Prime Minister Andy Burnham will have an unofficial goal when he meets members of Britain’s former empire next week: Avoid a fight about slavery reparations.

Good luck, as they say, with that.

His predecessor Keir Starmer’s trip to the last Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, at a beach resort on the Pacific island of Samoa in 2024, is still the stuff of rueful mutters in parts of Whitehall.

Lined up in a semi-circle of armchairs — “like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting,” as one person briefed on the gathering put it — leaders from many of the 56 Commonwealth nations negotiated live over a 16-page communique on laptops and tablets. Starmer, a barrister, found himself personally redrafting a key paragraph about reparations on a screen surrounded by other leaders, said two further people briefed on the meeting.

The unusually intimate format of the leaders’ retreat meant they had no officials with them on the veranda, and Starmer had just one civil servant — No. 10’s private secretary for foreign affairs — stationed in a tent close by. His chief of staff Morgan McSweeney was woken at 4 a.m. London time by a phone call to talk about the strategy for reparations.

That, however, was never clearly resolved. The retreat dragged on hours late; some leaders left before it was even over. Starmer was frustrated and felt he had been “ambushed,” said one U.K. official involved in the 2024 trip. A second said they had blocked the incident from their memory. A third said Starmer was left “furious,” adding: “He went in blind and it was terrible for him.” A fourth said simply: “It was a disaster.” All were granted anonymity to speak frankly.

The eventual communique agreed on a “conversation towards forging a common future based on equity.” This fudge kicked the issue of reparations down the road — where it now lands in Burnham’s lap.

Britain’s new prime minister will touch down at the biennial summit in Antigua and Barbuda next week to find the issue still firmly on some Caribbean and African leaders’ minds.

At the United Nations in May, 123 countries passed a motion calling for “inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice.” The U.K. abstained. Barbados PM Mia Mottley announced a manifesto from Caribbean leaders on the “moral, ethical and legal case” for reparations in June. Commonwealth Secretary-General Shirley Botchwey said last week that an apology for Britain’s role in the slave trade “wouldn’t hurt.”

The visit will be a test of how Burnham — who has a reputation for speaking off the cuff, especially on issues of moral justice — maintains a delicate U.K. government line that reparations are not “the answer,” as Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told POLITICO last month. And Burnham will face that challenge in a unique spotlight: It will be his first overseas visit with King Charles III, who is the head of the Commonwealth.

POLITICO spoke to a dozen U.K. officials or politicians who were involved in the 2024 summit or the planning for Burnham’s upcoming visit. They painted a picture of acute anxiety in the British state over how to deal with calls for reparations from its former colonies; tensions between Downing Street and the Foreign Office over the handling of 2024; and serious questions in Whitehall about whether the summit is even useful for No. 10 — despite the king’s role leaving U.K. prime ministers little choice but to attend.

Burnham will not have to deal with the extreme jetlag and communications hurdles that dogged Starmer’s trip, which involved a 28-hour flight in each direction. But like Starmer, he will fly out at a time when his in-tray is crowded by other issues — not least the U.S. midterms happening at the same time and the domestic aftermath of his first budget, just unveiled this past Wednesday.

The first U.K. official quoted earlier in this story said: “There’s a sense that there can’t be a repeat of [2024] this time around.” The third U.K. official quoted above said: “I don’t understand why they’re making the same mistake. Does the prime minister really have to go?”

A No. 10 official, however, said Burnham made clear soon after taking power on July 20 that he was “very keen” to attend the summit. Miliband has “laid the groundwork so that things hopefully won’t be as tricky as they were in 2024,” this person added.

“Andy’s style is that he is an honest broker with people, and he will give an instinctive response to things,” the official said. “But the government’s position is clear that reparations are not seen as the right route. It’s a careful balancing act, but one that we’re well prepared for.”

Climate resilience fund in the works

One tactic for the current No. 10 will be to try to avoid talking about it public.

Downing Street has broken with recent precedent by deciding not to bring the usual “pack” of political journalists, taking a smaller media “pool” instead. This will limit the scope of questions that Burnham faces. (Political editors from news outlets, including POLITICO, have written to No. 10 to object to the arrangement.)

