With Trump in White House, Ukraine Stands to Suffer at the Hands of Russia

Donald Trump’s second victorious election to the White House last week was both historic and foreboding.

As the world waits for what a convicted felon would do as the chief executive of the United States and moral leader of the free world, Ukrainians around the world waited with trepidation to see if the new White House team would in fact betray Ukraine. After all, Trump did not express admiration for Ukraine as he did for Putin and the Kremlin.

The answer came on Thursday, November 7, just two days after Election Day. Up until then, the current Administration didn’t offer any qualifications or prerequisites for its support for Ukraine. It was adhering to the premise stated two years ago by President Biden that America would support Ukraine against Russia as long as it takes.

The former captive nations cheered America. Old Europe probably moaned but complied because it understood that it could be the next captive region.

US Cabinet departments until recently echoed this steadfast support for Ukraine.

And then came one shocking revelation.

The US will support President Volodymyr Zelenskyy if he decides to start negotiations with Moscow, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said during a Nov. 7 briefing.

“It's not something that it is appropriate for us or for any other country to push him into. And we would support him in any process to try and ensure a just and lasting peace, but that is ultimately his decision, not ours,” Miller said.

Miller also stressed that, per the UN Charter, Ukraine has the right to maintain its borders, territorial integrity, and sovereignty.

He added that the US has “seen no indication” that Putin plans to “drop his demand to continue to gobble up Ukrainian territory.”

“I’m sure there’s a negotiation that Putin would accept where he gets everything that he wants, and Ukraine gets nothing that it is entitled to under the law, but that is not a negotiation that President Zelenskyy has been interested in, nor should it be,” he added.

In political nomenclature, hinting at a hypothetical conclusion is synonymous with expressing support for it in anticipation of its realization. Miller’s clarification is enlightening only for Putin as he’s waiting for an unraveling of America’s uncompromisingly strong support for Ukraine. The State Department’s bureaucrat has open Pandora’s door to needless speculation about something that Zelenskyy has disavowed since the first days of the latest iteration of Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

Moscow now as the opportunity to convince all of Washington that the world exists in a new reality and that Ukraine and its ardent former captive nations allies must follow the beat of this drummer. Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu said two days after Trump became president-elect, that the West should accept that Russia was winning its war against Ukraine and negotiate an end to it. “Now, when the situation in the theater of military operations is not in favor of the Kyiv regime, the West is faced with a choice – to continue financing it and destroying the Ukrainian population or to recognize the current realities and start negotiating,” Shoigu said.

A senior advisor to Trump echoed the president-elect’s version of a new pro-Russian realpolitik, saying that the incoming administration will focus on achieving peace in Ukraine rather than enabling the country to gain back territory occupied by Russia. Bryan Lanza, a Republican Party strategist, told the BBC the Trump administration would ask Zelenskyy for his version of a “realistic vision for peace.”

What if the allies in World War II had insisted that for the sake of peace, the Poles and the French surrender their historical lands that were annexed by the Nazis?

Lanza opined “And if President Zelenskyy comes to the table and says, well we can only have peace if we have Crimea, he shows to us that he’s not serious. Crimea is gone.”

Lanza, Trump’s political adviser since his 2016 campaign, didn’t mention areas of eastern Ukraine, but he said regaining Crimea from Russia was unrealistic and “not the goal of the United States.”

“When Zelenskyy says we will only stop this fighting, there will only be peace once Crimea is returned, we’ve got news for President Zelenskyy: Crimea is gone,” he told the BBC World Service’s Weekend program. “And if that is your priority of getting Crimea back and having American soldiers fight to get Crimea back, you're on your own.”

Lanza said he had tremendous respect for the Ukrainian people, whose “hearts are made of lions.” But he said the US priority was "peace and to stop the killing.”

