(Eds: Adds details) Washington, Jul 29 (AP) President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met Tuesday ahead of Senator Lindsey Graham's funeral, with the two leaders discussing ways for Ukraine to produce its own powerful weapons and “other ideas that could help” in its ongoing war against Russia.
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, Turkiye, where Trump announced that the US will give Ukraine a license to make Patriot defence systems -- a long-running request from Kyiv to counter Russian missile attacks.
Taken together, those meetings underscore how much the US president, once a major sceptic 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.
