What Russia and Ukraine Want from a Second Trump Presidency

Eight years ago, after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the mood in Moscow was one of lucky disbelief. In Donald Trump, Russian officials saw a transactional businessman who spoke in the language of national interests, not values—Vladimir Putin’s kind of leader. Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, the Russian state channel, declared that she would drive around the streets of Moscow waving an American flag. A nationalist politician threw a party in the offices of the Duma, with champagne toasts. For Russia, however, Trump’s first term turned out to be a disappointment: the U.S. introduced more sanctions, expelled Russian diplomats, closed Russian consulates across the U.S., and delivered antitank Javelin missiles to Ukraine.

So, in the lead-up to the 2024 election, Russian officials—including Putin—appeared generally unmoved by the possible outcomes, including the return of Trump to the Presidency. Putin offered only cryptic, mixed messages, joking about Biden calling him a “crazy S.O.B.,” or wryly noting Kamala Harris’s “infectious” laugh. Putin’s telegraphed disinterest—as much a pose as a policy—came from an awareness that Trump, in his first term, had proved to be incapable of delivering a new geopolitical grand bargain for Russia, and that the invasion of Ukraine had plunged Russia’s relations with the U.S. into a freeze too deep for any one figure to resurrect. “The élite became absolutely convinced it doesn’t matter who is in power in Washington,” Konstantin Remchukov, a newspaper publisher close to the Kremlin, told me.

Now that Trump has won, that pose of indifference has given way to a mood of “cautious optimism,” as one person in Moscow’s foreign-policy circles put it. “A certain political consolidation looks possible—Americans are dissatisfied with the ideology of neoliberalism and instead chose a self-proclaimed defender of national interests,” the person said. “This fits very nicely into the Russian picture of the world.”

Last week, at a policy forum in Sochi, Putin congratulated Trump and, in an appeal to his vanity, complimented his courage in the face of an assassination attempt in July. Putin tried to downplay his enthusiasm for Trump’s victory, but it was clear he sensed an opportunity. Another source familiar with policy discussions said, of Putin, “He is in a very good mood. It’s about more than just Trump. He’s sure of his own rightness. Everything is developing—in Ukraine and beyond—more or less as he imagined.”

The war in Ukraine will certainly be the main agenda item between Putin and Trump. In recent months, Russian forces have been advancing in the Donbas, in Ukraine’s east, and have seized more territory in October than in any month since the start of the war, nearly three years ago. Russian losses are enormous—more than forty thousand troops were killed or injured in October, according to the U.K.’s defense minister, John Healey—but, on the current trajectory, Russia is gaining the advantage. “That’s how it’s often been in Russian history,” Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, told me. “Moments of unambiguous triumph, like when Red Army soldiers raised a Soviet flag above the Reichstag, are actually rare. More common is a costly, drawn-out struggle, a process that exacts a huge price on the nation while eventually bending in our direction.”

During the Presidential campaign, Trump promised to bring the fighting in Ukraine to a close in twenty-four hours. Putin might prefer to end the war, too—exclusively on his terms, to be sure—but, because he expects Ukraine’s position to further weaken with time, he is fine to sit and wait. “He doesn’t really need to change anything,” Lukyanov told me. “He is achieving what he wants with Russian forces advancing on the battlefield. If there’s a proposal, he’ll consider it. If not, O.K., things will continue as they are.”

That means the Trump Administration will likely have to play a leading role in any peace negotiations, a development that the Kremlin would welcome. For starters, it would disprove any notion of Russia’s isolation and undermine Western unity. More practically, Moscow would rather hash things out with Washington than deal with Volodymyr Zelensky and others in Kyiv. (Such is the prerogative of great powers; Putin never believed that Ukraine or its leaders were independent actors.) “Biden was always saying that Ukraine itself will determine the parameters for ending the war, and the U.S. can only support decisions made in Kyiv,” the Russian foreign-policy source said. “Here in Moscow, we expect Trump to have a more proactive position. The U.S. will formulate its own ideas and proposals.”

Like much else in his agenda, Trump’s promise to end the war remains more a slogan than a policy. He has complained about the scale of U.S. aid and military assistance, which has totalled around a hundred and seventy-five billion dollars since Russia’s invasion, and called Zelensky “the greatest salesman on Earth.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the incoming Administration is considering offering a deal that would freeze the current fighting lines and keep Ukraine out of NATO for at least twenty years, in exchange for U.S. security assistance and weapons—though any Western peacekeeping troops would come from European countries, not the U.S. But, despite Putin’s sympathy for a transactional, strictly business mode of geopolitics, it will prove difficult for the U.S. to reach an agreement with him. Lukyanov doubted, for example, that Russia would accept the notion of a twenty-year hiatus for Ukraine joining NATO. “There’s no trust at all,” he said. “Russia won’t take seriously any commitments that aren’t set in stone.”

The problem of security guarantees runs at cross-purposes: what satisfies Russia leaves Ukraine perpetually insecure, and vice versa. The postwar composition of the Ukrainian armed forces and the continued supply of Western weaponry were among the sticking points during short-lived Russian-Ukrainian negotiations in the spring of 2022. Russia will now demand a denuded, unthreatening Ukrainian military; Ukraine, fond of citing a so-called porcupine theory of national defense, will insist on the opposite—a well-equipped, spiky force able to inflict pain on would-be invaders.

