Författare: Stefan Wolff Professor of International Security University

Since Donald Trump was reelected on November 5, speculation about what his presidency will mean for the war in Ukraine, which has now entered its 1,000th day, has become frenzied.

It is easy to be sceptical of Trump’s campaign assertion that he would end the war in 24 hours even before taking office in January 2025. But all the signs clearly point in the direction of a serious diplomatic push by Trump to force Moscow and Kyiv to agree on a ceasefire and possibly a broader settlement.

Whatever the outcome of Trump’s dealmaking, it will have consequences that need to be taken seriously and prepared for. From a Ukrainian perspective, the implication is that the country would lose its currently Russian-occupied territories, at least for the time being, and would have to give up on its aspiration for Nato membership. This is highly unpalatable for Ukraine.

However, given recent Russian advances on the front lines in both eastern Ukraine and the Ukrainian-held parts of the Kursk region inside Russia, Kyiv can ill-afford a continuation of the war. This is particularly true if Trump follows through on his threat to cut all military support for Ukraine.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, acknowledged as much on November 16 when he said that Kyiv “must do everything so that this war ends next year … through diplomatic means.”

This was partly a nod in Trump’s direction, indicating Ukraine’s willingness to engage in possible US-brokered mediation efforts. But it was also an acceptance that Ukraine’s long-term prospects in the war have been bleak for some time.

The Russian military has been is capturing territory more quickly over the past few months than at any time since the early days of the invasion.
Institute for the Study of War

In light of Moscow’s continuing military momentum, there is some doubt that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is keen to reach a settlement quickly. He has indicated an openness to negotiations, but Russia is known for dragging talks out, introducing additional demands and conditions, and only signing up to an agreement when it has extracted maximum concessions.

Even then, meaningful implementation on the ground is hardly a given and re-escalation is likely – as the Minsk accords on Ukraine of September 2014 and February 2015 illustrate only too vividly.

A rarely considered third caveat is that, while Trump will probably be fully committed to making a deal initially, he could simply abandon it if his and Putin’s timelines do not align. This is what happened when Trump’s short-lived enthusiasm for an agreement with North Korea’s Kim Yong-un during his first term evaporated, and he simply walked away empty handed.

But, even in this case, some negotiations took place, crucially without much concern for US allies like South Korea and Japan. Ultimately, the non-deal between Trump and Kim became one of the factors that enabled further advances in North Korea’s nuclear programme and a closer relationship between Pyongyang and Moscow.

Regardless of whether Trump pressures Ukraine into a bad deal, Russia defects from a Trump-brokered settlement at a later point, or Trump abandons his efforts to end the war, European allies of both Ukraine and the US must plan for the day after Trump’s inauguration.

This means, above all, taking more responsibility for their own security, as the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, put it succinctly before the US elections. This is easier said than done because it is not clear what the trajectory of relations between the key players will be. But several things are clear, and they can provide parameters for European planning now.

What should Europe plan for?

First, the bulk of military support for Ukraine will no longer come from the US. Kyiv’s European allies will have to do most of the heavy lifting in this regard in the future. This will mean providing financing for the purchase of arms and ammunition and investing long-term in Europe and Ukraine’s defence industrial base.

Second, it means supplying Ukraine in a timely fashion with what it needs. However, Ukrainian requirements will need to be aligned with a credible military strategy – not a dreamy victory plan aimed at restoring control over all Russian-occupied territories. This became wishful thinking at the moment Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive failed.

What is needed is a viable plan to protect the areas Ukraine will control at the time of a ceasefire, along the front lines and Ukrainian airspace. This will ensure some security against future Russian defection from an agreement, as well as making it more likely that Kyiv-controlled areas can gradually and sustainably be rebuilt.

Third, any military strategy to protect Ukraine will also need to serve as a pillar of a future European security order that reigns in, and credibly deters, future Russian adventurism. That is why Kyiv must not be left to its own devices in future negotiations. In negotiations involving Trump, Putin and Zelenskyy alone, Ukraine would be the weakest link and European interests would probably be completely ignored.

