By: The New York Times December 31, 2025 06:56 PM IST First published on: Dec 31, 2025 at 06:56 PM IST ShareWhatsapptwitterFacebookA meeting between President Donald Trump, right, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine in the Oval Office in Washington, Feb. 28, 2025. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)By Adam EntousThe train left the U.S. Army depot in west Germany and made for Poland and the Ukrainian border. These were the final 800 miles of a trans-Atlantic supply chain that had sustained Ukraine across more than three long years of war.The freight on this last day in June was 155-mm artillery shells, 18,000 of them packed into crates, their fuses separated out to prevent detonation in transit. Their ultimate destination was the eastern front, where Russian President Vladimir Putin’s generals were massing forces and firepower against the city of Pokrovsk. The battle was for territory and strategic advantage but also for bragging rights: Putin wanted to show U.S. President Donald Trump, that Russia was indeed winning.President Donald Trump delivers his inaugural address at his inauguration as the 47th president in the Rotunda at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times)Advertising their war plan, the Russians had told Trump’s advisers. “We’re going to slam them harder there. We have the munitions to do that.” In Washington, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been talking about munitions, too, testifying to a Senate appropriations subcommittee that those earmarked for Ukraine by former President Joe Biden were “still flowing.”Three months earlier, in fact, Hegseth had, unannounced, decided to hold back one crucial class of munitions — American-made 155s. The U.S. military’s stocks were running low, his advisers had warned; withholding them would force the Europeans to step up, to take greater responsibility for the war in their backyard.Story continues below this adDay after day, then, thousands upon thousands of 155s earmarked for Ukraine had lain waiting on pallets at the ammunitions depot. The U.S. commander in Europe, Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, had fired off email after email, pleading with the Pentagon to free them. The jam had been broken only after intervention from Jack Keane, a retired Army general and Fox News contributor who was friendly with the president.But on July 2, as the train approached the Ukrainian border, a new order came in to the U.S. military’s European Command: “Divert everything. Immediately.”Exactly why the liberated shells had been taken captive again was never explained. In the end, they waited for just 10 days, in a rail yard near Krakow, Poland. Yet to U.S. military officers who had spent the last 3 1/2 years fighting to shore up the Ukrainian cause, the interrupted journey of the 18,000 shells seemed to encompass the entirety of the United States’ new, erratic and corrosive role in the war.“This has happened so many times that I’ve lost count,” a senior U.S. official said. “This is literally killing them. Death by a thousand cuts.”Story continues below this adIt was to hold back the Russian tide, perhaps even help win the war, that the Biden administration had provided Ukraine with a vast array of increasingly sophisticated weaponry. The Americans, their European allies and the Ukrainians had also joined in a secret partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology, its workings revealed earlier this year by The New York Times. At stake, the argument went, was not just Ukraine’s sovereignty but the very fate of the post-World War II international order.Trump has presided over the partners’ separation.The headlines are well known: Trump’s televised Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in February. The August summit with Putin in Alaska. The furious flurry of diplomacy that led to the Mar-a-Lago meeting on Sunday with Zelenskyy, the latest high-stakes but inconclusive negotiation in which the fate of Ukraine has seemed to hang in the balance.FILE Ñ A destroyed Ukrainian tank a few miles from the border with RussiaÕs Kursk region, Jan. 9, 2025. (Finbarr OÕReilly/The New York Times)It is still unclear when, and if, a deal will be reached. This is the chaotic and previously untold story behind the past year of head-spinning headlines.The Ukraine specialists at the Pentagon afraid to utter the word “Ukraine.” Trump telling his chosen envoy to Russia and Ukraine, “Russia is mine.” The secretary of state quoting from “The Godfather” in negotiations with the Russians. The Ukrainian defense minister pleading with the U.S. defense secretary, “Just be honest with me.” A departing U.S. commander’s “beginning of the end” memo. Zelenskyy’s Oval Office phone call, set up by the president, with a former Miss Ukraine.Story continues below this adThis account draws on more than 300 interviews with national security officials, military and intelligence officers and diplomats in Washington, Kyiv and across Europe. Virtually all insisted on anonymity, for fear of reprisal from Trump and his administration.Trump had scant ideological commitment. His pronouncements and determinations were often shaped by the last person he spoke to, by how much respect he felt the Ukrainian and Russian leaders had shown him, by what caught