For all the ferocity of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the great personal clash of this conflict is not between the entrenched protagonists, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky – but between a Ukrainian leader facing a fifth winter of war and a US President whose tepid support for Ukraine has now morphed into all-out hostility.
The eruption of mutual dislike is of the worst order seen since the infamous verbal dust-up when Zelensky visited the Oval Office in February 2025. On that occasion, a Ukrainian official texted me: “It could not have gone worse.” To which the answer is, alas: “It just did .”
The latest stand-off between the pair will determine more than the just next phase of the war and even its eventual outcome. Its reverberations mean that Nato allies, including the UK, are being forced to redefine their relationship with Donald Trump as they seek to shore up Ukraine ahead of a crucial winter on the battlefield.
This time, the antagonism between these bullish presidents, each sure that their world view is the right one, is worse than two tetchy leaders getting under each other’s skin. The announcement of a diesel deal with Russia, which undermines Ukraine’s allies’ push to tighten sanctions on the country and dent its war economy, is largely about a symbolic amount of oil-based fuel – but a clear sign that the Trump administration is reversing hard out of previous support for isolating Moscow in its trade dealings.
So much for the belief that Trump had finally backed Congress’s call for sanctions – and even secondary sanctions – to hit Russia’s oil and gas business. He has simply decided that when he wants an opt-out from US arrangements to oil the wheels – figuratively and literally – of a sagging midterm elections campaign, he is willing to write commitments in disappearing ink.
His energy ceasefire, announced with due flamboyance via Truth Social – “Effective immediately. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!” – promoted a laconic response from Zelensky, who commented that any arrangement to stop attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure was “news to me”.
Posting from a security conference in Warsaw, Ukraine’s leader underlined that the ceasefire claim was a mere figleaf for a shabby deal to reintroduce Russian diesel to the US market in time for the midterm vote, pointing out that as Ukrainian oil infrastructure near Kharkiv had been targeted on Monday, “it’s clear that Putin does not read Truth Social”.
One rare area of similarity between the two men is that both are prolific and irreverent users of social media – each messaging their views and antagonisms. The era of soothing feathers after bust-ups is evidently over.
The alarm for allies is that a ceasefire – which has always, in the Trump playbook, been a negotiating lever to advance his interests rather than a real deal – is simply a business introduction from an American President who had always hankered for a commercial relationship with Moscow.
In real truth (not the Social kind), the diesel deal will make little difference to prices hitting US consumers and haulage and farming businesses – the present driver of high oil and gas prices is the impact of the war in Iran. But it is a message Trump can send in the final phase of the campaign – that he puts American pocketbooks above geopolitical interests or Ukraine as a moral cause.
That leaves a challenge for Andy Burnham, who is keen to retain a functioning relationship with the US, and has given an arms-length statement via a Government spokesman that the UK will not budge on backing Ukraine. For all the attempts by Kyiv’s supporters – notably Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte in the role of pacifier – Trump has returned to his fundamental and deeply held view that the war is not America’s problem and he will no longer align with Ukraine if he can seek beneficial commercial deals elsewhere.
His suggestion that it was “time for Ukraine to get a new president who knows how to negotiate” builds on the row of February 2025, when the highly-charged meeting in Washington ended in a furious exchange. It was personal as well as political, and even Ukraine’s allies wondered if it was entirely wise of a man communicating in his second language to take on the fire and fury of both Trump and Vice President VD Vance – and end up being roundly scolded for “not having the cards” to demand more from the US.
Yet the encounter saw Zelensky’s erratic popularity ratings at home rise to their highest level.
Zelensky’s recent strategy has had some successes in bringing the war home to its aggressor in Russia, rather than pursuing the draining, losing battles of purely defensive fighting. In truth, Ukraine’s military has also given up on begging for the “big serious kit”, as one UK senior figure puts it. On-off promises of sending US Tomahawk missiles in enough numbers to change the course of the conflict have petered out as the administration’s attention has turned to the Iran conflict.
But when Zelensky and Trump fall out, there is a danger of Ukraine’s supporters being dragged into the fray. And while support in UK, German and French government and military circles remains strong on that score, the blowback of Ukraine widening its targets to oil refineries brings allies like Burnham’s Government closer to an outright disagreement they do not want.
As one military figure who has worked with Kyiv since the outbreak of war puts it: “The call you do not want to take in No 10, if you can avoid it, is an irate [US] President asking, ‘Why are you guys in Britain helping those guys in Kyiv blow up Russian infrastructure?’”
Trump is in verbal double-down mode, as the midterms in early November pose the most serious threat to his legislative power if he were to lose the House of Representatives, the Senate or indeed both branches of Congress.
This outcome would allow his political foes to investigate his administration and challenge the legality of many of his decisions. That might well distract a distractible leader from other feuds.
But Zelensky has, for better or worse, defined himself as the figure who warned America that appeasing Russia will come back to bite it. One thing this American President does not warm to, however high the truth quotient, is advice.
Anne McElvoy is co-host of podcast Politics at Sam and Anne’s and executive editor at Politico