This is not to argue for a return to the format of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany that oversaw the failed Minsk accords. Rather, if the assumption is that Europe will have to step up and be the main guarantor of Ukrainian sovereignty, Kyiv’s EU and Nato partners need to have some input in negotiations.

The surprise phone call Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, shared with Putin on November 14 is an indication that this has been recognised.

Scholz and Putin’s phone call was the first discussion between Mr. Putin and a sitting leader of a large western country since 2022.
Filip Singer / EPA

A European channel of communication will be important to make clear that there is a common understanding of red lines among European partners and of the consequences if the Kremlin were to cross them – as well as the benefits if it were to respect them.

Both consequences and benefits are linked to the western sanctions regime, a point that was driven home by a G7 leaders’ statement in support of Ukraine on November 16, which reaffirmed the “commitment to imposing severe costs on Russia through sanctions”.

Europe will therefore also need to work with Trump and have communication channels into his administration. Scholz’s phone call with Trump on November 10 was reported as a “very detailed and good conversation”, including on Ukraine.

European scepticism of Putin as a reliable partner is at odds with Trump’s vision of cutting a deal with Putin to “un-unite” Russia and China. A common approach to this conundrum across the Atlantic is possible, but it hinges on a feasible and durable settlement concerning Ukraine.

After 1,000 days of the most devastating military confrontation on European soil since the second world war, it is time to accept that nothing about Europe should be without Europe. If it is true that Trump and Putin respect strength and disdain weakness, then the only pathway to getting this point across in Washington, Moscow and Kyiv is through muscular pursuit of European self-interest and self-assertion. Läs mer…

Reports of a phone call between the US president-elect, Donald Trump, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin (although quickly denied by the Kremlin) have given a first flavour of the tone and direction of their relationship in the immediate future. According to the Washington Post, Trump spoke with Putin on November 7, warning him against any escalation in Ukraine and reminding him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”.

Regardless of whether it happened or not, any – if even only indirect – exchange of messages between the pair should be heeded by America’s allies in the west, as well as Russia’s major partner in the east: China’s Xi Jinping. And there has been plenty of such messaging over the past few months.

Putin, earlier on the day of the alleged phone call, gave a long address at the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club thinktank in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Unsurprisingly, the speech – and Putin’s answers to questions from the audience afterwards – were anti-western and full of confidence that a new world order was now in “the phase of genuine creation”.

But at the same time, Putin took pains to flatter Trump as a “courageous man”, saying he’d consider any proposals from Trump aimed at restoring US-Russia relations and ending what Putin called the “Ukrainian crisis”.

But he then spent considerably more time making the case for the relationship between Russia and China. Here his audience was less the incoming US president and more his old friend the Chinese president.

The reason for this goes back to one of Trump’s messages to Putin and Xi. Trump told Tucker Carlson at a campaign event on October 31 that he would work to “un-unite” Russia and China. Trump implied that the two are “natural enemies” because Russia has vast territory that China covets for its population.

Donald Trump: US will ‘un-unite’ Russia and China.

Russia and China have a history of conflict over territory along their long land border in Siberia. This was part of the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, which preceded the US opening to China under then-president Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

In contrast to Nixon, Trump looks set to try to reset US relations with Moscow rather than Beijing. While it’s hard to imagine a similar split between Russia and China today, Trump’s apparent desire to exploit discord between Russia and China to the advantage of the US should not be dismissed as completely unrealistic either.

On the face of it, Putin and Xi are closely aligned. But a deeper dive into the relationship between Russia and China suggests it’s primarily one between their current leaders and lacks much of the institutional depth that other alliances have.

Putin and XI: a ‘new era’ of partnership between their two countries.
EPA-EFE/Maxim Shemetov/pool

There is a lot of resentment of China in Russia in both public and policy circles. Russians remain wary of China’s growing role in Central Asia and worry about the potential for disputes over long-contested borders. Many are also resentful of the fact that Moscow is now a junior partner to Beijing.

These are potentially all issues that Trump could use to drive a wedge between Russia and China. But a lot hinges on what Putin perceives is in it for Russia. This should be focusing minds in the west about what shape Trump’s Ukraine policy will take and what this means for Ukraine and the west.

