For panicked cheerleaders of the proxy war against Russia, the consensus view is that Trump has betrayed a stalwart US ally, sided with an enemy in Moscow, and may have even deliberately triggered the clash to serve his treacherous agenda.

Those who insist that Zelensky was ambushed are overlooking the cordial, lengthy exchange that occurred before the meeting turned testy. In a room full of aides and news cameras, Trump, Vance, and Zelensky held court for more than 40 minutes. It was Zelensky who became confrontational each time the two US leaders spoke favorably about negotiations with Russia.

In his opening remarks, Trump criticized his predecessor Joe Biden for refusing to “speak to Russia whatsoever” and expressed his hope to bring the war “to a close.” Zelensky responded by calling Vladimir Putin a “a killer and terrorist” and vowing that there would be “of course no compromises with the killer about our territories.” In a paranoid threat, he also declared that unless Trump helps him “stop Putin,” then the Russian leader will invade the Baltic states “to bring them back to his empire”, which would draw the US into the war, despite the “big nice ocean” shielding the US from Europe: “Your soldiers will fight.”

Trump did not interrupt or object to these initial, belligerent comments. The closest he came to a direct criticism occurred when a reporter asked about Zelensky’s avowed refusal to compromise. Trump replied that “certainly he’s going to have to make some compromises, but hopefully they won’t be as big as some people think you’re going to have to make.” Trump even promised that “we’re going to be continuing” US military support to Ukraine.

Yet because Trump also stressed that his goal is to end the war through diplomacy, Zelensky grew agitated. The tipping point came when, after 40 minutes, a reporter asked whether Trump has chosen to “align yourself too much with Putin.” Vance responded that, in his view, “the path to peace and the path to prosperity” entails “engaging in diplomacy.” It was here that Zelensky lost his composure and directly challenged Vance: “What kind of diplomacy, J.D., you are speaking about? What do you mean?”.

This drew a sharp reaction. Vance reminded Zelensky that his military is brutally nabbing Ukrainian men off the street to send them to the front lines, and that the US seeks “the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.” Zelensky then doubled down by challenging Vance to visit Ukraine and reviving his attempted fearmongering. “You have a nice ocean and don’t feel it now,” he said, referring to the Atlantic, “but you will feel it in the future.” That veiled threat angered Trump, who proceeded to call out Zelensky for, among other things, “gambling with the lives of millions of people,” and “with World War III.”

In opting to confront Vance, Zelensky showed that he is so reflexively hostile to the notion of negotiating with Russia that he is willing to berate his chief sponsor, in public no less, for daring to suggest it. And to serve his agenda, Zelensky also showed that he is willing to engage in distortion and even outright falsification.

To make his case that Putin cannot be negotiated with, Zelensky first invoked an agreement, brokered by France and Germany, that he signed with Putin in Paris on December 9, 2019. The pact called for a prisoner exchange, which, Zelensky asserted, Putin ignored. “He [Putin] didn’t exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners, but he didn’t do it,” Zelensky said.

Zelensky was not being truthful. He himself attended a December 29, 2019 ceremony welcoming the return of Ukrainian prisoners freed under his agreement with Putin. Then in April 2020, his office hailed the release of a third round of prisoners.

December 29, 2019: Zelensky attends a welcome ceremony for Ukrainian prisoners returned under his agreement with Russia. (Yuliia Ovsiannikova/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

That was not his only false statement. In insisting that Putin can’t be trusted to uphold agreements, Zelensky omitted his own record in undermining diplomacy with Moscow.

The December 2019 pact recommitted Ukraine and Russia to the Minsk peace process, the UN Security Council-endorsed framework for ending the war that broke out in 2014 between the post-coup Ukrainian government and Russian-backed eastern Ukrainian rebels.

After initially taking some positive steps toward implementation, Zelensky ultimately refused to comply, a stance that he previewed in Putin’s company. During a joint news conference in Paris, Zelensky visibly smirked as Putin discussed the importance of following through with Minsk. The following March, Zelensky, under pressure from Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists and US-funded NGOs, abandoned a pledge to hold direct talks with representatives of the breakaway Donbas republics, which would be granted limited autonomy under Minsk.

By that point, the Kremlin had begun to raise concerns that Zelensky was not following through. A Kremlin readout of a call between Putin and Zelensky the previous month noted that Putin had “stressed the importance of the full and unconditional fulfillment of all measures and decisions made in Minsk and adopted at the Normandy summits, including the one held in Paris on December 9, 2019… Vladimir Putin directly asked if Kyiv intends to really implement the Minsk agreements.”

