Kyiv is by far the best-defended Ukrainian city. The cafes are open and bustling, the supermarkets full, and cultural life is, if anything, more active than it was before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2002, so much so that a significant number of new bookstores and cultural venues have opened and seem to be thriving. Despite the air alert sirens that go off multiple times warning of incoming Russian missiles or drones that punctuate daily life in Kyiv, reminding one that one is in the capital city of a country literally fighting for its existential survival, it is often easy to be lulled into a false sense of normalcy.
And yet the mood here in the days running up to the third anniversary of the start of the war, has oscillated between despair and grim fortitude. It could hardly be otherwise, and for the obvious reason: with the rapprochement between Washington and Moscow as exemplified by the U.S.-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia that excluded Ukraine, the presidency of Donald Trump has already been proven to be an unmitigated catastrophe for Ukraine.
Nor is it by any means clear that the situation will not grow a great deal worse in the coming months. The most obvious example of this would be a decision by Elon Musk, who, in his public declarations, has proven even more susceptible to Vladimir Putin’s version of both the origins of the war and what an acceptable peace should look like, to cut off the Starlink constellation of low-altitude satellites on which, in this age in which electronic warfare has supplanted artillery as the proverbial queen of the battlefield, Ukraine’s management of its combat operations has depended throughout the conflict.
But even if Ukraine’s access to Starlink is maintained, the Trump administration has made it clear that it is definitively reversing the Biden administration’s pro-Ukrainian stance. Worse, it is demanding repayment for all the aid Washington has given Ukraine since the beginning of the war, preferably in the form of the Ukrainian rare earth minerals the administration covets, in the process eliding the distinction between grants and loans, but valued that aid at $500 billion, which, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy pointed out in a wide-ranging two-and-a-half hour-long press conference he gave on February 23, is approximately five times the amount Ukraine had in fact received from the United States. And as if that were not enough, Zelenskiy revealed that the Americans were demanding that for every dollar of any future U.S. military aid, Ukraine pay two dollars—an interest rate, as Zelensky pointed out dryly, of 100 percent.
The “Art of the Deal,” indeed. These demands are like the wet dreams of a mobbed-up loan shark (one wonders whether Trump would even mind the comparison), and it seems unlikely that Zelenskiy could submit to them even if wanted to, which, as he made clear at his press conference, his government has no intention of doing. Echoing the dreary, malign mendacities of Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, Trump has called Zelensky a dictator, a characterization that the Ukrainian president dismissed, commenting that it was hardly likely to trouble him since “[only] a dictator would be offended by being called a dictator.”
Zelenskiy’s sang froid during his press conference at what amounts to nothing less than the Trump administration’s betrayal of every promise and commitment the United States has made to Ukraine, both unilaterally and through NATO in concert with Washington’s European allies, was remarkable. It served as a gripping reminder of how important, for all his faults and both the military failures and failures of governance in Ukraine that have occurred during his watch, Zelenskiy’s leadership has been since, in the first hours of the full-scale Russian invasion three years ago, he declined the Biden administration’s offer to evacuate him with his family to Poland, defiantly saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
Even the many Ukrainians who are disenchanted with him in general terms accept that the country could not hope for a better war leader. In this, the oft-made comparison between Zelenskiy and Winston Churchill is anything but hyperbolic. Like Zelenskiy, Churchill before the war was considered something of a buffoon, a political dilletante who had changed parties several times and who had done everything but distinguish himself during various periods as a government minister. And then of course, immediately after the war, in the so-called Khaki election in which the votes of the war veterans proved dispositive, the British public voted him out of office. But although many Ukrainians are predicting the same fate for Zelenskiy in a postwar Ukraine, as long as the war goes, like Churchill between 1939 and 1945, Zelenskiy has proven himself the invaluable man. And his political opponents recognize this, as has been evident by the decision of his most dangerous rival, the former commander of the Ukrainian armed forces and now Ukrainian ambassador to Britain Valerii Zaluzhnyi, for the moment not to challenge Zelenskiy.
But for all the calm resolution Zelenskiy demonstrated at the press conference, one echoed by a separate joint press conference that preceded it given by Ukrainian intelligence chiefs, it is unclear just how seriously the Trump administration’s betrayal of Ukraine will affect its chances of holding off a Russian onslaught that, even before Trump all but wholly endorsed its self-declared motivations and many (though not all) of its strategic ones, showed no signs of faltering. After all, the conventional wisdom since the full-scale invasion was launched three years ago has been that while the EU countries in concert with the United Kingdom could prop up Ukraine’s shattered economy, thus permitting it to maintain basic services, pay pensions, etc., only the United States had the military resources necessary to provide the Ukrainians with the weapons platforms and munitions they required in order to survive.
