Constant Méheut
For days, he hammered one message — that Kyiv needed U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles to strike deep inside Russia. Then, he nudged President Trump toward selling the weapons in back-to-back calls last weekend. Finally, before his arrival, he sent top aides to Washington this week to meet with the missile’s manufacturer.
But when Mr. Zelensky landed in Washington, the landscape had changed. Mr. Trump had taken a phone call from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who appeared to steer him away from selling the weapons and toward reviving peace talks with an in-person meeting.
As Mr. Zelensky sat in front of Mr. Trump on Friday, the American leader’s shift was apparent. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to get the war over without thinking about Tomahawks,” Mr. Trump told him. Mr. Putin, he added, “wants to make a deal.”
“It’s a déjà vu,” Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian Parliament, said in an interview after Friday’s meeting. “Mr. Trump fell again for Putin’s old trick.”
The sequence of events was all too familiar to Ukrainians. For months, they have watched efforts to rally the mercurial American president to their side being repeatedly undercut by Russia dangling the promise of more peace talks.
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