Zelensky and Trump Agree to Meet in New York: 'This Meeting Could Change a Lot'
A Sunday call produced the week’s diplomatic centrepiece: the Ukrainian and American presidents agreed to meet at the UN General Assembly — “this meeting could change a lot. There is diplomatic momentum,” Mr Zelensky wrote, thanking Mr Trump for the envoys’ Kyiv visit earlier this month and naming the peace track his “number-one” priority. The agreement came hours after his drones lit Moscow’s refinery and days after his cities buried more dead.
The sequencing is Kyiv’s new diplomacy distilled: escalate, then negotiate from the smoke — the Moscow barrage was the meeting’s advance briefing, demonstrating that Ukraine arrives in New York as a state that can hurt Russia at scale, not a supplicant managing decline. “Diplomatic momentum” is generous for a process whose last round produced a three-day pause and a broken truce idea, but the phrase does its work: keeping Washington invested is Ukraine’s existential line, and flattery is cheaper than interceptors. The meeting’s real agenda is the energy-truce concept and its missing word, reciprocity — plus the Patriot arithmetic winter makes urgent. Watch whether a trilateral with Moscow gets floated from the UN podium — and what Ukraine is asked to pause this time.