Kyiv | Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday the Oval Office blowup with US President Donald Trump last week was “regrettable,” adding that he stands ready to work under Trump's “strong leadership” to get a lasting peace.
Zelenskyy's remarks in an apparent effort to placate Trump came in a social media post on X, hours after the White House announced a pause military aid to Ukraine that is critical to fighting Russia's invasion.
He also said Ukraine is ready to sign a lucrative deal on rare-earth minerals and security with Washington.
In an apparent reference to Trump's criticism following the contentious White House meeting on Friday that Zelensky does not want a peace deal, the Ukrainian leader said, “None of us want an endless war.”
“Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than the Ukrainians. My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump's strong leadership to get a peace that lasts,” he said.
The meeting "did not go the way it was supposed to be," Zelenskyy said. "It is regrettable that it happened this way. It is time to make things right. We would like future cooperation and communication to be constructive.”
The US decision to pause military aid catapulted his country into alarm and apprehension. Zelenskyy's statement came before Trump was expected to address the US Congress later Tuesday.
“Regarding the agreement on minerals and security, Ukraine is ready to sign it in any time and in any convenient format,” Zelenskyy said. “We see this agreement as a step toward greater security and solid security guarantees, and I truly hope it will work effectively.”
Zelenskyy's post came as officials in Kyiv said they were grateful for vital US help in the war and want to keep working with Washington. The country's prime minister, though, said Ukraine still wants security guarantees to be part of any peace deal and won't recognise Russian occupation of any Ukrainian land. Those are potential stumbling blocks for Washington and Moscow, respectively.
Ukraine and its allies are concerned Trump is pushing for a quick ceasefire that will favour Russia, which Kyiv says cannot be trusted to honour truces.
A White House official said the US was “pausing and reviewing” its aid to “ensure that it is contributing to a solution.” The order will remain in effect until Trump determines that Ukraine has demonstrated a commitment to peace negotiations, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the assistance.
The pause in US aid isn't expected to have an immediate impact on the battlefield. Ukrainian forces have slowed Russian advances along the roughly 1,000-kilometre front line, especially in the fiercely contested Donetsk region some 700 kilometres east of Kyiv. The Russian onslaught has been costly in troops and armour but hasn't brought a strategically significant breakthrough for the Kremlin.
Ukraine needs help to fight Russia
Ukraine, which depends heavily on foreign help to hold back Russia's full-scale invasion that began on February 24, 2022, has feared that aid could be stopped since Trump took office.
US-made Patriot air defence missile systems, for example, are a pivotal part of protecting Ukraine. Just as vital is US intelligence assistance, which has allowed Ukraine to track Russian troop movements and select targets.
“I feel betrayed, but this feeling is not really deep for some reason. I was expecting something like that from Trump's side,” said a Ukrainian soldier fighting in Russia's Kursk region, where Ukraine launched a daring military incursion in August 2024 to improve its hand in negotiations. The soldier spoke by phone to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media.
On the front line, where Ukraine is struggling to fend off the much larger and better-equipped Russian army, another soldier said the US decision would allow further battlefield gains for Moscow.
“War is very pragmatic,” he told AP, speaking on condition of anonymity in compliance with military regulations. “If we have weapons, enough ammunition, infantry, armoured vehicles and aviation — great. If not, then we're done,” he said.
He recalled a seven-month delay in US aid that ended in April 2024 but opened a door for the Russian capture of the strategically important city of Avdiivka.
Olena Fedorova, 46, of the southern port city of Odesa, said she hoped Trump's decision would be temporary because “we really need help.”
US support is vital because Europe cannot fully provide what Ukraine needs in air defence systems, said lawmaker Yehor Chernov. “As a result, this will lead to an increase in the number of casualties among civilians,” he said.
The US suspension of military aid is already being felt at a hub in eastern Poland that has been used to ferry Western weapons into neighbouring Ukraine, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.
The US-Ukraine relationship has taken a downturn since Trump took office and his team launched bilateral talks with Russia.
Trump says he wants to get traction for peace negotiations. He vowed during his campaign to settle the war in 24 hours, but later changed that time frame and voiced hope that peace could be negotiated in six months.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said US help is “vital” and has saved “perhaps tens of thousands” of civilian and military lives. But he emphasized that any peace agreement must be “on Ukraine's terms, as the victim country.”
Ukraine wants “concrete security guarantees” from Washington, European countries and Group of Seven leading industrialised nations, he said. Giving up territory to Russia, which occupies nearly 20 per cent of Ukraine, “is not possible” under the UN Charter, he said.
European allies stress support for Kyiv
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Washington's decision could act as a spur to a peace agreement.
“The US has been the chief supplier in this war so far,” Peskov said. “If the US suspends these supplies, it will make the best contribution to peace.”
Poland's Foreign Ministry said the US had not consulted with or informed NATO countries before announcing the pause.
