Zelenski sees faster war end under Trump, warns Scholz call with Putin opens 'Pandora's box'

Volodimir Zelenski sat down for a radio interview on Saturday morning with a message that cut against the anxiety gripping much of Europe: the war in Ukraine would end faster under Donald Trump. The Ukrainian president had spoken by phone with Trump after the American election, and what he heard gave him reason for cautious optimism. Trump, he said, had listened carefully to Ukraine's core positions and offered nothing that contradicted them. The two had not met in person—U.S. law prevented that before Trump's January 20th inauguration—but Zelenski made clear he intended to change that. He would speak only to Trump directly, he said, not through intermediaries or advisers.

That confidence in Trump's intentions stood in sharp contrast to Zelenski's alarm over a phone call that had taken place just days earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had reached out to Vladimir Putin for the first time in nearly two years. The Kremlin said Putin had expressed willingness to discuss energy agreements if Germany was interested—a reference to the gas supplies that had flowed from Russia to Germany before the war. Scholz's government framed the call as an effort to push Russia toward genuine negotiations with Ukraine, emphasizing Germany's commitment to supporting Ukrainian defense for as long as necessary. But Zelenski saw something different. The call, he said, had opened a Pandora's box, weakening the diplomatic isolation that had been carefully maintained around Moscow. Other European leaders had warned Scholz against making the call, according to people familiar with the matter. Now, Zelenski worried, other conversations would follow—a cascade of words that would do nothing but serve Putin's interests.

The tension between these two moments revealed the fragile state of the Western coalition supporting Ukraine. Germany, which had become Ukraine's second-largest backer after the United States with 15 billion euros in financial, humanitarian, and military aid, was facing domestic political pressure. Scholz's center-left coalition had collapsed, leaving him to govern with only the Greens and facing a snap election in February. His party was being criticized for insufficient diplomatic effort to end the war. The call to Putin, it seemed, was partly an attempt to show German voters that he was trying.

Yet Zelenski's skepticism about Putin's intentions appeared grounded in hard experience. The Russian president, he said, had no genuine interest in a peace agreement. For Moscow, the current state of the war—grinding, costly, but ongoing—was convenient. It allowed Putin to keep the question alive while avoiding the kind of decisive pressure that might force real concessions. When Scholz called, Putin responded by restating Russia's demand that Ukraine accept what Moscow called the "new territorial realities"—a euphemism for the four regions that Russian forces had partially occupied and now claimed as their own. Zelenski's position was unambiguous: no peace agreement would be acceptable unless Russian forces withdrew completely from all occupied Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.

Trump, by contrast, had claimed he could end the war in a single day, though he had never explained how. He had also questioned the billions of dollars the United States had poured into Ukrainian military aid since the 2022 invasion. What that skepticism might mean for future American support remained unclear. The uncertainty hung over everything—over Zelenski's hopes for a Trump presidency, over Scholz's diplomatic gambit, over the entire question of how and when this war might end. For now, Zelenski could only wait for his chance to sit down with the president-elect and make his case directly. Everything else, he seemed to suggest, was just noise.