Ukraine president meets Trump over Russia war
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
President Trump is holding talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, at the White House - with the visitor hoping for increased US support against Russia. Mr Zelensky is expected to ask the US for long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Also in the programme: there's been a last-minute adjournment of an agreement to reduce carbon emissions from global shipping; and how an ancient Roman gravestone found its way into the back garden of a New Orleans house.
(Picture: Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky participates in a bilateral meeting with US President Trump at the White House. Credit: AARON SCHWARTZ/POOL/EPA/Shutterstock)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.6 | Welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul Henley, the programme's coming to you live from London. |
| 0:16.9 | The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has now met Donald Trump at the White House. |
| 0:22.1 | They discussed whether Ukraine could be given powerful, long-range missiles to use against Russia. |
| 0:28.5 | President Trump had already said that the Kremlin was worried about that prospect. |
| 0:32.7 | Ukrainian politicians today denied the new weapons could escalate the conflict further. Shortly before |
| 0:38.9 | their meeting, the two men faced questions from journalists in the White House, asked what the |
| 0:43.5 | US would do if they needed the Tomahawk missiles themselves. Donald Trump said this. |
| 0:49.3 | Well, that's a problem. We need tomahawks and we need a lot of other things that we've been sending over the last four years to Ukraine. We've been, you know, we gave them a lot. Now we have a different situation. We send it to the European Union. They pay for it and all that and they have plenty of money. But we, it's beyond the money. You know, we need Tomahawks or we need a lot of other weapons that we're sending to Ukraine. |
| 1:14.0 | One of the reasons we want to get this war over is exactly that. |
| 1:17.9 | It's not easy for us to give. |
| 1:19.5 | You're talking about massive numbers of very powerful weapons. |
| 1:23.6 | So that's one of the things we'll be talking about. |
| 1:26.2 | Hopefully they won't need it. |
| 1:27.4 | Hopefully we'll be able to get the war over without thinking about Tomahawk. |
| 1:31.5 | President Zelensky suggested his country and the US could exchange Tomahawks for Ukrainian drones for their mutual benefit. |
| 1:39.6 | You don't use just Tamahawks. |
| 1:41.4 | If you want to target a military goal, you need thousands of drones. It goes |
| 1:48.5 | together with such missiles. Ukraine has such thousands of our production drones, but we don't |
| 1:54.8 | have tamahawks. That's why we need tamahawks. But the United States is a very strong production. And the United States has |
| 2:04.3 | Tomahawks and other missiles, very strong missiles. But they can have our thousands of drones. |
| 2:10.7 | That's why we can work together, where we can strengthen American production. |
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