Into early March the tremors from the ‘car crash’ Washington summit on 28 February 2025 between the Trump Administration and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continued to reverberate, with Europe and the United States further apart than ever on how to resolve the war in Ukraine.
While time will ultimately reveal whether the tempestuous Oval Office summit was, in fact, an organised ambush of Zelenskyy by US President Donald Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, the meeting certainly gave that impression. Vance, fresh from his 14 February attack on European attitudes to free speech and migration at the Munich Security Conference, in which he conspicuously barely mentioned the Ukraine War, led the attack on Zelenskyy, claiming that Trump-led diplomacy was the solution to a truce and accusing the Ukrainian president of being ungrateful for US military aid.
Trump then joined the verbal assault. When Zelenskyy, responding to Vance, asserted that the United States would ultimately feel the consequences of not standing up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump interjected, “You’re in no position to dictate what we’re gonna feel. … You’re not in a good position; you don’t have the cards right now,” to which Zelenskyy responded, “We’re not playing cards.”
Following the heated exchange, Zelenskyy was asked to leave the White House and a joint press conference was cancelled.
In the aftermath of Zelenskyy’s tumultuous time in Washington, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who had held a cordial summit with Trump in Washington on 27 February in an effort to shore up support for Ukraine after French President Emmanuel Macron had done the same on 24 February, hosted Zelenskyy in London on 1 March. Describing the meeting as “meaningful and warm”, Starmer told Zelenskyy that Ukraine had “full backing across the United Kingdom”. The following day, on 2 March, Starmer convened international leaders, including Zelenskyy, at a summit in London to formulate a plan to end the fighting in Ukraine. Off the back of that summit Starmer announced a GBP 1.6 billion (EUR 1.94 billion) deal to supply more than 5,000 Lightweight Multirole Missiles (LMMs) for Ukraine’s defence – the largest contract ever received by Thales in Belfast – as part of a GBP 3.5 billion export finance deal to provide Ukraine with military equipment from UK companies.
Starmer has lately been walking something of a tightrope with the Trump Administration. Addressing the UK House of Commons on 25 February, in advance of his summit with Trump in Washington, Starmer announced a UK commitment to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence by 2027, dulling any expected US criticism of European spending levels. In doing so, Starmer stated that the UK “must reject any false choice between our allies – between one side of the Atlantic and the other”. While noting that the UK’s relationship with the US “is our most important bilateral alliance”, given that it “straddles everything from nuclear technology to NATO, Five Eyes, AUKUS and beyond”, Starmer asserted that “strength in this world also depends on a new alliance with Europe” and that “now is the time to deepen it”.
When news of Zelenskyy’s ill-fated meeting with the Trump Administration on 28 February emerged, Starmer was not among the European leaders to jump to Zelenskyy’s defence with an overt criticism of how the Ukrainian leader had been received. Starmer has since maintained that the United States remains “vital in securing the peace we all want to see in Ukraine”, even as he pledged that the UK would be prepared to play a key role in the “coalition of the willing ready to defend” peace in Ukraine, which could include, if “necessary and together with others, boots on the ground and planes in the air”.
Macron, meanwhile, appears to have maintained cordial relations with Trump, even while stepping in to fact check the US president over military aid for Ukraine in real time during their meeting in Washington on 24 February. As the two leaders met in the White House, Trump claimed that European countries were merely “loaning” money to Ukraine and that “They get their money back”, at which point Macron immediately intervened to state, “No, to be frank, we paid 60% of the total effort, and it was, like the US, loans, guarantees, grants, and we provided real money, to be clear.”
However, following the German federal election on 23 February, chancellor-in-waiting and former Atlanticist Friedrich Merz stated that day – five days before the US onslaught against Zelenskyy in the Oval Office – “I would never have thought that I would have to say something like this … but … it is clear that this [US] government does not care much about the fate of Europe. … My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”
Trump, meanwhile, has maintained his criticism of Zelenskyy since their 28 February confrontation, with the implicit threat that US military aid for Ukraine could be curtailed, and has been followed in doing to by his ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) loyalists. Thus, while almost all European leaders are reasserting their support for the Ukrainian president more strongly than ever, Trump loyalists continue to question Zelenskyy’s desire for peace and have even suggested he should resign.
Moscow, of course, has enjoyed the spectacle of its Western adversaries so much at odds and has sought to exploit the situation, pushing for the restoration of direct air travel between the United States and Russia and reportedly seeking energy deals and a normalisation of US-Russian relations.
Thus, as much as Starmer and others might seek to paper over the cracks in US-European relations, the Atlantic looms larger than ever in dividing Washington from Europe.
