‘A little scary’: Ukraine tries to remain neutral in US political battle

Ukraine, which relies on U.S. military aid to survive, has long sought to maintain bipartisan support in the United States. That has never been easy, but it is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with the increased likelihood that Donald J. Trump, no great friend of Ukraine, will return to the White House.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is asked in almost every interview what a second Trump administration would mean for Ukraine. Though Mr. Zelensky chooses his words carefully, the emotional weight of the assumption behind the question — that Mr. Trump could cut off American military aid, allowing Russia to destroy the Ukrainian state — occasionally comes into focus.

Trump’s claim during his debate with Biden last week that he was the only one who knew the path to peace is “a little scary,” the Ukrainian president said in an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News.

“I have seen many, many victims,” Mr. Zelensky said. “But that really stresses me out a bit.”

“If there are risks to Ukrainian independence, if we lose the state, we want to be prepared for that, we want to know,” Zelensky said in another interview last week with Bloomberg. “We want to know whether we will have strong U.S. support in November or whether we will be completely alone.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to look forward to Trump’s return to the White House during his speech at a summit in Astana, Kazakhstan.

“The fact that Mr. Trump, as a presidential candidate, says he is done and wants to stop the war in Ukraine is something we take very seriously,” Mr. Putin said. said on thursday. “I haven’t seen his ideas about how exactly he’s going to do that, and that’s the key question. But I have no doubt that he’s saying that sincerely, and we support that.”

Mr. Putin often feigns interest in negotiations to end the war he started. But he underscored his intention to force Ukraine’s capitulation, saying Thursday that Ukraine must agree to irreversible “demilitarization measures” as a condition for a ceasefire.

Ukrainian officials have said both publicly and privately that the hyper-partisan atmosphere in the United States, Russia’s continued efforts to stoke divisions, the turmoil in the presidential campaign and a distracted White House are creating an extraordinarily difficult diplomatic challenge.

“To be honest, we are currently in a rather fragile situation,” Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an interview.

“If Trump becomes president, it shouldn’t be a shock to us,” he said, pointing to a stack of books on the Trump presidency that he’s been reading for insight. But reaching out to people close to Trump, he said, “has to be done in a delicate way, not to antagonize Democrats.”

“We are very careful not to get involved in internal political struggles in the United States,” he said. “We don’t want to spoil relations with anyone.”

Ukrainian disappointments are bipartisan. It is as common to hear frustration about the slow pace of American aid and bitterness about restrictions on the use of Western weapons that the Biden administration is demanding as it is to hear concerns about Mr. Trump.

Ukrainian officials say privately that the Biden administration’s policies have left Ukraine in a cruel limbo, without the weapons it needs to win and full U.S. support for a Ukrainian effort to open settlement talks on terms favorable to Kiev. Mr. Biden did not attend a Ukrainian-hosted peace summit in Switzerland last month, despite calls from Mr. Zelensky to do so. Vice President Kamala Harris attended instead.

Ukrainian officials found some comfort in Trump’s brief statement during the debate that he would not accept Russia’s terms for ending the war. Moreover, many noted that Ukraine enjoys strong support within the Republican Party, which they believe will have an impact on Trump.

More importantly, they said, Trump is unpredictable. If he fails to make a deal with Putin and feels disadvantaged, he can ramp up aid and would likely be much less concerned about fears of escalation.

“It’s a paradox,” Mr. Merezhko said. “He’s predictable in his unpredictability.”

The biggest concern for Ukrainians is that the whirlwind of debate over Biden’s political future will distract from a NATO meeting in Washington this week, just as the organization is moving toward a larger role in coordinating arms and ammunition shipments to Ukraine.

The Biden administration is trying to avoid Trump accusing it of investing large sums of money in Ukraine over the long term. In addition, the new governments in France and Britain both face major economic challenges.

Ukraine’s Western allies have taken restrained measures to ensure continued military support regardless of the outcome of the U.S. election. Domestic politics, however, make collective action difficult.

NATO ambassadors last week agreed to set up an office in Kiev with a senior civilian, NATO officials said. But efforts to commit member states to multiyear funding for Ukraine have so far failed.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg initially promoted the idea of ​​a five-year, $100 billion fund for Ukraine, partly to entice some member states to contribute more. But Washington and other key allies expressed doubts about the proposal, arguing that it duplicated bilateral efforts and could face a veto from countries skeptical of helping Ukraine, such as Hungary and Slovakia.

Instead, NATO allies have agreed to contribute only about $40 billion to Ukraine next year, roughly equal to previous contributions, without explicitly committing to future aid.

Michael Kofman, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said the military aid already pledged should allow Ukraine to defend itself through the end of the year and build for the future.

“The question is, what for?” he asked.

For many Ukrainian civilians and soldiers, stricken with loss and under no illusions about the struggle that awaits them, as they brace for another winter without heat and power while Russia continues to destroy critical infrastructure, the spectacle of the US election adds to the uncertainty that is part of daily life.

“The planet is in the final throes of gerontocracy – the power of the elderly,” wrote Ostap Drozdov, a Ukrainian journalistHe ran through a list of world leaders over 70 — a group that includes not only President Biden and Mr. Trump, but also Mr. Putin — and lamented that a “group of skeletons in their closet are running the world.”

“Trump or Biden is an equally sad and dubious spectacle,” he wrote. “It depends on people who already have one foot in the coffin so that Ukraine does not die.”

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine.