Now that Donald Trump has won the American presidential election, it is time for those of us on both sides of the Atlantic who support Ukraine to take stock of the situation in the cold light of day. 

Mainstream analysis of the outlook for Ukraine if Trump won was dominated by a mixture of hyperbole and amnesia, as well as a stubborn refusal to notice that the dynamics of the war on the ground were changing. This matters because Ukraine’s leaders and its influential cultural figures really do listen to what people in the West say about the conflict, and take a lot of their cues from pro–Ukrainian voices in western media. Ukraine now needs to hear voices among people they trust and regard as allies, who are properly attuned to both the political and military realities — on the battlefield, on the home front in Ukraine, and in Washington.

As it happened, the war didn’t end up being a key issue in the presidential election, primarily because neither side had an agenda that they wanted to press home to the American public.  The incumbents appeared to have no strategy besides continuing to drip-feed Ukraine just enough material and financial support to keep it from going under, whilst blocking anything that might have raised the costs to Russia of continuing its invasion indefinitely. In his interview with Joe Rogan shortly before the vote, Trump hinted at some kind of a plan to threaten, bluff or blackmail each side to the negotiating table; but obviously, such a plan cannot be effective if detailed in advance. 

So the future of Ukraine featured in the election primarily in the form of blithe assertions that Trump would “abandon” the country if he was elected. Now that the election is over, whatever purpose this kind of doom-mongering previously served is gone, and the Ukrainians would be ill-served by their friends in the West continuing to perpetuate it in aid of an electoral agenda that has been firmly defeated. 

The first and most important matter for Ukraine’s friends to reflect on is that it is no longer Spring 2022. Then, as the hordes descended on Kyiv, people in the West were briefly distracted from the solipsism of their own sordid politics by the spectacle of a people fighting not only for their freedom and their land, but for their very lives. Russia’s objective at that point was nothing less than the extinguishing of the Ukrainian nation and its statehood, and it would necessarily have entailed the murder of many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of its people in order to ensure their quiescence.   

At that time the overwhelming majority of Americans and Europeans were able to put aside their differences, briefly, in admiration and support for a nation under attack. The early phases of the war brought stories of valour, selflessness, stoicism, and miracles. The initial defence of Ukraine and the defeat of the Northerly and Northeasterly pillars of Russia’s invasion will echo down through the centuries. 

For some Western commentators, that romantic, heroic moment never passed. But at some point in the next half a year, if it hasn’t happened already, we will approach the point at which the total number of men killed or wounded on both sides will have reached one million. The two armies have fought themselves to a stalemate across hundreds of miles of front line, each side taking huge numbers of casualties for minimal exchanges of territory. The combat zone is now almost entirely depopulated, with hundreds of villages and towns reduced to their shells. It should be obvious to anyone with any appreciation of the reality of warfare that the poetic phase of this conflict has long since passed; yet some of Ukraine’s supporters in the West seem to be struggling to move on from the moral absolutes of the initial call to arms. 

Perhaps it’s because the mental map of the Western liberal is so firmly centred on World War II that they can conceptualise victories only as being total and crushing. Otherwise, for them, it is no kind of victory at all. They have lost any folk memory that, no matter how compelling the cause, most wars end in one miserable compromise or another, and that at some point a nation has to consolidate its gains and prepare itself to fight another day. Russia is clearly going to be a threat to any nation it borders, indefinitely. Any promises that it makes to behave peacefully in the future will be worthless to an insufficiently armed neighbour. Yet that is going to remain the case whether or not thousands of men continue to be killed or wounded every month along a static front line. 

… the sad truth is that every country ultimately has its point of exhaustion, and it’s horrifying to watch a proud nation being pushed ever closer towards it

The incoming Trump presidency is likely to cast a keener eye on the economic costs to the United States and to its stockpiles of war materiel, in continuing what is effectively open-ended support for the Ukrainian war effort. It is also likely to be making colder calculations about the resilience of the Ukrainian home front to endure further winters of privation, and further years with their sons, husbands, and fathers absent and at risk of death. This is not simply down to a cynical, transactional approach on Trump’s part; whatever the man’s personal flaws, he seems to have a far more visceral grasp of the basics of human nature than most modern politicians, which gives him an insight into just how far people can be pushed before they break. 

“Which bits of your own country’s territory would you be willing to negotiate away” remains a common retort from some commentators when some sort of negotiated end to the conflict is suggested. However, the sad truth is that every country ultimately has its point of exhaustion, and it’s horrifying to watch a proud nation being pushed ever closer towards it. A people may rally together to endure all kinds of torment at moments of great consequence; but the prospect of sitting in the cold and the dark for yet another winter of attritional warfare and stagnant front lines is a bleaker prospect. 

At present, most pro-Ukrainian commentators in the West are committed to nothing less than the total liberation of all of Ukraine’s pre-war territory, including Crimea. Yet they have tacitly conceded that there is not going to be a major NATO intervention, so this task is to be left up to the Ukrainian Armed Forces by conventional means alone. This seems like a position one might reasonably have held in the first months of the war when fronts were shifting rapidly, and when Russia had been forced to abandon two of its original invasion routes. It may have still seemed plausible in early 2023 after Kherson had been liberated the previous autumn and a great Ukrainian counter-offensive in the east was still on the cards. But based on any objective reading of the military situation in Donbas, it doesn’t seem like a position one can continue to hold in good faith as 2024 draws to a close.  

