Ukraine, Russia eye window of opportunity as they await return of Trump

KYIV, Ukraine — No audience outside the Beltway may be more hungry for details of the looming transition of power in Washington than Ukraine, whose very existence may hang on decisions to be made by President-elect Donald Trump and the security and foreign policy team he is assembling.

Ukraine’s desperate war to hold off a Russian invasion force has passed the grim milestone of 1,000 days, but many feel — and fear — that the next few weeks will determine the country’s fate.

The same calculus appears to be operating in the Kremlin. As the date of Mr. Trump’s return to the White House grows closer and speculation mounts over negotiations for a peace deal, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government has launched an all-out assault to gain as much territory inside Ukraine as possible to strengthen its bargaining position.

Military analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko said Ukraine is living through “the most difficult moment” of the war. The supportive Biden administration is packing its bags, and Mr. Trump and new advisers, such as retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, special envoy to Ukraine, have yet to show their hand.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Mr. Trump met privately in Paris last week. French President Emmanuel Macron arranged the meeting, which coincided with the dedication of the rebuilt Notre Dame. Mr. Trump has held his cards tight on how he will carry out his promise to “quickly” end the war with Russia. In a Time magazine interview, he criticized the Biden administration for allowing missiles to strike deeper into Russia and escalating the war.

Mr. Trump insisted that fears he would abandon Kyiv to reach a ceasefire deal were misplaced.

“I want to reach an agreement, and the only way you’re going to reach an agreement is not to abandon” Ukraine, Mr. Trump said. He said the war is a “tragedy” with a “staggering” number of people killed on both sides of the conflict.

With Mr. Trump’s inauguration still weeks away, Moscow has intensified its offensive in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts. Thanks to the recent influx of thousands of North Korean troops, the Russians have reportedly assembled a 50,000-strong corps to drive Ukrainian forces out of the Russian border territory that Kyiv seized this summer in Kursk.

In an assessment of the military situation, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War confirmed Russia’s progress along multiple axes of the 600-mile-plus front line. It noted that the Russian army had “recently advanced near Kupyansk, in Toretsk, near Pokrovsk, and near Velyka Novosilka.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s foothold in Russia’s Kursk oblast has steadily shrunk over the past weeks. Kyiv now controls only about 40% of the territory it initially captured during its surprise offensive across the Russian border during the summer. This difficult situation was made even worse by the growing manpower issues plaguing many of the Ukrainian armed forces.

Foregone conclusion

Mr. Kovalenko said Moscow’s show of force aims to convince the incoming Trump administration that Russian victory is a foregone conclusion and to secure advantageous terms for potential negotiations.

“Russia is trying to use these two months to impress Donald Trump, to convince him that they retain the potential to capture new territories and liberate their own in Kursk, and therefore that there is no choice but negotiating with them,” he said in an interview.

Ukraine has ample reason for uncertainty. The victorious Republican candidate repeatedly declared on the campaign trail that, if elected, he would end the war “in 24 hours.” Vice President-elect J.D. Vance once said he “didn’t care what happened to Ukraine.” Kyiv feared the Trump administration might pressure it into abandoning large swaths of territory by threatening to cut off military aid entirely.

About 18% of Ukrainian territory remains under Russian occupation. An interruption of U.S. aid could have catastrophic consequences for Ukraine because the United States remains by far its largest source of weapons and ammunition. The U.S. has provided an estimated $64.1 billion in military assistance since February 2022. The Biden administration has been expediting fresh shipments of supplies and weapons to Ukraine in its final days, anticipating that the spigot may be turned off when Mr. Trump takes office.

Mr. Trump’s early Cabinet picks, including several outspoken opponents of American aid to Ukraine, have done little to assuage those fears. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, nominated to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is one of them. Others come from the pro-Kyiv conservative hawkish wing of the Republican Party, including Sen. Marco Rubio, who was nominated to be secretary of state, and fellow Rep. Michael Waltz, who was selected as national security adviser.

Foreign affairs and security expert Alexander Khara, executive director of Ukraine’s Center for Defense Strategies, said he foresees a “very difficult period” on the military and diplomatic fronts. He said diplomatic challenges stem from what he called Mr. Trump’s “personality traits,” “narcissism” and hunger to make a deal.

