The Ukraine Crisis: What We’re Thinking—and Debating

It’s Monday, March 3. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today, we’re focusing on one big thing: the fallout from Friday’s extraordinary Oval Office spat.

Three days after the diplomatic earthquake between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, the world is still feeling the aftershocks.

In Europe, leaders have been jolted into action. Ukraine’s European allies, including British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron, met in London on Sunday to forge their own peace plan and agree on additional support for Kyiv.

In Moscow, officials continue to welcome Trump’s approach to the conflict—and his foreign policy more generally. “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Russian state TV described a new world order with Trump in the White House: “Now everything is being decided inside a big triangle: Russia, China & the US. Within this, the new construction of the world will come to fruition. The EU as a united political force no longer exists.”

In Washington, administration officials have made it clear that it is up to Zelensky to patch things up if there is any chance of a U.S.-Ukraine mineral deal being signed. “The president believes Zelensky has to come back to the table and he has to be the one to come and make it right,” one official told NBC News. (Italian leader Giorgia Meloni also urged Zelensky to extend an olive branch to the White House and warned of the risks of a “divided West.”)

The Zelensky-Trump bust-up—and the war in Ukraine in general—is one of those important subjects where people we respect (including our colleagues) passionately disagree. There are plenty of other outlets that will give you only one strongly expressed view. But it is our conviction—and among The Free Press’s reasons for being—that the only way we can get to the truth is by seriously considering multiple perspectives.

The differences of opinion start with the question of what, exactly, we all watched on Friday.

Were Trump and Vance bullying a besieged ally in public (as Eli Lake argued immediately afterward)? Or were we watching the White House finally stand up for American taxpayers (scroll down to read Batya Ungar-Sargon make that case)?

Then there are the bigger questions:

Is Trump’s Ukraine policy a long-overdue acknowledgment of the limits of American power? Or an unforced error that endangers not just America’s allies but America itself?

Could the end of NATO be just “days away,” as former Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis said Saturday? Or might the latest uncertainty get member states to finally meet the defense spending requirements on which the alliance depends?

And what are the chances of peace with honor for Ukraine?

One thing is clear: We’re at a pivot point not just for Ukraine but for the world order. Making sense of that shift is what we’ll be doing right here as events unfold.

For today, we wanted to offer four pieces from writers and thinkers we trust.

First, Christopher Caldwell assesses what Friday’s theatrics changed—and what they didn’t. “Zelensky is, Trump aside, the most Trump-like politician in the world,” writes Christopher. And, in his view, the Ukrainian leader tried to pull a Trumpian trick in the Oval Office, but it backfired. Chris explains Zelensky’s failed gambit—and why, in spite of the European effort now underway to take over leadership of the war, Zelensky still needs one man: Trump.

Read Chris: “Zelensky’s Trumpian Trick.”

Second, historian Victor Davis Hanson—a top interpreter of geopolitical events—explains why Zelensky’s White House visit ended without a signed minerals agreement, security guarantees for Ukraine, or a road map toward a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Read Hanson: “Ten Reasons for the Zelensky-Trump Blowup.”

Next, Batya Ungar-Sargon points out the divide between the media narrative of Friday’s fracas and the view of ordinary Americans. To hear the media tell it, says Batya, President Trump embarrassed himself and the country. But, as has become the dominant trend over the past decade, ordinary American taxpayers saw things differently. And polls are proving it.

Read Batya: “What Average Americans Think of Trump’s Showdown with Zelensky.”

Finally, Michael Oren remembers another Oval Office clash—and the lessons he learned from his ringside seat. Oren was Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. in May 2011, when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured President Barack Obama at the White House.

The incident—which led to Rahm Emanuel pounding Oren’s chest and barking “Your [expletive] prime minister cannot come into the [expletive] White House and [expletive] lecture the president!”—left a deep impression on Oren.

“It underscor[ed] the importance of interpersonal relationships in the shaping of foreign policy. It taught me the degree to which the leader of a small and dependent state can publicly challenge the head of a patron superpower. And it showed me the crucial need to correctly read the geopolitical map—to know what ‘cards’ a country does and does not hold.”

Read Michael Oren: “What Zelensky Can Learn from Netanyahu.”

To find all of our Ukraine coverage, including Eli Lake on a fiasco in the Oval Office, Natan Sharansky on why a president’s words matter, Peter Savodnik on the frightening consequences of abandoning Ukraine, and much more, click here.

