The Peril Donald Trump Poses to Ukraine

In the summer of 2023, while the second Ukrainian counter-offensive was still under way, I spoke to Alexander Bick, a Biden Administration official who had helped lead planning at the National Security Council on the eve of the Russian invasion. When we talked, American strategy in Ukraine was looking very good. In the run-up to the war, the U.S. had convinced skeptical Europeans that American intelligence about an imminent Russian invasion was legitimate, rallied the Europeans to mount a united response, creatively made intelligence available to prepare the American public for the coming fight, and eventually persuaded the Ukrainians themselves that Vladimir Putin wasn’t bluffing. U.S. intelligence knew Russian battlefield plans in advance and shared them with the Ukrainian military; the Americans rushed highly effective antitank weapons into the country and helped Ukrainian officials think through a robust defense of Kyiv. On top of that, American strategists got lucky. “We got one thing exactly right—what the Russians were going to do, when they were going to do it, and where they were going to do it,” Bick said. “We got everything else wrong”—Russian capabilities, Ukrainian capabilities, the European response. “We just happened to get them all wrong in our favor.”

Bick and I were speaking at an optimistic moment. The Ukrainian counter-offensive had not yet failed; Russia had not yet reconstituted its mutilated armed forces; and the memory of the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin’s armed rebellion was still fresh. Donald Trump was a former President fighting off criminal charges in numerous jurisdictions. Bick did not sense that Putin was open to genuine negotiations on ending the war. But, just as important, Bick and the Administration were in no particular hurry to get him there. They believed that time was on the side of Ukraine and its allies. The American Presidential election seemed far away, and Ukraine a peripheral issue to it.

That was then. In the wake of Trump’s reëlection, people who care about Ukraine split into two camps. One camp argued that, despite Trump’s long-standing infatuation with Putin, his Administration would end up with a policy that was roughly continuous with his predecessor’s, and perhaps even—some hoped—more supportive of Ukraine. Others worried that Trump 2.0 would be much worse. Last June, a group at the European Council on Foreign Relations, led by Jeremy Shapiro, a former Obama Administration official, presented a paper outlining what it only half jokingly called “six scary scenarios” for foreign policy under Trump. These included a rollback of American climate initiatives, the partial abandonment of NATO, and a hasty, ill-considered summit, in Saudi Arabia, on Ukraine. Shapiro told me over the summer that he wrote the paper mainly for European officials who were not thinking seriously enough about what a second Trump Presidency would entail. “They didn’t quite understand that, in the four years after Trump left office, there’d been a pretty impressive intellectual ferment on foreign policy and other topics in the Republican Party.” Trump 2.0, Shapiro warned, was going to do a lot more damage.

So far, all signs indicate that the pessimists were right. Earlier this month, the Trump team took its show on the road to Europe. At the Munich Security Conference, Vice-President J. D. Vance dismayed the assembled heads of state by spending far more time scolding them on migration and the suppression of far-right parties than discussing the war in Ukraine, which he barely mentioned. Two days earlier, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, declared that Ukraine would not be joining NATO anytime soon, nor could it hope to return, in negotiations, to its pre-invasion borders. The trend in policy was confirmed by the President, who had a long and friendly phone call with Putin. Trump emerged from the conversation with a new perspective on the war: it was the Ukrainians’ fault. He wanted the war to end, and he also wanted Ukraine to sign an extortionary contract ceding fifty per cent of mineral resource revenues to the United States. Zelensky, after months of trying to tiptoe around Trump, flatly refused. Last week, a Trump foreign-policy team—consisting of the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio; the national-security adviser, Mike Waltz, and the real-estate investor Steve Witkoff—met with senior Russian officials in Riyadh, to prepare for a summit between Trump and Putin. Zelensky reacted angrily to what seemed like a negotiation about his country’s future without his participation, after which Trump claimed on Truth Social that Zelensky had conned the U.S. into supporting the war. He called the Ukrainian President a “Dictator without Elections” and wrote, “Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.” At the United Nations on Monday, the third anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion, the U.S. joined Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and Israel, among others, in voting against a General Assembly resolution condemning the Russian invasion. On Tuesday, it was announced that Ukraine had agreed to a revised version of the resources agreement; Zelensky was hoping to come to D.C. soon for the signing ceremony.

