In an interview with Time Magazine, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy revealed that he had brought the heavyweight boxing championship bet won by Oleksandr Usyk to the White House and planned to gift it to President Donald Trump as a show of goodwill. But as the meeting began, he did not grab the belt placed beside him and instead picked a folder containing graphic images of Ukrainian prisoners of war.
“That’s tough stuff,” Trump told him as he looked over the images at a point when the meeting did not turn into a shouting match.
“Those pictures, according to some US officials, marked the point when the meeting went wrong. Had Zelensky offered the championship belt, the gesture might have lightened the mood. The photos had the opposite effect. They seemed to get Trump’s guard up, as though he were being blamed for the suffering of those soldiers,” the Time Magazine report said.
But Zelenskyy does not regret his decision of reaching the wrong gift, the report said. “He has family, loved ones, children. He has to feel the things that every person feels. What I wanted to show were my values. But then, well, the conversation went in another direction,” Zelenskyy said in the interview.
After Zelenskyy showed him the pictures, the shouting began as Vice President JD Vance accused him of not being grateful. Zelenskyy left the White House without Usyk’s belt, and he is not sure what happened to what was the actual gift for Trump.
“Maybe it’s still sitting there,” Zelenskyy said.
A White House staff reportedly confirmed to Time that the belt was eventually picked up and was put in Trump’s private dining room with other gifts.
“But in that moment there was the sense of not being allies, or not taking the position of an ally,” Zelensky said. “In that conversation, I was defending the dignity of Ukraine.”
