While addressing the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on 5 September, Vladimir Putin, in yet another attempt to sow confusion in American politics, remarked that while his “favourite” candidate in the presidential contest was Joe Biden, “he was removed from the race, and he recommended all his supporters to support Ms Harris. Well, we will do so – we will support her.” For good measure Putin criticised Donald Trump for having imposed sanctions on Russia, “like no other president has ever introduced before”.
These statements are the diplomatic equivalent of what’s known these days as “trolling”. Can anyone seriously doubt that Putin sat smiling as Trump delivered his victory speech in the early hours of 6 November? As for Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, it’s safe to say that no leader, save perhaps Kamala Harris, can be more dejected than him. The feeling is justified. Trump has called Zelensky a “salesman”, one who bilked American taxpayers to pursue a futile war and blames him for not making concessions to Russia in early 2022. (The latter is a bogus accusation that, as I have argued elsewhere, has nevertheless gained wide currency in the United States and other countries.)
In late-night texts to me, friends in Ukraine tried to put a brave face on the emerging outcome. One, a journalist, paraphrased the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko: “the only way to win is fight”. Another, who trained to serve as a sniper in Ukraine’s army, was more cynical (and characteristically salty). “For us,” she wrote, “nothing changes because no one has balls except those of us who are here”. These reactions are not surprising. Ukrainians can hardly throw in the towel and say that everything has now become hopeless – not when they are fighting with their backs to the wall. In the four visits I have made to wartime Ukraine, a refrain I heard in multiple variations was that Ukrainians cannot afford to stop fighting because, if they lose, they will not merely have lost the war, they will have lost their country. It might seem overly dramatic, but that’s easy to say sitting in New York or London.
No matter how resolute Ukrainians may be to keep fighting, this election amounts to a sea change. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s quip, offered during a 1998 television interview, that the United States is “the indispensable nation”, was the sort of hubris that’s typical within the Washington foreign-policy establishment – especially her coda that “we stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future”. But one part of Albright’s boast undoubtedly applies to Ukraine: the United States is indispensable for its fight against Russia. Between 22 January 2022 and 31 August 2024, the American government provided Ukraine €57 billion in military assistance, more than all other countries have supplied, combined.
It’s not that Europe hasn’t been helpful in other respects. It has provided Ukraine far more economic and humanitarian assistance than the United States has: €58 billion versus €28 billion. But what Ukraine needs on the battlefield above all is weaponry. And European countries, partly because of their decades-long underinvestment in defence (recognised internally in a recent EU report) would not be able to fill the gap should Trump taper, let alone end, the American arms supply. For now, the American weapons pipeline hasn’t run dry. In April, after months of wrangling – time that enabled the Russian army to make significant advances – Congress greenlit another $61 billion in overall security assistance for Ukraine, $25.7 billion of it for arms supplies. But the sand in the hourglass of the Biden presidency will run out in two months, even if the president wished to make Ukraine arms shipments a priority of his last days in office.
None of this means that Ukraine’s defeat is nigh; this war will drag on whatever Trump does. For one thing, Ukraine’s troops and civilians haven’t lost the will to fight, war-weary though have certainly become. This determination is not a minor consideration: outsiders can pump military aid into a country to sustain its fight against an invader, but they cannot do much if it lacks morale, something the United States has learned in, among other places, Vietnam and Afghanistan. Though Ukraine has lost considerable ground in Donetsk oblast, the main battlefront since Avdiivka’s fall in February, the Russians have suffered more than 600,000 casualties (as of September) since the 2022 invasion, according to the UK Ministry of Defence. And for the gains made after overrunning Avdiivka, they have paid a staggering price: a daily average in dead and wounded as high 1,262 per day since May. Nor has Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk province been repelled despite Russia’s redeployment of some 50,000 troops, including from the critical Donetsk front, to mount a counterattack. To be sure, Ukraine has sustained heavy losses as well. But, come February, it will have forced the country until recently regarded in superpower terms to fight for three years without Putin achieving his goal of annexing Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.
Still, Trump’s victory will clearly work to Putin’s advantage, and could deal a body blow to Ukraine. If he’s true to his word, Trump is likely to wind down military assistance and goad Zelensky into a political settlement which, because of Kyiv’s consequent loss of leverage, will favour Russia. Any Harris administration would never have pursued such a course. Proud, arrogant, Trump hates being seen as bowing to pressure from any quarter, and in a different context that might induce him to keep arming Ukraine. But that’s scarcely something Ukraine’s leaders can take as a given. Trump’s victory will probably kill off Ukraine’s aspiration of joining Nato – first mooted by Republican president George W. Bush in 2008. The second-best choice, as Ukraine’s leaders see it, is a multilateral security guarantee. But Trump won’t agree to American participation in any such arrangement, and without the United States a defence pledge won’t be worth much to Ukraine and will scarcely impress Putin.
Trump relishes his unpredictably. It is possible that he won’t abruptly abandon Ukraine, despite his evident lack of concern for its security. It is also possible that some of the foreign policy hawks tipped to be in his administration, such as his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, might persuade him not to cut off support. Yet Trump holds an isolationist worldview and is convinced that other countries, including Ukraine, have long taken advantage of the United States’s generosity. And that belief is widely shared within the Republican Party, which he not only has remade in his own image but effectively owns. To return to the words of my Ukrainian friends, whatever their commitment to the “fight”, 5 November was a dark day for their beleaguered nation.
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