Russian President Vladimir Putin sees an opportunity to consolidate territorial gains in Ukraine and freeze the war in Moscow’s favor, with President-elect Donald Trump having vowed to end the war “in 24 hours” once he was elected — even if it means forcing the beleaguered democracy to cede land that has been occupied or illegally annexed.
American efforts to force Ukraine to capitulate to Russia could spur Kyiv to develop nuclear weapons, and spark a race by several erstwhile U.S. allies to acquire their own nuclear arsenals for self-defense and deterrence.
The Kremlin has begun a massive counteroffensive with nearly 50,000 Russian and North Korean soldiers in an effort to retake territory lost to Ukrainian forces in Kursk ahead of Trump’s inauguration in January, military sources in Kyiv tell Rolling Stone. Meanwhile, Russian forces are making costly-but-steady progress in Ukraine’s east, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces are stretched to the breaking point.
With Trump packing his prospective cabinet with MAGA loyalists and surrounding himself with radicals who parrot Russian talking points, how he hopes to end the war in Ukraine is unclear. Trump’s policy decisions are often capricious, but he does have a history of making good on pledges to end American support for allies.
Trump’s promise to end the war was a centerpiece of his foreign policy pitch during the 2024 election campaign.
“They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done. I’ll have that done in 24 hours,” Trump told a town hall in May 2023, a stance he repeated often throughout the election cycle.
Despite his hyperbole — a U.S. president can hardly force either Ukraine to stop defending itself, or Russia to cease attacking it — Trump and his supporters say they can bring Putin to the negotiating table through economic and military coercion, warning that Ukraine may have to give up land to achieve peace.
The barriers to starting meaningful negotiations are high. Putin is committed to disarming Ukraine and installing a Moscow-friendly puppet government in Kyiv, routinely thundering against the “lies, deceit, and betrayal by the Western elites,” who have “turned Ukraine into their colony, into a military outpost aimed at Russia.”
“The truth is on our side,” Putin said in a video address on Sept. 30. “All the goals we have set for ourselves will be achieved.”
The U.S. and its allies have put in place wide-ranging economic sanctions against Russia, and the 54-country coalition supporting Kyiv has supplied more than $300 billion worth of aid to Ukraine since the war began in 2022, according to data from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research organization. The vast bulk of direct military aid — weapons and munitions purchases or donations — comes from the United States.
Speculation that Trump’s team could “flood Ukraine with weapons” to encourage Russia to reach a deal must reckon with the hard reality that even with expanded production, American arms factories are working at capacity, and Washington is already struggling to spend the funds allocated for aid before Biden leaves office.
Regardless of the shape of the promised diplomacy to come, Republicans are already signaling they have no appetite for continuing to support Ukraine with further military aid. With majorities in the House and Senate, it is increasingly unlikely that Congress will approve further funding for Ukraine.
The effects of a suspension of American aid are easy to predict. When Republicans in Congress blocked $61 billion earmarked for Ukraine earlier this year, Russia regained momentum as Ukrainian defenders ran short of ammunition, and drone and missile attacks proliferated against infrastructure and civilians as air defenses began to run dry.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, has vowed that his people “are not ready to give our freedom to this fucking terrorist, Putin.”
That public defiance, however, is tempered by the grim reality that Ukraine’s military is in some areas on the brink of collapse, its ranks depleted from savage attritional warfare against a numerically superior foe. While officials in France and Britain have mused about the possibility of sending ground troops to support the Ukrainians, there is at present no plan for any of Kyiv’s European allies to directly join the war.
In an October meeting with Trump, Zelensky said he told the now president-elect that in the absence of a formal security alliance, his nation’s best option would be to develop its own nuclear arsenal. Although he later walked back the statement, saying Kyiv was not seeking nuclear weapons, Ukraine does possess a number of nuclear power plants capable of producing the materials necessary for a weapons program.
