In his September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was asked if he wanted Ukraine to be victorious in its efforts to fight off Russia’s brutal invasion.
“I want the war to stop,” Trump, now president-elect, replied. “That is a war that is dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president.”
Now, after Trump’s win Tuesday, Ukraine and its allies in the US are preparing for the worst — a complete end to US military aid, forcing the embattled European country to choose between capitulation and limping along — and hoping Trump’s affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t win out.
What hopes they have appear to rest on the idea that Trump considers himself the consummate dealmaker — and if he wants to have any leverage in trying to broker a peace, he needs to help Ukraine keep the pressure on Russia on the battlefield.
Putin, through his military, has sought to show Ukrainians this week the cost of continuing to resist. On Thursday, waves of armed drones led to an eight hour air alert in in Kyiv, keeping many of its residents huddled in the subway for safety.
In the Black Sea port city of Odesa, Russian drones armed with thermobaric bombs hit residential areas Thursday, local media reported. These bombs contain two stages — an initial explosive that spreads a flammable accelerant, and a second stage that ignites that fuel, drawing the air out of the surrounding area to make a larger explosion. In addition to the blast, these “vacuum bombs” literally suck the air out of the lungs of those nearby.
In the southern city of Kherson, Russians have recently started using drones with first-person cameras to hunt unsuspecting civilians as they go about daily errands, dropping bombs on them from above. Locals have grimly started calling it the “human safari.”
Stopping these attacks will require more US military aid, on top of the $52.7 billion already committed to Ukraine since the invasion began in February 2022. The Biden administration has been criticised by Ukrainian officials and military experts for providing too little aid to Ukraine, and too slowly, even as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has asked for new weapons to strike into the interior of Russia.
After the election, the pro-Ukraine advocacy group Razom urged Congress to pass a new aid package in the post-election lame duck session before Trump takes office in January.
“The aid package must enable Ukrainians to survive the winter, push Putin’s forces back, and give President-elect Trump the flexibility he needs to act from a position of strength,” Razom said.
“Failure to urgently pass a supplemental package risks undermining President-elect Trump’s position before he assumes office.”
Why would Republicans in Congress agree to fund more weapons for a war Trump has said he would like to end, and has signalled he will end, by threatening to cut off weapons to Ukraine?
Leverage, according to Doug Klain, policy analyst for Razom.
Biden is planning to exhaust the current amount of so-called drawdown authority by the end of the year. Drawdown authority allows the president to declare some US weapons to be surplus, and thus available to be sent to allies abroad. It has been one of the main ways US weaponry has been donated to Ukraine.
Trump would need to go back to Congress to get similar authority if Biden follows through.
That would give Trump a way to show Russia he wasn’t going to just ”[let] Putin do what he wants,” Klain said.
Drawdown authority is discretionary — Trump alone could decide whether to use it or not. Being able to credibly threaten to send Ukraine more weapons without needing congressional approval would bring a recalcitrant Putin to the bargaining table, the argument goes.
“All that Republicans would be doing by passing a new supplemental during the lame duck session is giving Trump options,” Klain said.
A spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson (Republican, Louisana) told HuffPost that the Republican majority had no interest in taking up a Ukraine supplemental soon. In April, Johnson put his political life on the line by bringing forward a Ukraine funding bill to the House floor, against the wishes of many in his party.
Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian parliament member representing Odesa, also held onto the idea of Trump as a wild card.
“Yes, there are a lot of challenges, but also there are possibilities,” Goncharenko told HuffPost. “What’s good about Trump? Good is that he’s unpredictable, not only for us, but for Putin, too.”
Goncharenko said the world was devolving from a rules-based international order to “a deals-based international order.”
“I think that President Trump will try to make a deal with Putin. But the question is, will he succeed or not? And if he will not succeed, how will he react?”
The bedrock assumption underlying much of Trump’s thinking about Ukraine may be that Putin — after losing, by Kyiv’s count, 700,000 soldiers in just under 1,000 days — would be happy simply to consolidate his gains in eastern and southern Ukraine in return for a ceasefire.
But Ukrainians believe Putin would use a ceasefire to rearm for another war, and even Russian public officials hint that he would not have achieved his objective if the war were to end now.
Klain pointed to remarks by Sergei Karaganov, a prominent pro-war Putin ally, at a recent conference. Asked about Trump’s peace ideas, Karaganov said the important thing wasn’t what Trump wants but what Russia wants, adding Ukraine needs to be “shared” and demilitarised.
As if to emphasize the point, Putin did not call Trump to congratulate him and a prominent political pundit show on Russia 1, a state-sponsored TV channel, aired pictures from former First Lady Melania Trump’s nude modeling days soon after Tuesday’s election.
“We control only what we do. We can’t control what the Russians do. And the Russians are very clear about what they’ll do,” Klain said.
Another assumption that may be behind Trump’s thinking — that Ukrainians would simply give up and accept Russian control over Ukraine’s territory — is also questionable.
“Ukraine will never, ever accept Ukrainian territories to be Russian. Not Donald Trump, nor anybody else, will make us accept this. But the question is how to reclaim them,” Goncharenko said.
Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
Goncharenko did say he thought Zelenskyy made “a big mistake” in visiting a Scranton, Pa., artillery factory in September to thank the workers there. Zelenskyy made the visit while in the US to speak to the United Nations and consult with Washington. But the visit included no Republican elected officials, leading top Republicans to slam it as partisan.
On Friday, The New York Times reported Trump put Tesla CEO Elon Musk on the phone with Zelenskyy during a brief phone call.
The Times did not report what the subject of the call was, but Musk is a key supplier to the Ukrainian military as the CEO of satellite Internet provider Starlink, which has become vital for Ukraine’s battlefield communications. Ukraine’s Donbas region, one of the key fronts in the war, is also rich in rare earth minerals, such as lithium, that are important in the production of electric cars — like those built by Tesla.
Ukrainians could take heart that Trump appears to be considering at least one well-known Ukraine hawk for a top job in his administration. House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers (Republican, Alaska) is reportedly under consideration to lead the Pentagon.
Goncharenko was philosophical about what was next in the conflict. Given Trump’s stance and Harris’ stout defence of Ukraine aid, the choice of who Ukrainians should root for had been an easy one.
But Goncharenko said he personally was not despairing.
“We are where we are,” Goncharenko said. “We can’t change anything [in the U.S.]. We just can’t. So we just need to watch what will happen and we should do the best we can do.”
