EVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — Ukraine may have turned the tide against Russia’s four-year-old invasion, but it has not managed to win over President Donald Trump, who at the G7 summit Tuesday still appears to be more in tune with his benefactor, dictator Vladimir Putin.
With the rest of the G7 leaders suggesting now is the time to pressure Putin to end his invasion, Trump continued repeating his most recent arguments: that both sides were at fault and it was no longer his concern.
“Look, we have nothing to do with it,” he told reporters at a photo opportunity before a meeting with the emir of Qatar.
The state of play was illustrated Tuesday morning as the summit’s leader this year, French President Emmanuel Macron, chatted with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — apparently unaware that a TV crew’s microphone was capturing bits of their conversation — after his arrival at the Hotel Royal, the summit venue.
Macron told Zelenskyy he would put together a meeting with Trump for him after Zelenskyy said he had not been able to schedule one during his phone call with Trump on Sunday. “OK. I will arrange that,” Macron said, and then warned Zelenskyy: “Yesterday we had a difficult discussion with President Trump.”
Such has been the case ever since Trump returned to the White House. He has ended direct military support for Ukraine even as European countries have increased their assistance. Recognizing this, other allies created a “coalition of the willing” to help Ukraine beat back Russia. Those countries are now entering partnerships to purchase anti-drone technology from Ukraine. Gulf states that have been attacked by Iran in retaliation for Trump’s war have similarly looked to Ukraine for defensive weapons.
Europe has also begun the process of bringing Ukraine into the European Union free-trade bloc with a meeting set for Thursday in Brussels on the matter. That step had been blocked for years by Hungary’s former leader and Putin ally Viktor Orban, who in April was defeated in an election landslide. New Prime Minister Peter Magyar dropped Hungary’s objection — every EU member effectively has veto power on such things — as part of his efforts to reorient the country away from Russia and toward Western Europe.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who responded to some news from Zelenskyy with a smile and quick applause as they met Tuesday morning, expressed what appears to be the consensus view on the continent shortly afterward in a social media post.
“The tide is turning for Ukraine. The situation in 2026 is very different from 2025. Ukraine is bravely holding the frontline. Russia’s fatigue is openly showing. That’s the time to double down on our support,” she wrote. “With the first disbursement of the €90 billion EU loan. With a winter package to support Ukraine later in the year. The G7 stands in support of a strong and sovereign Ukraine.”
That may be true of six of the seven G7 members, but not the United States.
Trump on Tuesday repeated to reporters his lies that former President Joe Biden had given Ukraine $350 billion in weapons — although this time he said it was former President Barack Obama giving the fictitious sum — and his claim not to understand Zelenskyy and Putin’s inability to get along.
“They just, there’s a, a lot of dislike between the two leaders,” he said, and then suggested he was not particularly interested in what happens to Ukraine. “It’s that this, it has no impact on us, other than we sell weapons. We’re thousands of miles away.”
Macron — who invited Zelenskyy to attend the summit of the seven largest democratic economies, gave him a prime spot on the agenda Tuesday morning and then asked him to stay through dinner — did appear to succeed in arranging a brief meeting for Zelenskyy with Trump, although it remains unclear what that managed to accomplish.
Trump has been openly contemptuous of Zelenskyy since the middle of his first term, when he attempted to extort the newly elected president into publicly announcing an investigation into then-candidate Biden. That attempt eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment, although the Republican-run Senate refused to remove him from office.
When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 with the goal of seizing the entirety of the country, Trump called the move “genius” and “savvy.” When he returned to office early last year, Trump and Vice President JD Vance publicly humiliated Zelenskyy during an Oval Office visit, telling him he had “no cards” with which to negotiate and chiding him for not thanking the United States sufficiently. Later, Trump began drawing a moral equivalence between Ukraine’s military strikes on Russia’s oil infrastructure and Putin’s repeated strikes against Ukrainian apartment blocks, schools and buses.
And even though Trump promised during his 2024 campaign that he would end the war on his first day back in office, in the year and a half since then, he has primarily urged Ukraine to cede territory to Russia to get a ceasefire but has not asked Russia to make any such sacrifices.
That approach seems to have continued even after Ukraine has essentially stopped Russian territorial advances thanks to an astonishingly rapid development of a domestic drone and missile industry. Ukraine is now regularly hitting military and oil industry targets hundreds of miles inside Russia and even slowly winning back land it lost earlier in the war.
One bright spot for fans of normal international relations in this year’s G7 was Macron’s successful ploy to prevent Trump from disrupting the summit by leaving early, as he did last year at the one hosted by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Alberta.
“I’m a fan of beautiful places, and I was leaving in the afternoon, and then the French president, who happens to be a very nice man, invited me to dinner at Versailles,” Trump told reporters Tuesday, referring to the famous palace outside Paris. “And Versailles is not gold leaf. Versailles, it’s the real deal, and I said I’d like to do it. I mean, all it means is that I get home later in the evening, meaning early in the morning, and I’m not a big sleeper anyway.”
The dinner is to take place Wednesday evening, following the end of the summit that afternoon.
