With the new American president, Ukrainians may have hopes but should prepare for the worst.
The day after Trump’s election, Ukrainian media reports sounded like obituaries. “The blue wall failed”; “Ukraine will be thrown under the bus”; “Ukraine is f***ed”; “NATO will collapse without American membership”; “A great victory for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea”; “Welcome to the new world order of Fascists”. This is only a sample of comments by Ukrainian bloggers and journalists.
International experts looked less emotional but equally gloom. “A second Trump presidency in the US would be disastrous on every level. [And] the first victim would be Ukraine,” professed woefully Anders Aslund . “He [Trump] promises to end the war in Ukraine in a day, something that could only happen on terms favorable to Russia and a man he admires, President Vladimir Putin,” pondered Dan Balz of The Washington Post . ”The road ahead for Kyiv is extremely stark,”: CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh summed up the dominant mood.
Adding insult to injury
The timing for all this news can hardly be less appropriate for Ukrainians as they suffer painful setbacks both on the southeastern frontlines and in western political forums.
Domestically, they gradually retreat in Donbas, losing village after village under Russian attacks and its formidable preponderance in the air and artillery. In October, they lost 500 sq. km of territory – more than at any other time since March 2022, and probably also 30,000 soldiers killed and wounded (provided that Ukrainian losses are somewhat comparable with the Russian which are reported as over 1,000 casualties a day). Civilian casualties have been equally dreadful since strikes on civilian objects became a daily routine, too repetitive and therefore boring for international coverage, but bringing about a daily toll of at least several people killed and wounded, if not several dozen – as recurrently happens in Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro, Zaporizhia, and elsewhere.
On the political/diplomatic front, Ukrainians got a lukewarm response to Volodymyr Zelensky’s victory plan , extended ban on the use of the Western weapons to strike deeper into Russian territory beyond border regions, persistent delays in supply of much-needed artillery ammunition and anti-missile systems, the deployment of 8,000 to 12,000 North Korean troops at Ukraine’s border, multiple hurdles from the old Hungarian frenemies in the EU, and minor but pretty annoying blackmailing from the new Polish government that appeared no less nationalistic than the previous one. For many Ukrainians, Donald Trump’s victory came just as one more insult adding to daily injuries.
Putting on a brave face
The next reaction to this event, after the initial shock, was a sober analysis of domestic problems, government failures, and military deficiencies, with a stress on civilia mobilization and the gradual build-up of national self-sufficiency. Another kind of reaction was an attempt to suppress panic and alleviate anxiety. A popular image of Trump as an erratic and unpredictable politician was interpreted as a mixed blessing, while highlighting possible positive aspects of his cowboy-style political manner and double-edged unpredictability.
Commentators recalled that it was Donald Trump who broke Obama’s taboo on lethal weapons for Ukraine and supplied in particular the Javelin missiles that played a decisive role in repelling Russians from Kyiv on the first days of the war. They were thrilled with Trump’s “peace through strength” words, which he used during his previous presidency from 2016 to 2020, and which were a trademark of Ronald Reagan’s policy in the 1980s. “It is no coincidence that Ronald Reagan is now mentioned so often,” President Zelensky said in his congratulatory speech, titled notably the ”True peace can only be achieved by the truly brave” (a subtle hint at Trump’s earlier brags to finish the Russo-Ukrainian war in 24 hours). “People want confidence, they want freedom, they want a normal life… [Both] the US and the whole world will definitely benefit from this Reagan-style policy.”
A week later, in an interview with Ukrainian public radio, Zelensky expressed the hope that the war will end “faster” when the new American resident assumes power. “This is their approach, their promise to their society, and it is also very important to them,” he said. One of his allies, the head of the parliamentary committee on foreign relations and inter-parliamentary cooperation, Oleksandr Merezhko, went even further, declaring that he, as an MP and a law professor, has nominated Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. In his first term, Mr Merezhko explained, the US president facilitated the Abraham Accords, curbed Russian aggression against Ukraine by providing Ukrainians with lethal weapons and blocking the Russian Nord Stream-2 project. And now, judging from the president-elect’s statements, Dr Merezhko maintained, we may conclude that he has a viable plan to achieve a just peace in Ukraine and in Europe.
