U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to back a major reversal in U.S. policy on Ukraine, stating Tuesday that he believed Kyiv could win back all of Ukraine “in its original form.”
The statement, made following a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in New York, runs counter to Trump’s previously stated belief that the war between Russia and Ukraine would only end with Ukraine ceding some territory.
“I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Trump also appeared to suggest that Ukraine could end up taking Russian territory, as it did when it temporarily held parts of Russia’s Kursk region: “Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!”
It was unclear from his statement if Trump meant Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders, which would include Russian-annexed Crimea, or its borders before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russian troops hold around a fifth of Ukrainian territory, most of it taken in the early months of the invasion.
The U.S. president also slammed Russia’s military as incompetent: “Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.”
Trump did not offer further direct U.S. military support. “We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them,” he said, referring to a new scheme by which NATO members buy weapons from the United States and send them to Ukraine.
Trump’s statement is “positive,” said John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Kyiv and the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “Trump has understood that Russia is not inevitably winning this war, and Ukraine is not doing badly on the battlefield.”
Trump’s comments may reflect his rising discontent with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, despite attending a summit in Alaska in August on Trump’s invitation, has continued to target Ukraine with large numbers of missiles and drones. Following Trump’s meeting with Polish President Karol Nawrocki in early September, Russia also sent drones into Polish territory, and then last week, NATO member Estonia accused three Russian jets of entering its airspace.
At the same time, the statement may also reflect an increasingly positive relationship with Zelensky, with whom Trump clashed during a February meeting at the White House.
Herbst, however, said there were mixed signals from the Trump administration about just how much it was willing to confront Russia. Trump responded to the violations of Polish airspace, for example, by saying that the drones could have been there by “mistake,” Herbst noted.
“It is a way of saying, ‘I don’t need to do anything about this,’” he said. “And that’s not a signal of strength.”
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