2025 Moments: What changed after Trump's clash with Zelenskyy?

0:02Michael Clarke:Sky News, the full story first.

0:09Michael Clarke:Do you remember this from February? Your country's in big trouble. Wait a minute. No, no. You've done a lot of talking. The moment when Ukraine's President Vladimir Zelensky sat down in the Oval Office and was ambushed by Donald Trump. Well, as we head into Christmas here on the Sky News Daily, we're putting that moment under the microscope with our experts, profiling the exchange that changed the story of Ukraine's war with Russia.

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1:30Michael Clarke:Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. Hi everyone, welcome to The Daily, and with Christmas fast approaching, we thought we'd take a look back at 2025, but through the prism of some of the moments that defined the year. And we start back in February, soon after a changing of the guard at the White House. Now, no doubt you've had your fair share of grumpy meetings, those bruising encounters with colleagues that didn't go quite according to plan. But have you ever experienced anything like this? In this entire meeting, you said thank you. If you will speak very loudly about the war, you can...

2:10He's not speaking loudly.

2:11Michael Clarke:He's not speaking loudly. Your country's in big trouble. Can I ask? No, no, you've done a lot of talking. Your country is in big trouble. I know. You're not winning. You're not winning this. You have a damn good chance of coming out okay because of us. Mr. President, we are staying in our country, staying strong from the very beginning of the war. We've been alone, and we are thankful. I said thanks in this cabinet. We gave you, through this stupid president,$350 billion. We gave you military equipment, and you men are brave, but they had to use our military equipment. If you didn't have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks.

2:53Michael Clarke:In three days. I heard it from Putin. In three days. This is something new. Maybe less. In two weeks. Of course, yes. It's going to be a very hard thing to do business like this. That, of course, was the moment tempers flared in the Oval Office. President Trump and President Zelensky tearing strips off each other in full view of the cameras. This was pretty soon after Donald Trump had started his second term, and he had, of course, promised he'd sort out the Russia-Ukraine mess on day one. That didn't happen. And the shockingly unwelcome welcome the Ukrainian leader received that day has clouded everything to do with the war ever since.

3:29Michael Clarke:So, how have things changed, and are we any closer to peace? I sat down with our military analyst, Professor Michael Clarke, and our international affairs editor, Dominic Wacon, to find out.

3:41Dominic Waghorn:Well, it was an extraordinary moment. It is almost one of those moments that we all quite sort of remember where we were when we heard about it. And it was profoundly shocking. I think we've got kind of got used to what's happened since because in a way that event set the tone for the rest of the year. It was a full-on slanging match between Zelensky and the president and his vice president with the rest of various other administration officials arrayed in the Oval Office. Zelensky had gone to Washington thinking that he was going to be able to sign up to a kind of rare earth minerals deal with Donald Trump that would kind of put all the Americans' reservations about him and Ukraine to bed and would usher in a period of sort of closer cooperation.

4:21Dominic Waghorn:And in the end, the opposite happened. And he was effectively ambushed. I don't think there's much doubt about that, really. It seemed to have been led by J.D. Vance for whatever was motivating him. He rounded on Zelensky and Donald Trump piled in. They're all very emotionally annoyed with each other. Vance was most of all angry with Zelensky for not being grateful enough. There were concerns about Zelensky not wearing a suit. And I think the riot act was read out to Zelensky by the president, who said, you do not have any cards. You've got to make a deal. and that's basically been Trump's message ever since that the Ukrainians are the weaker party.

4:59Dominic Waghorn:Trump sees the world through a hierarchy of the strong and the weak. The Ukrainians are not playing to type and they've got to accept the fact that they are the weaker party and they've got to do a deal. He's still saying that where we are now at the end of the year and that rancor really has, I think, continued ever since that extraordinary encounter in the Oval Office.

5:17Michael Clarke:Michael, what did you make of that day in the White House? I mean, one thing you can say with certainty is diplomacy done differently. It was a shock to everybody because this is not what is supposed to happen. You know that everybody crowds into the Oval Office on these occasions. There's a great scrum of journalists. And occasionally the camera pans around to the scrum of journalists. And the Ukrainian ambassador was Oksana Markarova. And she'd been ambassador for four years to Washington, Ukrainian ambassador. And she was sitting on the floor. And as the camera panned around, she had her head in her hands and she was crying.