A report prepared for Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense leaked Thursday to the British newspaper The Times outlined how a rudimentary plutonium bomb similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki could be built “within months.”
“You need to understand we face an existential challenge. If the Russians take Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians will be killed under occupation,” Valentyn Badrak, director of the group that produced the paper, told The Times. “There are millions of us who would rather face death than go to the gulags.”
The policy turnaround in Ukraine between Biden and Trump is also being closely observed by other American allies. Hawks in some countries, like Poland, see a strategic imperative in the long-term acquisition of nukes, while others — like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia — are judged to be capable of acquiring nuclear weapons in a short timespan. All of these U.S. allies are signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty — which prevents the spread of nuclear weapons — and have previously felt no need to develop a weapons program for a variety of reasons, including the deterrent effect of America’s “nuclear security umbrella.”
With America turning inward, that umbrella seems to offer less protection than it used to.
Mykola Bielieskov, a security researcher at Ukraine’s National Institute for Security Studies, asserts that allowing a nuclear power like Russia to seize the territory of a non-nuclear power like Ukraine with nuclear threats signals an “end of nuclear non-proliferation. Period.”
Since beginning its full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia has invaded and occupied nearly 20 percent of Ukraine, claiming the right to annex the oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia — in addition to Crimea, which it seized in 2014. None of the annexations are recognized under international law.
In August this year, Ukraine conducted a surprise attack on the Russian border province of Kursk, seizing several towns and villages and eventually capturing an area of about 390 square miles — an expanse slightly smaller than the city of Los Angeles. Russia, meanwhile, holds about 45,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory.
Although it is impossible to gather reliable data on the costs of the conflict while it is ongoing, independent estimates indicate the war may already have killed and wounded nearly 600,000 Russians and 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers — with casualties on both sides easily surpassing more than 1,000 a day across the line of contact. Ukrainian civilians have also paid a heavy price, with at least 30,000 killed or wounded and tens of thousands still missing in captured cities, or from incessant air attacks by Russian drones and missiles.
Russia says that it will spend $145 billion on defense spending — i.e., the Ukraine war — in 2025. Putin continues to throw hundreds of thousands of professional soldiers, volunteers, and conscripts into the fight, and steadily receives munitions and aid from Tehran and Pyongyang — including, most recently, about 10,000 North Korean soldiers now deployed to Kursk. If Moscow recaptures the Russian territory currently in Ukrainian hands, it will enhance Putin’s bargaining position, in the eventuality that he agrees to negotiations led by Trump.
That Trump himself intends to represent the U.S. in any summit is clear, and it is unlikely he will find voices advocating alternative strategies from within his own administration.
His choice for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, is a Fox News television personality and National Guard veteran — but has virtually no international or defense policy experience. While he has long been obsessed with the “wokeness” of the U.S. military, he has also criticized NATO as “outdated” and “impotent,” while saying the war in Ukraine “feels like Putin’s ‘gimme my shit back’ war.”
“Maybe in a perfect world where he [Putin] had unlimited capabilities and he could crown himself king of Europe, he would,” Hegseth said in a podcast released shortly before his nomination was announced. “I think he probably knows enough to know he’s probably not going much further than Ukraine. And I don’t think he’s a suicidal maniac who’s hell-bent on bringing on Armageddon through nuclear warfare.”
“Hey, if Ukraine can defend itself against that, great,” Hegseth said, adding that he didn’t “want American intervention driving deep into Europe” and making Putin feel like he had to use nuclear weapons.
The appointment of Rep. Mike Waltz, a former Green Beret and staunch Trump supporter, as National Security Adviser offers added insight into the direction of Ukraine policy.
Waltz, with a reputation as an outspoken “America First” realist, was highly critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He has since become scathing about the Biden administration’s support for Kyiv, saying Washington “lacked clear strategy,” and lambasting “Biden and Harris’ too little, too late, incremental, slow-as-you-go strategy — with no end in sight, unlimited costs — that have backed us into a stalemate.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, is the closest nominee yet to a traditional GOP hawk. But he is also in alignment with ending support for Ukraine, saying earlier this month: “At the end of the day, what we are funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion, or that country is going to be set back 100 years.”