Mr. Khara, a former diplomat, said the president-elect is guided first and foremost by “his own ambitions rather than by strategic considerations.”

“I think he is aiming for [the Nobel Peace Prize], and he sees this perspective through Ukraine,” Mr. Khara said. “But this is impossible because Russia doesn’t want peace or the freezing of the war along the current line of combat. Russia and Putin need the whole of Ukraine.”

While some in Western capitals still hope to appease the Kremlin by pressuring Kyiv into relinquishing control over large tracts of its territory, Mr. Putin has remained inflexible about his preconditions for any peace negotiation.

His demands include the complete withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts despite Russian forces not fully controlling any of those regions, a significant downsizing of Ukraine’s armed forces, the lifting of all Western sanctions, and written assurances that Kyiv will never be invited to join NATO.

Mr. Zelenskyy has dismissed Moscow’s maximalist goals. He had a phone call with Mr. Trump shortly after the U.S. election. After a Nov. 16 phone call between Mr. Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Mr. Zelenskyy warned Kyiv’s Western backers that the Russian leader was “not interested in holding negotiations to end the war” but was instead hoping “to put an end to his international isolation.”

Many Western and Ukrainian analysts echo that sentiment and are unanimous in their assessment that nothing short of Ukraine’s total capitulation would satisfy the Kremlin.

Buying time for a degraded force

For Mr. Khara, Russia is trying to buy time to stabilize its struggling economy and rebuild its war machine before renewing the drive to control the whole of Ukraine.

“We understand very well that any peace with Russia is just a delayed death penalty,” said the analyst. “In two or three years, Russia will start war again.”

Time and again, Mr. Putin has made it abundantly clear that his war goals remain the total dismantling of Ukrainian statehood, the complete erasure of Ukraine’s national identity and the permanent reassertion of Moscow’s control over its former colony. The genocidal rhetoric from the Kremlin, relayed daily by Russian state media, has led to atrocities on a scale unseen in Europe since World War II, Ukrainian officials say.

In the occupied territories, Russian forces and security services stand accused of having systematically murdered, tortured, persecuted and disappeared thousands of Ukrainian civilians. They have overseen the forcible transfer of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to areas under Russian control and their adoption into Russian families, a tactic reminiscent of Josef Stalin’s wholesale deportations and imprisonment of ethnic minorities.

Russian drones and missiles have laid waste to much of the country’s civilian infrastructure, and countless Ukrainian cultural and educational institutions and museums have been looted or destroyed.

This systematic effort to wipe out Ukrainian identity has prompted the national parliaments of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Ireland — which in the past have been targeted for ethnic cleansing — to officially denounce Russia’s invasion as a genocide.

Despite the difficult situation at the front line, Mr. Khara and Mr. Kovalenko said Russia’s offensive potential has been severely degraded. Moscow’s growing reliance on North Korean troops and ammunition was, in this view, a sign not of strength but weakness.

“The bright indicators are that Russia has had to turn to North Korea for men, ammunition and weapons. Had they not received North Korean shells, would they have been able to continue pushing? I doubt it,” Mr. Kovalenko said.

Despite the grim headlines of relentless Russian territorial advances in the Donetsk oblast, the strategically significant town of Pokrovsk, a transportation hub that supplies Ukrainian troops in the southeastern Donetsk region, still hasn’t been captured. Relentless and costly attacks have reportedly brought Russian forces to within a few miles of the city.

Nearly three years into a draining war, Mr. Kovalenko said, both countries primarily rely on foreign support. The main difference, he said, is that Moscow’s partners have proved to be much more reliable and aggressive. A huge question mark hangs over the United States, Kyiv’s indispensable supplier in the conflict.

Russia’s allies “respond to their requests very quickly, whereas we have to fight and struggle and wait for every piece of equipment,” the analyst said.

If Kyiv’s allies step up their aid and do not allow themselves to be cowed by Russia’s all-out assault, Ukraine should be in a much better position as Moscow confronts a fourth year of war. Many in the Kremlin thought the military operation would be wrapped up in a couple of weeks when Russian forces first crossed the border in February 2022.

“The practice of deadlines has always existed in the Russian army. They always had some fetish dates under which they tried to adjust,” Mr. Kovalenko said. “The situation with Trump is as follows: Before the inauguration, they will try to show their strength, but then they will have to compensate for the losses and they will have to take an operational pause.”