When a man has everything, what do you get him?
The solution, as it has always been, is something that money cannot purchase if you are a Ukrainian politician hoping to win over a sitting US president who may harbor uncharitable views about your nation.
Oleksandr Merezhko, the head of the international affairs committee of the Ukrainian parliament, has therefore put Donald Trump forth as the recipient of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
Since Mr Trump’s election victory in November, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s leader, has dispatched a coterie of his most trusted allies, among them Mr Merezhko, to Washington to court the president-elect’s circle.
Mr Merezhko may have gone further than his colleagues, he acknowledges over a cup of coffee in a Kyiv café, admitting that he has faced accusations in some quarters for laying it on a little too thick.
But he insists the nomination is not, or at least not entirely, about flattery.
“When you do something so visible, there is inevitably criticism,” he said.
“Some say that this is just about buttering up Trump, about flattering him and, of course, there is a psychological element in nominating him.
“I am appealing to his desire to be a great politician. But there are plenty of other reasons, too.”
In the back of many Ukrainian politicians’ minds is not just the admiration the president-elect has previously expressed about Vladimir Putin, but also the lingering suspicion that Mr Trump likes neither their country or its leader.
In his first term as president, his relationship with Mr Zelensky was little short of disastrous.
Mr Trump seemed to share Putin’s belief that Ukraine was not a proper country, and appeared convinced that it was the Ukrainian government rather than the Kremlin which sought to manipulate the 2016 US presidential election.
To make matters worse, an attempt to coerce Mr Zelensky into ordering an investigation into the Ukrainian business activities of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, by withholding US military aid led to Mr Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019.
Given the stakes of the war with Russia, Mr Merezhko says he and his colleagues are doing everything they can to give the incoming president a more favourable impression of the Zelensky administration.
“He doesn’t have many good associations with Ukraine and I want him to have good associations with us,” Mr Merezhko said.
A Nobel nomination may just prove to be an astute piece of diplomacy. Mr Trump has publicly coveted one on several occasions, saying that he deserved one “for a lot of things”, for work he did to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula and to persuade Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s then dictator, to hand over some of his chemical weapons.
“I save a big war, I save a couple of them,” he said in 2020.
Never one to deny that the way to his heart was often through his ego, Mr Trump has praised previous politicians who allegedly nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in the past, including Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan.
Mr Abe, who was assassinated in 2022, never confirmed whether he submitted a nomination or not.
Mr Merezhko said he had nominated Mr Trump for the award on the basis of the work he had done restoring diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab states under the Abraham Accords.
He added that he had carefully worded his nomination to encourage Mr Trump to bring peace to Ukraine based on international law rather than the appeasement of Russian aggression through territorial concessions.
Mr Merezhko says he has worked to win over members of Mr Trump’s circle who might be tempted to advocate for just that for more than a year, reaching out first to the Heritage Foundation, a Right-wing think tank that has drawn up much of the incoming president’s policy agenda.
He later forged ties with Republican congressmen from the MAGA wing of the party, after concluding that Ukraine had spent too much time cultivating relations with Reaganites rather than Trump allies on Capitol Hill.
He has also made contact with Elbridge Colby, Mr Trump’s pick as undersecretary for policy at the Pentagon.
Mr Colby, a highly influential figure who wrote Mr Trump’s national defence strategy in 2019, has long argued that the United States needs to stop arming Ukraine and arm Taiwan instead, leading to fears that he will push for an abandonment of Kyiv.
While on the campaign trail, Mr Trump claimed that he would end the Ukraine war within 24 hours although Gen Keith Kellogg, his incoming Russia-Ukraine envoy, has since said that he hoped to have a solution to the war within 100 days.
Other advisers have privately said they did not expect a meaningful breakthrough for at least six months.
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