Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy went into a White House meeting with US President Donald Trump on October 17 hoping for a big arms deal, trading Ukraine’s advanced drone technology for US Tomahawk cruise missiles, and a tightening of the sanctions noose around Russia’s neck. He came out of the meeting empty handed.

“Ukrainian hopes had been built by the apparent Trump 180 on Russia a few weeks back with tweets around his UNGA appearance and suggesting that Ukraine actually had a path to victory. Ukraine has also been upping the ante with its campaign of deep strike drone attacks on Russian oil refineries. There was a growing sense here that Russia was looking increasingly vulnerable,” Timothy Ash, the senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management in London said in a blogpost.

Trump has pivoted back to Putin, lured by Putin’s offer of yet another summit in Budapest and Tomahawks are off the agenda again. Trump went further to say that the time was “not perfect” to consider fresh sanctions on Russia.

Ukraine has changed strategy this summer and has started targeting Russian energy assets inside the country in the hope of cutting the Kremlin from its main source of income, with some success. While estimates vary, Russia’s oil refining output is down by 10%-30%, sparking a fuel crisis. However, despite improvements, Ukraine’s drones can only do limited damage. The powerful Tomahawks could flatten refineries and to bring the point home a Kyiv Post reporter captured the moment the Ukrainian delegation carried maps into the WHH detailing the “pain points” of Russia's defence industry that these missiles could be used to destroy.

Trump was not buying it. After meeting with Zelenskiy, Trump said on social media that their talks were "very interesting, and cordial, but I told him, as I likewise strongly suggested to President Putin, that it is time to stop the killing, and make a DEAL!"

Axios, citing Ukrainian sources familiar with the discussions, reported that the two-and-a-half hour meeting was tense, at times getting "emotional." "Nobody shouted, but Trump was tough," one source described the meeting to Axios.

"You know, we need Tomahawks and we need a lot of other weapons that we're sending to Ukraine... Hopefully, we'll be able to get the war over without thinking about Tomahawks," Trump said after the meeting with Zelenskiy.

Since taking office Trump has sent no money to Ukraine, imposed no sanctions, and more recently US-supplies of weapons, paid for by Europe under the new PURL (Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List) initiative, have fallen dramatically.

Business talks

As bne IntelliNews has reported, Trump’s foreign policy is driven by minerals diplomacy, where he has tried to cut some sort of minerals deal in each of the conflicts he has become involved with, starting with Ukraine’s minerals deal signed on April 30.

Russia remains the big prize as it is home to a cornucopia of critical minerals and rare earth metals (REMs). Trump has made it clear from the start that he is interested in doing business with Russia and both presidents have recently admitted that they talked about more than Ukraine at the recent Alaska summit on August 15.

However, details of these business discussions remain vague. Amongst the items that have been mentioned is ExxonMobil return to the Sakhalin-1 oil project; lifting of aviation sanctions to allow Boeing to resume business in Russia in exchange for access to Russia’s titanium monopoly; and the exploitation of REM deposits in Russia and Alaska.

bne IntelliNews sources in Washington have also confirmed a business agenda is being actively discussed, but details remain vague.

Most recently, a “Runnel” was proposed – a tunnel linking Northwest Russia to Alaska connecting the two continents. Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and in charge of the parallel business talks, admitted in a post on social media that his fund already commissioned a feasibility study for the Runnel six months ago, which suggests the tunnel project has been on the discussion agenda since the talks kicked off in Riyadh on February 18.

The public appearance of the Runnel project adds a new significance to the surprising, but still symbolic, choice of Alaska as the venue for the first Trump-Putin meeting given its Russian heritage.

By the same logic, the choice of Hungary as the venue for a second meeting is also a surprising move. It is also symbolic as it is a clear slap in the face for Brussels, which will not be involved in the meeting at all, despite the fact that Hungary is both an EU and Nato member.

Brussels is now “scrambling for a seat” at the upcoming Putin–Trump summit, desperate to counter what EU officials call “Putin’s influence over Trump.” One senior EU source even floated that Finnish President Alexander Stubb should “somehow be present”, Bloomberg reports.

But at the same time, there is also a raw materials connection between Russia and Hungary, which continues to import significant amounts of oil and gas from Russia in defiance of an EU drive to ban all Russian imports by the start of 2027.

