KYIV, Ukraine — Outside of the Beltway, there may be no keener audience hungry for details of the looming transition of power in Washington than here in Ukraine, not surprising since the country’s very existence may hang on decisions to be made by President-elect Donald Trump and the new security and foreign policy team he is assembling.
Ukraine’s desperate war to hold off a Russian invasion force recently passed the grim milestone of 1,000 days, but many here feel — and fear — it may be the next few days and weeks that 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 gets ever closer and speculation mounts over negotiations for a peace deal, the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched an all-out assault to gain as much territory inside Ukraine to strengthen its bargaining position.
Ukraine currently finds itself living through “the most difficult moment” of the war so far, according to Ukrainian military analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko, with the supportive Biden administration packing its bags and Mr. Trump and new advisers such as Ukraine special envoy retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg yet to show their hand.
With Mr. Trump’s inauguration still weeks away, Moscow has intensified its offensive in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts, and, 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 Kyiv seized this summer in Kursk.
In a recent 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 frontline, noting 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, with Kyiv now controlling only about 40% of the territory it had initially captured during its surprise offensive across the Russian border during the summer. A difficult situation made even worse by the growing manpower issues plaguing much of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Foregone conclusion
According to Mr. Kovalenko, Moscow’s current show of force aims to convince the incoming Trump administration that Russian victory is a foregone conclusion and to secure advantageous terms ahead of 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.
There is ample reason for uncertainty here: The victorious Republican candidate declared repeatedly on the campaign trail that, if elected, he would end the war “in 24 hours,” while Vice President-elect J.D. Vance famously once stated that he “didn’t care what happened to Ukraine,” prompting fears in Kyiv that the incoming Trump administration might pressure it into abandoning large swaths of its territory by threatening to cut off military aid entirely.
As of today, around 18% of Ukrainian territory remains under Russian occupation. An interruption of U.S. aid could have catastrophic consequences for Ukraine as the United States remains by far its largest source of weapons and ammunition, having 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, in anticipation that the spigot may be turned off when Mr. Trump is in office.
For Kyiv’s Washington-watchers, Mr. Trump’s early Cabinet picks – which include a number of outspoken opponents of American aid to Ukraine such as former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — have done little to assuage those fears. Other personnel picks, however, have come from the pro-Kyiv conservative hawkish wing of the party, including Republican Sen. Marco Rubio to be secretary of state and fellow Florida Republican Rep. Michael Waltz to be national security adviser.
Given the mixed signals, foreign affairs and security expert Alexander Khara, the executive director of Ukraine’s Center for Defense Strategies, said he foresees a “very difficult period” ahead, both on the military and diplomatic front. The latter challenges stemming from what he called Mr. Trump’s “personality traits,” “narcissism” and hunger to make a deal.
Mr. Khara, a former diplomat, believes that 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 speculates. “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 are still holding out hope of appeasing the Kremlin by pressuring Kyiv into relinquishing control over large tracts of its territory, Mr. Putin has so far remained inflexible on his preconditions to 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.
Moscow’s maximalist goals have been dismissed out of hand by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had an early phone call of his own with Mr. Trump shortly after the U.S. election concluded. Following the 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 rather hoping “to put an end to his international isolation.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by many Western and Ukrainian analysts who remain 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 merely trying to buy some 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 coming out of the Kremlin, relayed daily by Russian state media, has led to atrocities on a scale unseen in Europe since the 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 Stalin’s wholesale deportations and imprisonment of ethnic minorities.
On the battlefield, 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 — nations that have themselves been targeted for ethnic cleansing or genocide in the past — to officially denounce Russia’s invasion as a genocide.
Yet, in spite of the difficult situation at the frontline, both Mr. Khara and Mr. Kovalenko believe that Russia’s offensive potential has been seriously degraded. Moscow’s growing reliance on North Korean troops and ammunition, in this view, was 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,” said Mr. Kovalenko.
And despite the grim headlines of relentless Russia territorial advances in the Donetsk oblast, the long-predicted capture of the strategically significant town of Pokrovsk, a transportation hub used by Ukraine to supply its troops in the southeastern Donetsk region, still hasn’t happened.
Nearly three years into a draining war, according to Mr. Kovalenko, both countries are now mostly reliant on foreign support. The main difference, he said, is that Moscow’s partners have proven to be much more reliable and aggressive, while 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 in 2025, as Russia confronts a fourth year of a war that many in the Kremlin thought 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 observed. “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.”
• Guillaume Ptak can be reached at gptak@washingtontimes.com.