Timing could also allow the visit to slip under the radar. Burnham and Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband will be there alongside counterparts including Anthony Albanese of Australia and Mark Carney of Canada, creating a rare opportunity for them to discuss the implications of the U.S. midterm results in private. The symbolism, as “middle power” nations deal with a drift in U.S. relations under Donald Trump, would be obvious.

Officially, the agenda is to build an alliance that can boost these middle powers, along with the developing states that global summits usually overlook. 

The Commonwealth Secretariat — the London-based body that co-ordinates the summit — said the aim of next week’s gathering is “partnerships and investment,” including in climate and youth employment, and removing trade barriers.

Likewise, the U.K. Foreign Office has been working on a climate resilience fund for developing nations, two people with knowledge of the talks said. A third said conversations in the U.K. government had focused on mobilizing public and private finance, and improving access to finance for climate-vulnerable countries.

Three people with knowledge of the planning emphasized that this summit would be an opportunity to build on relations with countries that could discuss bilateral trade, though they did not name specific nations and no U.K. trade ministers are due at the event.

“There will obviously be trade and investment discussions with a range of partners,” said one of the three people, a U.K. government official, who also noted that the U.K. will raise the impacts of El Niño. “The bigger picture is that we want to use the Commonwealth network to deepen trade and investment links across its 56 members — that Commonwealth advantage is one of the reasons the grouping matters to the UK.”

‘Playing Scrabble with words’

But leaders at these events, known by the awkward acronym CHOGM, can raise whatever topics they wish — reparations included.

Denis O’Brien, the Irish telecoms billionaire who founded the Repair Campaign calling for financial reparations to the Caribbean in 2022, said: “The conversation has moved radically forward.” He urged Britain and other European nations to “start off with an apology and then have an engagement,” adding: “The Foreign Office and the prime minister’s office are playing Scrabble with words — and unfortunately they’re leaving King Charles, who is so highly respected in the Caribbean, in a very difficult position.”

Paul Boateng, the Labour peer who was Britain’s first Black Cabinet minister and now campaigns on the issue, said Caribbean nations “are going to be pressing it. This issue is not going to go away.” The recent UN resolution reinforced Caribbean and African nations’ argument, argued Boateng: “We can’t be seen to simply ignore it … We cannot hold the Foreign Office line that it changes nothing.”

That position cast a long shadow two years ago.

No. 10 flew to Samoa in 2024 insisting reparations were “not on the agenda,” even though the summit’s free-wheeling format meant the choice was effectively out of Downing Street’s hands. 

This message “went down like a bag of sick” with Caribbean nations who saw it as “colonial” and “arrogant,” recalled one person involved in conversations at the time.

The handling created tension between Downing Street and the Foreign Office, then led by David Lammy, who also attended, according to six other people with knowledge of the 2024 trip. 

One of the six people said No. 10 figures had expected the Foreign Office to better manage expectations among Commonwealth nations ahead of Starmer’s arrival. The person said: “No. 10 did not feel like they were well enough informed, and felt some of this could and should have been handled in advance. There was the feeling that both Lammy and the Foreign Office were institutionally pre-disposed to this sort of stuff and not shutting it down. The PM didn’t know what he was going into.”

A second person said: “​​The FCDO world does forget, sometimes, the politics of what’s going on in the U.K. It’s very institutionalized.”

A third person stressed that senior aides in No. 10 had blamed Foreign Office officials, not Lammy personally. Before Starmer left office this year, No. 10 had been drawing up plans for Starmer to skip this year’s CHOGM — and send Lammy as his representative. By then Lammy had been moved from the foreign office and was Starmer’s deputy prime minister.

Another of the six people countered that it was No. 10 that persisted, ahead of the 2024 summit, with a line that was too binary — reparatory justice, as campaigners prefer to call it, has a wide definition that includes support for climate adaptation and education — and failed to listen to Foreign Office warnings ahead of time about the strength of feeling among Commonwealth nations.

“The audit trail would completely exonerate David and the Foreign Office,” this person said. They argued No. 10 officials — who were keen to hold on to the mantle of fiscal responsibility ahead of Starmer’s first budget — had viewed the row too much through how it would be perceived by the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper.