It may be another deal being discussed is the change of ownership of the European sections of the Druzhba pipeline to facilitate these imports. In recent comments, Trump has said that India must reduce the import of Russian oil but called Hungary’s case a “tricky problem.” He went on to say that it has “only one pipeline” and that it is “far from the sea”, suggesting that the White House would not support Brussels’ drive to end the imports of Russian oil and gas.

“Trump likes strong leaders - Xi, Putin, Erdogan, Kim, leaders who get their way, by hook or crook, as he aspires for the same “unchained rule”,” says Ash. “I also tend to explain away Trump’s relationship with Putin in the same way - Putin is a typical mafia boss that Trump might have come across in his NYC real estate dealings, and he might have learned there that you don’t cross them. Or you cross them at your personal peril.”

There is a precedent for a change of ownership of this pipeline. US investor and a veteran of the Russian market Stephen Lynch has already applied for permission to take the Nord Stream pipeline over, which currently belongs to Germany. The EU has attempted to block this move in its nineteenth sanctions package, but that package is stuck in committee due to vetoes from Hungary and a few other EU member states.

Donbas sticking point

Business deals involving Russo-US joint mineral ventures on each other’s territory will be very difficult to do in the current geopolitical environment, let alone changing the ownership of major energy infrastructure pipelines. However, the most serious logjam in talks appears to be political.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that during his call with Trump on October 16 just before the US president met with Zelenskiy, Putin once again insisted that Ukraine cede control to Russia of the entire Donbas region. As bne IntelliNews has opined, Trump is uninterested in Ukraine and sees it only as leverage in his negotiates with Putin, trading threats of military support for concessions from the Russian leader. While the talks with Putin are ongoing those threats are unlikely to materialise.

This is a red line for Ukraine and Trump has backed Zelenskiy no-go on this point, which also came up in Alaska. Putin offered to concede the parts of the other two regions the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) does not control as part of the bargain, which some analysts say was “progress”.

Kyiv will never agree to this, mainly as it has invested heavily into an extensive defensive line in Donbas that military analysts say will be extremely difficult for AFR forces to overcome. Bankova worries that giving this way would open the way for a rapid and largely unresisted advance for the AFR towards western Ukraine all the way up to the Dnipro River that cuts the country in half.

As Ukraine is once again running out of men, money and materiel Putin appears to have dug his heels in and believes that he can win eventual victory on the battlefield, not necessarily with superior military force, but simply by waiting for Ukraine’s mounting manpower and funding crises to peak, which could happen sooner than later as detailed by bne IntelliNews recently in a side-by-side comparison of the Ukrainian and Russian budgets.

The IMF recently announced it had underestimated Ukraine’s need for funding to continue the war. The government is already short between $8bn and $19bn (depending on war costs) to get to the end of this year and the IMF says it needs $65bn to get to the end of 2026.

Given that the US has de facto totally withdrawn from supporting Ukraine this sum entirely falls on Brussels, as bne IntelliNews reported Europe can’t afford to take over the burden of supporting Ukraine, as most EU countries are either in recession or approaching a crisis.

That leaves confiscating the frozen $300bn of Central Bank of Russia (CBR) funds using the so-called Reparation Loans, as the only way to bail Ukraine out, but that decision is fraught with problems and subject to disunity amongst the EU members.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said following Zelenskiy's meeting in the US that his trip turned out “tougher than expected” and “failed to deliver the results he counted on.”

“The visit didn’t go as Zelensky hoped,” Merz said, adding that only a strong Ukrainian army can bring peace, and surrender is not an option — because if Ukraine falls, Russia will strike another European country next.

“Back in September the EC made clear that Ukraine’s financing numbers no longer added up, a fact now reaffirmed by the IMF. The Fund has suggested its EFF for Ukraine faces a $65 billion shortfall. And actually Europe, Japan and Canada, are on the hook now for the full $100 billion annual Ukraine financing bill, for years to come,” says Ash.

“The cupboard is kind of bare now when it comes to funding Ukraine. There is no plan B, aside from the [Reparation Loans]. And without a plan b, and if the RL is not rolled out, then Ukraine is underfunded, risks losing the war, which would be a catastrophic blow to Europe,” says Ash.