800 words (700)
20 May 2025
NB: This is an update after the Trump-Putin phone call. There are minor nips and tucks throughout, so use this version (including a different cut for length). If it has already run, no harm done. Nothing has really changed.
Can Ukraine Survive Trump?
By Gwynne Dyer
We are getting very close to the point where Donald Trump realises that his dear friend Vladimir Putin has been playing him for a fool. The Russian president never had the slightest intention of moderating his war aims, which include the annexation of much of Ukraine and the demotion of the rest to the status of a puppet state.
There have been no ‘peace negotiations’; just Putin tirelessly repeating his non-negotiable demands. He behaves like a man who is certain he will win his war of choice, but then he has to. Any other outcome after three years of fighting and hundreds of thousands of Russian deaths would certainly lead to his removal from power and quite possibly to his death.
Yet there is no evidence that Ukraine is really on the brink of defeat. Its soldiers are certainly tired but so are Putin’s. The Russians are gaining ground so slowly – tens of metres a day along one or another small portion of the 2,000 km. front line – that at the current pace they would reach Kyiv in about 2029.
Trump, by contrast, wanted a cease fire within the next few weeks. After his phone call with Putin on Monday he ditched that goal in favour of ‘immediate peace talks’ without a cease fire, time and place to be arranged by Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That allows Putin to avoid talks or drag them out endlessly while continuing his offensive.
When Trump realises what he has done, he will try to bully Zelensky into accepting Russia’s terms because he has no leverage over Putin. He will probably insist once again that Ukraine has ‘no cards’ and must submit, but that wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. So what will happen after Zelensky says ‘no’?
It’s almost certain that Trump will react by once again punishing Ukraine. The United States would immediately stop selling it arms and, more importantly, cut off the flow of real-time intelligence data from US satellites and long-distance surveillance aircraft that helps Ukraine intercept Russian attacks.
This wouldn’t spell military disaster for Ukraine, although it would cause thousands of extra Ukrainian deaths both at the front and in cities under Russian air and missile attack. Ukraine survived six months without US aid when the Republicans in Congress halted arms deliveries in 2024. They can do it again, for longer if necessary.
Ukraine will get a bigger flow of arms and ammunition from its European supporters this time as they rebuild their defence industries to compensate for the loss of US support, but that will not make up for the loss of real-time intelligence data on Russian targets. It will be a long, hard road for the Ukrainians but they can probably hang on for another year or so.
There would be no point in hanging on if the Ukrainians were ultimately doomed, but they aren’t. The two sides are effectively deadlocked, even if superior Russian numbers enable them to creep forward a bit from time to time. Sooner or later one side will break, but nobody knows which one or when.
That is how wars of attrition usually end: a sudden collapse of morale on one side or the other after years of stalemate, often triggered by a major offensive that either succeeds (in which case the attacker wins the war) or fails (in which case the defender wins). These collapses often morph into outright mutinies, and entire regimes are sometimes overthrown.
The war in Ukraine is almost the First World War in miniature: a long war of attrition with everybody driven below ground level by new weapons (machine-guns and rapid-firing long-range artillery then; drones, drones and more drones now).
At this point, three years in, the situation in Ukraine can be compared to the First World War in 1917. There was a lot of movement and ground changing hands in the early months of the war, but then it was down into the trenches and bloody deadlock ever since.
There were two big offensives in 1917. The French one failed so badly that much of the army mutinied and France was effectively out of the fighting for the rest of the war. The Russian offensive failed even more disastrously and not only the army but the whole empire collapsed.
Germany’s great offensive in spring 1918 came within an ace of success, and then collapsed utterly. The army mutinied, and Germany surrendered in November 1918.
So what lessons can Ukrainians draw from these examples? First: It ain’t over till it’s over. And two: Stay on the defensive and wait for the Russians to break. It could happen. See above.
________________________________
To shorten to 700 words, omit paragraph 8. (“Ukraine…or so”)