Two other people with knowledge of the 2024 trip insisted they did not remember any significant friction between No. 10 and the Foreign Office. Lammy’s office did not immediately respond to an invitation to comment.

UK review mooted a scaled-back summit

More significantly, the 2024 summit also led to discussions in Whitehall about the set-up of CHOGM itself.

Lammy commissioned an internal review by Foreign Office officials on the Commonwealth in the wake of the 2024 summit, his former Special Adviser Ben Judah told POLITICO.

Judah said the review suggested reducing the frequency of CHOGMs to “every four or five years,” potentially aligned with the hosting of the Commonwealth Games, and seeking to remove the final communique and leaders’ retreat.

It suggested an investment conference in alternate years modeled on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, which could keep the Commonwealth branding but with no organizational role for the Secretariat, said Judah.

Judah suggested this would improve attendance at CHOGM, which is often patchy; India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi does not plan to attend next week’s summit, for example, though there will be a delegation led by External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.  “The Indians think this thing is ridiculous and self-harming and just totally bizarre,” said Judah. “They’d be interested in a real investment conference, not this farce.”

A second former U.K. government official said they knew about the report, which has not been made public, adding that No. 10 figures under Starmer discussed similar concerns about the format of the Commonwealth summit after the Samoa visit.

The Foreign Office declined to respond to questions about the report when contacted by POLITICO, including when it was finalized or whether any of its recommendations were pursued. One Foreign Office official, however, stressed that it was not the U.K. government’s position and that any decisions about future CHOGM arrangements would be for Commonwealth members collectively.

The U.K. government official quoted on trade and investment earlier in this piece said: “The Commonwealth is more important to our geostrategic position now than at any time throughout its 80-year history. In today’s more divided, unpredictable world, the Commonwealth has the potential to be a powerful, values-based force for good in the world.

“This gives us a huge opportunity to drive U.K. interests and priorities — Commonwealth relationships have helped to drive global support for Ukraine, and it is hugely important for our work on climate.”

Funding pulled from reserves

Judah, however, argued that the Commonwealth Secretariat is a “broken institution” and Britain should wind down its involvement to focus on an investment summit instead.

CHOGM has ended up as a “platform for the reparations campaign,” argued Judah: “There’s nothing else on the agenda because it’s not a real international organization, and it’s not a real summit with deliverables.” The Commonwealth and Secretariat, he said, has “essentially been taken over by the only countries that are still really invested in them, which are the Caribbean countries supported by a few African countries, to push the reparations agenda.”

For some, that extends to questions about the way the Secretariat spends its money.

Two people with knowledge of the situation said part of this year’s CHOGM summit is being paid for out of the Secretariat’s reserves. “There is a real sense of concern about the malaise and drift of the organization,” argued one of the two people. “Financially it’s in a dire, dire state.”

A Commonwealth spokesperson responded: “The Commonwealth Secretariat accesses reserve funds for the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and always with member country approval.”

Back in 2024, Starmer’s most senior aides privately raised the question about whether he should attend the Samoa summit at all. “We were overruled,” said another person who worked under him.

Whitehall officials initially assumed that Burnham would not go either, until he said otherwise. “To a lot of the Caribbean countries, the word [from officials] was that he wasn’t going to show,” said O’Brien. “I think people were taken aback by that.”

But despite Starmer’s experience in 2024, Burnham will attend. 

Among all other reasons, there is one very obvious one. “It’s very difficult for a prime minister not to go because the king goes,” said one person who worked under Starmer. “It’s important to him.”

Burnham’s ‘surer touch’

Once Burnham is in the room, campaigners hope he will at least be a listening ear.

Outside the prime minister’s Manchester office No. 10 North is a statue of Abraham Lincoln, commemorating the mill workers who refused to touch raw cotton picked by slaves.

Burnham referred to it in his first speech to the United Nations last month. “In 1862, people with little power used it to help those with none on the other side of the world,” he said. “The best change is change like that, bottom-up change led by people.”