If there was not already a precedent of awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to another American president for something he has not yet done but was only poised to do, the initiative may have looked as a sheer buffo. But it might also be an expression of desperate hope and a magic belief that the new American president will follow the script and assume the role of another Reagan, having neither the integrity nor the competence of his glorious predecessor. However wishful that thinking might be, Ukrainian politicians have little choice but to make awkward curtseys to the erratic man with the hope to incline him to the right, i.e. toward Reaganism.
The silver lining of dark clouds
Some Ukrainian hopes are not fully groundless. Donald Trump’s first term was indeed not as bad as predicted. American institutions appeared quite strong and resilient, the expert community not fully impotent and subordinate. And the signals that have been coming in the meantime from a victorious Donald Trump’s camp indicate that MAGA radicals do not (yet) have the upper hand in the president elect’s presumed nominations to the forthcoming government. On the one hand, indeed, Donald Trump’s maverick ally Elon Musk and his hubristic son Donald Trump Jr. make disparaging statements on Ukraine and its president; Trump himself announced a number of odd appointments that shocked specialists (Fox News presenter Pete Hegseth as the would-be secretary of defense bewildered the Pentagon, while some other Trump nominees like would-be attorney general Matt Gaetz evoked the memory of the Roman emperor Caligula who brought his beloved horse to the Senate). Two very competent and unambiguously pro-Ukrainian politicians – former Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – were iced out by Trump as not sufficiently loyal, even though the latter had good (and reasonable) hopes to become secretary of defense.
Yet, on the other hand, the very fact that the odious Matt Gaetz has ultimately withdrawn his name from consideration as the President’s possible pick as attorney general proves the robustness of American institutions which, as Alexander Motyl optimistically remarked, are still “barriers to radical change simply by virtue of establishing set patterns of generally accepted behavior.” By the same token, the “traditional” Republicans in the Senate did not support the radical MAGA candidate Rick Scott to lead the Republican majority in the chamber but elected instead moderate John Thune. Experts predict that the president may have more setbacks in both the Congress and House of Representatives since Republicans hold a very slim majority in both chambers and any wavering of the Republican MPs may bring down their numerical preponderance.
At least two important positions in the eventual US administration will be given reportedly to Ukraine-friendly politicians: senator Marco Rubio is poised to become the Secretary of State, and congressman Michael Waltz will become National Security Adviser. The third nomination, seen as favorable for Ukraine, of the former director of national intelligence Richard Grenell to the post of the President’s Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia has not, however, materialized. Donald Trump picked ultimately his staunch loyalist Lt. General (Ret.) Keith Kellogg for this role, sending a shiver down the spines of Ukrainians and their supporters. Not long ago, Mr Kellogg and his colleague and former chief in the Trump-era National Security Council Fred Fleitz published a report that was broadly considered as a draft of Donald Tramp’s peace plan for Ukraine and Russia. Many experts agreed that it was more about appeasement of the aggressor than a just and sustainable peace. The plan “very well could put an end to Russia’s war in short order, but only by giving Moscow everything it wants,” Noah Rothman summed up in an article headlined sarcastically “Peace through Surrender?” (a mocking paraphrase of both Trump’s and Kellog’s & Fleitz’s boastful rhetoric about “peace through strength”).
In another expression of pluralism bordering on incoherence Donald Trump picked another media person (in addition to Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz, Mehmet Oz and several other people from an industry he is fond of) Sebastian Gorka to serve as one of Michael Waltz’s top deputies, whose recipes differ notably from Trump’s mainstream advisers. In a recent interview on Times Radio, Mr Gorka called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “thug” and said the incoming administration could ramp up US military aid to Ukraine beyond the current level of support in an effort to bring about a swift end to the war. Literally, he said, “I will give away one tip that the president has mentioned. He will say to that murderous former KGB colonel, that thug who runs the Russian Federation: ‘You will negotiate now or the aid we have given Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts.’ That’s how he will force those gentlemen to come to an arrangement that stops the bloodshed.”
