On July 28, 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy (left) meets with US President Donald Trump (Republican) at the White House during his visit to Washington, DC.
Zelenskiy’s Social Media Accounts | Anadolu | Getty Images
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited the White House on Tuesday to meet with President Donald Trump, seeking to shore up support for Kiev as the conflict between Russia and Iran shows signs of abating.
The meeting took place at a critical stage in the US war against Iran and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Trump suspended airstrikes on Iran as part of an effort to give diplomacy another chance, but President Zelensky was buoyed by a series of successful strikes on Russian territory.
The meeting is a chance for Zelensky to further improve his relationship with Trump, some 17 months after the Oval Office meeting that turned into an unusual shouting match.
The trip also coincides with a new push in Congress to tighten sanctions against Moscow. The Senate is scheduled to vote Tuesday night on a bill sponsored by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham that would target Russia and countries that continue to buy its energy exports.
The bipartisan measure would impose tariffs on products from Russia’s biggest buyers of oil and natural gas, including China and India. Russian President Vladimir Putin, senior political and military officials, financial institutions and major energy projects are also subject to sanctions.
Mr. Zelensky is scheduled to meet with senators on Tuesday night after Mr. Graham’s funeral, the reason for his visit to Washington.
Despite the actions on Capitol Hill, no immediate end to the global conflict appears to be in sight. Indeed, a widespread Middle East war threatens to overlap with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in recent days.
Kiev launched an attack on an Iranian commercial ship in the Caspian Sea on Saturday, with the Iranian government saying one sailor was killed and several others injured. The Islamic Republic has threatened to retaliate over the attack, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi saying on social media: “We cannot go unanswered.”
In a post on Saturday’s X, President Zelenskyy said Ukraine “made very strong results in long-range attacks in the Caspian Sea, not only on warships, but also on vessels used for military cargo transport involving Iran.”
Christopher Glanville, managing director of TS Lombard, described Ukraine’s attack on Iranian ships in the Caspian Sea as a “very important” development.
“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy himself has spoken approvingly of these attacks, justifying them on the basis that Ukrainian intelligence has evidence that Russian intelligence is assisting Iran in targeting U.S. military facilities in neighboring Middle Eastern countries,” Glanville told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on Monday.
“This is a collision and a merger of these wars. Fundamentally I think this is very important. We don’t know how important it is militarily, of course, but Iran has said in public statements that it will fight back, and Ukraine has said that it has made a mistake that it will regret,” he added.
Glanville said Ukrainian officials may be calculating that Iran has its hands full with the war with the U.S. “But as it happens, military exchanges between the U.S. and Iran have disappeared in the last couple of days. So, yeah, this is a big deal.”
War is becoming “increasingly intertwined”
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sibikha said on Monday that Iran’s threat of retaliation was “unjustified and baseless.”
The Tehran regime is “a direct accomplice of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and is fueling Moscow’s criminal war with weapons that have been killing Ukrainians since 2022,” Sibiha said via X, referring to the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Russia has long used the Iranian-designed Shahid drone in its war against Ukraine, a weapon sometimes referred to by analysts as a “poor man’s cruise missile.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is pictured on July 27, 2026, during a visit to a naval base in Portsmouth on the south coast of England.
Aaron Chown | AFP | Getty Images
Hamidreza Azizi, an Iranian security expert and visiting fellow at the Berlin-based think tank SWP, said that on a political level, Iran could respond to the Ukrainian attack by recognizing Crimea and Donbas as part of Russian territory.
“In any case, what is clear is that Iran’s war is increasingly intertwined with two other conflicts: the Saudi-Houthi conflict and the Russia-Ukraine war,” Azizi said in a social media post Sunday.
“With each passing day, the war is developing into an increasingly complex and multidimensional international conflict,” he added.
—CNBC’s Azhar Sukri contributed to this report.