The stark reality was that ever since the end of the Cold War, almost all the major and the minor European NATO powers (Turkey is obviously a special case), most catastrophically the United Kingdom, have hollowed out their militaries, to the point that the entire strength of Britain’s land forces is only 72,000, which makes it smaller than U.S. special operations, which comprise only about 2 percent of America’s land forces. The situation in France, the Netherlands, and Germany is not all that much better. The only exceptions are Poland and the Baltic countries, which, with Russia as their neighbor, never fell prey to the European (or at least Eurocratic) dream of Europe becoming what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the world’s first “post-national constellation.”
In fairness, it is not only Donald Trump who has been demanding that Europe rearm. To the contrary, both Democratic and Republican policymakers have been saying for more than two decades that in the long run, the situation in which the United States shouldered the costs of the Western alliance’s military burden and Europe focused on soft power was unsustainable. In 2010, President Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, warned a NATO meeting in Washington, “In Europe, large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it.” That had been a good thing initially, Gates conceded. But now it had “gone from being a blessing in the twentieth century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the twenty-first.” A year later, Gates was even more explicit. At a security conference in Brussels in 2011, he called out Europe’s apparent unwillingness “to devote the necessary resources to make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in the own defense.”
At the time, European leaders politely dismissed the suggestion, operating in what with hindsight was the tragic mistake of believing that there would be in the future no existential military threats they would need to defend against, focusing instead on real or potential non-military existential threats such as climate change, migration, and the transformation of the world economy. And to the extent that European NATO powers invested in their militaries at all, leaving aside Britain and France’s nuclear forces, it was largely with the idea that if Europe fought at all, it would be in wars of choice such as Afghanistan or the Sahelian countries of central Africa—that is, in warfighting that precisely did not require the weapons, munitions, logistics, and industrial base for a conventional war between roughly peer armies.
A telling example of this unpreparedness was that when Russia invaded Ukraine, European munitions manufacturers simply did not have the production lines necessary to provide the artillery shells needed for serious warfighting. This explains both the desperate attempt by European countries to ramp up their own production, and, in the interim, to send agents to quite literally scour the globe for munitions that the so-called Ramstein Group of some 57 countries supporting Ukraine could secure and pass along to Kyiv.
Unfortunately, while European countries now recognize that Vladimir Putin has definitively put paid to Europe’s conviction that soft power was basically enough, and hard power ever more of an atavism, no matter how much money you commit to the effort, you cannot rebuild a military industrial complex that you have let atrophy for three decades in a matter of months. It is certainly true that the situation is better than it was even a year ago. The German arms company Rheinmetall in particular has been building munitions plants in a number of countries in Eastern Europe and is said to even have set up (presumably heavily defended and concealed) production lines in collaboration with Ukrainian arms companies, Ukraine having been the main center of military production in Soviet times.
But again, assuming the Trump administration does cut off military aid to Ukraine, or, more likely, imposes financial conditions so outrageous that Zelenskiy, as he more or less declared at his press conference, will have to reject them, it is anything but clear when the European arms production that will be at the point where it can make up for what the United States no longer supplies (and this is not even including Musk’s Starlink, for which, at present, there is simply no European equivalent of the same quality).
Since late April 2022, two months after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, I have been spending a steadily increasing amount of time in Ukraine so that now I spend about 40 percent of my time there. I mention this autobiographical detail only because it has allowed me to witness how radically the mood there has shifted during those three years.
At the beginning, Ukrainians took heart from having driven the Russians back from Kyiv and discovering, to their own surprise as much as to that of the world at large, that Russia was anything but invincible. The protracted, heroic defense of the Black Sea coastal city of Mariupol, even though finally after an eight-month Russian siege the Ukrainians were forced to surrender, was something of a Pyrrhic victory for Moscow in that the heroism of the Ukrainian soldiers who held out for months against all odds in the ruins of the giant Azovstal steel works was tremendously inspiring throughout Ukraine. Early victories over the Russian navy, including the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship vessel of Moscow’s Black Sea fleet, only seemed to confirm to Ukrainians that they might not just courageously resist but actually win. In those days, it was commonplace to hear across the country the mealtime toast, “Until the victory.”