Whatever American politicians may say, they are constrained in their decision-making not only by Russia’s refusal to negotiate in good faith, but also by some normative principles that cannot be easily sacrificed without tarnishing their image and, crucially, by their own electorate who is overwhelmingly on Ukraine’s side. Only 2% of respondents in the latest opinion survey (August 2024) declared being sympathetic to Russia, while 62% (including 58% Republicans) felt more sympathetic to Ukraine. This pro-Ukrainian attitude is quite stable: it declined slightly in 2023, but has increased again since last Fall.
It seems the American political class is fully aware of this. “Ukraine matters to US security for four blunt reasons. Putin’s war is a direct threat to European security, a clear challenge to our NATO allies, an attack on our shared values, and a frontal assault on the rules-based international order that keeps us all safe,” US secretary of defense Lloyd J . Austin III recently declared upon his snap visit to Kyiv.
Even Trump’s obsession with China, which is seen (perhaps reasonably) as a much bigger strategic threat to the US and world order than Russia, might be beneficial for Ukraine inasmuch as the US president and his team grasp the obvious. The way from Beijing to Taipei goes through Russia’s victory in Ukraine.
Still, even the most optimistic scenarios with regard to Trump’s Ukraine policy provide no clear answer to the most daunting question: how to finish the murderous, genocidal war that the powerful nuclear-armed state wages against a much weaker neighbor, with the openly stated goal of its thorough elimination.
Russian goals unchanged
The simplest way to achieve peace within “24 hours” (as Donald Trump boasted) would be to throw Ukraine under the bus, i. e, to force the Ukrainian government to capitulate unconditionally, by accepting all of Moscow’s demands. The Kremlin would hardly be satisfied with anything less. As Putin reiterated shortly after Trump’s election: “Russia will interact with the new administration when it comes to the White House, firmly upholding Russia’s national interests and working to achieve all the goals of the special military operation [as they define euphemistically the war aimed at elimination of the Ukrainian state and extermination of all disobedient Ukrainians as alleged “Nazis”]. Our conditions have not changed, and Washington is well aware of them.”
Indeed, as American historian Robert Kagan remarked sarcastically, why should Putin demand less? “Because he recognizes the injustice of his own actions?” In fact, Ukrainians are not the main obstacle to a peace settlement, as Moscow propagandists claim and many foreigners tend to believe. “If the United States and NATO wanted to force Kyiv to accept it,” Kagan contends, “they could. Brave and determined as the Ukrainians may be, they cannot continue fighting without US and Western support and so must eventually accept the West’s diktat” – just as the Czechs were forced to accept Chamberlain’s notorious “peace for our time” in 1938. But what about Vladimir Putin? Why must he go along?
“It would be one thing if the United States, NATO and Ukraine were in a position effectively to dictate terms to Putin — as might have been the case had the Biden administration not failed to give Ukraine what it needed in the first months of the war, and as still might be the case if the administration gave the permissions and weaponry Ukraine needs right now. But it didn’t, and it isn’t.”
So, Kagan maintains, unless Russia is demonstrably losing the war, Putin has no reason to accept any peace deal. And at the moment, he is fully confident that it is Ukraine and the West, not Russia, who are “short of breath.” Optimists may believe the unbelievable – that Donald Trump would not remove but double military support for Ukraine (as Mike Pompeo implied), and would stand with “Putin’s threats of escalation that have so far frightened the Biden administration”, but he is no match for Reagan and is unlikely to become one.
Missed opportunities
In January 2022, the Americans and their allies had a good chance to prevent the war if they had refrained from signaling to Putin their unwillingness to interfere (as Biden infamously did) and promptly dispatched instead a limited contingent of US-UK troops to Ukraine upon the request of the Ukrainian government fully in line with the spirit (if not the letter) of the Budapest memorandum. This would have definitely been enough to discourage Putin from a full-scale invasion. All his bullishness and bluffing skills notwithstanding, he rolls back all the time he encounters real strength and determination. The most he could have done at the time would have been to escalate in Donbas on behalf of the DNR-LNR – but Ukrainians could have managed on their own.
