Mykhailo Podolyak was cautiously optimistic about Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In an interview with Meduza in the days after the new U.S. president’s inauguration, the top advisor to Volodymyr Zelensky said he saw a change in Trump’s rhetoric towards Russia that gave him “some hope.” But in the weeks since, Trump has abandoned talk of putting pressure on Moscow and adopted a harsher attitude towards Ukraine: calling Zelensky a “dictator without elections,” demanding that Kyiv sign an unfavorable deal to exchange Ukrainian natural resources for military aid, and sending a delegation to conduct bilateral peace talks with Russia. To find out how officials in Kyiv view this change, Meduza called Podolyak for another wide-ranging interview. The following translation has been edited and abridged for length and clarity.