For many in Europe, Trump’s Truth Social post was a genuine shock. “It’s probably smart to wait and see how this develops,” Janis Kluge, of the German think tank Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, said. “But my impression is that Trump aligning with Putin, who is the biggest threat to European security, means that things have fundamentally changed.” Kluge went on to point out that Trump may not realize how radical Russian demands are. Will he really attempt to force Zelensky to abandon Ukrainian cities in government-held areas simply because Putin has laid claim to them? Or—as Putin has also demanded—withdraw NATO troops from Eastern Europe? Perhaps not, but Ukraine seeks robust security guarantees from its Western partners and the capacity to defend itself in the future, should Russia decide to invade again. Those are precisely the things that Russia does not want it to have—and, for now, it very much looks as though Trump is taking Russia’s side.

Trump and Putin seem intent on meeting, and soon. The prospect of this meeting is depressing. On the other hand, no one wants the war to go on. Three scenarios now present themselves. In broadest outlines, Trump could use American leverage with both Russia and Ukraine to forge a lasting settlement to the war. Another possibility is that he could help arrange a ceasefire and a political settlement that may or may not last. This is the “Minsk-3” scenario, named after the two ceasefires that Ukraine agreed to in Minsk, under Russian military pressure, in 2014 and 2015. Or Trump could start negotiations, grow frustrated and bored, and give up, leaving Ukraine—and Europe—on its own.

Under the best of circumstances, with the world’s most skillful diplomats—for example, as one D.C. think tanker put it, the “A-team” that negotiated the Iran nuclear deal, rather than the “Bad News Bears” that travelled to Saudi Arabia last week—a lasting settlement to the war would be very difficult to achieve. The two sides remain far apart on their core demands, with no clear pathway to a middle ground. Even the most basic cessation of hostilities is, in this circumstance, devilishly complex. The Russian and Ukrainian armies are pressed up against each other, and constantly exchanging drone and artillery fire. “They are entangled. You’re going to need disengagement zones, potentially a D.M.Z. You’re going to need to have withdrawal zones for heavy equipment. And you’re going to need to have monitoring along a line that is so long that humans cannot do it,” Samuel Charap, a RAND analyst who has been an outspoken supporter of negotiations to end the war, said. All of this is going to have to be agreed to by two sides that are still killing each other every day.

Shapiro, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, believes that a Minsk-3-type ceasefire is achievable, if only because it is the shortest path for Trump to tread to his minimal goal of “ending” the war. “It’s not hard to imagine how the negotiation could come out,” Shapiro said. “You go in, you give enough things to the Russians to get them to find the negotiation helpful, and then you force the Ukrainians to swallow it. Then you go home.”

Shapiro imagines a ceasefire accompanied by a promise from Ukraine that it will soon hold a Presidential election. (Last year’s scheduled Presidential elections were not held, because Zelensky had declared martial law; it’s been a Kremlin talking point since then that he’s an unelected leader, a point Trump parroted in his Truth Social post.) The Kremlin can hope that Zelensky will lose the election and that the new Ukrainian President will be more accommodating, allowing Russia to exercise decisive influence on Ukraine through means short of war, as it has for the past decade or so in Georgia. Russia will have achieved its aim of a non-aligned, if not entirely defenseless, Ukraine; Ukraine will have held on to its sovereignty, at least for now; and the Trump Administration can claim a victory.

“The secret for a negotiator going into a situation like this is to encourage this kind of false optimism on all sides,” Shapiro said. “At least one of them needs to be wrong, of course, but who knows which one it’ll be? And what you can be saying to the Ukrainians is, O.K., this is not great, but you’re losing this war. The alternative is a lot worse. What you can do now is freeze it in place. There’s going to be a lot of reconstruction money from the Europeans. You’re still going to have an indigenous arms industry that you can build up with some European help.” Ukraine could fortify itself, Shapiro suggested, like West Germany, or Israel, “and we’ll see what happens in five or ten years.”

Kluge, in Berlin, doesn’t believe that the Kremlin would accept such an arrangement. “Putin thinks he is winning the war,” Kluge said. “He has all the leverage.” A ceasefire would blunt his momentum and allow Ukraine to shore up its defenses. “And once you stop a war it becomes hard to start it again.”