This dangerous, anti-Ukrainian point of view is only a step from promoting the notion that Kyiv should also surrender to Moscow Luhansk and Donetsk for the sake of an elusive peace. Furthermore, where do the incoming foreign policy experts draw the line in their panicky pursuit of peace: Kyiv, Lviv, Ternopil, Krakow?

The former captive nations as well as besieged Ukraine believe that giving in to Russian pressure is a fatal mistake. Nothing will stop Moscow from pursuing its manifest destiny to subjugate all of Ukraine and leaders of Eastern European countries, who know the meaning of so-called Russian liberation, agree with that mortal eventuality.

Zelenskyy on many occasions has said that the idea of any concessions to Russia is unacceptable for Ukraine, and he considers it suicide for the whole of Europe.

“And some of those present here strongly advocated that Ukraine should make ‘concessions’ to Putin. This is unacceptable for Ukraine and suicidal for the entire Europe. So what's next? Should Europe hope for Kim Jong Un's sympathy that he will also leave Europe alone? No strong leader who has helped build a united, strong and peaceful Europe could even imagine that.”

At the same time, he correctly advised that the tried and true concept of “peace through strength” has repeatedly proved its realism and effectiveness. “Now it peace through strength is needed once again. And there should be no illusions that you can buy a just peace by showing weakness or surrendering any European positions or the positions of any European country.”

There are hundreds of thousands brave Ukrainian men and women in uniforms on the eastern frontline of Ukraine pondering if they’ll survive the winter without suitable weapons and warm apparel. Both are dependent on foreign budgets and funding for both is stalled. Monies even for humanitarian projects in the USA such as U4U for Ukrainian refugees are again stuck in a bureaucratic morass.

Fortunately, the Biden administration is planning to rush the last of more than $6 billion remaining in Ukraine security assistance out the door by Inauguration Day, as the outgoing team prepares for the weapons flow to end once President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

The plan, according to two administration officials who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, is the only option the White House has to keep sending equipment to Ukraine to fight off continued Russian offensives. But the problems are immense. It normally takes months for munitions and equipment to get to Ukraine after an aid package is announced, so anything rolled out in the coming weeks would likely not fully arrive until well into the Trump administration, and the next commander in chief could halt the shipments before they’re on the ground.

One big holdup to pushing that aid out the door quickly is that the US can only send equipment already on its shelves. While the money allocated reimburses the Pentagon for that equipment, it is dependent on how fast new artillery shells and weapons can be produced or contracted to replace them.

“We have been sending whatever industry can produce each month, but the problem is you can only send these things as they are produced,” said Mark Cancian, a former Department of Defense budget official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The administration could dip into the stockpiles and send equipment more quickly, but it’s unclear the Pentagon would want to do that since it would affect its own readiness.”

During his campaign, Trump said he will “not give a penny to Ukraine.” Part of his plan to end the war “in one day” – he is overdue as of today – is that he would the Ukrainian president no more. You got to make a deal.” But if Russia is allowed to conquer and subjugate Ukraine, it would only be a matter of which democracy gets colonized next by the neighboring dictatorship: Poland, the Baltic States, Moldova, or Taiwan. This is an important point, overlooked by the president-elect. Ukraine, for all of its crimes, misdemeanors and faults, is still a democratic country and Trump is willing to send it into Putin’s waiting arms.

In addition to military viciousness, Russia, through its relentless violence, has thousands of unarmed civilians in Ukraine and displaced millions.  “It has razed Ukraine’s infrastructure and is threatening global food security.  Russia undermines our collective work to advance economic security in the OSCE region. Russia’s forces have waged a systematic campaign against Ukraine’s agricultural sector, destabilizing global food markets.  Moscow has sought to break Ukraine’s exports at every link of the supply chain, whether destroying the food itself or the means to produce and ship it.  Russia has set fire to fields, mined seabeds and farmland, torn up roads, bombed grain silos, and reportedly rendered millions of hectares of Ukraine’s farmland unusable,” said US Chargé d’Affaires Katherine Brucker to the Permanent Council, Vienna on November 7.

Even as the final votes are still being counted, Russia resumed it brutal missile and drone attacks against Ukrainian cities.

Russian missiles, bombs and drones battered three regions of Ukraine in targeted nighttime attacks, officials said Friday, November 8, as Russia mounts an intensified aerial campaign that Ukrainian officials say they need more Western help to counter.

Since the war began almost three years ago following Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the Russian military has repeatedly used its superior air power to destroy civilian targets across Ukraine. More than 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the conflict, according to the United Nations.

A 500-kilogram (about 1,000 pounds) glide bomb severely damaged a high-rise apartment building in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, in the middle of the night, regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said. At least 25 people, including an infant, were injured, he said.

Russia is unleashed two days earlier near-constant waves of long-range drone strikes on Ukrainian cities as its troops advance in the east. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Moscow was firing about 10 times as many drones as it did last fall. Missiles and drones for the most part are being manufactured in Iran, which together with Russia and North Korea are waging a singularly devastating war against Ukraine.

As well as drastically increasing the number of strikes, Russia has begun to fire decoy drones without warheads to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses. Decoy drones carry a “3D-printed ball wrapped in foil” to imitate the warhead of an Iran-made Shahed-136 drone, Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s air defenses, told CNN. These cheaper drones confuse Ukraine’s air defenses, which may shoot down decoy drones instead of ones carrying a lethal warhead. Decoy drones now account for as many as half of all Russian drones fired at Ukraine, Ihnat said.

The x-captive nations are still holding fast to their commitment to help Ukraine overcome Russian aggression. For example, the fundamentals of Estonian foreign policy have not changed because of the American president elections. After all, Putin hasn’t changed his objectives. He’s still waging a war of aggression with the aim of controlling the whole of Ukraine and creating a buffer zone in Europe, pushing NATO’s military activities back to the pre-1997 borders, which makes this an existential issue for us. 

The Estonian foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, on November 6 issued a statement, saying that Trump’s victory does not change Estonia’s foreign policy aims.

“Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections of the United States of America does not change Estonia’s foreign policy aims and actions towards the United States because the foundations of Estonia’s foreign policy have not changed,” the foreign minister said. “Russia still wants to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty and dismantle the security architecture based on the European Union and NATO. Our task is to make sure that Russia does not achieve its goal, and a just and long-lasting peace is achieved in Europe.”

Many in Ukraine fear Trump’s return to the White House would leave Eastern Europe vulnerable.

Fewer than 5% of American voters consider foreign policy a top issue, according to polls, suggesting that Russia’s war on Ukraine has not played a central role in the campaigns of either Harris or Trump.

Nevertheless, Trump has promised to “end the war in 24 hours” without providing details on how he intends to do so.

Ahead of the final US presidential election results, Euronews spoke to several Ukrainians about their thoughts on the outcome and its potential impact on their future.

“I’m really scared,” said Denys, a Ukrainian journalist, in an interview with Euronews. He is not alone. A Ukrainian woman living in Poland told Euronews that, for her, a Trump victory would feel like “the end of the world.”

Poland, which fears Russian aggression as much as Ukraine and other East European countries do, announced last week plans to invest 3 billion zlotys ($750 million) to boost ammunition production, according to a bill published late on Monday, aiming to ensure it has sufficient supplies in the event of an attack from Russia.

Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland has become NATO’s biggest spender on defense in relation to the size of its economy, with the 2025 budget allocating 4.7% of gross domestic product for the purpose.

“The draft act aims to create opportunities to provide financing for activities aimed at increasing the capacity for ammunition production,” the bill says, with a particular need to expand large-caliber production to bolster the potential of the Polish Armed Forces.

If all else fails, as we’ve written many times in the past, Ukraine and the former captive nations must build a strong multilateral military and political alliance, a mini-NATO, to protect themselves against ongoing Russian aggression.