The US is “destroying” the established world order, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK has said.
Criticising the new Trump administration’s way of handling foreign policy, Valerii Zaluzhnyi said the White House had “questioned the unity of the whole Western world”.
His comments come amid an apparent cooling of tensions between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and his US counterpart Donald Trump, after a public falling-out between the two in the Oval Office on Friday.
Kyiv has made attempts to mend relations with Washington in recent days, after the US paused its military aid to Ukraine and intelligence sharing in a bid to bring Zelensky to the negotiating table.
But Mr Zaluzhnyi’s remarks at a conference at Chatham House in London on Thursday suggest there remains discontent over the US’s actions.
He told an audience: “We see that it is not just the axis of evil and Russia trying to revise the world order, but the US is finally destroying this order.”
The Ukrainian envoy added that talks between the US and Russia – the latter of which was “headed by a war criminal” in President Vladimir Putin – showed the White House was making “steps towards the Kremlin, trying to meet them halfway”.
Mr Zaluzhnyi, who took over as Kyiv’s ambassador to London in 2024 following three years as commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, also suggested that Nato could cease to exist as a result of Washington’s change in posture, and warned that Moscow’s next target “could be Europe”.
While Zelensky has expressed a wish to bring the war in Ukraine to an end swiftly, Kyiv has expressed concerns about the Trump administration’s handling of talks and the concessions to Moscow that may be made without security guarantees for Ukraine.
Trump vowed during the US election campaign to bring the war to an end quickly, and a US delegation met with a Russian one for preliminary talks in Saudi Arabia last month – without European or Ukrainian representatives present.
Following that, Zelensky accused Trump of living in a “disinformation space” after the US president repeated some of Moscow’s claims – including that Ukraine was responsible for starting the war – prompting the latter to call Zelensky a “dictator”.
The US’s decision to halt its assistance to Ukraine has been cast by Trump administration officials as a means of getting Kyiv to co-operate with the US-led peace talks.
The pause was welcomed by the Kremlin, while it has raised concerns that Ukraine may only be able to hold out for a matter of months.
Zelensky has since made conciliatory overtures to Trump, without mentioning the US security guarantees he previously said were necessary to prevent further Russian aggression. Trump said he appreciated Zelensky’s remarks.
Mr Zaluzhnyi said the pause in intelligence sharing, as well as an earlier decision to oppose a UN resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine, were “a huge challenge for the entire world”.
