By Stephen Ubanna
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country, Ukraine, is currently at war with the neighbouring Russian Federation, appears to have lost faith in President Donald Trump of the North American country, the United States (US).
Zelenskyy’s source of unhappiness was the American President’s inability to end the war with Russia, which had dragged on for over three and a half years, leading to the loss of millions of lives and massive destruction of the country’s basic infrastructural facilities, including energy infrastructure, while he had ended the state of war between Israel and Palestine in Gaza.
Zelenskyy, according to diplomatic sources, had challenged Trump that if he could successfully end the Ukraine-Russia war to forestall Vladimir Putin from taking over the country, he would personally nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2026. The American President had expected to be given the Nobel Peace Award in 2025 for successfully ending wars across different parts of the world. But the Nobel Peace Committee had given the prestigious award to Maria Corina Machado, the 58-year-old Venezuelan opposition leader, over her struggles “to achieve a just and peaceful transition from a brutal authoritarian state to democracy in a country currently suffering humanitarian and economic crises like Nigeria, despite being an oil-rich nation like Nigeria.”
Zelenskyy has every reason to be unhappy with Trump because the US was instrumental in the breakout of war between Ukraine and Russia. The Ukrainian government had given the US the nod to establish a military base in the country, which President Putin had rejected, describing it as a threat to Russia. Barack Obama, the American President at the time, had said that he had no right to interfere in the arrangement, insisting that since Zelenskyy had given the approval, “it is none of his business but he should face his country’s internal problems.”
Trump, who had succeeded former President Joe Biden, who in turn was the successor to President Obama, was not ready to follow in their footsteps of only spending the country’s money, which was said to have risen to over US$350 billion as at 2023, with nothing to fall back on as its own benefit for funding the Ukraine war.
This may have informed why he had worked on the Ukrainian President, who is desperate to win the war against Russia, and who had signed an agreement with Trump for the sale of the country’s mineral resources and rare earths in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas. This would provide an economic incentive for the US to invest in Ukraine’s defense and its reconstruction at the end of the war with Russia.
Based on the agreement, Zelenskyy had expected that the two countries would share the profits and royalties from the future sale of the Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, including magnetite, to the US, but that was as far as he could go. This may have informed why the Ukrainian Army had fought desperately to reclaim Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, all in eastern Ukraine, particularly Donetsk, where the soldiers had defended Kupiansk in Kharkiv, another region in eastern Ukraine, with the last drop of their blood to encourage Trump to still fund the war and even give approval for the sale of Tomahawk cruise missiles to the country to strike deep into Russia.
But the Ukrainian 50,000-strong encircled army, which could not withstand the superior firepower of the Russian troops, had surrendered, losing the Kharkiv region. This made it the sixth Ukrainian region to have been captured by Russia. The Russian Army, according to security reports, is still pushing to capture Lviv, Sumy, Odesa, and indeed the entire Ukraine, including Kyiv, the capital, which has become a shadow of itself.
There is no gainsaying the fact that if Zelenskyy had agreed to the terms and conditions set by President Putin, which was said to have been agreed upon by Trump, to end the war by allowing Russia to take over the earlier captured five regions, it could have ended. But he had depended on the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO countries, particularly the US, United Kingdom, UK, France, and Germany, to sustain the war and even win.
This may have discouraged the American President, who had asked Mark Rutte, Secretary-General of the EU, and the European countries’ leaders to take over the funding of the Ukraine war from where the US had stopped. He also gave a warning that they should forget about admitting the East European country into NATO.
Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian President, who had not been happy that Ukraine, as a country, had not joined the EU, let alone been admitted into NATO, yet had continued to benefit from the Union, had continuously kicked against it. Take, for instance, Zelenskyy had requested US$250 billion from the EU to sustain the war against Russia.
He was said to have also asked Rutte, the EU Secretary-General, to consider as a matter of necessity taking over the payment of the Ukrainian soldiers’ salaries. These soldiers had not been paid over the last three months but are fighting the better-funded Russian military.
There appears to be a major crack in the EU, as the Hungarian President withdraws from the EU. Even Giorgia Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister, who had never supported Ukraine for going into war with Russia, was said to have signified her intention to leave the EU to tackle the country’s immediate problems and not concern herself with Ukraine’s war that has become a drainpipe.
Zelenskyy appears to have realized that he has been left in the lurch, as the much-expected financial help from the NATO countries is not coming in. He had reached out to President Macron of France, who has more pressing problems at hand, saying that “Ukraine urgently needs air defense systems and missiles to defend against intensifying Russian attacks.” He was said to have made the French President understand that what the country really needed to change the direction of the war against Russia is only the use of the US Tomahawk long-range missiles that could target Russian military targets. This meant that he should join forces with other EU leaders to pile up pressure on Trump to give approval to release the weapons to Ukraine.
President Trump may be dilly-dallying to offer the deadly weapons to Ukraine, as he was said to have sought to know from Zelenskyy his targets in Russia to avoid escalating the war. This may lead to WW 3, as Putin had threatened.
Aware that the Ukraine war may not end anytime soon, and that Ukraine would continue to need large amounts of external funding to sustain the war, may have emboldened the European Union leadership to unlock the US$300 billion tied up in Russia’s assets.
The EU leadership had taken a bold decision based on recent estimates that had put Ukraine’s external financing needs at US$65 billion between 2026 and 2029 for its reconstruction after the war. Already, the country, according to informed diplomatic sources, is also currently negotiating with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, IMF, on a new loan programme, as its current loan had been used up to buy weapons and run the affairs of the government daily to sustain the war against Russia.
The most recent EU proposal on how to spend the unfrozen US$300 billion of Russian assets in European countries was said to have outlined an innovative legal and financial plan to lend €140 billion of the frozen assets to Ukraine.
Reports had it that two-thirds of Russia’s estimated US$300 billion in unlocked assets are said to be held in the Belgian financial institution Euroclear. The European finance ministers were said to have agreed to redirect €185 billion of the Russian unlocked amount to the EU via a tailored debt contract with Euroclear.
Unconfirmed reports said the EU member countries’ finance ministers, who were said to have met on October 9, 2025, and October 10, 2025, in Luxembourg, had discussed the proposed plan ahead of a crucial EU leaders’ meeting on October 23, 2025, to rubber-stamp their decision.
