Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said during an interview that the “future of the free world is before us” in light of the heated White House meeting on Friday between President Trump, Vice President Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“This is no time for an apology war. There are lives at stake. There is peace at stake, and the future of really, I think it is not exaggeration to say, the future of Europe, the future of the free world, is before us,” Klobuchar said during her Friday night appearance on CNN when asked if she thought Ukraine’s president should apologize for the contentious back-and-forth, something that Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested he should.
Klobuchar, who was part of a bipartisan group of senators that met with Zelensky hours before the Oval Office huddle, argued that letting Russian President Vladimir Putin “march through Ukraine, to go at these negotiations with surrender instead of strength, is a big mistake.”
“One of the most troubling things to me was when Vice President Vance, as I noted today, as he accused President Zelensky of never thanking America,” the Minnesota senator said on CNN’s “The Source.”
“And as you just recently showed on your show, repeatedly, I have heard President Zelensky thank Republicans, thank Democrats, in private meetings, in public events, over and over,” she added.
Klobuchar was one of many Democratic lawmakers who rebuked Trump and Vance over their Friday spat with Zelensky, which appeared to have strained the relationship between Washington and Kyiv.
The bilateral meeting went awry when Vance suggested that Trump would forge a peace agreement to end the three-year war through diplomacy. Zelensky questioned the point with Putin’s actions that quashed previous ceasefires.
Vance said Zelensky was “disrespectful” for debating the premise in front of the media and that he was insufficiently grateful for the assistance that has been provided to Ukraine, adding that Kyiv’s head “should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to his conflict.”
Zelensky said Washington has not directly felt the implications of the conflict due to its distance from Eastern Europe, a point that promoted a forceful response from Trump.
“You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards,” Trump told Ukraine’s president, emphasizing that he is “gambling with the lives of millions of people, you’re gambling with World War III … and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, that’s backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have.”
Trump wrote after the meeting that Zelensky is not prepared for a peace agreement that would end the devastating war and that the Ukrainian president can return to Washington “when he is ready for Peace.”
Zelensky said on Fox News hours after the heated discussion in the Oval Office that he would not apologize and that the meet-up ended badly for both sides.
Klobuchar said Friday night that she has spoken to Republican senators who are interested in working on repairing the relationship between Kyiv and Washington.
“All President Zelensky was saying is that we need to make sure that the agreement is firm, or Vladimir Putin, as he has in the past, will violate it,” the Minnesota Democrat said.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, the majority of European leaders stood behind Zelensky after he met with Trump.
The Minnesota senator said three things will be important for fixing the relations between Ukraine and the U.S. The first would be signing the minerals agreement, which was supposed to be done on Friday but was canceled after the fallout.
Second, it would be standing strong with Washington’s allies, and the final component to get it “back on track” is to “just remember what is at stake here for American leadership across the world, and everything is on the table.”
“I think we should be, in America, moving forward with our allies, and I would hope that tomorrow, that we can start resetting this again instead of dividing everyone,” she said on CNN.