The new prime minister “understands the importance of Manchester as the second great city of empire, and he has a surer touch than his predecessors,” argued Boateng. “We’ve got an opportunity to reset the relationship.”

What reparatory justice would look like is another matter. 

Previous estimates have suggested Britain should owe as much as £18 trillion, but the conversation is far more nuanced than talking about a single big number.

While Boateng argues that no measures should be taken off the table, he would begin with reforming the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to give more Commonwealth countries a meaningful seat at the table, and returning historic artefacts such as the Benin bronzes that are displayed in London’s British Museum. “The British Museum holds loot, literally loot. These are stolen goods,” he said.

Britain is working on debt relief too. Chancellor John Healey plans to make international finance for developing countries a key theme when Britain hosts G20 finance ministers next year. 

NGOs have urged Healey to make debt relief more generous by changing the G20’s common framework and UK domestic law, which sets the terms for 90% of debt that low-income countries owe to private lenders.

Maria Finnerty of Bond, the membership body for NGOs, said Britain “continues to play a role in enabling illicit financial flows through loopholes linked to the City of London and its overseas territories, amounting to the loss of billions from some Commonwealth countries.”

Miliband reflected all this in his POLITICO interview last month at the Labour Party Conference. While condemning the slave trade as “terrible,” he said his focus was on addressing current issues in countries “on the front line of the climate crisis, of the debt burden, of trying to reduce poverty in those countries.”

O’Brien is calling for monetary payments, however. Through the Repair Campaign, he wants to see the EU and U.K. make money available to the 15 Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries — with a special case for Haiti — “each year for the next 75 years” for issues such as education, green energy and storm defenses to deal with climate change. 

O’Brien would not be drawn on a single figure, but suggested payments should supplement the national budget of each affected country by around 10% a year.

Asked if he had had conversations with the Foreign Office, O’Brien replied: “What do you think?

“I mean, we would like to. We’re approaching this in a very friendly way, taking a very, very sensitive period of history and trying to get results. We have the highest respect for the British government, and particularly the King. But it can’t go on forever.”

he world is starting to understand that there is no way to fully and lastingly protect itself from President Donald Trump.

The man just can’t let things go — and he’ll get creative to get what he wants.

The latest blowup over Ukraine is emblematic of Trump’s wily persistence, and it suggests a challenging two years lie ahead for the international set even if Democrats gain some power in the midterm elections.

Not that long ago, Trump seemed to have patched up ties with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Kyiv made gains against Russia. Trump signed legislation last month that was championed by his late friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to impose heavy new sanctions and tariffs to punish Russia for its war on Ukraine.

This month, the original Trump — the one who fawns over Russian leader Vladimir Putin and despises Zelenskyy — roared back. He waived many of the legislation’s penalties on Russia, moved to buy Russian diesel and signaled he’s more interested in doing business with Moscow than seeking justice for Kyiv. Ukrainians suspect the U.S. has pressured them by throttling its satellite connections and intelligence-sharing. (The Trump administration disputes much of this.)

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Trump said Monday as he welcomed the idea of an arms control summit with Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that might include talks about Ukraine.

The lesson, foreign officials and others steeped in diplomacy tell me, is that you cannot truly change Trump’s mind or stop his overall trajectory. Even if Trump seems briefly chastened or stages a tactical retreat, he will eventually return in new, often-surprising modes to push his original views and goals. He will try to exhaust you into submission.

Imagine how startling it is to be Ukrainian these days as Trump pressures you to make concessions to Russia by blaming you for a global energy crisis he caused by launching a war on Iran. Or what it’s like for officials across European capitals trying to craft a response, knowing there’s never an end to the process.

“There is no immunity to Donald Trump. He makes a deal in order to make a better deal the next day,” one senior European official mused, having been granted anonymity because the topic involves sensitive diplomacy.

It’s hard to blame world leaders who think they’ve learned to manage Trump only to be bewildered by a sudden left hook on his part. Foreign policy is often driven by hope when you lack good options. And Trumpology is a confounding, but still a relatively new, subfield.

