Trump Gave Zelenskyy a Friendly Reality Check During Their Ukraine War Talk: Report

Wishful thinking won’t get Ukraine or Russia out of their three-year-long war — and that’s the message President Donald Trump and his administration apparently delivered to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

According to a Thursday from Axios, despite Zelenskyy pressuring Trump not to hold high-level talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a Wednesday phone call between the two leaders, Trump “stressed there is no way around it if he wants his diplomatic efforts to be successful,” the outlet noted.

“I need to talk to Putin in order to save Ukraine,” Trump told Zelenskyy, sources said.

Zelenskyy, meanwhile, argued that Putin only talked to Trump because he wanted to buy time.

“Putin told you he wants a deal only because he is afraid of you, because you are strong,” Zelenskyy reportedly told Trump.

Trump reportedly admitted that Zelenskyy could be right, but that Putin could be serious and “we will know soon.”

The call came the same day Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made his first trip to Europe, where he delivered another reality check to Ukraine — calling Kyiv’s demand for the return of all territory seized by Russia since 2014 an “unrealistic objective,” according to The Washington Post.

“Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more pain and suffering,” Hegseth said, arguing that “robust security guarantees” for Ukraine would be a far more realistic objective.

In addition, both he and President Trump have said they don’t see membership in NATO as an option for Kyiv, with the president telling reporters he couldn’t see any way “that a country in Russia’s position” would allow that to happen.

Again, this might not be what the people still sporting Ukrainian flag emojis in their X user names might want to hear, but it’s the reality of the situation.

As for the territory currently controlled by Russia, much of it was controlled by Russia before the 2022 invasion; Crimea was annexed in 2014 by Moscow, despite a lack of international recognition of the legitimacy of the move, and the Donbas region was under the de facto control of Kremlin-backed militias, with virtually no control by Kyiv, long before the invasion even began.

Ukrainian forces have done an admirable job of controlling Russian gains — and some of those, particularly along the coast, are likely to be returned to Ukraine as part of any peace deal. However, a reset to 2014 boundaries is simply infeasible, no matter how much the war gets escalated.

As for an international cordon sanitaire around Putin, refusing to talk to him about a peace deal until he comes begging to the table like a dog — this, too, is wildly unrealistic.

Perhaps Putin believes talking to Trump buys himself some time from a new president he fears more than Biden. Perhaps it’s a realistic overture. All we know is that, one way or another, it’s a calculated move by a notorious calculator.

The more blood and treasure that gets spent on this war, however, the better the calculus becomes for Putin. He doesn’t have to hold elections — and when and if he does, anyone who poses a legitimate threat to him getting somewhere above 90 percent of the farce vote will be drinking a Novichok Frappuccino from a knockoff Starbucks in St. Petersburg sooner rather than later.

Western nations, alas, don’t have the luxury of putting off elections or poisoning opponents — and while Zelenskyy has postponed elections due to the war, it’s going to be difficult for him to put them off forever, lest more voices in the free world start insinuating both rulers are different sides of the same anti-democratic coin.

Furthermore, as much as Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion has been both laudable and exemplary, even the rosiest of pro-Kyiv media prognosticators can’t help but use language like “the grim realities of raw numbers,” or something to that effect, when talking about the war’s progression — euphemistic language for the fact that Russia has more money, equipment, troops, and time to wait this one out if Zelenskyy and his allies really want to play the long game.

In other words, one can hope this is the first of many friendly reality checks by the Trump administration in regard to the trajectory of this conflict. The status quo cannot hold, and a better deal is likely to be had sooner rather than later.

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