Russia will likely try to use the halt in supplies to extend its territorial gains and strengthen its position in prospective peace talks.
Russia's state RIA Novosti news agency quoted Andrei Kartapolov, a retired general who chairs the defense committee in the lower house of parliament, as saying Ukraine would exhaust its current ammunition reserves within months. “We need to keep up the pressure and continue to target their bases and depots with long-range precision weapons to destroy the stockpiles,” he said.
Ukraine's European allies, meanwhile, reaffirmed their commitment to Kyiv.
The chief of the European Union's executive proposed an 800 billion Euro (USD 841 billion) plan to bolster defences of EU nations and provide Ukraine with military muscle.
The British government, which has been leading European efforts to keep Trump from pushing to end the war on terms that could favour Moscow, said it remains “absolutely committed to securing a lasting peace in Ukraine.”
Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director-general of the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defence think tank, said Washington's move could encourage Russia to ask for more Ukrainian concessions, including demilitarisation and neutrality.
Washington | Vice President JD Vance has struck a nerve with key allies in the UK and France after arguing that a US-Ukraine critical minerals deal is a more practical deterrent against Russian President Vladimir Putin than a peacekeeping force for post-war Ukraine that includes “some random country.”
Vance, in an interview with Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity aired Monday evening, said the economic pact with Kyiv sought by President Donald Trump “is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years.”
The Trump administration has been making the case that tightening the US-Ukraine economic ties through an agreement that gives the US access to valuable mineral deposits in Ukraine will give Russia pause about taking malign action against Ukraine in the future.
The Republican vice president did not mention any particular country in his skeptical comments about a potential peacekeeping mission. But the “random country” comment was seen by some lawmakers and government officials in the UK and France as a slight that discounted both countries' partnership with the US military in conflict zones over the last 25 years.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron are leading the call for a post-conflict peacekeeping force in Ukraine to prevent Russia from invading again if Moscow and Kyiv reach a truce to put a stop to Russia's invasion, launched in February 2022.
French troops deployed to Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and British troops have served alongside American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and in a US-led coalition against the Islamic State group.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage told broadcaster GB News that “JD Vance is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.”
“For 20 years in Afghanistan, pro rata our size against America's, we spent the same amount of money, we put the same number of men and women in and we suffered the same losses," Farage added. “We stood by America all through those 20 years putting in exactly the same contribution. And, all right, they may be six times bigger, but we did our bit.”
Vance on Tuesday took to social media to try to head off the criticism by noting that he didn't name any countries in the TV interview. He also applauded Britain and France for fighting "bravely alongside the US over the last 20 years, and beyond.”
Later, during an appearance on Capitol Hill, Vance underscored to reporters that “the British and the French have offered to step up in a big way.”
French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu, in France's parliament, noted the move by Vance. "Thankfully, the American vice president corrected his comments,” Lecornu said.
But in London, Liberal Democrat defence spokeswoman Helen Maguire, a former Royal Military Police officer who served in Iraq, called for the UK ambassador in Washington to ask Vance to apologise.
“JD Vance is erasing from history the hundreds of British troops who gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan,” she said. “I saw firsthand how American and British soldiers fought bravely together shoulder to shoulder. Six of my own regiment, the Royal Military Police, didn't return home from Iraq. This is a sinister attempt to deny that reality."
Vance's comments came in an interview recorded hours before a White House official confirmed on Monday evening that Trump had directed a pause of US assistance to Ukraine as he seeks to put pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to engage in negotiations to end the war with Russia.
Trump remains frustrated with Zelenskyy. He again criticised the Ukrainian leader on Monday after Zelenskyy said that reaching an agreement with Russia to end the conflict likely “is still very, very far away.”
Trump administration and Ukrainian officials, during Zelenskyy's White House visit last week, had been expected to sign off on a deal that would have given the US access to Ukraine's critical minerals in part to pay back the US for aid it has sent Kyiv since the start of the war.
But that plan was scrapped as the visit ended abruptly after Trump and Vance had a heated exchange with Zelenskyy during Oval Office talks at the start of the visit.
Ukraine is believed to have deposits of strategically important minerals — including titanium, lithium and manganese — that could be useful for American aerospace, electric vehicle and medical manufacturing.
“The president knows that, look, if you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine,” Vance said in the Fox interview.
Trump hasn't given up all hope of reaching an agreement. And the White House has billed such a pact as a way to tighten US-Ukrainian relations in the long term.
Trump on Monday called the proposal “a great deal” for the US and Ukraine and signalled that he would speak to it during his Tuesday address before a joint session of Congress.
Starmer says that "a mineral deal is not enough on its own” to ensure Ukraine's security. The British prime minister has no illusions about US troops taking part in a potential peacekeeping mission.
Starmer, who met with Trump last week, and others are trying to make the case to Trump that the plan can only work with a US backstop for European forces on the ground — through US aerial intelligence, surveillance and support, as well as rapid-response cover in case of breaches of a truce.