At the NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday, Donald Trump told reporters why the Russia-Ukraine war hasn’t ended. Vladimir Putin is a difficult character, he said, and then turned to deliver the same line to Volodymyr Zelensky’s face.
The two had just finished a bilateral meeting on the summit sidelines when Trump turned to face reporters and laid it all out. “We’ve settled a lot of wars, and this one is the one that I thought maybe would be the easiest, but Putin’s a difficult character, and this guy’s a difficult character!” he said, gesturing at Zelensky as he said it. Trump laughed afterward, but Zelensky’s expression never budged.
He filled the silence himself.
“It’s not the easiest thing,” Trump continued. “There’s a lot of commitment and there’s a lot of love of the countries and everything else, but… I think we’ve made a lot of progress in the last couple of weeks. We’ll see how it all goes.”
Trump:
We’ve settled a lot of wars, and this one is the one that I thought maybe would be the easiest, but Putin’s a difficult character, and this guy’s a difficult character!
– points to Zelenskyy pic.twitter.com/m5fxW6RCDX
— Alexander Willis (@ReporterWillis) July 8, 2026
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Later that day, describing the broader summit for a different set of cameras, his tone shifted considerably: “We just had our NATO meeting and it was a great meeting. You probably heard it was a great meeting because… there was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity, and I don’t think it could have gone much better.”
Not every country got a compliment out of him. Trump singled out Spain separately, calling it “a terrible partner in NATO,” a remark that carries extra weight given Madrid’s continued resistance to the alliance’s defense spending targets.
Zelensky’s expression next to Trump wasn’t a one-off, either. Every joint appearance between the two men this year has been picked apart for exactly this kind of exchange, ever since their February Oval Office sit-down turned into a televised shouting match.
The meeting produced substance too, at least on paper.
Trump told Zelensky the US would license Ukraine to manufacture its own Patriot air-defense missiles domestically, framing it as an answer to supply complaints.
“So one of the things we’re going to be talking about is we’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool, right. This way you can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough,” he said.
The offer arrives as Russia intensifies its air campaign against Kyiv, having launched ballistic missiles at the capital for the third time in under a week and exploiting Ukraine’s shrinking stock of American-made interceptors.
Featured image via X screengrab