The second point on which Ukraine’s western supporters urgently need to schedule an appointment with the real world concern the West’s ability to sustain material supply for a drawn-out attritional conflict with a peer adversary. This is true on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially true in Europe, where various commentators have suggested that Trump’s victory is a further reminder of the need for Europeans to invest in their own defence. Whilst the intention here is admirable, the naivety would be touching if it weren’t so alarming. 

Almost every nation in Western Europe is now locked in a desperate battle to keep the lights on in the medium term, and these efforts largely depend on off-shoring as much manufacturing capacity abroad as possible. Not a single Western European country has a government committed to energy security and to reversing the decline of their industrial sectors. Instead they each have governments that are deeply bound into what is essentially a strategy of industrial de-growth in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. These are not nations that are going to be filling the void of the American military-industrial complex anytime soon. 

But even the United States isn’t in a position to sustain the scale of basic munitions production that this war has demanded. Each side is firing thousands of shells a day. Ukraine’s once vast stockpiles of Soviet–era munitions are gone, and they now depend on the supply of 155mm shells from the US and European allies. Russia’s ability to outgun Ukraine has now become entirely asymmetric, and the US simply doesn’t have the ability to produce enough shells to alter that fact. The potential to surge production capacity has atrophied over recent decades, as basic industries have moved abroad or been rendered obsolete. Ironically, the one place that still does have vast basic industrial capacity is Ukraine — however Russia’s relentless attacks on its energy sector have severely inhibited this. 

The truth is that a drawn-out conflict against a peer adversary isn’t a prospect that the West has seriously had to contend with since the dawn of the nuclear age. And up to now, the end of the Cold War also appeared to have removed the need to prepare for a lengthy proxy war against a Soviet-backed adversary. The slow decay of the West’s basic defence industries are as much a reflection of those geopolitical assumptions as they are of economic change or globalisation. But whereas in 1914 or 1939, we had huge reserves of basic industry that could be retooled for defence purposes, today our manufacturing capacities are far more niche.  

Instead, the West has come to rely on a smaller array of far higher value weapons to provide a deterrent, in the hope that our adversaries will never catch us up technologically to the point that they could counter them. However in this war, the US has so far proved itself too cautious to leverage this technological advantage in Ukraine’s favour for fear of igniting a more dangerous conflict. As a result, it has been left trying to compete with Russia in the grunt work of getting 10,000 shells a day to the front line. 

Pro-Ukraine commentators in the West therefore need to focus on ensuring that our support for Ukraine is reoriented to play to the West’s technological superiorities 

For Putin’s Russia, maintaining this kind of basic manufacturing capacity is a far more attractive proposition. Striving to keep up with the United States on military technology empowered a technical and scientific caste in the USSR that ultimately outgrew its military establishment and proved the undoing of its totalitarian system of government. Putin’s regime has no such ambitions, and has focussed its strategy on basic sectors such as hydrocarbons, metallurgy, fertilisers, and simple machinery. The production of massive quantities of shells, and the business of getting most of them to the front line, is the sort of task that this kind of economy can be oriented towards easily enough. 

Pro-Ukraine commentators in the West therefore need to focus on ensuring that our support for Ukraine is reoriented to play to the West’s technological superiorities, which remain immense compared to those of Russia. There are reasons to be hopeful that such a strategy will become a possibility under a second Trump administration. During his battle of wills with the Iranians in late 2019 and early 2020, Trump showed himself able to apply the principles of strategic escalation, combined with the use of weapons technologies out of reach of the adversary, to exhaust Tehran’s nerves. 

Russia will of course pose a vastly more serious adversary than Iran, and Vladimir Putin will present a far more equal opponent to Donald Trump in a test of nerves than the committee of religious academics who rule in West Asia. On the other hand, it is abundantly clear that Putin takes any threat from Trump very seriously, and finds his behaviour far more difficult to predict than any other US president he has faced. Putin was apparently blindsided by Trump’s authorisation of the attack on the Shayrat airbase in 2017, and it’s notable that Russia avoided almost any serious escalation of its more limited invasion of Ukrainian territory during Trump’s first term in the White House. 

Still, this is all contingent on President Trump being sufficiently invested in the outcome of the conflict that he is willing to take very serious risks to force the Russians into accepting an end to the war that might also be bearable to the Ukrainians. And it’s worth bearing in mind here that, despite support for Ukraine becoming a totemic issue for American liberals, the outgoing administration was never convinced to consider such risks.  

Trump’s only guiding principle since he turned full time to politics is being seen to keep faith with the very particular coalition of voters that emerged around his candidacies. For all that his base is believed to have adopted a reflexively anti-Ukrainian position, the truth is that those voters support him at least partially because they wish to see a restoration of the deference for American power that they grew up with, at home and abroad.  

Securing an end to this conflict in which Putin’s ambitions are clearly contained is Trump’s most obvious opportunity to achieve this in the single term he has left. Despite being fought since 2014, the war was massively escalated on his opponents’ watch and has caused global instability; he will want to be seen to have ended it. For Ukraine’s supporters in the West now, however, there is an urgent need to decontaminate the cause from its association with Trump’s opponents.