What Trump 2.0 Would Mean for Ukraine
Sorting through the mass of conflicting signals, what’s left is dire.
LAST WEEK’S PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE in which a frail, stumbling Joe Biden got bulldozed by a thuggish, swaggering Donald Trump understandably sent shock waves not only through the United States, but also through Ukraine—which according to a recent poll sees Biden as the friendlier candidate by a seven-to-one ratio—and through the mostly exiled Russian opposition, which tends to view Trump as a Vladimir Putin wannabe. As uncertainties swirl about whether Biden will remain his party’s candidate, and as Trump’s path to victory looks clearer, the question of what Trump’s return to the White House would mean for Ukraine acquires a scary new urgency. Meanwhile, the Kremlin regime, which has long tended to regard Trump as nash—“our guy”—is watching very closely.
The actual Russia/Ukraine section in the debate was fairly short (and with detours such as Trump going off on a tangent about how the military “can’t stand this guy”—i.e., Biden—and regards him as “the worst commander-in-chief”). On this occasion, Trump refrained from overt Putin love and instead fell back on his standard claim that Putin never would have invaded Ukraine on his watch. He asserted that Biden invited the invasion by demonstrating weakness in the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan—not mentioning that it was Trump himself who started that withdrawal—and just generally by being too weak to keep Putin in line.
Trump also served up the MAGA-base-pleasing kick at Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as a clever operator who siphons money from the United States: “I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it. Every time that Zelensky comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion. He’s the greatest salesman ever.” Trump then backpedaled—“I’m not knocking him, I’m not knocking anything, I’m only saying the money that we’re spending on this war, and we shouldn’t be spending, it should have never happened”—and reiterated his promise to have “that war settled between Putin and Zelensky” in the eleven weeks between Election Day 2024 and Inauguration Day 2025.
When Trump was pushed on whether he considered the terms of Putin’s recent “peace proposal”—which would allow Russia to grab four Ukrainian regions and keep Ukraine out of NATO—to be acceptable, he said that they were not. However, he also repeated his claim that he would quickly get it all settled.
How all this will play out in reality if Trump gets elected is anyone’s guess. But one can look at Trump’s record of words and deeds as president—and his words since leaving the presidency—to try to get a sense of what he will do in office.
The perception of being pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine has trailed Trump, with good reason, ever since the 2016 election. (No, “Russiagate” wasn’t the hoax Trump supporters and many anti-anti-Trump pundits confidently assert it was.) The disclosure that Trump’s campaign orchestrated a change in the Republican party platform to remove the commitment to supplying Ukraine with weapons, not just nonlethal aid, in its ongoing war against Russian intervention in the country’s eastern regions was one of the alarm bells that got people talking about Trump’s possible Russia connection. In 2017, there were reports that Trump was personally involved in making that change; while the former campaign aide to whom this information was attributed denied it, he acknowledged that it reflected Trump’s position of favoring “better relations with Russia.”
Nevertheless, in 2017, the Trump administration approved the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, reversing the Obama administration’s policy of not providing Ukraine with lethal weapons. Since then, Trump has sometimes touted this fact as evidence that he was the one who was tough on Putin in the Ukraine conflict: “I was the one that sent the Javelins, not Obama. Obama sent blankets,” he told a rally in March 2022, soon after Putin’s war in Ukraine escalated into a full-scale invasion. But this claim—which Republicans also made in 2020 when Trump was impeached for holding up another aid package because Zelensky wouldn’t do him a “favor” and falsely implicate Biden and the Democrats in corruption and hacking in Ukraine—leaves out some important details. According to an undisputed Foreign Policy report published in November 2018, Trump initially resisted the sale of the Javelins and went along with it only “when aides persuaded him that it could be good for U.S. business.”
This episode shows that Trump’s “transactional” approach to foreign policy could sometimes help Ukraine—a view taken by some pro-Ukraine conservatives who are at least open to the idea that a second Trump term would not be so bad and, in particular, that Trump would not throw Ukraine under the Kremlin bus as is generally believed. But is there a cause for such optimism?
It’s true that Trump’s statements on Ukraine, as on many other difficult and polarizing issues (abortion, for example) have been all over the place, making his position almost impossible to pin down. See if you can make sense of this mess:
On February 22, 2022, when Putin formally recognized the independence of Ukraine’s two separatist regions, the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, Trump praised the move as a brilliant and “savvy” pretext for going in.
