If there is one date on the calendar that Europe, Ukraine, and Russia are eyeing today, it’s Jan. 20, 2025. Inauguration Day in America and the return of Donald Trump to the White House could bring significant U.S. policy changes, not only in Ukraine but on issues pertaining to European security broadly.
None of this is a surprise to anybody. Trump has a long record of viewing Europe as exploiting America’s good nature, too fat and lazy to take care of its own defense. Nor is it a revelation, particularly to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that Trump wants the war in Ukraine, which will enter its fourth year this coming February, to end. He reiterated as much during a Time interview last week.
How Trump intends to do this has never been sufficiently explained. While some of Trump’s advisers have their own ideas—Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, appointed to be the special envoy to the war, wrote a paper earlier this year that, in part, called for withholding U.S. military aid to Kyiv if Zelensky didn’t enter peace talks—Trump himself hasn’t said anything beyond vague platitudes. Whether this is a deliberate strategy to be ambiguous, a reflection of the mountains of advice he’s receiving or simply because he doesn’t have a clue where to start, nobody can say for sure.
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