WASHINGTON - Just hours before Sen. Amy Klobuchar boarded a flight Friday to return to Minnesota from Washington, she sat down with about a dozen senators — Republicans and Democrats alike — to talk with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the United States partnership with Ukraine in its war with Russia.
The Senate meeting with Zelenskyy went well, Klobuchar says. Then the Ukrainian leader went to the White House.
The Minnesota senator was in a bipartisan group that met with Zelenskyy only hours before the blowup in the Oval Office.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
March 1, 2025 at 11:59PM
By all accounts, Klobuchar walked away thinking the bipartisan meeting with Zelenskyy went well. She posted a selfie with Zelenskyy and her colleagues on social media after the hourlong meeting and spoke about the Senate’s “strong bipartisan support” for Ukraine.
But she realized things had gone awry when she was midair.
“While I’m on the plane coming back to Minnesota on the Delta flight, everything goes to hell,” Klobuchar said.
While she was en route home, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance took turns berating Zelenskyy in the Oval Office on a live broadcast for being “disrespectful” during his visit to Washington to sign a minerals agreement with the U.S. and discuss continued military support for his country.
It was an about-face from what Klobuchar said was a positive meeting with Zelenskyy and her fellow senators, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Hours after Klobuchar’s photo of a smiling Graham and the Ukrainian president was posted on X, Graham changed his tune and declared: “I don’t know if we can ever do business with Zelenskyy again.”
The White House meeting took a turn when Vance and Zelenskyy began to spar over Russia and its diplomatic commitments. The exchanged prompted Trump and Vance to tell the Ukrainian president that he was being “disrespectful” and ungrateful for U.S. support.
Zelenskyy, Klobuchar said, “was making a point that Russian President Vladimir Putin has blown through these agreements before and invaded and killed people, and he was just making the case that it has to be a strong agreement.”
Minnesota’s senior senator said she wondered whether Trump and Vance had planned the confrontation all along.
“I can’t figure out if they planned it or if they just blew up in the meeting at him,” Klobuchar said. “Either one is bad because we should be negotiating from a position of strength, and we shouldn’t be cutting down Ukraine and Zelenskyy because Vladimir Putin, he’s just rejoicing in this.”
Trump advisers asked Zelenskyy to depart after the exchange, leaving unsigned the minerals deal that Trump said he believed would help to end Ukraine’s war with Russia.
Klobuchar refused to say the agreement is “not possible.”
“As much as I was just appalled by what they did, I will be talking to my Republican colleagues in the coming days and trying to do anything I can to resurrect this agreement,” she said.
The five other Democrats in Minnesota’s congressional delegation also spoke out after the meeting.
“Call-out to all the Republicans who have posed for photo ops with Zelenskyy: Is today the day to finally speak out?” Sen. Tina Smith said. “Patriotism demands it.”
Rep. Tom Emmer, one of the state’s four Republicans in Congress, applauded Trump and Vance’s approach Friday in a post on the social platform X.
“Peace through strength is the only way forward,” he wrote, adding that Trump and Vance displayed “America First leadership.”
“The bloodshed must end, and President Trump is the master negotiator and peacemaker who can get it done,” Emmer wrote.
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