Perhaps, the foreign-policy source mused, Putin could withdraw his claim to Ukrainian territories in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, which Russia formally annexed but does not fully control. But that would mean that the rest of those regions, and the whole of Donetsk and Luhansk, would end up inside Russia’s de-facto borders. Could the hawkish members of Trump’s Cabinet and the Republican Party, not to mention Zelensky and the whole of Ukrainian society, stomach such a clear victory for Putin? Would Trump himself agree to such a public display of weakness?

Perhaps Trump and Putin could reach an agreement that would effectively freeze the front line. “There is a deeper contradiction at work,” the source familiar with policy discussions said. “For America, based on its own experience, ending a conflict means finding an exit strategy—how you withdraw, close things out, leave the theatre.” One could imagine Trump following this logic, the source said. The war has dragged on for nearly three years, it’s costly for Russia and has cut it off from markets and investment—Putin should want out. “But, from our side, the approach is exactly the opposite. No one is talking about an exit strategy but, rather, a more sustained victory: the West should admit that Russia has a right to certain inviolable prerogatives regarding its own security.”

The general mood in Moscow has hardened—or, rather, as a Russian expression goes, the appetite has grown with the eating. In an op-ed for Kommersant, a Russian newspaper, the analyst Dmitri Trenin—the former head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, who has since become a Ukraine-war hawk—argued that freezing the current lines is far from enough to satisfy Moscow. The Kremlin believes it has a right to have a say over, as Trenin writes, “the nature of the future Ukrainian regime, its military and military-economic potential, and Ukraine’s military-political status.”

Ukraine’s reaction to Trump’s victory is even more difficult to predict. In September, six weeks before the election, I interviewed Zelensky, in Kyiv, on the eve of his upcoming high-stakes visit to the U.S. He tried his best to maintain a neutral pose—“Ukraine has demonstrated the wisdom of not becoming captured by American domestic politics,” he said—but it was clear that he was both frustrated with the Biden Administration’s incremental approach to providing military aid, which Zelensky has always viewed as overly cautious, and wary of Trump’s headstrong certainty in making a deal with Putin. “My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how,” Zelensky told me. “I’ve seen many leaders who were convinced they knew how to end it tomorrow, and, as they waded deeper into it, they realized it’s not that simple.”

In Kyiv, I got the feeling that the Biden status quo had run its course—despite the President’s rhetoric of backing Ukraine “as long as it takes,” it felt as if Ukraine was on a path to sacrificing lives and territory on the way to eventual defeat. Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the New Europe Center, called this the “killing us softly” policy. Ukraine received just enough not to lose precipitously, but not enough to fight its way to actual victory. In this context, there appeared to be some collective openness to a Trump Presidency. The Economist reported that many senior officials in Kyiv hoped for a Trump victory: “Faced with the choice of continued bare life-support or a wildcard president who would rip up the rules and almost certainly cut aid, they were prepared to gamble.”

Getmanchuk said that, just as U.S. pollsters once spoke of “shy” Trump voters, Kyiv is full of “shy” Trump supporters. “It’s not that all these people necessarily prefer Trump,” she told me. “But he is certainly seen as less threatening than he is often portrayed.” The main thing, she said, is that few in Kyiv welcomed a continuation of Biden’s approach. An adviser to the Ukrainian government on relations with Western countries called the current situation a “drawn-out war of attrition with, at the end, a rather expected result.” The adviser went on, “People are tired. They don’t always think strategically, but, rather, emotionally. There’s a lot of wishful thinking.”

Trump’s vagueness allows for exactly that. It says a lot about the state of the war that, to many in Kyiv, unpredictability feels like a desirable strategy. The Economist cited a senior Ukrainian military commander who admitted that there had been “a collapse in morale in some of the worst sections of the front,” and quoted a source in the general staff who suggested that “nearly a fifth of soldiers have gone AWOL from their positions.” As the adviser told me, “There’s a small probability that Trump could use his unconventional style to end this war in a way Biden couldn’t. There’s a bigger chance, of course, that things will end badly for Ukraine—but then again, that’s how it felt already.”

Getmanchuk told me something similar. The second Trump Presidency “could be a huge challenge, but it could also be a big opportunity,” she said. Under Biden, for example, the U.S. often held back its European allies in NATO—such as France, the U.K., Poland, and Lithuania—from ramping up their weapons supplies or involvement in the war. Trump, who has long pushed for European countries to take on more of the burden in supporting Ukraine, would presumably welcome, rather than block, such initiatives.

There are dangers, of course. Trump could make good on his threat to cut off aid entirely as a way of forcing Ukraine to negotiate. And if he prioritizes speed above all—an eminently possible scenario—it will be Ukraine that pays the price. “A quick deal will most likely entail forcing us to make some really painful concessions,” Getmanchuk said. Still, she added, there is a feeling in Kyiv that Zelensky can appeal to Trump’s most determinative trait: his ego. “Hopefully we can explain that a bad deal for Ukraine also means a bad deal for him and his Presidency.” ♦