What does Trump’s election victory mean for Ukraine?

We all know that US President-elect Donald Trump is big on words, but that his actions don’t always mirror his rhetoric. He has said on numerous occasions that he would end Russia’s war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”, but what is that likely to mean in practice?

The most widely used adjective to describe Trump (or the most widely used adjective that I can repeat in print) is “unpredictable”. His actions are impossible to second guess, but what we do know is that Russian president Vladimir Putin will be dancing a jig (inwardly at least) at the prospect of a second Trump term.

Russia has played an active role in helping to influence in Trump’s favour the outcome of all three presidential elections he has contested. A US investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russian troll farms had disseminated propaganda aimed at damaging the Democratic Party and attacking its 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, as well as hacking the Democratic Party campaign and promoting Trump. During this year’s campaign, the US government in September sanctioned high-profile Russian figures, including Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, for allegedly interfering in the election and seized internet domains linked to Russian propaganda.

Trump has repeatedly touted his close relationship with Putin, and the two are reputed to have participated in frequent phone calls. His past remarks on the Russian invasion of Ukraine make troubling reading. He has described the Kremlin’s actions as “savvy” and “genius”, and declared that he would not help protect NATO allies that fail to allocate at least 2% of their GDP to defence: “I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills,” he said in February. He has also described Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as “one of the greatest salesmen in history,” for his success in obtaining billions of dollars of US support for Ukraine.

But Putin is a wily old fox. His expectations for the outcome of his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 may have been wildly misguided (a “special military operation” intended to last two weeks has rumbled on for close to 1,000 days) but he can still outsmart Trump any day of the week. Recent comments by Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov hint that Putin isn’t going to make it easy for the incoming US president.

“We know him from his previous quest for power and we believe that some of his promises, in which he spoke of a quick resolution of the situation in Ukraine, are nothing more than rhetoric,” Ryabkov told Russian news agency Interfax. Moscow currently only conceives of ending the war on its own terms, he continued. "There is no opportunism here and our interests do not depend on who occupies the Oval Office.”

President Zelensky may have been quick to congratulate Trump on his victory, but his election win has met with deep fear and despondency in Ukraine. All his campaign rhetoric indicates that Trump will withdraw financial support for Ukraine and try to broker a peace deal. This manifesto represents a lose-lose for Kyiv. Without US weaponry and ammunition, Ukraine would quickly cede territory on the battlefield; and any deal is likely to favour Russia, with the added fear that Putin would fail to honour the terms of the treaty and advance again in the future.

Putin in June laid out his demands in a peace proposal and there’s no reason to suggest his goals have changed since then. He said Russia should keep all the land it occupies as well as the provinces that it claims but does not fully control – meaning the whole of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, even though Ukraine still holds parts of the latter two, including their regional capitals. Russia would also insist on Ukraine giving up all hope of NATO membership. For Ukraine, these demands are nothing short of an ultimatum for surrender.

Whatever the terms of any new peace treaty, the signals from Washington and Moscow already hint that progress may be far from straightforward. Trump and Putin are both notorious for their casual relationship with the truth. We’ve already had Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov (an expert in the art of denying statements that later turn out to be true) dismissing reports of a phone call between the two after the Washington Post reported that Trump had warned Putin of “Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe”.

We learned during Trump’s first term that campaign rhetoric is not necessarily an indicator of his policies once in office, and his opinions can pivot wildly depending on who he listens to. He appears to be surrounding himself with a small group of wealthy allies and loyalists, and has ruled out his pro-Ukrainian former secretary of state Mike Pompeo as a possible defence secretary. But frequent personnel changes were a feature of Trump’s first term, and Pompeo says he still believes Trump will adopt a more hardline approach to Russia once he re-enters the White House.

“It’s absolutely critically important that the perception is the West stood up to this thug and this horrible guy [Putin] and didn’t allow evil to triumph and that’s imperative,” Pompeo told the Fortune Global Forum. “I’m very hopeful President Trump will see that imperative.”

Pompeo told the BBC Ukrainecast podcast back in May that the way to deter Putin’s aggression is with “an administration in the US and a strong, capable NATO that deliver a message to President Putin that the cost of continuing his aggression will exceed the benefits”.

Only time will tell whether Trump listens to Pompeo’s view, or to those Republicans who say the billions of dollars allocated to supporting Ukraine would be better spent at home. The future of Ukraine is more uncertain than ever.


Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash