There is an old saying many of us are quite familiar with: ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.’ And that is exactly what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did when he met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last Friday.

Both Trump and Zelenskyy had been poised to sign a historic agreement to set up a joint investment fund for rebuilding Ukraine that would have allowed the U.S. to profit off mining rare earth minerals in the war-torn country. Kyiv was prepared to put 50 per cent of future revenues from the country’s oil, gas, and minerals into the fund. The investment deal was brokered by Senator Graham and others as a way to keep Trump interested in backing Ukraine’s security while brokering a peace negotiation between the Russians and the Ukrainians. However, what started as a seemingly jovial meeting turned out to be a shootout at the O.K. Corral.

What was astonishing is not so much how President Trump was crucified by the left-wing and neoconservative mainstream medias for the manner he conducted himself towards the end of the encounter, but the fact that President Zelenskyy was hailed as a martyr, even by European leaders, when it was he himself who publicly antagonized his hosts.

The shootout was sparked when one of the journalists asked whether President Trump was aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin, to which Vice President J. D. Vance intervened by saying:

‘The path to peace and the path to prosperity is, maybe, engaging in diplomacy. We tried the pathway of Joe Biden, of thumping our chest and pretending that the president of the United States’ words mattered more than the president of the United States’ actions. What makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy. That’s what President Trump is doing.’

Zelenskyy, whether he was unable to contain himself or whether he lacked diplomacy, or both, raised the fallacious policies of previous presidential administrations as to why Putin can not be trusted, thereby equating the Trump administration with the previous ones.

‘…in 2019, I signed with [Putin] the deal. I signed with him, [French President Emmanuel] Macron and [former German Chancellor Angela] Merkel,’ Zelenskyy aggressively stated. ‘We signed ceasefire.…But after that, he broke the ceasefire, he killed our people, and he didn’t exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners. But he didn’t do it. What kind of diplomacy, J.D., you are speaking about? What do you mean?’

The fact that Zelenskyy openly defied his hosts before the American media and others, in addition to calling the vice president ‘J. D.’ as opposed to Mr. Vice President, displayed what a statesman should not be—him not wearing a suit as both protocol and respect require underlines this.

‘I told him this morning, don’t take the bait, don’t let the media or anybody else get you into an argument with President Trump.’

‘Mr. Zelenskyy would have been wiser to defuse the tension by thanking the U.S. again, and deferring to Mr. Trump,’ said the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). ‘There’s little benefit in trying to correct the historical record in front of Mr. Trump when you’re also seeking his help.’

Senator Lindsey Graham, who met with the Ukrainian president that morning, stated: ‘I told him this morning, don’t take the bait, don’t let the media or anybody else get you into an argument with President Trump.’

Zelenskyy went beyond that, especially when he indirectly threatened Trump by saying if he did not guarantee security vis-à-vis putting American troops in Ukraine during a would-be ceasefire, the U.S. would suffer the consequences. He had also hinted the Russian Federation must return the four oblasts seized during the war, plus Crimea, which Putin annexed in 2014, something that will just not happen.

When King Abdullah II of Jordan met with Trump in February to discuss the disastrous situation in the Gaza Strip, in a similar open discussion in the Oval Office, Trump publicly declared his plan for the U.S. takeover of Gaza and to displace the Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt. Taken back as he may have been, the king nevertheless behaved like a real statesman and did not publicly contest his host. The same can be said of French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minster Keir Starmer in their individual meetings with Trump last week; both of whom expressed their differences with the American president but behind closed doors.

Regardless, as printed by the aforementioned WSJ op-ed piece, which reflects just about every news outlet put out, we were told: ‘But as with the war, Mr. Zelenskyy didn’t start this Oval Office exchange. Was he supposed to tolerate an extended public denigration of the Ukrainian people, who have been fighting a war for survival for three years?’

It is true that it seemed as if both Trump and Vance berated Zelenskyy as if he were a child who refused to do his homework, saying that he was not grateful enough for U.S. aid. And I do not wish to exonerate their behavior, either, but one has to place things into context: it was Zelenskyy who sparked the fire. Perhaps the media should see what transpired in the first twenty-minutes of the meeting in which Zelenskyy kept insisting how his vision is the only valid one, to which Trump remained silent.

I do remain dumbfounded in what appears to be a revisionist interpretation on the part of President Trump when he had blamed Ukraine for the war. ‘You’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it....You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,’ Trump said.

Clearly it was Russia’s army that crossed the border on 24 February 2022, in an all-out invasion that Putin sought to justify by arguing it was needed to protect Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine and prevent the country from joining NATO. Unless, of course, Trump was referring to both how the U.S.-led West under Biden provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, as well as, when then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and then-President Joe Bide convinced Zelenskyy not to make peace with Putin a month after the fighting had begun. Regardless, President Trump was right in that this war should never have happened, and that it is time to stop the fighting before more people are unnecessarily killed.

As of yesterday, Zelenskyy has declared that Ukraine is ‘ready to sign’ the minerals agreement with the U.S., adding: ‘I just want the Ukrainian position to be heard.’ Time will tell what the end of it all will be.

The views expressed by our guest authors are theirs and do not necessarily represent the views of Hungarian Conservative.

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