A Trump-brokered agreement is likely to involve the recognition of Russian territorial gains in Ukraine since 2014, complete sanctions relief and broad international rehabilitation granted to Moscow. It would surely also involve a down-scaling of the US commitment to Nato and a pledge not to pursue further enlargement of the alliance.

Trump might get a deal with Putin, but whether Putin would stick to it is questionable. Putin is much more likely to simply play both sides in the hope that Russia might in this way become a third peer alongside China and the US in an emerging new international order.

This is of course a complete fantasy given the size of the Russian economy alone, but unlikely to affect Putin’s calculations, given his longing to restore Russia’s superpower status.

Chinese leverage

An American opening to Moscow, as opposed to Beijing, is also difficult to imagine because America’s European partners are unlikely to go along with it. Some, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico might find the idea attractive in general, but Germany and France, among others in the EU, are more likely to want to make a deal with China.

The reason for this is economic – they have largely overcome their dependence on Russian oil and gas, but not on China as an export market.

Shared values? Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 1918 armistice.
EPA-EFE/Ludovic Marin

Beijing, meanwhile, won’t sit idly by while Trump tries to drive a wedge between Russia and China. Despite Putin’s efforts to build parallel relations with North Korea and Iran, Xi retains plenty of economic leverage over Russia and is going to use it to keep Russia on side.

Diplomatically, Putin depends on Xi and China-led outfits such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Brics. While there are differences between Moscow and Beijing, they also both share a world view of a US in terminal decline – which is now likely to be further accelerated by the upheaval expected from a second Trump term.

For China in particular, preventing the US from completely pivoting to the Indo-Pacific will be a key priority – and not allowing Trump to cut a deal with Putin at China’s expense will be high on Xi’s agenda as a means to achieving that end.

Trump might still try to open up to Russia by striking a deal with Putin over Ukraine. But such a deal with Putin is not the same as dividing Russia and China. On the contrary, it is more likely to “un-unite” Europe and the US and to further weaken the transatlantic alliance.

Rather than making America great again, Trump could further hasten its decline by mistaking the destruction of what is left of the liberal international order with its reshaping according to US interests. Läs mer…

Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, combined with a Republican-led US Senate and House of Representatives was widely feared among international allies and will be cheered by some of America’s foes. While the former put on a brave face, the latter are finding it hard to hide their glee.

On the war in Ukraine, Trump is likely to try to force Kyiv and Moscow into at least a ceasefire along the current front lines. This could possibly involve a permanent settlement that would acknowledge Russia’s territorial gains, including the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the territories occupied since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

It is also likely that Trump would accept demands by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to prevent a future Ukrainian Nato membership. Given Trump’s well-known animosity to Nato, this would also be an important pressure on Kyiv’s European allies. Trump could, once again, threaten to abandon the alliance in order to get Europeans to sign up to a deal with Putin over Ukraine.

When it comes to the Middle East, Trump has been a staunch supporter of Israel and Saudi Arabia in the past. He is likely to double down on this, including by taking an even tougher line on Iran. This aligns well with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current priorities.

Netanyahu seems determined to destroy Iran’s proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen and severely degrade Iranian capabilities. By dismissing his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, a critic of his conduct of the offensive in Gaza, Netanyahu has laid the ground for a continuation of the conflict there.

It also prepares for a widening of the offensive in Lebanon and a potentially devastating strike against Iran in response to any further Iranian attack on Israel.

Trump’s election will embolden Netanyahu to act. And this in turn would also strengthen Trump’s position towards Putin, who has come to depend on Iranian support for his war in Ukraine. Trump could offer to restrain Netanyahu in the future as a bargaining chip with Putin in his gamble to secure a deal on Ukraine.

Pivot to China

While Ukraine and the Middle East are two areas in which change looms, relations with China will most likely be characterised more by continuity than by change. With Chinese relations being perhaps the key strategic foreign policy challenge for the US, the Biden administration continued many of the policies Trump adopted in his first term – and Trump is likely to double down on them in a second term.

A Trump White House is likely to increase import tariffs, and he has talked a great deal about using them to target China. But Trump is also just as likely to be open to pragmatic, transactional deals with Chinese president Xi Jinping.

