KYIV -- The heated White House exchange between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Vice President JD Vance has touched many Ukrainians in many different ways.
Some felt a surge of pride in their wartime leader, while others tempered that pride with growing unease over the future of U.S.-Ukrainian relations -- and what that could mean for their country's three-year war against Russia.
'Raising Your Voice In The Oval Office'
For Andriy Veselovskiy, the former Ukrainian ambassador to the European Union, however, the dominant emotion was sheer horror.
"I'm sorry I agreed to do this broadcast with you, because I'm in a very bad mood after what I saw," Veselovskiy told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service on February 28.
"Raising your voice in the Oval Office at the vice president and the president and interrupting both of them is not a style that can help Ukraine's interests."
Zelenskyy's meeting with Trump on February 28 ended in acrimony after a tense exchange of words in the Oval Office. Shortly afterwards, Zelenskyy left and Trump said the Ukrainian leader was disrespectful and could "come back when he is ready for peace."
Before the meeting broke up, Trump said that Ukraine would have to make compromises and that Kyiv should be more appreciative of U.S. assistance in the country's war against Russia. Zelenskyy pushed for U.S. security commitments and said that there should be "no compromises with a killer," a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Oleksiy Honcharenko, a parliamentary deputy for the center-right European Solidarity Party, shared Veselovskiy's sense of horror, saying it was the "end of relations with Trump."
Those opinions were echoed on the streets of Ukraine.
A woman in Rivne, a city in western Ukraine, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service that the widely broadcast White House meeting left a "super negative" impression of Ukraine, "because we are a country at war and we need aid from the U.S." Ukraine's diplomacy, she added, "should have been professional."
Pride In Their President
But for other Ukrainians, however, they felt only pride watching their president's exchange in the White House.
"Honestly, I don't know what the consequences will be for Ukraine, but I am sure that we have shown our strength," another woman told RFE/RL in Rivne. "Our president showed that we are strong, we will not bend, and we have our own opinion."
Natalia Serhiyenko, a pensioner in Kyiv, told the Associated Press that "Zelenskyy fought like a lion." "They had a heated meeting, a very heated conversation," she said, but Zelenskyy "was defending Ukraine’s interests."
Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the Kharkiv region that borders Russia, also praised Zelenskyy, telling AP that the Ukrainian president stuck to his guns that there could be no peace deal without security assurances for Ukraine.
“Our leader, despite the pressure, stands firm in defending the interests of Ukraine and Ukrainians," Syniehubov said. "We need only a just peace with security guarantees.”
As well as pride, for some Ukrainians there was a sense of anger at how they thought Zelenskyy had been treated.
"We are striving for democracy, and we are met with total disrespect toward our warriors, our soldiers, and the people of our country," Artem Vasyliev, originally from Russian-occupied Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, told Reuters.
How Can Relations Be Fixed?
Trump, according to Vasyliev, "doesn’t understand that people are dying, that cities are being destroyed, people are suffering, mothers, children, soldiers."
Whether their reaction was one of pride or horror, most Ukrainians had one common concern: how to repair Ukraine's strained relationship with its most important wartime ally.
"We have to consistently strengthen our ties with Europe and focus on Europe and on ourselves," a woman told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service from Dnipro, a city in central Ukraine.
Former ambassador to the EU Veselovskiy said that Zelenskyy's response should have been more restrained and now doubts that the Ukrainian president will be able to get into the White House at all.
Oleksandr Merezhko, a parliamentary deputy from Zelenskyy's Servant of the People party, told RFE/RL that, despite any difficulties, Ukraine had to work with Trump because the stakes were so high.
"We have to reduce the tensions," Merezhko said. "There are some connections -- congressmen and senators who have influence on Trump.... We need to immediately get in touch with these people."
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote in a post on Telegram that he hoped that "Ukraine does not lose the support of the United States, which is extremely important to us."
"Today is not the time for emotions, from either side. We need to find common ground," Klitschko wrote.