5:48She was weeping because everything she'd done for four years was coming apart at this attack. This was the first time that one of these press conferences staged as a sort of Trump vehicle had happened. So it was a shock in diplomatic terms. But it also indicated it wasn't just that it set off a lot of rancor, as Dominic absolutely correctly says, but it came off the back of a lot of rancor. But we all thought that Zelensky was going in on that 28th of February, that he was going in to talk about the minerals deal, which was already fairly contentious. But we thought, OK, he'll talk about the minerals deal and then they make a statement about more progress.

6:26And suddenly all that was off. This was a dreadful press conference. And Zelensky was then sort of ejected from the White House. And there was there was pictures of him literally without any ceremony, just being almost thrown out the door back into his car on his own to drive away. and that was as vicious a piece of diplomacy as any of us could remember in the diplomatic world.

6:45Michael Clarke:I mean, Don, what did you make of President Zelensky's presence, his performance, in fact, in the Oval Office? Because at points, you know, he gave as good as he got.

6:55Dominic Waghorn:His team will admit that in the end, he didn't play out as well as he could, but for very understandable reasons. I mean, he did lose his rag at one moment. He was pretty restrained for a while and then he kind of let loose and it just turned into this massive shouting match. But, you know, the fault, I think, lies mainly with the vice president, J.D. Vance, who behaved disgracefully turning on him, then I think encouraged the worst excesses of the president to his right, who I think was angry that Zelensky hadn't just sort of taken it on the chin from the vice president. And I think Zelensky then felt that he had no choice but to hit back.

7:31Dominic Waghorn:And it's taken a long time to kind of recover from that. Zelensky did eventually go back, of course, to the Oval Office. He had a much more successful encounter with the president where he did wear a suit of sorts. I think the bottom line for the Ukrainian president is that whatever he's done, and he's gone to all kinds of lengths, advised by a lot of the best diplomatic brains in Europe, at least. and he's tied himself up in pretzels, effectively, to try and get back in the good books of the American president. And Donald Trump still sort of wriggles out of whatever hold he's put into by Zelensky and the European leaders and goes back to his default position, which is his sympathies lie with Russia for a number of reasons.

8:11Dominic Waghorn:And I think in a way, this encounter was engineered to try and make it impossible for the American president to support Ukraine as much as Ukraine would have liked. It's sad, the mood, and it's made it impossible really for diplomacy to get back on track, I think, ever since.

8:26Michael Clarke:I mean, I suppose we shouldn't forget the fact that before Donald Trump entered the White House for a second time, he was very clear about what he was going to do with Ukraine. He was going to solve it and he was going to solve it on day one. And I just wonder, given that obviously he didn't, whether perhaps what was going on in the Oval Office on that day was as much about, you know, making the United States position about Ukraine a little bit more clear and perhaps explaining why they hadn't done what he promised the American electorate and the rest of the world that he would do. Yes, he had to have a reason why he hadn't delivered peace in 24 hours.

9:01CNN, you know, used to keep a tally of the number of times he said it. And he said it 53 times, that he was going to end the war in 24 hours or in a day. Later then, when people asked him about it, he said, well, I was only speaking figuratively. But on none of those 53, 54 occasions did he ever say, speaking figuratively, I think I could end it in 24 hours. It was just part of his campaign rhetoric, thought that the war should end. He just thought that it could be brought to some sort of negotiated end very quickly because it would be like a property deal. You get a bit, I get a bit, and we all walk away.

9:30And of course, there are reasons why politics is not like property deals.

9:33Michael Clarke:Dom, just in terms of the moment itself and the ripples that we might still be experiencing from it, to what extent did that fiery showdown in the Oval Office have an influence on the course of the war in Ukraine?