his eye on Fox News.Policy was forged in the clash of bitterly warring camps.Biden had left the Ukrainians a financial and weapons nest egg to cushion them for an uncertain future. Trump’s point man for peace negotiations presented him with a plan to maintain support for Ukraine and squeeze the Russian war machine.Story continues below this adBut that strategy ran headlong into a phalanx of Ukraine skeptics led by Vice President JD Vance and like-minded officials he seeded at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration. In their view, instead of squandering the United States’ depleted military stocks on a sinking ship, they should be reapportioned to counter the greatest global threat: China.A cold wind — what one senior military officer called “a de facto anti-Ukraine policy” — swept through the Pentagon. Time and again, Hegseth and his advisers undermined, sidelined or silenced front-line generals and administration officials sympathetic to Ukraine.Against that backdrop, Trump granted Hegseth and other subordinates wide latitude to make decisions about the flow of aid to Ukraine. On several occasions, when those decisions brought bad press or internal backlash — as with the 18,000 shells — Ukraine-friendly commentators at Fox stepped in and persuaded the president to reverse them.FILE Ñ President Trump, left, meets with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Aug.18, 2025. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)Even as Trump bullied Zelenskyy, he seemed to coddle Putin. When the Russian stiff-armed peace proposals and accelerated bombing campaigns on Ukrainian cities, Trump would lash out on Truth Social and ask his aides, “Do we sanction their banks or do we sanction their energy infrastructure?” For months, he did neither.But in secret, the CIA and the U.S. military, with his blessing, supercharged a Ukrainian campaign of drone strikes on Russian oil facilities and tankers to hobble Putin’s war machine.Day to day, Trump was inconsistent. But he was still a deal maker determined to broker a deal — and convinced that, in the calculus of leverage, the advantage lay with the stronger. Both sides fought a war within the war, to shape the president’s perceptions. “They look invincible,” he told aides in May after seeing footage of a military parade in Moscow. Three weeks later, after Ukraine mounted an audacious covert drone operation inside Russia, Zelenskyy sent a parade of aides to the White House with his own victory message: “We are not losing. We are winning.”Yet on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, Trump kept pushing the Ukrainians deeper and deeper into a box. What he underestimated was the Russian leader’s refusal to budge from his demands.The origin point of this story was the president’s belief in what he saw as his personal connection to Putin. On the campaign trail, he had promised to broker peace quickly, perhaps even before taking office. After he won the election, European and Middle Eastern leaders began calling, offering to help smooth the way for talks with the Russians during the transition.Trump’s aides knew he was eager to get started, but they were also aware of the shadow that outreach to Russia had cast over his first term. Then, several aides’ undisclosed contacts with the Russians before the inauguration had become part of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump took to bitterly calling it “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.”This time, his aides decided, they needed official cover.“Look, we’ve been getting all kinds of outreach,” Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told his Biden administration counterpart, Jake Sullivan. “We’d like to go ahead and start testing some of these, because Trump wants to move quickly.”And so Waltz made a request, never before reported, for a letter of permission from Biden.PART 1: The TransitionWaltz had some grounds for optimism.It had been a profoundly rancorous campaign, but once it was over, Biden told aides that he wanted an orderly, cooperative transfer of power.The week after the election, he hosted Trump at the Oval Office and explained why he believed it was in the United States’ interest to continue military support for Ukraine. Trump didn’t telegraph his intent. But according to two former administration officials, he ended the meeting on a strikingly gracious note, commending Biden on a “successful presidency” and promising to protect the things he cared about.Before Biden dropped out of the race in July, many of his rival’s most stinging attacks had been aimed at his son Hunter, over his legal troubles, struggles with addiction and business dealings in Ukraine and elsewhere. Now Trump told him, “If there’s anything I can do for Hunter, please let me know.” (Three weeks later, Biden would, controversially, pardon his son, sweeping away his illegal gun purchase and tax evasion convictions — and shielding him from potential presidential retribution.)Biden’s top national security aides had, for the most part, cordial meetings with their successors. The exception was the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. Austin had been a proud architect of the Biden administration’s Ukraine partnership, and he, too, hoped to argue for its survival. He let it be known that he was available to meet with Hegseth, but the Trump transition team did not reply.Waltz’s request for the letter divided Biden’s national security aides.There is a law, the Logan Act, last employed in 1853, that prohibits an unauthorized person from negotiating a dispute between the United States and a foreign government. But the West Wing debate wasn’t a legal one. It turned on far murkier questions.While one senior aide argued that providing the letter would underscore Biden’s desire for transition goodwill, another saw danger — especially given the president-elect’s history of deference to Putin.