When Tomahawks become boomerangs

Leave it to Mr. Unpredictable, aka Donald Trump, President of the United States, to pack a policy U-turn, a harsh unfriending, and some fuzzy ambiguity into just a few days. As things stand now, Trump has said “no” to American Tomahawk cruise missiles for Kiev – maybe not yet forever, as his vice president J.D. Vance has stressed – but, clearly, for the foreseeable future, whatever that may mean with Trump.

In the process, he has also made it clear – painfully clear – that Kiev’s Vladimir Zelensky is back in the doghouse. Seemingly in favor for a while – after donning a suite like a good boy and flattering Trump at every opportunity and without inhibitions – the Ukrainian leader-without-elections is out in the cold again: No welcome at the airport; a Friday-afternoon meeting demonstratively scheduled to get a nuisance visitor out of the way before the weekend; and, we hear, some rough talk, even shouting, again.

It is as if Zelensky did not board a plane to pay another submission visit to Washington but a time machine. And it deposited him right back in February, when he received an urgently needed public drubbing in the Oval Office.

Compulsive optimists among the thinning crowd of deadly “friends”-of-Ukraine in the West may want to take solace in the fact that, this time, Trump had the decency to administer Zelensky’s spanking behind closed doors. But then, it was leaked immediately, to the Financial Times, no less.

Of course, the leaker may have been a desperate pro-Zelensky holdout still hiding somewhere in the US administration (that you, Keith Kellogg?), trying to alert the Europeans so they can come again to their Ukrainian protégé’s aid and sabotage the oh-so-horrible prospect of a quick peace. And according to Maria Zakharova, speaking for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they have already started interfering again.