Donald Trump meets Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday as patience wears thin on Russia, at a UN summit where the US president is expected to offer a dark take on the future of the world body.
Trump will address the United Nations for the first time since he returned to office and quickly took to slashing the US role in international organizations.
It will be Trump’s second time seeing Zelensky since the US leader invited Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 15 to Alaska, a meeting that broke Moscow’s isolation in the West but yielded no breakthrough on Ukraine.
Russia has not only kept up its barrage of attacks on Ukraine in the past month but has increasingly raised fears in the West, with drone or air incursions in NATO members Poland, Estonia and Romania.
Mike Waltz, newly installed as the US ambassador to the United Nations, voiced solidarity over the airspace violations.
“The United States and our allies will defend every inch of NATO territory,” said Waltz, who was earlier Trump’s national security advisor.
Trump took office vowing that he could end within one day the Ukraine war, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and boasted of his personal chemistry with Putin.
But Trump acknowledged last week that Putin had “really let me down.”
Zelensky is expected to press Trump to take a harder line and impose long-threatened new sanctions on Russia.
But Secretary of State Marco Rubio, last week previewing the talks with Zelensky, said that Trump was not ready to pressure Putin, saying that without him, “there’s no one left in the world that could possibly mediate” on Ukraine.
Zelensky will again need to tread carefully with Trump, who — along with Vice President JD Vance — berated the wartime leader in an explosive February 28 meeting at the White House, calling him ungrateful for billions of dollars in US military assistance.
Trump, a native New Yorker, is spending barely a day in town for the weeklong summit.
One of his few other one-on-one meetings will be with Argentina’s right-wing President Javier Milei, an ideological ally to whose government the United States is considering offering an economic lifeline.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump would discuss the “renewal of American strength around the world.”
“The president will also touch upon how globalist institutions have significantly decayed the world order, and he will articulate his straightforward and constructive vision for the world,” she told reporters in Washington.
Trump in his second term has moved more aggressively in his nationalist “America First” vision of curbing cooperation with the rest of the world.
He has moved to pull the United States out of the World Health Organization and the UN climate body, severely curtailed US development assistance and wielded sanctions against foreign judges over rulings he sees as violating sovereignty.
“Instead of inflaming global crises and fueling chaos and inequality, he should use his power and influence to work with the global community to provide meaningful solutions,” said Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America.
Trump’s appearance comes a day after French President Emmanuel Macron led a group of Western allies of the United States in recognizing a Palestinian state, a historic but largely symbolic step strongly opposed by Israel.
The United States and Israel both shunned the special session.
