US President Donald Trump departs the White House in Washington, DC, 28 February 2025. Photo: EPA-EFE / JIM LO SCALZO
US President Donald Trump has halted all US military aid to Ukraine in a bid to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into negotiations with Russia, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing senior US government officials.
According to an unnamed official in the US Defence Department, Washington will withhold all pending military assistance to Kyiv until Zelensky demonstrates a “good-faith commitment to peace”, in a move that shows how drastically US-Ukraine relations have soured since Trump took office in January.
While the full extent of the order is unclear, it applies to all military equipment that has not yet reached Ukraine, including weapons currently en route to the country, including those being held at the main US military transit hub in Poland.
“The president has been clear that he is focused on peace. We need our partners to be committed to that goal as well. We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution”, a White House official told CNN.
Reporting the decision, the network called it a “direct response to what Trump views as Zelensky’s bad behaviour” during a fractious exchange in front of reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, but added that Ukraine would likely be able to “sustain its current fighting pace for several weeks — perhaps until the start of the summer — before a US pause would begin to have a major effect”.
The Trump administration has made it clear that talks between Washington and Kyiv will only resume once Zelensky publicly apologises for his behaviour during the argument, in which Trump accused Zelensky of showing insufficient gratitude for US aid and “gambling with World War III”.
After a summit in London on European support for Ukraine on Sunday, Zelensky said that he believed an end to the war was still “very, very far away”, further incensing Trump, who called the Ukrainian president’s remarks “the worst statement” he could have made and warned that the US would “not put up with it for much longer”.
“This guy doesn’t want there to be Peace as long as he has America’s backing and, Europe, in the meeting they had with Zelenskyy, stated flatly that they cannot do the job without the U.S. — Probably not a great statement to have been made in terms of a show of strength against Russia. What are they thinking?”, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Monday.
Though Trump suggested to reporters at the White House on Monday that Zelensky wouldn’t “be around very long” if he refused to engage in talks with Russia to end the war, European leaders have rallied around to show their continuing support for Zelensky since Friday’s diplomatic meltdown.
