The sit-down in the Oval Office, which was closed to the media, followed a consequential meeting at the NATO summit earlier this month in Ankara, Turkey, where Trump announced that the U.S. will give Ukraine a license to make Patriot defense systems — a long-running request from Kyiv to counter Russian missile attacks.
Taken together, those meetings underscore how much the U.S. president, once a major skeptic of continued assistance to Kyiv, has warmed to Zelenskyy as Ukraine continues to withstand the Russian barrage more than four years after Moscow’s invasion in 2022. The Ukrainian leader, whose relationship with Trump in his second term was marked by a raucous White House visit in which he was denigrated for being ungracious, has worked to court the Republican administration while relying on both likely and unlikely allies in Trump’s orbit to exert their influence with the president.
The ongoing conflict in the Middle East, which has consumed much of the Trump administration’s focus this year, has also become gradually entwined with Ukraine, with Ukraine firing on at least one Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea over the weekend while Zelenskyy asserts that Russia has been offering satellite imagery of U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf to Iran.
