A Relationship on the Rocks: US Policy Shifts Alarm Kyiv

The embrace Steve Witkoff offered Volodymyr Zelensky before talks in Oslo is unlikely to have soothed the Ukrainian leader's doubts about the direction of American policy. Zelensky posted footage of the moment online with a message of thanks to partners for their support. Whether he still counts Donald Trump among them is another matter.

Rhetoric and action have combined over the past ten days to expose a rupture as severe as any in their fractious relationship. Trump's assessment of his Ukrainian counterpart has been withering. Zelensky, he told Newsmax last week, is not a good guy to deal with. On Monday, asked about the Ukrainian leader's suggestion that a diesel deal with Russia placed Washington on the wrong side of history, Trump retorted that Zelensky did not know what he was talking about.

Such personal attacks are characteristic of the American president's sledgehammer diplomacy, and his enthusiasms have proved reversible before. In June he turned an expletive on Benjamin Netanyahu, only to endorse the Israeli prime minister four months later as a great warrior. Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform concedes that Trump can always perform another U-turn. This, though, does look bad.

Zelensky has generally been circumspect about his unreliable but indispensable counterpart. This month his frustration has spilled into public view. Addressing a congressional delegation, he spoke of American decisions that were hard to explain between friends and voiced the fear that some political decision had been taken to slow support for Kyiv. To Trump's charge that he was the principal obstacle to a settlement, he responded with exasperation, insisting on Telegram that Ukraine had welcomed literally every attempt by its partners to end the war with dignity.

The two men have travelled this road before. After their televised confrontation in the Oval Office in February 2025, when Trump accused Zelensky of gambling with the Third World War, Washington suspended military assistance and restricted intelligence sharing. That crisis lasted a week. When the administration later decided against financing direct military aid, a mechanism was devised for European countries to purchase American equipment on Ukraine's behalf.

The glaring exception has been Patriot air defence missiles, the only reliable shield against Russian ballistic attacks. Amid a global shortage, supplies to Ukraine have slowed to a trickle. The Washington Post, citing an unnamed Ukrainian official, reported that only a couple of interceptors remained in Kyiv's stockpile and that Washington had slowed the approval process for allied transfers. US officials have not confirmed the account.

The diplomatic weather has darkened further. Earlier this month, as Ukrainian negotiators arrived in Miami for talks with Witkoff and Jared Kushner, they learned that Trump had struck a deal with Vladimir Putin to open American markets to Russian diesel. Experts doubted it would meaningfully reduce petrol prices before next month's midterm elections, the apparent motive, but as a signal of displeasure at Ukraine's long-range strikes on Russian refineries it landed as a rebuke.

Last Friday came a sharper jolt. Trump waived wide-ranging sanctions on Russia two days before they were due to take effect, arguing that the measures in the Graham Act would hinder his efforts to broker peace. The late senator Lindsey Graham had been a vocal supporter of Ukraine. For Kyiv and its backers, the waiver looked like further evidence that the White House was siding with the Kremlin. William Taylor, a former US ambassador to Kyiv, described the administration as offering carrots to the Russians and sticks to the Ukrainians. It was, he said, inexplicable and saddening. Kirill Dmitriev, a senior Putin envoy, hailed an important and truly historic moment, a return to what Russian officials like to call the spirit of Alaska.

Suspicions multiply. Kyiv alleges, again without confirmation from Washington, that the US has restricted intelligence flows and interfered with Ukraine's access to Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network. As Russian drones and missiles rain down on Ukrainian cities, Zelensky told NBC News that advance warning from American satellite intelligence had been absent for three days of ballistic attacks. On 12 October, five Russian S-400 missiles struck Kyiv, reportedly before air raid sirens or mobile alerts had sounded. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, denied any pause in intelligence sharing, attributing the gap to a software problem.

Uncertainty also surrounds Starlink. A week ago Ukrainian officials reported that the system was being throttled, with terminals unable to sustain high-speed connections, impeding efforts to intercept fast-moving Russian drones. Since the summer, Ukraine has struggled against a wave of attacks by advanced jet-powered drones. Reuters reported that the restriction originated at the White House. Rubio insisted that nobody there had ordered anyone to slow down the internet. The frequency with which such suspicions surface speaks to a deficit of trust.

Much of it has roots in Trump's long-standing mistrust of Ukraine and of Zelensky personally. A decade ago he became convinced that Ukraine had tried to prevent his first election, an unfounded belief fuelled by allegations that the Democratic National Committee had a server hidden in the country. When Zelensky entered office three years later, he resisted Trump's demands to investigate election interference. In a notorious telephone call in July 2019, Trump pressed him to investigate Joe Biden, his eventual conqueror at the polls. Zelensky refused. At the time, the White House was withholding $391m in military assistance, a juxtaposition that led to Trump's first impeachment.

Whether such historic grievances still shape policy is an open question, but the roller coaster of US-Ukraine relations has taken another stomach-churning dip. After the Oslo talks, Witkoff is carrying updated proposals to St Petersburg, where he meets Putin on Wednesday. Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway's prime minister, said the discussions had helped straighten out a few things. There was nothing to be gained, he observed diplomatically, from digging into what was said yesterday or a week ago. Zelensky reported a productive conversation with Rubio and voiced cautious optimism on Patriots and Starlink. All eyes now turn to the Kremlin. Russia's unprovoked invasion grinds on, its forces occupying roughly a fifth of Ukrainian territory, and the Ukrainian people continue to endure Moscow's brutal campaign. The World House has consistently stood with Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began, and details of its support initiatives can be found at worldhouse.uk/support.