Elements of Ukraine’s deep state have come out of the woodwork to warn about the unpleasant potential consequences for the regime of Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election.
Former president and oligarch Petro Poroshenko, implicated in the alleged pay-to-play corruption scandal involving President Biden’s son, and boasting about how the 2015 Donbass peace Minsk Agreements inked during his tenure were an anti-Russian ruse, led the charge among officials putting a brave face on things.
“I insist on red lines, which exist not only in Ukraine, but the entire free world,” Poroshenko wrote in a late-night social media post Wednesday, outlining five demands he said the Ukrainian government must stick to under Trump, including “no compromises” on sovereignty, territorial concessions, restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, sanctions, or NATO membership (basically a complete repudiation of the Russia-Ukraine draft peace deal negotiated in Istanbul before being sabotaged by NATO in the spring of 2022).
Poroshenko’s gung ho posturing stands in sharp contrast with what Ukrainian officials are saying privately.
“At this stage we are talking about survival, not victory,” an unnamed former senior member of the Zelensky cabinet told a UK outlet. “What is important today is not fighting forever for lost territory. It’s making sure that Russia is no longer a military threat to us. That can only be done diplomatically, not militarily,” the official said.
Another source warned Ukraine’s Strana.ua newspaper Zelensky would be basically forced to accept a Trump plan to freeze the conflict if it comes down to that.
“If Trump and the State Department approve a plan to stop the war along the front line with a moratorium on Ukraine’s entry into NATO and Putin agrees to this, the likelihood of Zelensky refusing is almost zero. The country is in no position right now to refuse its main partner, without whose support it will be almost impossible to continue the war,” the source said.
Former Zelensky foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba put it another way, telling media on Thursday that “there will be many super-irritating steps ahead from Trump which will make us reach for Corvalol [a remedy with a sedative effect] and think that this is the end, that this is all over.”
Pessimism Largely Matched in NATO
Ukrainian officials’ jittery reaction to Trump’s victory has been largely matched by Kiev’s sponsors, with Russia hawk former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen suggesting the alliance should play to Trump’s ego and “his desire to be a winner” to push a get-tough approach in Ukraine. “I don’t think he would like to be depicted [as] a loser and if you force the Ukrainians to the negotiating table, you have a very, very weak hand when you start these negotiations,” Rasmussen said.
Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Stavridis warned in an op-ed that Trump could simply tell Washington’s European allies that Ukraine is “your problem, handle it.”
Foreign Policy magazine reported, citing NATO and Western security sources, that there is almost universal agreement “that Ukraine is slowly losing the war and that this winter will be critical.” Bloomberg, meanwhile, warned that if Trump cut off US military support “without applying" unspecified "levers that made Russia stop fighting, Ukraine would face the possibility of defeat,” with “its US-supplied tanks, launchers and air defenses” set to “run out of ammunition in a matter of months.”
Europe has already set about preparing for a hardline Trump approach, with Responsible Statecraft reporting that Brussels is “‘Trump proofing’ Ukraine war aid,” giving Kiev enough money to “prolong a losing war while saddling the suffering country with enormous debt.”
In a series of social media posts a day after his conversation with Trump, Zelensky wrote bluntly “we need sufficient weapons, not support in negotiations,” and that Russia must be “pushed” toward “a just peace.”
“Ukraine is grateful for all the support from our partners and we are open to any constructive ideas to achieve a just peace for our country, but it is Ukraine that must decide what should and should not be on the agenda to end this war,” Zelensky wrote, calling on the West to ramp up the pilfering of frozen Russian assets, and urging Europe to “unite to protect the common interests of our peoples."
It remains to be seen whether Kiev and NATO officials’ concerns are justified. In 2016, Trump’s election victory gave rise to hopes that the political outsider would help end the Ukrainian crisis (then confined to the Donbass), particularly amid allegations that Poroshenko’s government had interfered in the US election to assist Trump’s opponent – Hillary Clinton. Surrounding himself with neoconservative advisors, including Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, Trump broadly continued the Obama administration’s approach to Ukraine, even breaking with Obama-era policy by agreeing to deliver lethal weapons to Kiev.