9:47Dominic Waghorn:Those sort of aftershocks were felt for a long time afterwards, still, to some extent, still being felt to this day. We've had other meetings. We've had various speeches from, for instance, J.D. Vance's speech in Munich, where he spelled it out to Europe. I think he said there's a new sheriff in town. There's going to be a new arrangement. And I think for Europeans, you know, I think the repercussions have been not just about Ukraine, but a clear sense, I think, from that meeting and what's happened since, that America just doesn't see the world in the same way as Europeans. Most recently, we've been hearing from the White House national security strategy documents saying Europe is a civilizational decline and it's decaying and it's going in the wrong direction.

10:24Dominic Waghorn:A lot of that, I think, is motivated by a kind of ethno-nationalist view of the world. But there are lots of different reasons why the Trump team see the world differently. In the mind of the president and what I think the body language, the kind of alpha male dynamic of that meeting, the Oval Office, was this was an American president who does see the world in terms of the strong and the weak. and it's entirely hierarchical. It's kind of amoral in the sense it doesn't matter who's right or who's wrong. If you are strong, then your role is to prevail and to conquer and to dominate. If you're weak, your role is to be prevailed upon.

10:57Dominic Waghorn:It's to be subjugated. And he sees Ukrainians, despite their extraordinary courage, despite the fact that, you know, against all the odds, they push back against this Russian war machine and push it out of much of the country it initially invaded. He still sees Ukraine as the weak party. And therefore, he sees Ukraine's role as effectively it should roll over, accept what's happened to it and move on. And he's frustrated because he sees Ukraine's refusal to do so as an obstruction to what he really wants, which is better relations between America and Russia. And he's had all kinds of sort of deals, I think, national and possibly personal to him and his team dangled in front of him by the Russians.

11:37Dominic Waghorn:That's where he wants to get to. And the Ukrainians aren't letting that happen. So I think the frustration for him is Ukraine's not playing to type. And I think he's now saying to the Ukrainians still, you've got to accept your fate. And he just doesn't have the patience or it seems the intellectual diplomatic bandwidth to do the really difficult bit. Making peace is very difficult. It's not a question of forcing one side to accept terms. He would prefer Ukraine to accept the terms because he doesn't feel he can force Moscow to do so. I think for personal reasons as much as other reasons. I don't think he's got the ability to stand up to Putin and say to him, you've got to make peace.

12:16Dominic Waghorn:The weaker, the easier option, I think, for him is to make Ukraine do so. And Zelensky is still refusing to do so. We're still at this point where the American president is trying to force Ukrainians to make peace. And he hasn't quite gone as far as pulling away military intelligence and walking away completely. But that still remains a threat to the Ukrainians. And I think that means we're entering the new year still in pretty perilous territory.

12:39Michael Clarke:I mean, Michael, for how much longer can this situation continue? I mean, don the flak jacket for a moment and take us to the front lines. As of this moment, where is the war? It's in a third iteration, really. We've had three wars, different sorts of wars, in the last four years. So it started off in 2022 as a sort of a 20th century style war, you know, attacking defence in ways that people sort of understood. It looked very like the Second World War in some respects. And then by 2023, it turned into a war of attrition when it was clear the Russians would just keep going, regardless of the cost, regardless of the damage and all the rest of it.

13:16So then it became a sort of a war of attrition, which was much more disturbing. And it put the Western alliance under pressure. Are you really going to support Ukraine for as long as it takes? Which is what they'd always said. Well, now you're going to have to stand by as long as it's going to take a long time. And then in 2024 through to this year, it's become a really different sort of war, dominated by the drones, dominated by robotics, where armoured vehicles can't move around on the battlefield, where only small groups of troops can move around. Any big groups of troops get targeted. The average target time now is seven minutes from being spotted to being hit.