Zelensky kept signaling that he had no such intention. In mid-July 2020, Zelensky’s party proposed a measure that would hold local elections throughout Ukraine – yet in a deliberate omission, the plan excluded Donbas, which was supposed to have new elections under Minsk. By that point, Zelensky was openly contemptuous of Donbas residents. “The people of the Donbas have been brainwashed,” Zelensky complained. “They live in the Russian information space… I can’t reach them.”

The entry of the Biden team to the Oval Office in January 2021 encouraged Zelensky’s confrontational path. In February 2021 – one year before Russia invaded – Zelensky shut down three television networks tied to his main political opposition, which advocated better ties with Russia. A Zelensky aide later disclosed that this crackdown was “conceived as a welcome gift to the Biden administration,” which offered its enthusiastic endorsement of Zelensky’s effort to “counter Russia’s malign influence.”

The following month, the Biden administration returned the favor by approving its first military package for Ukraine, valued at $125 million. That encouraged even more bellicosity from Zelensky’s government. Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council approved a strategy to recover all of Crimea from Russian control, including by force. Ukrainian military leaders also announced that they were “ready” to retake Donbas by force, with the help of NATO allies.

By this point, Zelensky was openly disdainful of the diplomatic path that he had signed onto in Paris. “I have no intention of talking to terrorists, and it is just impossible for me in my position,” he declared in April 2021. Zelensky also demanded changes to Minsk. “I’m now participating in the process that was designed before my time,” he said. “The Minsk process should be more flexible in this situation. It should serve the purposes of today not of the past.”

Zelensky and his aides maintained this stance in the weeks before Russia’s February 2022 invasion. “The position of Ukraine, which has been expressed many times at different levels, is unchanged,” top Zelensky advisor Andrii Yermak said. “There have not been and will not be any direct negotiations with the separatists.” Added Ukrainian security chief Oleksiy Danilov: “The fulfillment of the Minsk agreement means the country’s destruction.” Perhaps to underscore the point, Zelensky’s government escalated attacks on rebel-controlled areas.

The Russian invasion forced Zelensky to abandon his hostility to negotiations, resulting in the Istanbul talks of March-April 2022. While Zelensky now claims that Russia cannot be negotiated with, his own representatives in Istanbul hold a much different view.

“We managed to find a very real compromise,” Oleksandr Chalyi, a senior member of the Ukrainian negotiating team, recalled in December 2023. “We were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April, to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.” Putin, he added, “tried to do everything possible to conclude [an] agreement with Ukraine.”

According to former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovich, who also took part in the talks, “the Istanbul peace initiatives were very good.” While Ukraine “made concessions,” he said, “the amount of their [Russia’s] concessions was greater. This will never happen again.” The Ukraine war, Arestovich concluded, “could have ended with the Istanbul agreements, and several hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive.”

The US and UK sabotaged the Istanbul talks by refusing to provide Ukraine with security guarantees and encouraging Zelensky to keep fighting instead. Zelensky’s decision to obey their dictates helps explain why he is so desperate to obtain a security guarantee from Trump. Having walked away from a peace deal that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Zelensky needs a tangible Western security commitment to show for it.

In Zelensky’s defense, he has also faced, from the start of his presidency, the threat of violence from Ukrainian ultra-nationalists staunchly opposed to any peace deal with Russia and allied eastern Ukrainians. And rather than help him overcome this domestic obstacle to peace, Washington has enabled it. As the late scholar Stephen F. Cohen prophetically warned in October 2019, Zelensky would not be able to “go forward with full peace negotiations unless America has his back” against “a quasi-fascist movement” that was literally threatening his life.

For this reason, it was disrespectful of Vance to insist that Zelensky thank the US for its military support, when that assistance has in fact fueled Ukraine’s decimation. Yet Zelensky is also responsible for putting himself in this position. Because he dutifully served the US goal of using Ukraine to bleed Russia, Zelensky was rewarded with political and media adulation, along with tens of billions of dollars in NATO funding.

The unprecedented dispute at the White House shows that Zelensky’s disingenuous hostility to negotiations is no longer welcome in Washington. While this may prove fatal to Zelensky’s political career and US proxy warfare against Russia, it is a tangible step toward ending his country’s destruction.