Today, though, one rarely hears anyone toasting “to the victory.” The failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023 finished off the hope that the successes of the first year of the war could be easily reproduced. There were many reasons for what happened, ranging from the United States’ and other NATO powers’ inability or unwillingness to provide the Ukrainians with the weapons and munitions they would have needed to break through Russian defenses (Ukrainians obviously infinitely preferred Biden to Trump, but the Biden administration’s aid to Ukraine was too often too little, too late) to failures of generalship and of command and control on the part of the senior leadership of the Ukrainian army to the fact that in the military history of Russia, from the Swedes in the seventeenth century to Napoleon to the German invasion of 1941, the Russian army has often lost a great many battles before righting itself and adopting effective strategy and tactics. After that failure, the mood in Ukraine became noticeably bleaker. But of course it was nowhere near as bleak as it is today. Ukrainians I know are once again speaking speculatively of where they may have to flee to if their resistance ends up being for naught and Putin, this time seconded by Trump, wins after all.
That is certainly what the Russians expect. Ukrainians are attentive consumers of Moscow’s ups and downs, and they are acutely aware of how high the Russian mood is today, so much so that Putin’s favorite philosopher, Alexander Dugin, whose views make those of Alexander Solzhenitsyn seem enlightened by comparison, has moved in less than six weeks from heralding a grand Islamo-Russian alliance against the United States to warning Germany that if it doesn’t submit to Moscow’s demands on Ukraine, Russia and the United States will split Germany between them.
This helps explain why, though Ukrainians are in despair, they are not in shock, or at least far less in shock than the political establishment is in the UK, France, and Germany. For the European political elites misunderstood and misunderstand the United States in a way their Ukrainian opposite numbers never did. Betrayal is a good teacher in that regard. And throughout its history, from the days of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth to the subjugation of Ukraine by the Russian Empire to the murderous days of Red Power and the Moscow-made famine of 1932-1933, the Holodomor, to the contemporary era in which Ukraine was constrained to give up its nuclear weapons in return for independence and security from Russian revanchism, through to the Biden administration’s consistently insufficient grants of aid, to Donald Trump’s monstrous U-Turn, Ukrainians have the misfortune to be connoisseurs of betrayal.
This is why Zelensky’s calm determination at his press conference was so counter-intuitive and so heartening to many Ukrainians. Even with regard to Starlink, the worst case scenario is not as bad as it sounds. One of the security chiefs even implied, though no more than that, that Kyiv had not by any means been caught unawares by the possibility of losing Starlink, and it is known that Ukraine has already acquired a certain number of a different, if far less well-known system of portable internet terminals manufactured by the Swedish firm Satcube.
The victory of the Christian Democrats in Germany, and, more importantly, the statements by the soon to be chancellor Friedrich Merz that are quite simply unprecedented in recent European history, and unimaginable in the mouth of any German leader before him. In his first post-election press conference, Merz bluntly equated Russian and American meddling in German politics, speaking of Germany, and by extension all of Europe, as being “under massive pressure” from both Washington and Moscow.
In a televised roundtable later Sunday evening, Merz also criticized U.S. “intervention” in the German election campaign in recent days. “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow,” he said. “We are under such massive pressure from two sides that my top priority is to create unity in Europe,” adding that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.” Donald Trump, Merz went on, had made it clear that his administration was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” The message was clear: as far as Merz was concerned, the fate of Europe was inseparable from that of Ukraine.
This is what Ukrainians have been trying to tell the EU countries and the UK for three terrible years. And perhaps Merz’s realization will become the European consensus. If so, Ukraine’s hideous sacrifices of its best and its brightest—for once the cliché is not hyperbole but rather a sober statement of fact—will not have been in vain, even though in a better world it would not have taken Ukraine’s risking all and sacrificing all to wake Europe up to its own existential interests. Those interests are in fact the same as Ukraine’s, even if, as Merz rightly noted, they are no longer shared by Donald Trump’s America.
And in the end, if Ukrainians continue to hope, what other choice—besides flight—do they have? Which is why this bitter defiant twist on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous theory of the five stages of grief—defiance, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—is now making the rounds in Kyiv. In the Ukrainian telling, the first four stages are the same. But instead of acceptance, the fifth stage is the polar opposite: it’s “fuck you.” There are worse ways to prepare oneself for the ordeals that lie in store.
The post The Trump Presidency Is an Unmitigated Catastrophe for Ukraine appeared first on New Republic.