On the surface, criticisms about Biden’s lack of strategy are indistinguishable from similar complaints by an angry coterie of Ukraine supporters, who have long lamented that the U.S. was slow-rolling aid and preventing Kyiv from striking targets inside Russia with American weapons.
Unlike those who disparage Biden for not being hawkish enough toward Russia, Trump’s inner circle is filled with those who wish to cut off aid to Kyiv, and who feel no sympathy for Ukraine’s plight — with some exhibiting an almost pathological animosity toward the country as it fights for survival.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who was invited to join a call between Trump and Zelensky last week and is reportedly advising the former president on Cabinet picks, regularly shares memes and posts opinions that align with Russian propaganda.
Last year, Musk mocked Zelensky’s requests for military aid, sharing a photoshopped picture of the Ukrainian president with a throbbing vein in his forehead and the caption: “When it’s been 5 minutes and you haven’t asked for a billion dollars in aid.” The president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr., has also shared memes mocking Ukraine, last week reposting a video of an upset-looking Zelensky with the caption, “POV: You’re 38 days from losing your allowance.”
While it is tempting to write off such callous social media posts as trolling — easy enough for MAGA diehards to be edgy when it isn’t their brothers or sisters dying on the frontlines, or neighbors being killed by drones and missiles — such messages resonate with a wider audience that supports Trump.
Right-wing influencers like podcaster Joe Rogan and commentator David Sacks continue to rail about “corruption” and portray American support for Ukraine as not just a massive boondoggle, but an intentional deception by the “deep state” aimed at continuing war.
The idea that the American people have been suckered into supporting a misbegotten war is a potent force, particularly given U.S. misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Vietnam. The “fundamental suspicion in the American character” — as identified by the war correspondent Eric Sevareid in his 1946 memoir, Not So Wild A Dream — that involvement in foreign conflicts is a swindle has a long pedigree.
“It was an American trait, not so much to avoid action, but to avoid the humiliation of being ‘taken in,’” Sevareid wrote upon returning to a neutral, isolationist America in 1940, after covering the Fall of Paris and Battle of Britain. “America was terribly afraid of losing its fancied status as the ‘wise guy,’ of being a ‘sucker.’”
Trump’s most vocal supporters — and incoming members of his administration, like his pick for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard — take it as an article of faith that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is America’s fault, and want nothing to do with aiding Ukraine. Whether this is out of partiality for Putin or hostility toward a “war-mongering” establishment responsible for decades of failed military interventions is immaterial.
“The mandate is very specific… a desire to get out of stupid foreign wars,” the libertarian commentator Dave Smith told Rogan in a podcast shortly after the election. “Bring in the non-interventionists, man. No one wants to fight these stupid wars anymore.”
That it is tens of thousands of Ukrainians, not American G.I.s, who are sacrificing their lives in the “stupid” defense of their country makes little difference to such skeptics. That billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine are primarily used to clear existing stocks of munitions and replenish them with new weapons produced by American arms factories merely reinforces the conspiratorial view: that the real purpose of all this activity is to engorge an insatiable military-industrial complex.
There are reasons why views like Smith’s gain traction across swaths of the electorate both left and right, even as most Americans continue to support Ukraine. Americans are grappling with a cost-of-living crisis with a limited safety net, while the U.S. spends billions on military and foreign aid for reasons which are rarely clearly articulated outside wonkish policy circles. And in truth, it is difficult to identify resounding American foreign policy successes in the 21st century, whether under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or Joe Biden.
Certainly there are valid critiques to be made about the Biden administration’s handling of the war and support for Ukraine. It closed the U.S. Embassy and evacuated American military forces training Ukrainians as Russian forces gathered on the border, and abandoned strategic ambiguity to openly declare the U.S. would not put “boots on the ground” to defend Ukraine, giving Putin a clear signal that the door was open on the eve of invasion.
