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 is fear 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, announced Volodymyr Zelensky, claiming to have had an excellent exchange and to have “agreed to maintain close dialogue and advance our cooperation.”
“Strong and unwavering American leadership is essential for our world”he assured on X.
“Continued substantial US military aid appears doubtful, but Trump himself has remained vague on how he would deal with the conflict,” said Brian Finucane, specialist in US foreign policy at the International Crisis Group in Washington.
“They are not going to fix anything quickly, regardless of the rhetoric, but they may, 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.
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.
Pour Donald Trump, “this war should never have happened”. 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 him to 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 resemble “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,” However, judges John Herbst of the Atlantic Council and former US 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 to U.S. interests in Europe and elsewhere should Washington abandon Ukraine.”
Ukraine will, in any case, “the first test for transatlantic relations”, writes Célia Belin of the European Council on International Relations (ECFR) in Paris.
She emphasizes that “Europeans will have to decide whether they want to participate in the negotiations and what constitutes an acceptable outcome”, while planning to “deep divisions between Europeans on this subject”.
But, confides Brian Taylor, “I’m not sure that Europe has the shoulders” to do this. “I think that in the short term, there is no easy replacement for American military aid”he said.
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