Kyiv Is Left With Few Good Options And Allies In A Trump 2.0 World

On December 18, Zelensky met with NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, another negotiation skeptic. Like Kallas, he is keen to“focus on the business at hand ... to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs to prevent Putin from winning.” Rutte's words echo those of António Costa, the new president of the European Council, who similarly noted that the EU needs“to stand with Ukraine for as long as necessary and do whatever it takes for Russia's invasion to be defeated and international law to prevail”.

In the meantime, Putin, during his annual phone-in, was full of his usual bluster about Russia winning in what he continues to call a“special military operation” in Ukraine. The main purpose of this event is to reassure ordinary Russians that things are by-and-large on track towards achieving Russia's war aims. Apparently lost on both the president and his audience is the irony that this is the third such event in a row – after 2023 and 2022 – at which Putin has touted Russia's superiority and imminent victory.

This message of the Kremlin seeking a military victory, and confident in being able to achieve it, was further underlined by a meeting on December 16 of the board of the Russian defense ministry. Here Putin outlined continued investment into the country's armed forces, now totalling 6.3% of GDP.

While he sounded a note of caution that the Kremlin“cannot increase this expenditure endlessly,” he was also unequivocal in reiterating that“the state, the Russian people are giving everything they can to the armed forces to fulfil the tasks we have set.” These tasks, in Putin's view, include the defeat of“the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, which seized power back in 2014” and“to drive the enemy out from our territory.”

At least in their public pronouncements, leaders in Moscow and Brussels seem strangely aligned in their determination to keep fighting – regardless of what kind of deal Trump might propose.

For Putin, the logic in doing so is that he clearly believes that he has the military momentum behind him. His forces made daily gains of around 30 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory in November alone. Western permission to strike targets deep inside Russia has made little impact so far. Russia's latest air campaign against Ukraine's critical national infrastructure, meanwhile, has caused unprecedented damage.

For the EU, the logic is different. EU leaders fear abandonment under Trump and are as yet unable to agree on credible security guarantees for Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire, let alone a full peace settlement. A Trump-brokered deal, therefore, carries too many risks. The main concern exercising minds among European leaders is the prospect of Putin using a mere break in the fighting to regroup and rearm and then posing an even greater threat to European security in the future.

Support for Ukraine to continue defending itself against Russia's aggression, it is hoped, will allow the EU and European NATO members to avoid the kind of existential fight that Ukraine has been facing since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

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All of this leaves Ukraine significantly exposed – both to diplomatic pressure from the incoming Trump administration to make a deal and to military pressure from Russia to accept the loss of around 20% of Ukrainian territory that Russia has illegally annexed since 2014. There will also be political pressure from Ukraine's European allies to keep fighting a fight that Europe is desperate to avoid.

As we head into 2025 and Trump 2.0, this leaves Zelensky with no good options and few dependable allies. The best that Ukraine can hope for is playing for time. Zelensky will need to placate Trump. He'll need to be open to the idea of negotiations with Russia while avoiding a collapse of the frontlines before a ceasefire can be achieved.

If Europe, in the meantime, gets serious about its own defense, this might finally lead the EU and Kyiv's European NATO allies to stand on their own feet and provide the continent, including Ukraine, with credible deterrence against Russia.

So far, they have talked the talk. In 2025, they will need to prove that they can walk the walk.

Stefan Wolff is a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham .

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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