But in the end, it was neither Biden, nor Zelensky, nor the “deep state” that chose to invade Ukraine. It was Putin.
And it is Putin with whom Trump must make a deal — all the while convincing Ukrainians that the dictator who has already broken multiple agreements will not do so again.
That Trump can be trusted to be an honest broker in negotiations will be undermined by the former president’s open admiration for the dictator. Trump admires Putin, as he does most autocrats, and regularly praises him — even as he disparages America, NATO, and Ukraine.
Trump has repeatedly shown enthusiasm for Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, calling the dictator’s move “smart.”
“They say, ‘Trump said Putin’s smart.’ I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars’ worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart,” Trump told a crowd at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago the day after the invasion began. “He’s taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”
It is difficult to define a doctrine that can be attributed to the former president, but this reporter saw the impact of his decisions directly during the first Trump presidency, covering violent protests by Palestinians when Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in 2017; spending months on the Korean Peninsula during the tense standoff that ended with Trump meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un at the DMZ in 2018; and standing on a hill watching Turkish artillery bombard the Syrian city of Ras al-Ayn when Trump pulled U.S. forces out of northern Syria, abandoning America’s Kurdish allies in 2019.
Mercurial, theatrical, and transactional are the words best used to describe Trump’s foreign policy.
Years later, with Trump returning to the presidency, Israel is fighting a two-front war, in Gaza and Lebanon, while the U.S. provides cover against Iran; North Korean troops are in combat in Europe; and Russia is mired in a bloody war of conquest.
Outside America, friend and foe alike are awakening to the reality that “America First” — anti-interventionist, nationalist, non-aligned, and alliance-skeptical — policies will dominate the incoming Trump administration.
But history shows that whatever guideposts observers believe these principles offer will quickly be ignored amid conflicting priorities. Certainly it is difficult to make a case for military action against drug cartels in Mexico — as Trump has done — while claiming a mantle of non-interventionism. It is difficult to declare oneself anti-war while continuing to support Israel — as Trump says he will — as it bombards civilians in Gaza and Lebanon.
Still, every indication is that under Trump 2.0, Washington will forsake NATO, coddle Putin, and end American support for Ukraine — handing a significant victory to Moscow.
“Americans want allies in Europe, not client states, and our generosity in Ukraine is coming to an end,” Trump’s vice president-elect, J.D. Vance, wrote in an opinion piece in the Financial Times, establishing himself as one of the more analytical voices in Trump’s orbit — and one who is deeply skeptical about Ukraine. “Europeans should regard the conclusion of the war there as an imperative. They must keep rebuilding their industrial and military capabilities. And Europe should consider how exactly it is going to live with Russia when the war in Ukraine is over.”
Last Thursday, Trump is reported to have spoken to Putin — again with Musk listening over his shoulder — and issued a warning to Moscow not to “escalate” the war before he returned to office. The Kremlin denies that such a call ever happened. Certainly if it did, Putin did not take the warning to heart. In addition to the counter-offensive in Kursk, in the week since Trump’s election there have been over 400 air alerts across Ukraine, with nearly 100 documented impacts.
One attack in Kryvyi Rih killed a mother, Olena Kulik, and her three children, the youngest of which was only two months old. Their names are added to the dozens of civilians who die every week in such strikes.
If the past is any indication, Trump’s primary goal will be to host a grand summit to showcase himself as a dealmaker on the world stage. Ukraine’s defense, or concern for the wider consequences of allowing Putin to achieve victory there, will be an afterthought.
“People are dying every day,” one official in Kyiv, who asked to be identified only by Yulia as she has loved ones currently fighting on the frontlines, tells Rolling Stone. “It seems like it’s all for nothing if Trump makes a deal without considering Ukraine’s interests.”