Donald Trump and his advisers are basically right when they say that “Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine was an avoidable crisis,” that it could have been prevented if Americans and their Western allies had not blinked before Putin. It is another question whether Trump would have done the deterrence job much better than Biden. But the option was real and pretty feasible. As James Sherr argues (without any references to Trump), “one big part of [that job] would have been US President Joe Biden stating very clearly on national television: ‘the United States will not stand idly by and watch Ukraine be dismantled and destroyed.’ It would have involved after the [Russian] mobilisation of March 2021 a serious program of arming Ukraine, creating institutions, and joint bodies to assess the threat together and assess the armaments required. It certainly would have ruled out Biden initiating a summit with Putin. It would have ruled out backing off for every challenge Russia posed in 2021 because there were others. Biden was tested multiple times by the Russians in 2021, and he failed every single one of those tests, in my view, he wasn’t even aware of some of them. In Russian history, you could not find an example, in my view, where the Russians have attacked a stronger adversary. If they feared the consequence of attacking Ukraine would have been massive and immediate support by the West, if they saw that support emerging already, I don’t think they would have done that. They attacked Ukraine because first, they thought Ukrainians themselves were weak and incapable and that the West was not going to respond effectively.”
It is much more difficult to stop Russians now when they advancing full stream regardless of tremendous military losses, and when the Russian dictator has invested so much of his symbolical capital and all his personal future in this millenarian adventure.
Peace through strength
Most experts agree that Ukrainians cannot liberate all occupied territories without direct Western military engagement, but the chances of mustering such a coalition against the nuclear armed Russia are close to zero.
So, if the first best option (‘peace and justice’) is unachievable, Ukrainians should consider the second-best option that might be a decent peace, while the issue of justice is relegated to some remote future. Richard Haass (former president of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington) in his detailed plan of such a settlement recognizes that Putin would not be eager to accept it unless he got a strong signal from the West that his army “will not prevail on the battlefield,” which means that military support for Ukraine should be doubled.
But even if he accepts a deal, he definitely cannot be trusted. Ukraine will need firm security guarantees from the West and a continuing flow of arms for the long haul. Even if Putin rejects the deal, Haass contends, “the initiative [of armistice] should make it less difficult to galvanize continued military and economic support for Ukraine. It would highlight that it really is Putin’s ambitions, not Zelensky’s, that stand in the way of an end to the fighting. Either way, Ukraine would be better off than it is now.” There are too many ‘ifs’ and ‘unlesses’ in Haass’ plan but as a template for Trump’s peacemaking it is certainly more responsible and perhaps feasible than simply leaving Ukraine at Putin’s mercy.
So far politicians have paid little attention to the peacemaking proposals made by several wise economists, most recently by 2024 Nobel Prize winner Simon Johnson. His recipe is rather simple and does not require much battlefield escalation but requires strong political will. In a nutshell, it is a replay of Reagan’s policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, launched in particular after Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan. It strikes Russia where it really hurts – its gas and oil exports that make up to 50% of its budget revenues. Without that money Moscow simply goes bankrupt – as happened in the 1980s. There is no need to completely block those exports, putting at risk the stability of the global oil market where the share of Russian export is 8%. It is enough to lower the price cap from the current $60 a barrel to $15-20 (which is reportedly its production cost), to curb the activity of the Russian ‘shadow fleet’, and impose secondary sanctions on anyone who violates these measures. This might be difficult to implement but is definitely worth trying.
Otherwise just peace in Ukraine will remain a remote prospect, achieved at the highest cost, if at all, on the battlefield. Ukrainians may still have hopes but should prepare for the worst. After three years of dubious Western homeotherapy that neither heals nor kills the patient but, rather, keeps him on life support, Ukrainians under Donald Trump’s presidency face radical surgery that may push them toward a decent life or, quite possibly, Putin’s graveyard.
Mykola Ryabchuk is a research director at the Institute of Political and Nationality Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. He has written extensively on civil society, nation-state building, national identity, and post-communist transition. One of his books has been translated into French: De la 'Petite-Russie' à l'Ukraine, published in Paris by L'Harmattan in 2003.