Andrew Cuomo announces his run for New York City mayor. (Kena Betancur via Getty Images)

• South Carolina governor Henry McMaster declared a state of emergency on Sunday as firefighters work to contain a series of wildfires that have affected nearly 4,200 acres across the state. Evacuation orders have been issued for several neighborhoods in the Myrtle Beach area.
  

• Disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has launched his campaign for New York City mayor. Cuomo left the governor’s mansion in 2021 amid multiple sexual harassment allegations that he brushed aside, citing his Italian heritage as an excuse. Cuomo has denied all wrongdoing, but has remained suspiciously mute on widespread allegations that he donned a pair of nipple rings while attempting to manage the coronavirus pandemic.
  

• Israel said Sunday it was halting entry of goods into Gaza, just one day after its ceasefire with Hamas expired without any agreement for what’s next. Just before the ceasefire ended, Israel claimed it had accepted a proposal by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to continue the ceasefire, but that Hamas had rejected it. Netanyahu has accused Hamas of stealing aid and using it to continue its fight.
  

• On Saturday a federal judge in Washington blocked Trump’s firing of Hampton Dellinger, who headed the Office of the Special Counsel—a federal watchdog meant to protect whistleblowers. The judge said that removing the official without cause violated the law. The administration argues that the office Dellinger ran should be run by someone sharing Trump’s agenda. They are planning to repeal the decision.

• Blue Ghost, a private spacecraft, has landed on the moon, making it the second private carrier to do so. It’s carrying 10 payloads to help NASA prepare for a future manned mission called Artemis—that is set to put women, and even more shockingly, Canadians, on the moon for the first time.

• Politico reports that the centrist Democrat group Third Way hosted an event last month encouraging Democrats to “reduce far-left influence and infrastructure” within the party in order to win back the trust of the working class. They also suggested that Democrats show up at gun shows and prioritize economic issues over identity politics. Seemingly undiscussed? Any specific policies Democrats can offer their voters.

• The number of migrants crossing the southern border has declined to a level not seen in at least 25 years. Last week, Border Patrol apprehended fewer than 9,000 people on the U.S.-Mexico border. At some points in the Biden administration, they were nabbing as many as 8,000 per day. Guess we didn’t need the wall after all!

• On Truth Social, Trump promised to make the U.S. “the Crypto Capital of the World” and create a “strategic crypto reserve” that will hold digital currencies like Bitcoin, Solana’s SOL token, XRP, and more. If that all sounds like gibberish to you, keep scrolling down.

ICYMI: Brian Armstrong on Honestly

You’ve heard of DOGE, but have you heard of Dogecoin? And what’s a bored ape, besides the creatures you might encounter at the zoo?

Confused? In the latest episode of Honestly, Bari explains all things crypto in a conversation with Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase—the country’s largest crypto trading platform. He explains what crypto is, why he thinks it’s the future, what happened in his meeting with Trump earlier this year, how he once stuck out his neck against the far-left mob, and more.

Listen to their conversation by clicking play below, or catch it on the Honestly feed on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What Happened Last Night. . . at the Oscars

The cast and crew of Anora collect the Best Picture award. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The Brutalist is a movie that could have had “zero impact on the world” as our senior editor Peter Savodnik recently wrote, but instead made more than $36 million at the box office on a paltry $10 million budget. It also had a huge impact at the Academy Awards, winning Best Cinematography, Best Score, and Best Actor (Adrien Brody).

Kieran Culkin nabbed Best Supporting Actor for his role in A Real Pain, a movie about two Jewish American cousins who visit Majdanek concentration camp, which was portrayed as a sort of macabre theme park, as Tanya Gold recently observed in The Free Press. In accepting his speech, Kieran, a father of two, said he made a deal with his wife to have more kids if he won an Oscar, so I suspect we’ll be getting a new Culkin in around nine months.

Zoe Saldaña took the Best Supporting Actress trophy for Emilia Pérez, a film about a transgender Mexican drug lord hated by both Mexicans and transgender people.

Finally, the big winner of the evening was Anora, a film about a romance between an American prostitute and the son of a Russian oligarch, which raked some of the biggest awards: Best Actress (Mikey Madison), Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Picture. Made for $6 million and shot in Brighton Beach, Anora was born out of the “blood, sweat, and tears of incredible indie artists,” the film’s director and producer Sean Baker shouted at the end of the Oscars broadcast. “Long live independent film!”

CORRECTION: A previous version of The Front Page said the two main characters of A Real Pain visited Auschwitz concentration camp, however, they toured Majdanek concentration camp. This has been updated. The Free Press regrets the error.