In the long and grueling war in Ukraine, emotions can swing wildly between hope and despair. But President Trump’s sudden reversal on Tuesday in how he views the war — he said Ukraine could win it — suggested such a major shift that many Ukrainians were unsure how to process it.
Whereas he once pressed Ukraine to take any deal or risk losing even more territory, Mr. Trump said on Truth Social that he now believed that Ukraine could not only survive Russia’s onslaught but also eventually win and retake all its land. He painted a picture of a Russian economy teetering on collapse and said the Russian army looked like a “paper tiger.”
His comments were met in Ukraine with a mix of gratitude and caution, shaped by experience. Even President Volodymyr Zelensky, while welcoming the statement, said he was “a little bit” surprised by its strength.
Ostap Yarysh, a well-known Ukrainian commentator, said on Facebook that “Trump’s statement on Ukraine yesterday was certainly the most favorable we’ve heard so far” but that it was “too early to talk about a White House strategy overhaul or a radical shift in the president’s thinking, although there is such a temptation.”
Many Ukrainians seemed not to take President Trump’s post seriously or joked that it could change at any moment. “What happens next may be as written, or it may be the other way around,” Viktor Shlinchak, the head of the Institute of World Policy, an analytical research group, said on Facebook.
Moscow, predictably, dismissed Mr. Trump’s comments. “Russia is more associated with a bear, and there are no paper bears,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said.
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