“Why are we going to give them cover to start what could be a very damaging Russia conversation?” Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, asked Biden.It wasn’t as if the Biden administration hadn’t explored talking to the Russians.In November 2021, amid signs of impending invasion, the president had sent William Burns, head of the CIA, to Moscow to press Putin to pull back. In secret, a close Biden adviser, Amos Hochstein, had also tried to forestall invasion through talks with the chief of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev.Now, in the twilight of his power and of the wartime partnership he had shepherded, Biden weighed the Trump team’s request and saw little reason to believe that Putin would now be any more willing to negotiate peace. After all, he believed he was winning.Biden would not forbid the administration-in-waiting from engaging with the Russians. But there would be no letter.As one aide remembers it, “What Biden said was: ‘If I send this letter, it’s like I’m blessing whatever Trump does, and I have no idea what he’s going to do. He could make a deal with Putin at Ukraine’s expense and I don’t want to be endorsing that.’”Formal talks would wait for Inauguration Day. Still, it was imperative to be prepared. And the man who very badly wanted to be at the center of those preparations was Keith Kellogg.A retired Army general and one of the president-elect’s most loyal longtime aides, Kellogg had served as Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser in the first Trump presidency. He had definite ideas about the Russians and the war in Ukraine — and a conviction that if Trump didn’t manage negotiations well, it would be disastrous for the U.S., for Europe and for his legacy.Kellogg’s feelings about the Russians had been forged in the depths of the Cold War. Serving in U.S. Special Forces, he had led a Green Light team, soldiers trained to parachute behind Soviet lines with tactical nuclear weapons strapped between their legs. He also harbored a suspicion that the Russians had once tried to kill him. In 2000, while on the Army staff at the Pentagon, he had just left an event at the Russian Embassy when he felt a sharp pain in his right elbow. Later, at dinner with friends, his wife noticed the swelling. The next day, he was rushed to the hospital, where doctors nearly had to amputate his arm to keep a staph infection from spreading.His evolving ideas on the Ukraine war had formed the basis of a policy paper he published in April 2024. He had once been among those who believed that the Biden administration was not doing enough to support the Ukrainians. Now the battlefield balance had shifted, and Ukraine, Kellogg wrote, no longer had a path to victory. Still, he argued, the United States needed to arm the Ukrainians sufficiently to convince Putin that his territorial ambitions had hit a wall.Kellogg sent the paper to Trump, who sent it back with a note at the top that read, “Great job,” and beneath it his distinctively squiggly signature. Kellogg framed the autographed page and hung it in his home office.As the new administration took shape, Kellogg sought, unsuccessfully, to be named defense secretary or national security adviser. But in late November, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago to pitch himself for another job — special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. This time, Trump bit.Almost immediately, the appointment ignited an early flaring of the ideological combat that would run through the administration’s handling of the war. To some of Vance’s allies, Kellogg, 80 at the time, was a Cold War relic with a cold warrior’s view of the conflict and the Russian threat. Putin, they suspected, would never work with him. What’s more, in their view, the sort of support Kellogg was advocating would only prolong the fighting; the U.S. needed to de-escalate.Knives were out, and Kellogg didn’t help himself with the “listening tour” he was planning of several European capitals. His daughter, Meaghan Mobbs, who ran a charity that operated aid programs in Ukraine and Afghanistan, offered to help arrange financing for the trip. She found a donor to pay for a plane and hotel expenses.Some Trump aides had their suspicions about the charity, its founders and Kellogg’s daughter. They saw them as fervent Ukraine advocates, openly hostile toward Putin and Trump. (In reality, some were anti-Trump, others pro-Trump.) They worried, too, that a high-profile trip, by an outspoken Putin critic, might spook the Russians. Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, vetoed the trip, and Vance moved to limit his remit.Kellogg could talk to the Ukrainians and Europeans, Vance told aides, “but keep him away from the Russians.”One man would be talking to the Russians during the transition — Steve Witkoff, the New York developer and old Trump friend who had been appointed special envoy to the Middle East. The man he would be talking to was the sovereign wealth fund chief, Dmitriev.Dmitriev hadn’t only flirted briefly with the Biden administration. He’d had repeated flirtations with Trumpworld and come to know the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.A month into his job as Middle East envoy, Witkoff traveled to Riyadh to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, about the war in the Gaza Strip. The crown prince was aware of Trump’s campaign pledge to quickly negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, and he proffered an introduction.“You’re going to have a lot of people come to you claiming to have a line into President Putin,” the crown prince told Witkoff. And Dmitriev, he added, was “the right guy. We’ve done business with him.” Kushner vouched for him, too.Unlike the talks that Biden had refused to sign on to, Trump’s advisers told themselves, these would be informal, “a business guy to a business guy.” And so Trump directed Witkoff to open a back channel to the Russian.PART 2: First DaysWhat would Trump’s Ukraine policy be? In the first days of his new administration, the competing camps set out their markers.Hegseth — onetime infantry officer turned Fox News host — arrived at the Pentagon on Jan. 25 as something of a blank slate on the war. “He didn’t have any of his own thoughts on Russia and Ukraine,” a former Pentagon official explained, adding, “But he had civilian advisers who did.”On Day 4, the freshly minted defense secretary sat at a Pentagon conference table as one of his coterie of advisers argued for an immediate U-turn.The ideological godfather of the group was Elbridge A. Colby, grandson of the Nixon-era CIA director William E. Colby. The younger Colby and Vance had been introduced in 2015 by an editor at National Review who thought they were like-minded. Nearly nine years later, as Biden poured billions of dollars into arming Ukraine, Colby argued that “we would have been better served to put a lot more of that money to use in the Pacific.”Now, it was one of his disciples, Dan Caldwell, presenting the group’s recommendations to Hegseth, Gen. CQ Brown, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other military leaders.The Pentagon, Caldwell argued, should pause delivery of certain munitions that the Biden administration had promised to Ukraine, because, he believed, existing stocks were insufficient to execute U.S. war plans around the world. Nor should it use the additional $3.8 billion left unspent by the Biden administration to buy weapons for Ukraine.Brown did not speak as Caldwell wrapped up. He simply shifted uncomfortably in his chair.The next day, Kellogg and his team arrived at the Oval Office bearing several large charts that laid out their plan to end the war. One was headlined, hopefully, in Trumpian all-caps, “AN AMERICA FIRST PLAN: TRUMP’S HISTORIC PEACE DEAL FOR RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR.”In many ways, the plan was a refinement of Kellogg’s 2024 policy paper. It echoed some of Trump’s campaign talking points: “Stop American taxpayer dollars funding an endless war” and “push Europe to step up for its own security and stability needs.” In Kellogg’s presentation, he quoted from Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal”: “Leverage is the biggest strength you can have.”U.S. assistance would continue — but only if Zelenskyy agreed to negotiate with Russia.For Putin, there was incentive — the easing of sanctions — and counterincentive: choking off oil and gas revenues; pressuring China to end economic support for the Russian war machine; and working with the Europeans to use more than $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to rearm and rebuild Ukraine.First would come a ceasefire, then negotiations on a deal.Trump broke in.Ukraine, he said, should not join NATO. (Kellogg advocated at least pausing such plans.)He disliked Zelenskyy.And then, addressing his special envoy: “Russia is mine, not yours,” one official recalled the president saying.To which a bewildered Kellogg replied, “OK, you’re the president.”At one point, Hegseth chimed in with the recommendation against using the unspent $3.8 billion. “We’re not going to do that right now,” the president told him.Trump and Hegseth spoke briefly as the meeting broke up. One official recalls the president’s message this way: “Pete, you’re doing a great job, and you just go ahead and you don’t need me to make decisions.”Back at the Pentagon, later that day, Hegseth pulled Brown aside and told him, “Stop PDA.”PDA referred to munitions and equipment Biden had agreed to provide using “presidential drawdown authority.” But exactly what would be stopped? Generals in Europe sent blistering queries to the Pentagon.At the urging of his chief of staff, Joe Kasper, Hegseth clarified his order. It would not affect supplies already headed to Ukraine by road or rail. But at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, nerve center of the partnership birthed by the Biden administration, Ukrainian officers suddenly saw on their screens that 11 supply flights from the United States had been canceled.Within minutes, the Ukrainians began calling people who might have insight and influence.They called Kellogg, who called Waltz. Zelenskyy’s top adviser, Andriy Yermak, called Brian Kilmeade, a Fox News personality who was supportive of Ukraine and had administration clout. Kilmeade called Hegseth and Trump. (Kilmeade declined to comment.)Trump had just seemed to give Hegseth a blank check. Now he told his advisers that he had not, in fact, meant for the defense secretary to cut off the supplies.The flights would resume, after a six-day pause. But for the Ukrainians and their U.S. military partners in Europe and at the Pentagon, the episode became a premonition of their deepest fears.