Top European leaders will be on hand to back up Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during his White House meeting with President Trump on Monday amid angst over how the Alaska summit with Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin unfolded.
European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte have all confirmed plans to travel to Washington, DC.
It is not clear yet whether all of those leaders will join the actual White House meeting or possibly meet with Trump separately.
“They’re not coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted to CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “This is such a stupid media narrative… We’ve been working with these people for weeks.
“We invited them to come,” Rubio said.
Notably, the delegation joining Zelensky’s trek to Washington, DC, features Stubb, Meloni, and Rutte, who are known to have a remarkably chummy rapport with Trump.
Some of them have courted such close ties with the president that they’ve earned the moniker of “the Trump whisperer.”
Looming large over Monday’s dramatic assembly of European allies buttressing Zelensky is the infamous Feb. 28 Oval Office meeting between Trump and the Ukrainian leader that devolved into a shouting match caught on camera.
European leaders see the upcoming sitdown with Trump as critical for the future of Ukraine, especially following the president’s summit with Putin on Friday.
Trump, who had given Putin an ultimatum to pursue peace in Ukraine or else face a wave of sanctions, told Fox News ahead of their summit that he “won’t be happy” if the Russian strongman didn’t agree to a ceasefire in the ongoing conflict launched in February 2022.
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Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire, but Trump walked away touting “progress” and signaled interest in a full-fledged peace deal rather than a ceasefire.
While many details of what was discussed are still murky, Putin was adamant that Ukraine cede over the rest of the minerals-rich Donetsk, a historically Russian-speaking region, The Post previously reported.
In exchange, Putin agreed to potentially freeze up fighting in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Axios reported.
Some experts were leery about those terms — if that was what Putin actually offered Trump — because Donetsk, which has been described as a “fortress belt,” is heavily fortified by the Ukrainians. If they relinquish the remainder of Donetsk, the Russians could theoretically return to fighting in the future and more easily cut deeper into Ukraine.
Putin, during the summit, also appeared to mount a charm offensive with Trump, who later recounted to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the Russian leader claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that if he were president, the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have taken place.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ripped the highly-anticipated meeting as “the most vomit-inducing episode in all the tawdry history of international diplomacy.”
It marked the first time Putin set foot on US soil in about a decade and the first time he had an in-person meeting with a US president since the war in Ukraine began.
Trump later had a call with Zelensky and European leaders to brief them on the talks with Putin.
The president has made clear that one of his top goals is for Putin and Zelensky to meet together and negotiate an end to the war.