The Trump administration’s efforts to broker a peace negotiation ending the war in Ukraine came to a halt Friday following a testy exchange between President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The encounter ultimately led to a canceled press conference, Trump requesting Zelenskyy to leave the White House, and the failure to sign a rare-earth minerals deal between the U.S. and Ukraine that would have allowed the U.S. access to Ukraine’s minerals.
Tensions escalated in the Oval Office after Zelenskyy challenged Vance, who said that the path forward was through diplomacy. Instead, Zelenskyy issued a caution and noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin has broken other agreements in the past.
‘What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about?’ Zelenskyy said. ‘What do you mean?’
In response, Vance said: ‘I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.’
‘Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media,’ Vance told Zelenskyy. ‘Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for bringing it, to bring it into this country.’
Trump also snapped at Zelenskyy and warned him that Ukraine was in ‘big trouble’ and was ‘gambling with World War III.’
Following the encounter, Trump announced a pause to peace negotiations and said that Zelenskyy could return to the White House when he was ‘ready for Peace.’ Additionally, Zelenskyy left the White House without signing the minerals deal.
‘I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations,’ Trump said in a Truth Social post Friday. ‘I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.’
Zelenskyy also followed up with a social media post on X expressing gratitude to the U.S. for its support.
‘Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit,’ Zelenskyy said. ‘Thank you @POTUS, Congress, and the American people. Ukraine needs just and lasting peace, and we are working exactly for that.’
Despite the fallout from the meeting, Zelenskyy told Fox News’ Bret Baier on Friday that the relationship between Ukraine and the U.S. could be salvaged.
Here’s what else happened at the White House this week:
Large-scale reductions in force
The Trump administration also sent a memo instructing agencies across the federal government to launch plans for ‘large-scale reductions in force’ and construct reorganization plans by mid-March.
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management sent a memo on Wednesday ordering agencies to prepare to cut staffers and share reorganization plans by March 13.
‘The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt,’ the memo said. ‘At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public.’
Several federal government roles are exempt from the order, including those ‘necessary to meet law enforcement, border security, national security, immigration enforcement, or public safety responsibilities,’ according to the memo.
First Cabinet meeting
Trump held his second administration’s first meeting with Cabinet members Wednesday, where he shared plans to massively cut the Environmental Protection Agency and seek to retrieve military equipment left in Afghanistan.
Trump revealed that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is eyeing cutting 65% of federal employees from the agency.
‘I spoke with Lee Zeldin, and he thinks he’s going to be cutting 65 or so percent of the people from Environmental, and we’re going to speed up the process too at the same time,’ Trump said. ‘He had a lot of people that weren’t doing their job, they were just obstructionists, and a lot of people that didn’t exist.’
Trump also shared that he wanted back the military equipment U.S. troops left behind when withdrawing from Afghanistan, but didn’t share plans on how the U.S. would retrieve the equipment.
‘We left billions, tens of billions of dollars worth of equipment behind, brand new trucks,’ Trump said Wednesday. ‘You see them display it every year, or their little roadway, someplace where they have a road and they drive the, you know, waving the flag and talking about America … that’s all the top of the line stuff. I think we should get a lot of that equipment back.’
The Taliban seized most of the more than $7 billion worth of equipment U.S. troops left in Afghanistan at the time of the withdrawal in August 2021, according to a Department of Defense report released in 2022.
English official US language
Trump signed an executive order Friday mandating English as the official language of the U.S. The order eradicates a previous mandate from President Bill Clinton in 2000 requiring federal agencies and recipients of federal funding to issue language assistance to those who don’t speak English.
The executive order allows each federal agency to determine whether it will offer services in languages besides English.
The U.S. is an anomaly in that it has never had an official language, whereas roughly 180 countries out of the 195 countries in the world have official languages, a White House official told Fox News Digital.
Fox News’ Emma Colton and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