(The Pentagon declined to answer specific questions about Hegseth’s role in this and other episodes. But the chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said in a statement that Hegseth shared the president’s vision and “would never carry out actions that contradict the wishes of the President or actions that contradict the pillars of the America First agenda.”)PART 3: ‘Just Be Honest With Me’At the Pentagon, the Joint Staff had recently prepared an assessment of the Ukrainians’ battlefield situation: Unless the administration tapped into the unspent $3.8 billion, Ukraine would start to run out of critical munitions by summer. The generals knew Trump’s emerging strategy hinged on Europe taking the lead. But after depleting their already thin weapons stocks to aid Ukraine, the Joint Staff warned, the Europeans had little left to give.An artillery unit of the 28th Mechanized Separate Brigade fires an M109 howitzer on Russian positions, on the outskirts of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine, May 20, 2025. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)Russia, in truth, was eking out only minimal territorial gains and taking huge losses — more than 250,000 soldiers killed and 500,000 more wounded. Still, without a steady supply of American munitions to Ukraine, one senior U.S. official said, “eventually the music stops.”Yet if Ukraine’s supporters at the Pentagon hoped to sway Hegseth and his advisers, the defense secretary’s camp had a different interpretation: The Ukrainians were losing, and they had till summer to push them to cut a deal with Moscow.In the second week of February, Hegseth headed to Europe. His would not be a listening tour.Hegseth’s first stop was the Army garrison in Stuttgart, Germany, to meet with his European commander, Cavoli.For nearly three years, Cavoli had been on Austin’s speed dial. Every day but Sunday, he had sent Austin a detailed battle report.The general started out by sending Hegseth the same daily reports, only to be told they were too long. He sent abbreviated daily reports, only to be told they were too frequent and still too long. Henceforth, Cavoli would send a single weekly summary, four or five sentences long.On the morning of Feb. 11, Cavoli escorted Hegseth to his office and, sitting knee to knee, walked him through everything European Command was doing to support Ukraine. “If we stop doing this,” he said, “it’s going to veer to the wrong side.”Exactly what it was that so annoyed the secretary, his aides were not sure. It could have been the protesters who had gathered outside, condemning the Pentagon’s crackdown on transgender soldiers. It could have been jet lag. It could have been the meager refreshments — two small bottles of water for six people — or the way the general leaned forward as he spoke. Or it could have been Cavoli’s clear sympathy for Ukraine and animus toward Russia.In any case, this — their first and only meeting — “was when Hegseth began to associate General Cavoli with the Ukraine fight,” an official said. “He started hating them both. And I don’t know who he hated first.”The next day, the secretary traveled to NATO headquarters in Brussels and met with Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov. The Ukrainians had repeatedly requested a proper sit-down. Instead it would be a brief stand-up affair in an anteroom.Beforehand, according to a U.S. official present, Hegseth dabbed his nose with powder from a small compact. “Look commanding,” he told one aide. The handshake with the Ukrainian might be shown on Fox; the president might be watching.Then the standing meeting began, Umerov coming in close, taking his voice down to a whisper, assuring the secretary that he knew the United States’ political and security agenda might be changing. He didn’t ask for new aid. He just needed to know one thing: Would the U.S. military continue to supply the munitions Ukraine was counting on, the ones approved by Biden? Every delivery sustained the lives of Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines; every delivery that didn’t arrive one day meant those soldiers would die the next.Again and again, Umerov repeated his plea: “I just need you to be honest with me. Just be honest with me.”“I got goose bumps,” said a U.S. official standing nearby. “He wasn’t pleading for the answer that he wanted, but just for honesty, some indication. He was saying: You can trust me; you can trust us. Just tell me what you guys are thinking.”Hegseth, aides said, simply nodded.Hegseth laid down his hard truths later that day at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, the international alliance supporting the war effort:“We must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.”Then, “The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.”Finally, U.S. troops would not join a peacekeeping force after a deal to end the war.