Charap added that, in his view, even if Russia agreed to a Minsk-3-type ceasefire, Ukraine would ultimately reject it. “A general principle is that, if you try to impose a political order where it has no basis of legitimacy, there will be resistance to it,” he said, pointing to U.S. attempts to stand up a government in Afghanistan. “So, if there is an arrangement that is just not viable in Ukraine, they will undermine it. They have a lot of cards, violent and nonviolent, that they can play in terms of subverting agreements that are made without their buy-in.” In that case, it is likely that the war would resume—this time without an American Administration that is willing to go to the mat for Ukraine.

This is probably the likeliest scenario of all: a continuation of the war, but with significantly diminished U.S. support. How long would Ukrainian forces be able to hold out, especially without American intelligence, a key aspect to their success so far, and where else could they turn for help? Kluge believes that a “coalition of the willing” could emerge in Europe. These nations could supply what they have in terms of weaponry and buy the rest from the United States. Kluge said, “We have to decide if this is a Zeitenwende”—a historic turning point—“for European defense, or whether we are going to give in to all of Putin’s demands, and not only on Ukraine.”

One question—merely historical, perhaps—is whether the Biden Administration could have done anything to head this off. Some observers argue that the Administration was too cautious with its weapons deliveries; others insist that it was too cautious when it came to pursuing peace. If the war was always going to end in negotiations, shouldn’t these have started sooner? As Shapiro sees it, the Biden Administration had a rhetorical problem: How could you negotiate with Putin after you had labelled him pure evil? It also had a strategic problem, involving what is known in the literature as “pivotal deterrence.” The Biden Administration promised to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” and never to enter into negotiations with Russia behind its back: “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” as Ukrainian officials had long demanded. For Shapiro, this was all well and good, but it failed to take advantage of the leverage that the U.S. had in the conflict. “If you’re a third-party nonbelligerent trying to push both sides into a deal, you actually have to coerce both sides,” he said. “If you look at your ally and say, ‘Well, we can’t coerce them because they’re our ally,’ you will never get a deal. Every time you get to where the ally was, their demands will escalate.” Shapiro thinks that the Biden Administration could have done more to get both Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table.

Alexander Bick, the national-security strategist, who now teaches leadership and public policy at the University of Virginia, rejected this criticism. The Biden Administration did not manage to achieve a negotiated conclusion to the war, he told me, because Russia fundamentally did not want one. “We received no indication that the Russians were interested in anything short of a basic capitulation of Ukraine,” he said. The Administration tried various forms of dialogue, and all of them came to nothing. It was left with only one alternative: “You put your side in the best position to negotiate that you can. And that happened. It’s why the Ukrainians have as many weapons as they do, which will not last forever but are lasting right now.”

When I proposed to him that the Biden team might have been better off forcing Ukraine into a lousy peace deal, given that the Trump Administration may be about to force it into an even lousier one, he balked. “You’re saying that a morally indefensible step—pushing a country to accept essentially its indefinite subjugation to Russia’s whip—is what the Biden Administration should have done? You can argue that it would have saved lives, because fewer people would have been killed in between. But, to me, that argument is totally unconvincing.” Ukraine had made the decision to defend itself; he felt that it was not its ally’s place to tell it when to stop.

During the summer, Shapiro had mused that, though he could never get past Trump’s fundamental corruption, there were certain things they agreed on: Shapiro also thought that the U.S. was spread too thin abroad, and that it should be less moralistic, sometimes, in its dealings with adversaries. Now, however, he was horrified. “We’ve changed sides in the war,” he said. “There’s really no other way to interpret what the President has said in the past few days.” And, whereas during the first Trump term there was enough chaos and resistance inside the government that some of Trump’s more damaging impulses—to withdraw from NATO, for example—could be slow-walked into oblivion, this time around was different. The federal government, Shapiro noted, is being turned into “an apparatus built for some sort of Orwellian nightmare. In ‘1984,’ they would be fighting Eurasia and then suddenly the edict would go down that actually Eurasia was their friend and they have to be fighting Eastasia, and everything would change but it would be as if nothing had changed; it’s always been thus. That’s what they set out to create.” He added, “I guess I am a little bit surprised that they got so far in just the first month.”

The U.S., as a country, will survive, though damaged. Europe, too, in Shapiro’s view, will find its footing. But Ukraine is in trouble. “If the Americans continue to behave this way, all sorts of opposing coalitions will form to them—that’s the sort of law of politics,” he said. “But when will it happen and how long will it take is a difficult issue. And it is particularly difficult for Ukraine. They are fighting a war right now, today, and they’re losing it already.” ♦