The D Brief: Oval Office explosion; Spies target shaken feds; Strykers to the border; China’s battle automation; And a bit more.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s much-touted mineral-access agreement with Ukraine collapsed Friday ahead of a planned signing ceremony with visiting President Volodymir Zelenskyy. But what the world saw in that televised meeting inside the Oval Office was potentially a much more consequential collapse of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship under Trump. 

Rewind: The BBC posted video of the meeting and the New York Times published an extended transcript. Zelenskyy’s visit proceeded somewhat smoothly until the very end, when Trump and his Vice President JD Vance exploded in acrimony after blaming Russia’s Ukraine invasion on Trump’s predecessor. 

“We tried the pathway of Joe Biden, of thumping our chest and pretending that the president of the United States’ words mattered more than the president of the United States’ actions,” Vance said while reporters observed the increasingly tense exchange. “What makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy. That’s what President Trump is doing,” Vance said. 

“I’m not speaking about just Biden,” Zelenskyy replied. “But those times was Obama—[or] then-President Obama—then President Trump, then President Biden, now the President Trump. And God bless: Now President Trump will stop him. But during 2014, nobody stopped him. He just occupied and took. He killed people.”

“I think it’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance replied. “You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”

Have you said ‘thank you’ once this entire meeting? No,” Vance said loudly, according to Zelenskyy. 

• For the record, here are nearly three dozen times Zelenskyy has thanked the U.S., its elected representatives, and its people for American assistance to help Ukraine defend against Russia’s invasion.  

The exchange quickly descended into a tense back-and-forth between the three men, with Trump repeatedly saying, “Your country is in big trouble” before falsely alleging the U.S. has given Ukraine $350 billion. (The actual number is less than $183 billion, according to the U.S. office that monitors it.) “We gave you—through this stupid president—$350 billion. We gave you military equipment,” said Trump. 

“You don’t have the cards,” Trump said to Zelenskyy. “But once we sign that deal, you’re in a much better position. But you’re not acting at all thankful,” he added, before ending the meeting and sending the Ukrainians out of the Oval Office. And that deal Trump was referring to? Zelenskyy left Washington having never signed it. 

Trump’s top advisor later accused Zelenskyy of “fact-checking” the past instead of agreeing with Trump and Vance’s incorrect portrayal of Ukraine’s recent history. National security adviser Mike Waltz told right-wing Breitbart Radio that Zelenskyy acted like an “ex-girlfriend that wants to argue everything that you said nine years ago, rather than moving the relationship forward.”

Trump’s ardent loyalists on Capitol Hill jumped to his defense, with some—like Sen. Lindsey Graham, e.g.—insisting Zelenskyy resign or bend to Trump and Vance’s will. “He either needs to resign or send somebody over that we can do business with, or he needs to change,” Graham said on Friday. By Saturday, Graham had all but given up on the U.S. helping Ukraine, tweeting to Europeans, “Be my guest to defend Ukraine from Putin. It is long past time for the Europeans to show they are capable of defending their own continent.” Graham’s colleague in the senate, Tommy Tuberville, called Zelenskyy a “weasel” in a social-media post. 

Mississippi’s Roger Wicker deleted a tweet showing his support for Zelenskyy following a bipartisan senators’ meeting the two attended Friday morning. 

Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski was a Republican voice of dissent, writing Saturday on social media, “This week started with administration officials refusing to acknowledge that Russia started the war in Ukraine. It ends with a tense, shocking conversation in the Oval Office and whispers from the White House that they may try to end all U.S. support for Ukraine.”

“I know foreign policy is not for the faint of heart, but right now, I am sick to my stomach as the administration appears to be walking away from our allies and embracing Putin, a threat to democracy and U.S. values around the world,” said Murkowski. 

Related reading: “Did Russia Invade Ukraine? Is Putin a Dictator? We Asked Every Republican Member of Congress,” The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey reported Thursday. 

In a subsequent interview on Fox, Zelenskyy declined to apologize for speaking the truth to Trump and Vance, telling Bret Baier, “No, I respect the president and I respect the American people and if, I don’t know, I think that we have to be very open and very honest and I’m not sure that we did something bad.”

Trump, afterward: “He [Zelenskyy] disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace,” the president wrote on social media. 

Mark Hertling, former EUCOM commander: “Some have disappointed, some had bad policy, some made big mistakes. But I’ve never in my life been ashamed of American leaders. Until today.”

Now on the drawing board: “Ending all ongoing shipments of military aid to Ukraine,” according to the Washington Post’s John Hudson. 

In a largely symbolic gesture, Norwegian firm Haltbakk Bunkers announced it will stop selling fuel to U.S. naval vessels at Norway’s ports, citing Trump and Vance’s treatment of Zelenskyy. The firm’s owner, Gunnar Gran, said over the weekend that “not a liter” would be sold to U.S. troops or sailors “until Trump is finished.” 

In a statement, the company described Trump and Vance’s Oval Office behavior Friday as “a backstabbing TV show” and “the biggest shit show ever presented live on TV.” Gran, the owner, said, “We run a private limited company and choose our customers.” He also noted the firm stopped selling to Russia after Putin’s full-scale invasion began three years ago. 