Trump has said he will target China with sanctions, but is also likely to pursue a pragmatic approach to relations with China.
Newscom/Alamy Live News

Just like in relations with his European allies in Nato, a serious question mark hangs over Trump’s commitment to the defence of Taiwan and other treaty allies in Asia, including the Philippines, South Korea, and potentially Japan. Trump is at best lukewarm on US security guarantees.

But as his on-and-off relationship with North Korea in his first term demonstrated, Trump is, at times, willing to push the envelope dangerously close to war. This happened in 2017 in response to a North Korean test of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The unpredictability of the regime in Pyongyang makes another close brush of this kind as likely as Trump’s unpredictability makes it conceivable that he would accept a nuclear-armed North Korea as part of a broader deal with Russia, which has developed increasingly close relations with Kim Jong-un’s regime.

Doing so would give Trump additional leverage over China, which has been worried over growing ties between Russia and North Korea.

Preparing for a Trump White House

Friends and foes alike are going to use the remaining months before Trump returns to the White House to try to improve their positions and get things done that would be more difficult to do once he is in office.

An expectation of a Trump push for an end to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East is likely to lead to an intensification of the fighting there to create what the different parties think might be a more acceptable status quo for them. This does not bode well for the humanitarian crises already brewing in both regions.

Increasing tensions in and around the Korean peninsula are also conceivable. Pyongyang is likely to want to boost its credentials with yet more missile – and potentially nuclear – tests.

Loose cannons? Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un meeting in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, June 2019.
EPA-EFE/KCNA

A ratcheting-up of the fighting in Europe and the Middle East and of tensions in Asia is also likely to strain relations between the US and its allies in all three regions. In Europe, the fear is that Trump may make deals with Russia over the head of its EU and Nato allies and threaten them with abandonment.

This would undermine the longevity of any Ukrainian (or broader European) deal with Moscow. The relatively dismal state of European defence capabilities and the diminishing credibility of the US nuclear umbrella would not but help to encourage Putin to push his imperial ambitions further once he has secured a deal with Trump.

In the Middle East, Netanyahu would be completely unrestrained. And yet while some Arab regimes might cheer Israel striking Iran and Iranian proxies, they will worry about backlash over the plight of Palestinians. Without resolving this perennial issue, stability in the region, let alone peace, will be all but impossible.

In Asia, the challenges are different. Here the problem is less US withdrawal and more an unpredictable and potentially unmanageable escalation. Under Trump, it is much more likely that the US and China will find it hard to escape the so-called Thucydides trap – the inevitability of war between a dominant but declining power and its rising challenger.

This then raises the question of whether US alliances in the region are safe in the long term or whether some of its partners, like Indonesia or India, will consider realigning themselves with China.

At best, all of this spells greater uncertainty and instability – not only after Trump’s inauguration but also in the months until then.

At worst, it will prove the undoing of Trump’s self-proclaimed infallibility. But by the time he and his team come to realise that geopolitics is a more complicated affair than real estate, they may have ushered in the very chaos that they have accused Biden and Harris of. Läs mer…

Following a campaign marred by widespread and credible allegations of massive interference by Russia and pro-Russian proxies, Moldova’s incumbent president, Maia Sandu, has won another term in the second round of presidential elections.

According to preliminary results published by the country’s central electoral commission on November 3, Sandu beat her second-round challenger, Alexandr Stoianoglo, with 55% of the vote and on a higher turnout than in the first round of elections on October 20.

There were more than 180,000 votes between the incumbent and her challenger. In a country with an electorate of just over three million people, this is a significant margin, especially when compared with the razor-thin yes vote in the EU referendum that was on the same day as the first round of the presidential election two weeks ago. In that election, Sandu came first with 42%, compared to Staionoglo’s 26%, but in the EU poll, just 10,000 votes separated the yes and the no votes.

Sandu, who campaigned on a strongly pro-European platform, prevailed despite pro-Russian interference and fearmongering and a campaign by Stoianoglo that emphasised the importance of good relations with both Moscow and Brussels.