A month later, on March 21, Trump told Fox Business that the United States needed to do more to help Ukraine and even accused Putin of “killing thousands,” once again taking credit for having given Ukraine lethal weapons and kept Putin in check during his presidency.
On May 13, he excoriated congressional Democrats for “sending another $40 billion to Ukraine” while there are struggling families in America.
In 2023, Trump repeatedly flogged the theme of supposedly ruinous U.S. spending on Ukraine on the campaign trail while $60 billion in military assistance to Ukraine was agonizingly stalled in the House.
In April 2024, Trump stood aside and did not oppose the aid bill after a portion of the funding was repackaged from grants to forgivable loans (an earlier Trump proposal); he even declared on his Truth Social site that “Ukrainian Survival and Strength” was important to the United States, though urging Europe to do more.
Last month, on his visit to Capitol Hill, Trump ripped into the aid package once again. Militantly anti-Ukraine Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida gloated on Twitter that it was “epic” to see “Trump trashing the Ukraine Aid to [House Speaker Mike Johnson’s] face.” Gaetz also quoted a Trump comment about Ukraine that remains unconfirmed, but is perfectly in character: “They’re never going to be there for us.”
On June 21, on the podcast of venture capitalist and self-styled Ukraine expert David Sacks, Trump accused Biden of provoking Putin’s invasion of Ukraine not by showing weakness, but by affirming that “Ukraine will go into NATO.” This is, of course, the Kremlin rationale for the invasion—one of them, at least.
Incoherence? Opportunistic pragmatism? It’s anyone’s guess. The only two consistent points in Trump’s pronouncements on Ukraine have been that (1) the war would not have happened if he had still been in the White House, and (2) if re-elected, he could get it settled in one day by deploying the art of the deal. The deal, according to Trump, is that either Russia and Ukraine sit down to negotiate for peace, or the recalcitrant party will be punished: aid to Ukraine will be cut off if Zelensky refuses to play ball, or boosted to the max if Putin says no.
The problem with that idea should be obvious. Given that Ukraine is the party that officially takes a stance against negotiating with Putin—and that Putin periodically floats “peace” proposals that amount to a demand for Ukrainian capitulation—it’s difficult to see this position as anything other than a signal that Ukraine will indeed be thrown under the bus.
As Tamar Jacoby writes this week in The Bulwark, the “peace plan” released by two former Trump national security staffers now at the Trump-friendly America First Policy Institute—which would involve cutting off aid to Kyiv unless it agrees to negotiate a peace deal with the Kremlin, indefinitely postpone NATO membership for Ukraine, and allow Russia to maintain de facto control of currently occupied Ukrainian territory under an indefinite ceasefire—would amount to the same thing. Strong critics of the plan include former Russian dissident Yuri Yarim-Agaev, whose sympathies lean Republican (and who even argued shortly after the 2020 election that Trump had done much that was “constructive”). In a Radio Liberty interview, Yarim-Agaev notes that not only would the Trump “peace plan” give Russia a pause it would use to rearm and shore up its military, it would also give Putin an incentive to grab as much land as he can before the U.S. presidential election, since the ceasefire would freeze the battle lines. And it is worth remembering that when we talk about letting Russia keep occupied territory, it’s not just a question of land but of millions of people forced to endure the horrors and indignities of occupation—including not only economic deprivation and propaganda bombardment but terror against pro-Ukrainian residents and forced conscription of young men.
TRUMP’S CLAIM THAT HE WOULD HAVE kept Putin from invading Ukraine had he been re-elected in 2020 is obviously a hypothetical that cannot be tested. But the claim that he curbed Putin’s aggression against Ukraine during his time in the White House is worth examining. That claim has been repeated by such pro-Ukraine Trump supporters as Washington Post columnist Mark Thiessen:
It’s true that Putin invaded neighboring countries under George W. Bush (Georgia in 2008), Barack Obama (Ukraine in 2014), and Joe Biden (Ukraine again in 2022). But while there was no new invasion of Ukraine between 2017 and 2021, Russian aggression against Ukraine remained a continuing fact. Localized but often intense warfare continued in Eastern Ukraine, with Russia-backed “separatists” in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions attacking Ukrainian troops and towns; it was an open secret that they were reinforced by Russian military personnel. (Since the capture or death of Russian servicemen couldn’t always be kept under wraps, the Kremlin claimed, with a straight face, that these were soldiers on leave who had decided, completely of their own free will, to spend their vacation on a war safari in Eastern Ukraine.) Just a week after Trump’s inauguration, pro-Russian forces attacked the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka in violation of the ceasefire agreement signed in 2015; the fighting raged for days, causing the town to be evacuated.
