Donald J. Trump’s refusal to say that he hopes Ukraine will win its war against Russia has cast a spotlight on what promises to be an abrupt U.S. policy shift toward the conflict — and Washington’s relations with Moscow — if Mr. Trump returns to the White House.
Twice Mr. Trump was asked directly at the debate on Tuesday night whether he hoped for Ukraine’s victory, and both times he insisted that his main goal was for the war to end quickly. “I think it’s in the U.S.’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, negotiate a deal, because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed,” he said.
The former president went on to suggest that he would leverage his friendly relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, underscoring clear signs that he intends to reverse President Biden’s confrontational relationship with Russia.
Mr. Trump’s answers “should tell people all they need to know — which is that if Trump gets elected and gets involved, Ukraine’s going to be the loser and Russia’s going to be the winner,” said John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. Mr. Bolton has become a vocal critic of the former president, who fired him after repeated policy disagreements.
Mr. Trump offered little detail on how he would negotiate a rapid end to the Ukraine war, saying only that he would speak to both Mr. Putin and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to strike a deal even before he was inaugurated in January.
That is a seemingly impossible goal. Mr. Zelensky has ruled out any settlement with Russia that does not restore his country’s original borders, while Mr. Putin seems determined to conquer even more of Ukraine than the roughly one-fifth of its territory that his army now occupies.
Given the realities on the ground and Ukraine’s lack of leverage over Russia, analysts said that calling for a swift end to the war was tantamount to arguing that Ukraine should surrender much of its territory to Mr. Putin. It could also rattle other U.S. allies who might question their assumptions about American commitments.
Richard N. Haass, a former diplomat and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, called the idea that Mr. Trump could broker a near-immediate end to the war “preposterous.” Mr. Haass said the claim was most likely “an empty but impossible-to-disprove boast that associates Trump with peace and his opponent with war.”
Speaking at a news conference in Kyiv on Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken left no doubt about where the Biden administration stood. “We want Ukraine to win,” he said.
During her nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, Vice President Kamala Harris declared that “as president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”
Mr. Trump did not criticize or threaten to halt U.S. military and economic aid to Ukraine, but he has previously implied that he considers that spending wasteful. During remarks in June, Mr. Trump referred to Mr. Zelensky as “the greatest salesman of all time” and complained that the Ukrainian’s plea for more aid “never ends.”
Mr. Trump’s call for a swift peace deal amounts to proposing one of the most sudden and drastic shifts in modern American foreign policy. Even his unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, painstakingly negotiated by President Barack Obama, did not happen until his second year in office. And unlike U.S. aid to Ukraine, that agreement never enjoyed bipartisan support.
Mr. Biden has overseen the delivery of more than $107 billion in military and economic aid to Kyiv, and tens of billions more to NATO allies deemed at risk of further Russian aggression. European nations could make up for some of that support were Mr. Trump to halt or reduce it, but the result would still be a calamity for Ukraine as it struggles simply to defend existing battle lines.
Mr. Trump’s comments also drew renewed attention to his past courtship of Mr. Putin, an authoritarian widely reviled among Western democratic leaders. Even many of Mr. Trump’s former top advisers have said they were mystified by his praise of Mr. Putin.
Insisting that he could strike a fast deal because both Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin “respect” him, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Biden had not pressured the warring leaders into peace talks. “He hasn’t even made a phone call in two years to Putin,” Mr. Trump said. (That is roughly accurate: Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin last spoke in February 2022. Oddly, Mr. Trump falsely asserted that Ms. Harris met with Mr. Putin shortly before the Russian invasion the following February.)
Andrew Weiss, a former U.S. national security official and Russia expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has chronicled Mr. Trump’s statements about Mr. Putin and Russia for months on the social media site X. Mr. Weiss notes that Mr. Trump has repeatedly indicated that he would seek to normalize relations with Moscow and resume direct dialogue with Mr. Putin.
Mr. Trump was particularly enthusiastic during his interview with the X owner and Tesla mogul Elon Musk in August, telling him that, as president, “I loved Russia. I was a friend of Putin and I loved Russia.”
Mr. Trump continues to dismiss concerns about his admiration for Mr. Putin as part of a grand “Russia hoax” meant to discredit him. At the debate, he claimed that Mr. Putin had “endorsed” Ms. Harris, referring to ostensibly positive comments the Russian leader recently made about her.
But Mr. Putin appeared to be speaking mischievously or even sarcastically, as when he said he admired Ms. Harris’s “infectious” laugh, which has been the subject of frequent mockery by Trump allies. Ms. Harris for her part told Mr. Trump that Mr. Putin “would eat you for lunch.”
Many former top officials in Mr. Trump’s administration continue to say they remain confounded by his seeming admiration for the Russian autocrat.
In a new book, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster described his bafflement at his boss’s eagerness to please Mr. Putin.
Mr. McMaster recounted how, in 2018, Mr. Trump reveled over a newspaper article about comments Mr. Putin made both deriding America’s political system and praising Mr. Trump. The story appeared just days after a former Russian spy was poisoned with nerve agent in Britain in a brazen plot quickly attributed to Russia.
Using his Sharpie, Mr. Trump wrote a friendly note to Mr. Putin on the newspaper page and instructed Mr. McMaster to have it delivered to the Kremlin.
“After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump,” Mr. McMaster remembered telling his wife at home that night. (He never delivered the note.)
For now, Mr. Haass said, the key question is what kind of deal Mr. Trump would actually pursue as president.
Mr. Haass, who has advocated more U.S. efforts to begin peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, suggested that Mr. Trump might in fact “continue aid and try to persuade both sides that further fighting would not yield benefits.”
That approach could eventually lead to “an interim cease-fire with modest territorial adjustments and which required neither side giving up its long term aims,” he said.
“But the danger given Trump’s admiration for Putin and antipathy toward Zelensky is he might opt for an imposed peace that would surely be rejected in Kyiv but would cause real harm to Ukraine and to the U.S. standing with allies everywhere,” he added.
Read More: Debate Puts Trump’s Affinity for Putin Back in the Spotlight
