Donald Trump will move quickly to pressure Ukraine to end the war with Russia if he wins November’s election and has developed “well-founded plans” for a peace deal, says Hungary’s far-right premier Viktor Orbán, who has held private talks with the Republican candidate.
Orban enjoys close relations with both Mr Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The news will cause shudders in Kyiv and the European capitals fighting to ensure that Russia is expelled from the 18 per cent of Ukrainian territory that it has already occupied. A Trump-style peace deal is expected to call on Ukraine to concede much of its invaded territory to Moscow, something Kyiv and most Western capitals bitterly oppose.
Defence experts have warned Mr Putin may use such a deal as a stop-gap measure to regroup before launching further aggressions against Kyiv and even the Baltic states, which would be helped by Russia’s transition to a war economy.
“We can expect no peace initiative coming from [Trump] until the elections. I can however surely state that shortly after his election victory, he will not wait until his inauguration, but will be ready to act as a peace broker immediately,” Orbán wrote in his letter seen by the Financial Times that was sent to European Council president Charles Michel and other EU leaders. “He has detailed and well-founded plans for this.”
The concession of Ukrainian territory under a Trump deal would be “hugely contentious as it is predicated on accepting the Russian invasion and accepting that territory captured beyond the 2014 occupation of Crimea is also acceptable”, says Todd Landman, professor of international relations at Nottingham University “I cannot see the EU or UK accepting [this] at all.”
But unless the UK and Europe step up to fill the void in financial and military assistance left by America’s detachment, Ukraine will be under extreme pressure to back the plan.
“The UK/EU alone are unlikely to be able to provide the scale of support necessary for Ukraine to win,” says Christopher Tuck, of King’s College London’s defence studies department.
“It’s not that these countries aren’t providing significant support or that they can’t go on doing so. But… as the current military situation in Ukraine demonstrates, if Ukraine is struggling to turn the tide with US support, it is going to struggle even more without it.
“Undoubtedly, the hope of a Trump victory in this year’s presidential election is one of the key pillars of Putin’s current strategy in Ukraine.”
According to Anand Menon, a professor of European politics at King’s College London: “It is very hard to see what the Europeans can do if Trump gets in and says to Zelensky, ‘sign this deal or I’ll stop US aid’. Ukraine could refuse to sign. But how long would it last without US support? And he could say to Putin: ‘Sign up or we’ll double the amount of weapons we send to Ukraine.’”
Mr Trump’s attitude to European security might be more positive if all Nato’s European members stepped up to give 2 per cent of GDP to the alliance. Spain and Italy remain prominent offenders, with an estimated 2024 defence spend of well under 2 per cent.
Regardless of Nato spending rows, there is a visceral reluctance among Mr Trump’s wing of the Republican Party to give any US taxpayer money to Ukraine. Fears that America’s support for Kyiv will wither if Mr Trump is elected have been heightened by the announcement JD Vance will be his running mate.
The Ohio Senator is a staunch proponent of Trump’s “America First” vision and generally suspicious of US intervention in foreign affairs. Soon after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Vance declared: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
One senior EU official told Politico that the appointment of Vance was a “disaster” for Ukraine – and by extension the European Union, which has given close to £100bn worth of financial and military assistance to Kyiv since 2022.
Mr Vance led the ultimately unsuccessful attempts among the Maga section of the GOP in Congress to kill off President Joe Bien’s latest $60bn US aid package to Ukraine.
Democrats had hoped the $60bn would shore up Ukraine’s defence against Russian for the next 18 months. But if Mr Trump gets in, even this Congress-approved package might not be safe,
“If Trump were to win, he could veto aid packages to Ukraine pending any negotiation,” says Landman. “But it is not clear he would have any support from European allies and thus would have to engage in a unilateral policy that does not have acceptance across the EU and UK.”
Tuck thinks it is “likely that European countries would continue to provide aid for as long as Ukraine is willing to fight”. He noted that for most European states, a Russian victory in Ukraine would be a colossal threat to their security interests.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy met with Vance in May in his position as shadow Foreign Minister in opposition.
Mr Lammy referred to Vance as his “friend” and agreed with the senator that “we in Europe have a problem that we need to fix with higher defence expenditure.”
But that’s not a guarantee that America won’t propose a deeply unpalatable Ukraine peace deal – one Britain won’t be able to prevent even if it dares criticise it.
Asked to comment on the possible diplomatic crisis, the Foreign Office pointed to a recent article by Mr Lammy, in which he declared: “We will stand by the brave people of Ukraine, as they defend their freedom against Vladimir Putin’s new form of fascism. British military, economic, political and diplomatic support for Ukraine will remain ironclad.”
On Tuesday, Ukraine and some of its supporters tried to put a brave face on events, in the hope Vance might radically change his views – and those of Trump.
“JD Vance is a devout Christian and the circumstances of his childhood give me great hope that he, like Speaker Mike Johnson, will conclude that US support for Ukraine is the only option,” said Melinda Haring, a senior adviser for Razom for Ukraine, a US-based charitable organisation that advocates for Ukraine.
Maryan Zablotskyy, an MP for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, argued Russia was harming US interests on many fronts, and he said that a US politician pursuing an America First agenda “will never be positive towards Russia”.
For Trump, the most transactional of politicians, Ukraine’s wishes will come somewhere near the bottom of a list of priorities; America’s and Trump’s short-term interests will be at the top.