Ukraine's Peace Prospects under a Trump Presidency: A View from Kyiv

UKRAINE - In Brief 07 Nov 2024 by Dmytro Boyarchuk

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Another sleepless night in Kyiv, with air alerts lasting over 8 hours. For more than two months, nearly every night has been interrupted, with only rare exceptions. It feels like a deliberate tactic, KGB-style, to exhaust people by depriving them of sleep. After all, the chief barbarian from the East is a former KGB operative, making this approach feel entirely logical. The news of Donald Trump’s election win was met with a sense of gloom. While there’s no fatalism, the mood is decidedly pessimistic, given all that Trump and his allies have said about Ukraine. After three years of war, the expectation is that challenging times lie ahead. People on the streets are grimly joking about the war ending in 24 hours, as Trump once promised. Against this backdrop, news of markets turning positive on Ukrainian Eurobonds feels like news from another galaxy. Trump is expected to push Ukraine to 'make a deal,' likely using cuts in arms supplies as leverage. Markets seem to believe that Ukraine’s leadership will have little choice but to accept a harsh reality and sign whatever is put before them. This straightforward scenario is the most attractive to the markets, but I doubt it will come to pass. The main question is what Trump might propose that would make a deal acceptable to Ukrainian leadership without undermining Ukrainian statehood. Simply enforcing this by cutting arms supplies is unlikely to work. Funding under the ERA program appears secure, the EU will want to avoid Ukraine’s collapse, and we have other allies with available weapons besides the U.S. And on the other side of the equation, what could possibly make Putin agree to a deal that preserves Ukrainian statehood? ...