US president meets Zelenskyy at Vatican as popularity plunges at home

Donald Trump spent his Saturday at the Vatican, attending the funeral of Pope Francis along with his wife Melania and leaders from more than 150 countries. Before the ceremony, the US president met with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for the first time since their heated Oval Office exchange in February.

This time, the two men sat face to face on chairs drawn up in St Peter’s Basilica, after huddling briefly with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. The results of the quiet conversation were apparent soon after, when Trump posted on his social media platform that there was “no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days. It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently”.

The two men then emerged to take their places among the guests of honor at the funeral, with the one notable difference being that Zelenskyy was greeted with cheers from the assembled crowd outside.

Trump listened as Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re read a homily that seemed to nod at the tensions between Trump and the late pontiff, particularly over the White House policies on migration and the recent executive order on deportations.

“‘Build bridges, not walls’ was an exhortation he repeated many times,” Re said during his homily.

Trump then flew home on Air Force One to be greeted by new polling from a number of organizations that shows he is historically unpopular for a president nearing Day 100 of his term.

Here are the key stories at a glance:

At papal funeral, Trump has a revelation – about Russia

“It was a fitting moment for an epiphany, if that’s what this was” our global affairs correspondentAndrew Roth wrote of the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting. “The photographs released from the summit were dramatic: the two men sat alone in simple chairs in front of a mosaic of Jesus being baptised in the river Jordan. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy to Ukraine, felt compelled to quote the book of Matthew. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God’”, he wrote.

Soon after, came the Truth Social post from Trump suggesting that Russia’s slaughter of Ukrainian civilians this week, “makes me think that maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war.”

It was a “very symbolic meeting”, Zelenskyy said later, and it had the “potential to become historic, if we achieve joint results”.