Besides, Trump’s messaging is inconsistent, incoherent and nonstrategic — characteristics that can obscure his single-minded pursuit of his goals. So the global actors dealing with him — whether it’s the Gulf Arab states who shower him with gifts or the Canadians furious over his trade and territorial threats — sometimes think they’ve come to terms with him only to find they’re fighting on a newly configured plane.

A Supreme Court ruling that gutted many of Trump’s tariffs earlier this year was good news in many capitals. But since then, the so-called Tariff Man has moved to impose the import taxes under pretexts not considered by the court, including turning to accusations involving forced labor.

The White House doesn’t dispute Trump’s aggressive tactics.

“There is no greater fighter for America First interests than President Trump — and he is willing to look anyone in the eye to deliver wins on behalf of the United States,” spokesperson Anna Kelly told me in a statement.

The Greenland saga shows the limits of trying to mollify Trump.

In his first term, Trump wanted to buy the frozen island. The idea was shelved amid global laughter, but authorities in Greenland and Denmark made it clear to Trump that they welcomed more U.S. investment in the Danish territory.

In his second term, Trump huffed and puffed about an all-out U.S. takeover of Greenland, only to agree in September to an expanded U.S. military footprint that he could have gotten anyway under existing, decades-old diplomatic accords without all the drama. The whole affair has led to lingering anger in Europe about what Canada’s leader called a “rupture” in the global order — but many European officials hoped that the saga had faded away.

Yet, it’s far from certain that Trump has given up on possessing Greenland. Just days ago, he touted on social media plans to start oil, gas and mineral exploration in “our new and beautiful Greenland.”

The use of “our” is more than a little suggestive.

Defying Trump, too, can get you only so far.

Brazilians effectively told Trump to take a hike when he used tariffs and sanctions to punish the country for charging its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, in a coup attempt.

A few months later, as Bolsonaro was about to start his prison sentence, Trump seemed to admit defeat in his effort to help his political ally. “That’s too bad,” he said in November 2025, with little emotion. (“Brazil Defied Trump and Won,” The New York Times declared.)

But Trump wasn’t done with Brazil. He and his team have pursued efforts to undercut the current Brazilian government while quietly backing Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, in his efforts to win the presidency this year. The runoff election is on Sunday, and it’s tight.

World leaders are doing what they can to make their countries Trump-resistant, if not all-out Trump-proof.

That has meant everything from diversifying their sources of trade and security alliances to joining Trump on ventures that, on the surface at least, can be helpful to them. (Then there are the many countries, especially in Africa, that diplomats privately tell me are happy to be off Trump’s radar.)

My takeaway from watching all of this, though, is that it’s not enough to stay one step ahead of Trump. You have to stay several steps ahead, and you have to be wildly imaginative about the lengths to which Trump and his devoted aides are willing to go to complicate your life.

The second Trump administration is filled with people who have turned to unique, bizarre and clever interpretations of law and reality to push his agenda. It’s not always clear who is behind which move, but it’s hard to imagine Trump isn’t fine with most of what’s happening.

It’s why a teenager is being held in immigration detention for the actions of his grandmother decades ago. It’s why Congress can scream and shout about its spending orders yet Trump ignores it.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said other nations should not hope that the Republican Party will shed Trump’s worldview, including his disdain for allies, once Trump’s out of power.

“I would love for our allies to know that we have consistent common adversaries that we’re going to work together to fight. I just don’t know that you can make that guarantee,” Murphy, a frequent Trump critic, told me. “That’s painful to say, but given the state of the Republican Party right now, it’s true.”

I understand why Ukraine and the European Union are trying to diversify their sources of intelligence and military industrial bases as Trump keeps chasing love from Russia.

Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claims, the reality is that the United States can no longer be trusted for such security assistance.

But it’s not enough to find new intelligence partners or weapons manufacturers. You have to ask bigger questions, like, “What are the untapped streams of intelligence that no one knows are out there? What’s a potential weapon no one has considered? How can I acquire what I need before Trump stops me?”

Governments need to have plans — now — for scenarios that seem completely crazy. Better to be wrong than unprepared.

Still, even if you do all of that … “I don’t think it’s possible to stay two or three steps ahead of Trump,” said Charles Kupchan, a former senior national security official during the Obama administration who apparently enjoys raining on parades.

