Ukraine reels as Trump pulls US support while Russia’s war rages on

Zynaida Shelepenko is still reeling about what happened in the White House on Friday.

“They cornered Zelenskyy like two bandits, like two mafiosi who want your money and your humiliation,” the 52-year-old bank clerk told Al Jazeera, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s meeting with United States President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.Therefore, Shelepenko said, she was not surprised with Trump’s Monday night decision to freeze military aid to Ukraine after Zelenskyy refused to apologise for the spat and said his aborted visit to Washington, DC, “didn’t bring anything positive”.

The Ukrainian president and his US counterpart have since struck more conciliatory tones, but to Shelepenko, there is a clear winner from these tensions between Washington and Kyiv, which until Trump came to power were close allies.

“Guess who’s cheering now? The vampire, the killer of children in the Kremlin,” she said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We saw the most shameful moment in American history.”If the US aid is stopped altogether, the move will entail “great financial and legal problems” for US arms manufacturers such as Lockheed that have been commissioned to produce weaponry for Kyiv, said military analyst Mykhailo Zhirokhov, who is based in the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv.

Washington may also stop providing intelligence data to Ukraine, including crucial, real-time information from military satellites, and stop training Ukrainian pilots and other servicemen to operate F-16 fighter jets and advanced weaponry, he said.