European Leaders To Join Ukraine's Zelenskyy For White House Meeting With Trump

European leaders will join Ukraine’s Zelenskyy for his crucial meeting with Trump, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Sunday.

KYIV (AP) — European and NATO leaders announced Sunday that they’ll be joining President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Washington for crucial talks with President Donald Trump, rallying around the Ukrainian leader after his exclusion from Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The remarkable move — with one European leader after another announcing that they’ll be at Zelenskyy’s side when he travels to the White House on Monday — was an apparent effort to ensure that the meeting goes better than the last one in February, when Trump berated the Ukrainian president in a heated Oval Office encounter.

“The Europeans are very afraid of the Oval Office scene being repeated and so they want to support Mr. Zelenskyy to the hilt,” said retired French Gen. Dominique Trinquand, a former head of France’s military mission at the United Nations.

“It’s a power struggle and a position of strength that might work with Trump,” he said in a phone interview.

The European leaders’ presence at Zelenskyy’s side, demonstrating Europe’s support for Ukraine, could potentially help ease concerns in Kyiv and in other European capitals that Ukraine risks being railroaded into a peace deal that Trump says he wants to broker with Russia.