Ukraine recap: the bleak prospect of a Trump-Vance White House

By Jonathan Este, The Conversation

Ukraine will no longer exist by 2034, or so says former Russian president and Kremlin attack dog, Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev didn’t say so in as many words. But, reflecting recently on the outgoing Nato leader Jens Stoltenberg’s dream of Ukraine joining within ten years, he said none of the current leaders would still be in office by 2034 and that it was “quite possible the notorious country 404 will not exist either”, using the reference to the 404 error message displayed when a webpage can’t be found to suggest the existence of Ukraine was a mistake.

But the Russian media has joined the dots, reinforcing the Kremlin’s message that it may well be a long war, but that Ukraine, which is not a real country in any case, would not win.

One person who, by his own admission, doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other”, is Donald Trump’s pick as running mate, the junior senator for Ohio and arch-isolationist, J.D. Vance. Vance has made no secret of his opposition to US aid to Kyiv, something that puts him in lockstep with Trump.

So Vance’s appointment to the Republican ticket is bad news for Ukraine and equally worrying for Europe, write Stefan Wolff and David Dunn, experts in international security at the University of Birmingham. Vance sees the main threat to the US as coming from China and contends that US military aid, including – for instance – Patriot air defence batteries, would be better off being supplied to Taiwan in volume. Vance sees Volodymyr Zelensky’s aims to restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders as “fantastical”.

Without US support, write Wolff and Dunn, Ukraine cannot defeat Russia in the field. And, given how untrustworthy Putin has shown himself to be – as evidenced by the collapse of the two Minsk ceasefire agreements struck in 2014 and 2015 – it’s hard to imagine any peace deal forced on Ukraine being anything but temporary.

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