Moldova’s election result will certainly have come as a relief not only to Sandu and her supporters but also to Moldova’s western partners. It is the first time that a popularly elected president has won a second term in the tiny landlocked former Soviet satellite. The country borders Romania and Ukraine and has a small but significant Russian breakaway region, Transnistria, as a constant reminder of Moscow’s influence in the region.

Moldova’s election presents a clear difference to the Georgian parliamentary election results on October 26, which saw an openly pro-Russian Georgian Dream party win an election considered as neither particularly free nor fair, in results that the Georgia’s opposition-aligned president and western pollsters allege have been rigged.

Sandu’s win, by contrast, demonstrates both the appeal of the idea of a European future and the limits of Russian interference. Yet the understandable enthusiasm about the result in Moldova also needs to be tempered by a more careful analysis of some of the deeply entrenched societal cleavages that the elections have all but confirmed and the difficulties that lie ahead.

Deep divisions

Sandu’s win overall looks impressive. But she did not win the vote in Moldova itself, where Stoianoglo beat her by some 30,000 votes. What saved Sandu, like the EU referendum, was the strong support for her among voters in the diaspora, where she captured almost five times as many votes as Stoianoglo.

Just over 270,000 votes (83%) of the votes cast by Moldovans living abroad, predominantly in western Europe and north America, saw her comfortably across the finishing line. There may be good reasons not to distinguish between votes from inside and outside Moldova – but the optics are not good.

Nor can the overall margin of Sandu’s victory gloss over the fact that her supporters inside the country are predominantly concentrated in the capital and the centre of the country. In the capital Chisinau, in the centre of Moldova, Sandu won with 57%, representing almost one-third of her total vote inside the country. In the north and south of the country, Stoianoglo generally took the largest vote share.

In the country’s second-largest city, Balti in the north, he won 70% of the vote, compared to Sandu’s 30%. In the southern autonomous region of Gagauzia, a hotbed of pro-Russian, anti-European activism, Sandu obtained less than 3%. In Transnistria, Sandu came away with just 20% of the vote.

Map of Moldova showing the breakaway regions of Transnistria and Gaugazia.
Institute for the Study of War

These results are not surprising, given the outcome of the first round of the elections. But they represent fall in support for Sandu compared to in 2020, when she beat the then incumbent, socialist party leader Igor Dodon. Four years ago, Sandu obtained over 250,000 votes more than Dodon, winning almost 58% of the total vote. While she took the overwhelming share of the diaspora vote then as well, she also bested Dodon in most constituencies in the south.

Dodon campaigned for Stoianoglo in this election, but much of the challenger’s support was very probably due to a massive pro-Russian interference campaign that capitalised on many Moldovans’ fears and frustrations. Pro-Moscow messages aimed to capitalise on fears about being dragged into Russia’s war against Ukraine.

But there was also frustration with a government that has made little progress on much needed anti-corruption reforms and presided over a serious cost-of-living crisis in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and made worse by the war on Moldova’s eastern neighbour. Sandu’s party, the Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) won a commanding majority in the 2021 elections – so failures of the government are seen as failures of Sandu and her agenda.

Challenges ahead

That Sandu won the presidency again, and against these odds, demonstrates her resilience. But it can’t be taken for granted that her party will similarly prevail in parliamentary elections due by the autumn of 2025. She may well be forced into a difficult cohabitation with a potentially socialist-led government next year. In a parliamentary democracy, in which the powers of the government by far exceed those of the president, this could significantly slow down Moldova’s EU accession negotiations.

But there are also some silver linings on the horizon. That Sandu won clearly demonstrates the limits of Russian interference. There is a core part of the Moldovan electorate that cannot be swayed by Russian misinformation or vote buying. This is a basis on which Sandu and PAS can build.

Perhaps more importantly, Sandu and Stoianoglo both sent conciliatory signals on election eve. Stoianoglo emphasised the importance of respecting the outcome of the democratic process and expressed the hope that Moldovans would now move beyond hatred and division. Sandu acknowledged the concerns of those who had not voted for her and promised to serve as the president of all Moldovans and to work for the country’s further development.

If they both stay true to their word, Moldova may finally break with a past of repeated political crises and economic stagnation. Läs mer…