“I don’t think that it is wise to take Ukrainian NATO membership off the table and make territorial concessions to the Russians before the negotiations have even started,” the German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, broke in. “He had steam coming off his head,” a senior U.S. military officer in the room said.That was just the sort of stunned reaction Hegseth had been seeking, U.S. officials recalled, and afterward, he and his adviser Caldwell pronounced “mission accomplished!”Every point of Hegseth’s speech had been coordinated with Trump’s top advisers via a Signal chat. Absent from the group was Kellogg. That day and over the next several days, he would come to better understand what Trump meant when he declared, “Russia is mine, not yours.”At 1:30 p.m. on Feb. 11, Waltz, the national security adviser, took to the social platform X to announce that Witkoff was “leaving Russian airspace with Marc Fogel,” an American teacher jailed in Russia since 2021.It quickly emerged that the freeing of Fogel was the fruit of the talks that Witkoff — unknown to Kellogg and all but a handful of others — had begun with Dmitriev during the transition. Now the back channel had passed its first test.The next morning, the president posted his own announcement, on Truth Social. He had just finished a “highly productive” call with Putin; their teams would start negotiations immediately.On the call, according to two U.S. officials, Putin had praised Witkoff. He would lead Trump’s team, along with John Ratcliffe, the CIA director; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; and Waltz. The post did not mention the special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Kellogg.In Germany on Feb. 14 for the Munich Security Conference, unsure whether he still had a job or what it entailed, Kellogg encountered European and Ukrainian leaders in their own storm of confusion. “Do we still have an alliance?” the Polish deputy prime minister, Radosław Sikorski, asked. Kellogg sought to reassure them, describing himself as “your best friend” in the administration.A Hegseth loyalist at the conference, though, rendered it differently in messages to Washington, accusing Kellogg of claiming, “I’m holding the line against these isolationists in the administration.” This only cemented the envoy’s outsider status, as did a Fox News item juxtaposing his latest social media post about Zelenskyy (he was “the embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war”) with one from Trump (he was “a dictator without elections”).When Kellogg visited the Oval Office soon after, the president pounced.“So you call Zelenskyy embattled and courageous?” he snapped, according to two officials.“Sir, he is,” Kellogg responded. “It’s an existential fight on Ukrainian soil for his nation’s survival. When was the last time an American president faced that? It was Abraham Lincoln.”Recounting the episode later to other advisers, Trump grumbled, “He’s an idiot.”PART 4: ‘Be Very, Very Thankful’Trump had made some things crystal clear: For all the help the U.S. had given the Ukrainians, it should get something in return.On the golf course with Trump during the campaign, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had floated an idea. Graham had recently returned from Ukraine, where officials had given him a map of the country’s mineral riches. The senator recalls showing it to Trump, who proclaimed, “I want half.”No one had a firm fix on how much mineral wealth the Ukrainians actually had, or whether it could be mined anytime soon. But by his first weeks back in office, Trump had fixated on striking an immediate deal.What ensued might have been a set piece from a madcap diplomatic farce: the president’s men, rivalries on display, competing to see whose version of a deal would win over the Ukrainians — and Trump.First up was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. His plan called for Ukraine to cede half its revenue from mineral, oil and gas resources in perpetuity. He arrived in Kyiv on Feb. 12. Several top officials seemed to give positive feedback, but Zelenskyy declined to sign, saying he had yet to read the document. Frustrated and empty-handed, Bessent left town.Vance, Rubio and Kellogg would be meeting Zelenskyy in Munich on Feb. 14, hopeful of agreement on a revised version of the document. They were so hopeful that they had a room all decked out, with Ukrainian and U.S. flags, an ornate desk for the signing and tape markers on the floor instructing the dignitaries where to stand. But beforehand, Vance and Rubio pulled Zelenskyy away, and the Ukrainian made clear that he was not ready to sign.Even so, the show would go on, and later, when Vance asked if he would sign, the president turned to the justice minister, Olha Stefanishyna, who told him, “No, you cannot sign this — it has to be approved by the Rada,” Ukraine’s parliament.Now Kellogg headed to Kyiv to try a different tack. He asked Zelenskyy’s top adviser, Yermak, to arrange for the president to sign a brief letter saying he