by Roger Childs

There should be no enduring mystery about what a Trump presidency means for Ukraine. Donald Trump has said he would end the war “in 24 hours,” but not how. He also said that “Zelensky should never have let that war start,” and dubbed him “one of the greatest salesmen I have ever seen” who gets $100 billion on every visit to Congress. –Nick Patton Walsh on CNN 7 November 2024

The unwinnable war

Russian forces supported by Belarus invaded the Ukraine in February 2022. They had been mobilising troops on the borders for weeks, so it came as no surprise. Putin made his intentions clear – he wanted a quick campaign to capture Kyiv, overthrow the Zelensky government and install a regime which would cooperate with Russia. The Russians did not want Ukraine to join the European Union and NATO, and consequently put more geopolitical pressure on their borders in the south-west.

Enlightened politicians in the West could have prevented the invasion, but the Biden administration saw it as a challenge. As everyone knows, the Russians attacks became bogged down as Ukrainian resistance was much greater than the Kremlin expected. The Russians have taken over significant areas in the east but increasingly the invaders, unable to make much progress on the ground, have waged war on civilians and shelled apartment buildings and reduced many settlements to rubble. Both sides have suffered tens of thousands of casualties. 

The Biden administration and their NATO allies have poured in aid to the Kyiv government, enough to prevent all of Ukraine from being overrun by the Russians (if that was the intention). The US has been the biggest arms supplier to Ukraine — between February 2022 and the end of June 2024, it delivered or committed weapons and equipment worth $US 56 billion according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research organisation. as reported by Sofia Santos on BBC News, 10 November 2024.

However, in late 2024, the reality is that after two years, 9 months of bitter fighting, neither side can win the war, and the only certainties if it continues are more casualties on both sides and more damage to Ukranian settlements, infrastructure and power facilities.

For American taxpayers the Russo-Ukraine war has become a bottomless expense pit and in the presidential campaign Trump claimed he would end it. But how?

A quick look back at the region’s history

History … shows that Ukraine has long been culturally and politically involved with the west and has acquired notions of social contracts and statehood from the west as far back as the early modern period. –Professor Serhy Yekelchyk, University of Victoria, Canada

Ukraine was part of the Tsarist Empire and later in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR). However, the Ukranians have always regarded themselves as a separate nation. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the People’s Republic in the region declared independence but ended up fighting a four-year conflict with the Bolshevik government of Russia and loosing much of its territory. 

Soviet leader Josef Stalin was determined to crush the spirit of the Ukraine people and in the 1930s engineered a famine in the area — Holdomor —  which killed about 4 million people. Stalin also moved some Russian people into the area in a “Russification policy” which the Czars had used in the 19^th and early 20^th century. He also moved Tatar groups out of the Crimea.

When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Ukrainians were divided – some fought alongside Soviet forces, but others saw the invaders as liberators. Various Nationalist groups emerged and a minority of Ukranian activists were involved in the Holocaust. After the war the region was absorbed back into the Soviet Union by Stalin.  

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 Ukraine like many other regions declared independence. In 2004 a pro-Russian candidate Victor Yanukovych was declared the winner in the Ukrainian presidential election. However, there were claims of electoral fraud and protests, in what became known as the “Orange Revolution”.  His rival Viktor Yushchenko became president in January 2005 but this caused friction with the Russian government and five years later Yanukovych was re-elected president. 

Then in 2014 tensions increased between Russia and the Ukraine as there were protests against Yanukovych because he would not improve links with the EU. The Russian President decided to annex the Crimean Peninsula and pro-Russian separatists seized the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine. At the time of the 2022 Russian invasion Putin and his ministers recognized these areas as being autonomous. Earlier, in 2019, the anti-Russian and pro-western Volodymyr Zelensky had been elected president. 

So, the background to the present conflict is complicated and neither side will accept loss of territory.

Finding solutions

 … they’re scared of him in Russia, they’re worried about him in Europe because they know he actually means what he says. –J D Vance

According to Vance, Trump will start negotiations with the Kremlin, Ukraine and European stakeholder with an eye towards achieving a peaceful settlement. Features of a settlement would likely include:

• Ukraine retains its independent sovereignty
• Russia gets the guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine. 
• Ukraine doesn’t join NATO or the European Union. 

Vance proposes that the current demarcation lines between the rivals military forces would determine future boundaries, but this would mean that Ukraine would effectively have to cede control of some of the territory Russia has captured in the war.

The Russians would probably go along with these proposals, but Zelensky would not want to lose any territory. There is also the issue of the attitude of the other NATO countries which have been supporting Ukraine. 

It is a complicated situation, but as the biggest supplier of funds and armaments to Ukraine the Americans hold the whip hand. Could Trump convince the Europeans that what he is proposing is worthwhile? Re-establishing peaceful relations with Russia is highly desirable, but at what cost?

In the meantime it is Biden, President for another two months, who calls the shots on US policy and he has no intention of ending support for the Zelensky regime.