Less than a week after rallying to show support for their fellow Ukrainians on the three-year anniversary of the war with Russia, Anna Tselukhina and her organization are preparing to come together again.
The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) will host what it is calling an emergency rally Sunday afternoon in downtown Calgary in response to the Friday meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice-President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
During the testy and heated exchange in front of cameras in the Oval Office, Trump told Zelenskyy to make a deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine or “we’re out.”
Trump and Vance also accused Zelenskyy of “gambling with World War III” and told him he must be more grateful for U.S. assistance in the fight against Russia’s three-year siege.
“This is our way to raise up our voice and say that Ukraine is not just a flag, not just those rare metals somewhere underground, but Ukraine are people who know, who understand, who feel, who want their home to be free and independent,” Tselukhina said.
She says Ukrainians who fled to Canada because of the war are disappointed with how the meeting went down.
The UCC called Trump and Vance’s behaviour “disgraceful” and a “shameful attack.”
Zelenskyy, who was in Washington to finalize an economic agreement granting the U.S. ownership of some rare earth minerals in Ukraine, left the White House without signing a deal.Despite Friday’s explosive exchange, the connection between Kyiv and Washington is strained but not severed, according to Hanna Shelest, security studies program director for Ukrainian Prism Foreign Policy Council and editor-in-chief at Ukraine Analytica.
“My professional intuition is saying that it was done intentionally,” Shelest said, referring to Trump and Vance on Friday.“ So now it is possible to say that President Trump is that hero who would like a peace, and Ukrainians has the president who would like war and Ukrainians are guilty by themselves.”
For McGill University political science associate professor Maria Popova, Friday’s exchange signalled the goals of the Trump administration.
“To get Zelensky to sign a sort of blank cheque type of deal. They want to break him and to make him really submit to whatever they decide will be the deal for peace,” she said.
“We’re going to continue, in fact, for a while, to see this kind of back and forth and this attempt by the Trump administration to strong-arm Ukraine into agreeing to something.”
Despite not signing a rare earths deal with the U.S., Shelest says Zelenskyy was open about the fact that he is ready for the future with the U.S.
Shelest says that Trump’s apparent retraction of his comments calling Zelenskyy a dictator shows that the president is willing to change his mind.
Ukraine-U.S. relations strained, not broken following tense Oval Office meeting, experts say
