What will Donald Trump decide about Ukraine? Difficult to answer as the President-elect of the United States is unpredictable and has remained vague on the issue, while promising to end the war.
• Also read: Seoul does not rule out directly sending weapons to Ukraine
But experts agree that once in the White House, from January 20, the United States’ policy towards its Ukrainian ally should change profoundly, and military aid and American economy are shrinking like nothing.
In recent months, the 78-year-old tycoon has constantly insisted that he was capable of imposing peace in Ukraine in “24 hours”, without ever explaining how. He decried, just like Vice President-elect JD Vance, the scale of the tens of billions of dollars in aid paid to kyiv.
In kyiv, there are fears that the new president of the United States could impose a peace plan favorable to Russia.
Far from being a coincidence, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate Donald Trump on Wednesday, saying he hoped his election would help Ukraine achieve a “just peace.” He also praised his “‘peace through strength’ approach” to world affairs.
The two men spoke by telephone on Wednesday, Volodymyr Zelensky announced, saying they had “agreed to maintain a close dialogue and advance our cooperation”.
“Strong and unwavering leadership from the United States is essential for our world,” he assured on X.
“The continuation of substantial US military aid seems doubtful, but Trump himself has remained vague on how he would deal with the conflict,” Brian Finucane, a specialist in US foreign policy at the AFP, told AFP. International Crisis Group in Washington.
“They’re not going to fix anything quickly, regardless of the rhetoric, but they can, when they come to power, try to stop funding, which would have significant and very negative implications for Ukraine,” adds Brian Taylor , professor at Syracuse University.
• Also read: After Donald Trump’s victory, Ukrainians are worried
Accelerate help
In the meantime, the outgoing Biden administration should focus, in the three months remaining before the swearing-in, on accelerating the delivery of aid to Ukraine and continue to put in place mechanisms so that the Europeans take the relay, according to diplomats.
NATO has already taken over the coordination of military aid to Ukraine, until then in the hands of the Americans alone since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022.
It seems unlikely, on the other hand, that Washington will lift its veto on kyiv being able to use long-range missiles to strike Russian territory in depth.
For Donald Trump, “this war should never have taken place”. And he praises his “very good relationship” with Vladimir Putin to remedy this.
Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute, a research center in Washington, expects he will seek a summit meeting with the Russian president, “one-on-one, man-to-man.” “.
But he doubts that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump can get along given their fundamentally divergent interests. The first because he “will accept nothing less than victory in Ukraine”, and the second because he will be reluctant to accept what would look like “a defeat of American interests”.
“It is difficult to anticipate Mr. Trump’s policies, because his entourage is made up of people with very different opinions,” judges John Herbst of the Atlantic Council and former United States ambassador to kyiv.
He adds that we will have to wait for “first clues with the appointments to key positions in the field of national security”.
However, according to him, two factions compete for influence around Trump, one advocating a sharp reduction in aid to Ukraine, while the other “recognizes the threat weighing on American interests in Europe and elsewhere if Washington were to abandon Ukraine.
Ukraine will, in any case, be “the first test for transatlantic relations,” writes Célia Belin of the European Council on International Relations (ECFR) in Paris.
She underlines that “Europeans will have to decide whether they want to participate in the negotiations and what constitutes an acceptable result”, while foreseeing “deep divisions between Europeans on this subject”.
But, confides Brian Taylor, “I am not sure that Europe has the shoulders” to do this. “I think in the short term there is no easy replacement for American military aid,” he said.