“We lost a lot of revenue, but we have a moral compass,” said Gran. In its statement, Haltbakk Bunkers encouraged others in Europe to exclude Trump’s military from fuel sales, and declared, “Slava Ukraini!”

For what it’s worth, Gran’s firm sold just three million liters of fuel to the U.S. Navy in 2024. 

And Norway’s military chief vowed no significant disruptions, promising, “American forces will continue to receive the supply and support they require.” 

Read more: 

• “After Oval Office disaster, Europe emerges as Ukraine’s best hope,” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Friday evening;
• “European Defense Stocks Surge After Leaders Aim to Broker Ukraine Peace Plan,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday morning;  
• “Who Will Join Europe’s ‘Coalition of the Willing’ to Help Ukraine?” the New York Times reported Monday; 
• “Macron urges Europe to boost defense spending to over 3 percent of GDP,” Politico reported Monday;
• And “Kremlin: Trump foreign policy ‘largely aligns’ with our vision,” The Hill reported Monday.  

Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Bradley Peniston and Ben Watson. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1943, hundreds of Londoners were crushed and 173 died while trying to enter an air-raid shelter at the Bethnal Green tube station. “No bombs were actually dropped in the East End that night but the government kept the tragedy secret to avoid it being used as propaganda by enemy forces,” the BBC reports. 

Workforce under stress

Russia, China working to recruit fired, disgruntled federal workers, CNN reports, citing “four people familiar with recent US intelligence on the issue and a document reviewed by CNN. The intelligence indicates that foreign adversaries are eager to exploit the Trump administration’s efforts to conduct mass layoffs across the federal workforce – a plan laid out by the Office of Personnel Management earlier this week.” Read on, here.

SecDef to employees: comply with the next “what you did last week” email. The Defense Department’s civilian workers can expect a second email from the Office of Personnel Management asking them to lay out in five bullet points what they accomplished last week—and this time, they must respond, the defense secretary said in a Thursday memo. 

The memo is an attempt to avoid a repeat of the confusion and stress engendered by a similar Feb. 22 memo. DOGE chief Elon Musk tweeted that failure to comply would mean “resignation”; Hegseth and several other agency chiefs eventually told their staffs to disregard it. More details, here.

Pentagon guts national-security program that harnessed social science. Science mag: “Dozens of researchers with grants under the Minerva Research Initiative (MRI)—studying violent extremism, disinformation, and threats from climate change, for example—have had their grants terminated in recent days.” Read on, here. 

New: SecDef Hegseth ordered CYBERCOM to stop offensive cyber ops against Russia, Martin Matishak of The Record reported Friday. 

Still unknown: The scope, duration, and implications of the order, Matishak writes. The New York Times confirmed the cyber stand-down, and described it as an apparent effort to bring Russia into “a new relationship with the United States.”

For the record: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency says it’s still defending U.S. critical infrastructure. 

Expert reax: “If true, this policy shift will make America less secure in cyberspace because it violates fundamental principles of international relations and cybersecurity,” said retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The administration appears to believe that it will be rewarded with reciprocal restraint; Putin's previous performances call this theory into question,” he said. 

“This is not a partisan issue—both parties have long recognized the challenges the United States faces in defending its cyberspace,” said Montgomery. “By effectively unilaterally disarming in the digital domain, we sacrifice our leverage and invite further aggression, not concessions,” he said. 

More troops to border

The U.S. will send combat vehicles to the Mexican border, the Defense Department said Saturday. A Stryker Brigade Combat Team with about 4,400 soldiers equipped with 20-ton armored fighting vehicles will be dispatched within weeks. “It was not clear Saturday whether vehicles will be mounted with weapons during the deployment,” the Washington Post reported.

An aviation brigade is also to be deployed: roughly 650 troops and “UH-60 Black Hawks for command and medical evacuation, and CH-47 Chinooks for heavy lift,” said the Pentagon statement, which you can read here.

The Stryker deployment may mark the first troops deployed for border combat instead of “sustainment and logistics.” More of the latter are also on the way, NORTHCOM announced on Friday: 1,140 troops from seven units. 

NPR: “The latest troop deployment comes despite a sharp decline in the number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since a peak in 2021—a number that has dropped even further since Trump took office.”

Defense systems

A 3D-printed submarine? Not likely, but maybe something close. The U.S. Navy is bumping up its use of additive manufacturing to make critical, delay-prone submarine parts, said Christopher Miller, executive director of Naval Sea Systems Command. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams has more, here.

Lastly today: new products show China’s quest to automate battle. “The drones that fanned out during a recent People’s Liberation Army exercise were dispatched by the Intelligent Precision Strike System, a new product from Chinese defense giant Norinco that used the UAVs’ real-time data to model the battlefield, track targets, devise strike plans, distribute firing information, and execute follow-up strikes,” write BluePath Labs’ Tye Graham and New America’s Peter W. Singer in the latest edition of The China Intelligence, an occasional column about the Chinese military based on open-source information. 

Norinco’s IPPS “epitomizes how the PLA aims to ensure dominance in the next era of conflict: with autonomous capabilities that blur the line between human oversight and machine execution.” Read it, here. ]]>