13:52Sometimes it's a lot faster than that. So we're now in a situation where the war is not moving very much, even though it's extremely destructive. And I don't think there'll be any big breakthroughs next year, but the big breakthroughs might be political. So what we're looking at, you know, the war now, it's not frozen, but it's not moving very much because of the hybrid nature of it. Is this the point then that we can say, Michael,

14:16Michael Clarke:both sides are kind of looking for the exit door now? They may be. By the middle of next year, it is possible that if the Russians have taken the hold of the Donbass, they would regard that as enough of victory. I mean, in Kiev, they think that the Russians want a victory parade in Kramatorsk. If they could march through Kramatorsk in a victory parade, Putin might say that's enough for now. I mean, it won't be enough forever. We know that. And the Ukrainians may find that that's imposed upon them. So that's possible. It's also possible that the Americans stay involved and find a way of creating a ceasefire.

14:48I think by the middle of next year, there are other possibilities, but they'll be created more by the politics than by what happens on the battlefield.

14:56Michael Clarke:Dom, what's your view on that? I mean, how is the campaign going for Donald Trump to get a Nobel Peace Prize? By which I mean, how is the peace plan for Ukraine and Russia going?

15:04Dominic Waghorn:Well, the plan is flawed in a number of ways, because I mean, most of all, because it does seem to have been dictated to a certain extent by the Kremlin, written by Moscow. So, and obviously, if you're Ukrainian, that's totally unacceptable. I was in Ukraine at the time of the Alaska summit, and Ukrainians I was speaking to were really depressed and dejected by the spectacle of Putin and Trump striding the world stage together, Putin being allowed back in out of the cold. And the spell he seemed to have the American president under. And then obviously, they've been very depressed by the fact that the Kremlin seems to be kind of dictating terms via Kirill Dmitriev and Steve Witkoff, who have a business background.

15:41Dominic Waghorn:I think it's important to sort of stress this. You know, Steve Wyckoff, he's now Trump's chief negotiator, but he was a property tycoon, a real estate lawyer, very much aligned with Donald Trump. And they've been through business careers together for decades. And Russian money, pretty murky Russian money, arguably, has helped bail out Donald Trump a number of times and has certainly helped kind of bankroll both the Wyckoff and Trump property empires at certain times. And there are links between Wyckoff and Kirill Dmitriev. So the Ukrainians say this is completely unacceptable and not honest broking at all.

16:17Dominic Waghorn:And they're deeply suspicious and cynical about the motives of Donald Trump and his chief negotiators. So, you know, that's the fundamental issue, I think, with the peace plan. And the other fundamental issues, the Ukrainians say, you know, if they do have to make peace and we're a long way from that, they would say. They've got to be security guarantees because they were given guarantees in the past. They were encouraged to give up their nuclear weapons and given commitments by Britain, America and Russia. And that hasn't helped them at all in what's happened since. So they're not prepared to be burned again.

16:47Dominic Waghorn:And they're deeply suspicious about any deal that's not going to really reassure them in terms of what will happen if Putin stops in the Donbass now, as Michael was saying, but then in a few years time comes back. And then if he does come back, he's rebuilt his very battered war machine. He will have plenty of tanks to roll across the open plains from Donetsk and the Donbass towards Kiev, and he'll wrap up the rest of Ukraine. Lots of arguments have been made about why Putin's gone to war and saying he was provoked by NATO expanding. He explicitly said, you know, on camera, he said that Donbass is Russia.

17:22Dominic Waghorn:It's part of Russia. It's always been part of Russia. And we have got to take it back by rights. This is a kind of imperialist ambition that's motivating the Russian president. and there's no reason to believe that he wouldn't take what he's given in any peace deal now and then come back for more later. And just to add to what Michael was saying, I was in Ukraine, as I was saying, around the Alaska summit, we went to a drone factory, which is difficult to go to. It's difficult to get access, but we're able to, very top secret location. In the one building we were in, they are making 30 ,000 drones a month.

17:56Dominic Waghorn:So that's 1 ,000 drones a day and they say whatever they make, it's never enough. And that's just one company. As Michael's saying, this war has turned into a kind of dystopian sci-fi battle of machines. The thing I came away from Ukraine from that trip, bearing in mind, was that that's what's happened in three and a half years. This war is metastasized completely from a kind of tanks versus other tanks, artillery, infantry, more conventional war, to now kind of a real sort of 22nd century, if you like, a war of the future between machines. If it's allowed to go on further, God knows what it will end up metastasizing into.