“He acts on impulse,” argued Kupchan, who has a new book out on the crumbling world order. “We need to try to limit the damage he’s causing and ride him out.”

A Democratic win in November’s midterms — one or both chambers of Congress — is unlikely to do much to rein in Trump’s actions abroad during his final years, current and former U.S. and foreign officials tell me.

He still has the veto and has been willing to ignore congressional demands. There’s also the fact that presidents have significantly more power to act in unilateral ways overseas than they do domestically.

Ukraine, the European Union, the world — all will be dealing with a politically wounded Trump who’s likely to double down on what he feels he must have.

“He’s going to be angrier,” Murphy predicted.

The president of Cyprus wrote to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen calling for the EU to resume talks on its mutual defense clause.

“I cannot overstate the importance of this provision for the EU and its Member States, especially in times of geopolitical uncertainty,” Nikos Christodoulides wrote in a letter dated Oct. 20 addressed to von der Leyen, seen by POLITICO.

Article 42.7 of the Lisbon Treaty states that if an EU member is faced with “armed aggression,” other members have an obligation to provide “aid and assistance by all the means in their power.”

The defense clause article had risen up the agenda because of mounting geopolitical threats, including U.S. President Donald Trump’s undermining of the transatlantic alliance, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and hybrid warfare campaign against the EU, and wars in the Middle East.

“Given the gravity of the challenges we face, Cyprus would welcome the resumption of discussions at the relevant preparatory bodies. I would therefore appreciate an update on the proposals under consideration, as well as a timeline for the next steps,” Christodoulides wrote.

The EU gamed out how the clause would work in practice with exercises earlier this year. Cyprus’ six-month presidency of the European Council, which ended on June 30, prioritized the issue after Iranian drones struck a British base on Cypriot soil in March.

But the topic has largely fallen off the bloc’s radar, as the EU turns its attention to negotiating its seven-year, almost €2 trillion budget and finding more funding for Ukraine.

Article 42.7 is not scheduled to be discussed at any European leaders’ summits in the foreseeable future, confirmed an EU official, granted anonymity to speak freely.

In a throwaway comment this week, Donald Trump made clear that he does not regard the war in Ukraine as a conflict with fault on both sides. “Russia frankly has been fine on Ukraine,” the U.S. president said. “They have not been doing that much.”

To residents of Kyiv — who have endured weeks of intensifying bombardment — and Ukraine’s allies across Europe, the remark confirmed a growing impression that the U.S. is taking Russia leader Vladimir Putin’s side in the war.

“American negotiators have been trying to push Ukraine into surrender for already almost two years,” the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas told the European Parliament on Tuesday. The reason Ukraine hasn’t “surrendered on Putin’s terms” so far is because Europe has been providing so much support, she added. 

As they scratch their heads for explanations for Trump’s latest turn against Ukraine, some European officials and diplomats think it comes down to the president’s personal preferences, as much as his country’s political aims.

“I do think it’s a personal thing,” said former British Cabinet minister David Lidington, now distinguished fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a leading security think tank in London. “Trump is self-centered — his personal predilections for dictators and autocrats, his desire to give opportunities to U.S. businesses … are very important parts of his motivation.”

In private, EU officials agree. “Trump doesn’t like [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy. He just doesn’t like him,” said one government official who has observed both men closely. “That makes it harder to get the U.S. to help on peace. Everything is a rational business deal with Trump, until it’s not.” 

A diplomat from an EU country — granted anonymity, like others in this report, to discuss sensitive matters — said the inconsistent Trump could change his mind again and reverse recent moves against Ukraine. The U.S. president has chopped and changed on many issues, “except one thing,” the diplomat said. “He seems to be supportive of the Russians.”

“He’s been critical of Ukraine, the EU, NATO, but hardly ever said anything critical about Putin. It is striking. We have to deal with an administration that seems to be more pro-Russian than anything else,” the diplomat said.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mounting losses

For Ukraine and its European allies, the idea that nothing can or will change Trump’s feelings about Zelenskyy is a bleak one. After four-and-a-half years of war, Kyiv is running low on funding, air defenses and — amid swelling support for Europe’s populist right — facing a potential loss of political support in the months ahead. 

Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met the Ukrainian president and the leaders of Norway and Finland for talks in Oslo on Tuesday, and will head to St. Petersburg to discuss peace proposals with the Russian leadership on Wednesday as the White House pushes hard for a ceasefire. One option Putin will be offered is a three-way leaders’ summit with Trump and Zelenskyy.

Previous efforts to get the Russian president to attend such a meeting have failed, however, and EU diplomats do not believe Putin is showing any genuine desire for a ceasefire. That is partly what makes Trump’s hostility toward Zelenskyy so problematic.

“There is a clear consensus across Europe that Putin does not want peace,” a second EU diplomat said. “He will need to be forced into peace.”

But instead of making demands of Putin, Trump has ratcheted up his pressure on Zelenskyy, even amid escalating Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities this month. Ukraine’s leader is feeling the strain, as he told his EU counterparts in private meetings in Brussels last week, according to the first diplomat.

In a succession of highly critical comments in recent days, Trump has said Zelenskyy “doesn’t care” and “doesn’t want to end this war;” and should be replaced as leader or as Ukraine’s negotiator. “President Putin would like to see a settlement,” Trump said. “President Zelenskyy could have solved this war, or he could have made a deal, many times.” 

The Oval Office beating

Trump’s animosity may date back to an incident during his first term in 2019, when he urged the Ukrainian leader to help with an investigation into Joe Biden, who eventually defeated Trump in the following presidential election, Lidington said. A succession of hostile encounters in the years since — including in the Oval Office in February 2025 — have reinforced the impression, he said. 

“It was clear that in the infamous meeting in the White House that Trump and [Vice President JD] Vance had planned that public beating-up of Zelenskyy and it struck me then that there was a strong personal element to this,” said Lidington.

“I think there’s another element, which is that if you look at the people Trump tries to court, it tends to be autocratic strongman — and it is ‘man’ — leaders,” Lidington said.

He recalled attending a dinner with world leaders in 2018 to mark the centenary of the end of World War I in Paris. French President Emmanuel Macron and the German chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, were playing joint hosts “at the top table,” but Trump was not interested in making small talk with either of them, Lidington said.

“It was pretty obvious from the body language that Trump was impatient with them and one of the people he really wanted to talk to was [Turkish leader Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan and other people who were a bit more in that strongman image that he likes to portray himself,” he observed.

‘Strange stories’

A senior official from a European country familiar with the Ukraine talks said Trump’s motives were partly political, partly about calculating what would be profitable and partly about personalities.

“They are currently in an election cycle and need someone to blame for rising prices,” the official said. “In general, Trump tends to like various types of people and leaders. He actually has a fondness for successful and cheerful people.”

In recent days, Zelenskyy has warned his country is suffering more civilian casualties because the U.S. has cut back on support, including Starlink and Starshield services that help Ukraine defend itself against Russian attacks and plan operations. “We still have no explanation for this, just different strange stories,” Zelenskyy told U.S. congressmen on Monday.  

This month, the advanced warnings of incoming Russian missile attacks from U.S. partners have failed to come through as normal. Ukraine is also running low on Patriot missile interceptors, he said. 

The Pentagon has not issued an official comment on the Ukrainian complaints. The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said 328 civilians were killed and more than 2,000 wounded across Ukraine last month, an 85% increase compared to September 2025. The U.N. said that the first two weeks of October were among the deadliest for civilians in Ukraine in years, driven by increased missile and drone strikes.

The first EU diplomat quoted above said many European governments were irritated that Trump had cut them out of his conversations with Putin so far. “There is probably much more dialogue between the Americans and the Russians than we might know,” the diplomat said. 

Tuesday’s meeting with Witkoff in Norway raised the possibility that direct engagement with Putin might be back on the cards, for Zelenskyy at least. 

“Today was a good day for peace,” Finland’s President Alexander Stubb said after attending the talks in Oslo. “On a substantive and technical level we have actually made a lot of progress under the radar in the past week or so,” Stubb said.

The process is now going in the right direction again, he added. “Hopefully, we don’t do any backtracking.”