Also during the Trump presidency, in March 2018, Russia completed the unlawful construction of a bridge across the Kerch Strait connecting the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland. In subsequent months, Russia stepped up its military presence in the Sea of Azov and used it to disrupt Ukrainian and international shipping. Cargo vessels going to and leaving from Ukrainian ports were harassed with stop-and-search operations that, the British Foreign Office noted in a strong statement, were “damaging Ukraine’s economy and undermining its sovereignty.”
In July of that year, Trump met Putin in Helsinki for the infamous summit where his conduct was so obsequious that even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made critical noises, warning that Putin would interpret this as “a sign of weakness”—while Fox News pundit Neil Cavuto echoed John McCain in calling Trump’s performance “disgraceful.”
And yet Trump now expects us to believe that his tough love deterred Putin from grabbing Ukraine—a claim he has made repeatedly in recent months.
SOME COMMENTATORS DID zero in on one remark from Trump during the debate: While explaining that the American fiasco in Afghanistan made Putin feel that he could go in and take Ukraine, Trump added, “This was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.” This was a truncated version of a story he has repeatedly told in the past year, in interviews and campaign rallies: that he and Putin discussed Putin’s lusting for Ukraine and that Trump stopped Putin from acting on his “dream” of invasion with a carrot-and-stick combination of “good relationship” and macho swagger. In most versions of this anecdote, Trump tells Putin, “Don’t do it” and points out that there would be “hell to pay,” or even threatens specific acts of retaliation. (For the record, Trump never said that he was the apple of Putin’s eye, as some reports wrongly implied; he said that “it” as in Ukraine, not “I” as in “Donald Trump,” was “the apple of his eye.”)
The safest assumption is that this story in all its variations is standard Trumpian bull. If it isn’t, some have suggested that Trump’s failure to warn Ukraine and other allies if he had advance knowledge of Putin’s aggressive plans could be treasonous.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson discusses another interesting possibility: that Trump may have been obliquely referring to a plan his campaign aide Paul Manafort was hatching with his Russian partner. The Mueller report described it as “a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine,” involving the return of disgraced pro-Kremlin ex-president Viktor Yanukovych to Eastern Ukraine. According to the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee’s massive, five-volume report on Russia and the 2016 election, discussions of this plan continued into “at least 2018,” though with Manafort out of the picture by then.
If Putin was aware of these behind-the-scenes efforts, it could be one explanation for why he didn’t invade earlier: He may have believed that, with the Trump administration’s connivance, he could get a large chunk of Eastern Ukraine without going to war.
TRUMP’S EVER-SHIFTING STANCE on Ukraine gives pro-Ukraine Trump supporters enough cover to claim that, actually, a President Trump will be good for Ukraine. Given how mercurial Trump is, making predictions is near-impossible. It may be, for instance, that if Trump gets elected and Putin is seen as losing the war (or at least in a bad position) by Inauguration Day, Trump will decide that he doesn’t want to back a loser and will ratchet up the bragging about being the first American president to give Ukraine lethal weapons.
But overall, the odds that a Trump 2.0 administration would be pro-Ukraine are pretty low. One thing to remember is that in 2024, the MAGA caucus in the Republican party and in the right-wing media has gotten both far more powerful and far more rabidly anti-Ukraine compared to 2016. When Trump was inaugurated in 2017, there was no Marjorie Taylor Greene and no J.D. Vance in Congress. Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, and Tucker Carlson were not on a full-time anti-Ukraine crusade. MAGA may be a “follow the leader” cult, but today, Ukraine hate is such a core part of the MAGA identity that it may be hard even for Trump himself to sell a pro-Ukraine turn. Nor would Trump 2.0 have the old contingent of Russia hawks like John Bolton or Fiona Hill in the White House.
The fact remains that for those who support Ukraine and its defense, a Trump victory remains an extremely bad bet. To insist otherwise is an exercise in gaslighting.