guarantees beyond very much," he said. "We’re going to have Europe do that, because Europe is the next door neighbour. But we are going to make sure that everything goes well," he said.
The White House press conference debacle underscored the growing gap between the EU and America. It provoked an immediate outpouring of support for Ukraine and Zelenskiy from almost all of Europe’s leaders within the first hour on social media.
Europe is going to struggle to find the money to pay for Ukraine’s support. As bne IntelliNews reported, the sixteen rounds of sanctions have done more damage to the EU’s economy than to Russia’s in an unexpected boomerang effect. Europeans are facing multiple budget crisis as the EU as a whole goes into recession and faces a new energy crisis.
The G7 $50bn loan to Ukraine, approved at a G7 summit in Italy last June, has yet to be disbursed. A new EU €20bn aid package for Ukraine has also become snarled up in inter-EU wrangling over the “lack of fairness” amongst the member states over the burden sharing. Currently only the Baltic states and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen fully endorse it. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called an emergency meeting of EU leaders for March 3 to discuss the issues.
All-in-all the cost of the war is running at an estimated $100bn a year and so far the EU has contributed some €140bn and the US a total of $90bn. If the US cuts funding altogether the pressure on the EU to seize the Central Bank of Russia’s (CBR’s) $300bn of frozen assets will greatly increase as one of the few sources of funds available.
Nevertheless, thanks to a surge in funding and weapon deliveries by the outgoing Biden administration, Kyiv is fully funded for 2025 and has a comfortable $48bn in reserves and so can probably get through the rest of this year on its own. The main constraint is a growing manpower crisis and the rising rate of desertion from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) as morale crumbles.
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