Will Trump Actually End The Ukraine War?

Both Trump's supporters and critics think he will end the proxy war in Ukraine, but there are some serious questions as to if he actually will.

The conventional wisdom amongst mainstream pundits both supportive and opposed to Donald Trump is that he will end the Ukraine war. To be fair if you took his rhetoric at face value this assessment would be correct, he has repeatedly claimed that he is planning to “end the war in 24 hours”.

However, a closer look at Trump’s actual policy record and statements from top Trump administration foreign policy officials brings this claim into serious question. In this article, I will review all of the evidence that points to the idea that Trump will actually continue the war.

Has Everyone Forgotten Trump’s First Term?

I find it strange that so many take Trump’s rhetoric on ending the Ukraine war at face value given his past record on Russia. While Campaigning in 2016 he actively supported warmer relations with Russia.

At a 2016 campaign rally, he said the U.S. should “get Russia to help us get rid of ISIS” and “actually be friendly with Russia”. He also said that it “would be a good thing” if the U.S. could “get along with Russia” and even criticized NATO expansion saying that NATO has been “obsolete” since the end of the Cold War.

However when Trump became president this completely changed. While the Obama administration backed the coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected president in 2014 leading to a civil war between Ukraine's pro-Russia factions in the East and Pro NATO factions in the West, he refused to give lethal arms to Ukraine’s government in that war, saying he opposed this policy because he “doesn’t want a nuclear war with Russia”.

However, Trump actually did go forward with this policy, passing a bill that sent 41 million dollars worth of lethal arms to Ukraine in 2017 and another that sent 39 million worth of lethal arms in 2019.

Not only did this policy massively ramp up the war in Eastern Ukraine but Trump had a chance to help negotiate an end to it and chose not to. When Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 he campaigned on implementing the “Minsk 2” accords, a peace plan that would have ended the conflict in Eastern Ukraine but was threatened by the U.S.-backed far-right paramilitaries against ending the war. As Noam Chomsky said in 2022 “He (Zelensky) … tried to go to the Donbas, the Russian-oriented eastern region, to implement what’s called the Minsk II agreement” but was “blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort.”

Trump could have ended the war had he supported Zelensky against the far-right forces threatening him against ending the war but the Trump administration instead sided with the far-right elements who wanted to continue the war.

As the renowned Russia expert Stephen F Cohen said in 2019 (when Trump was in power) Zelenaky could only go through with the peace deal if “America has his back” but was “being threatened … by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine” and said that “unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating”. Trump instead chose to side with the far-right forces threatening Zelensky and refused to help him implement the Minsk 2 accords.

Aside from this Trump also withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty and INF treaty, two important Cold War era treaties with Russia that limited the amount of nuclear weapons in both countries and allowed for cooperation between the two. The ending of this treaty was one of the grievances Russia listed at the UN in 2022 to justify its illegal invasion of Ukraine. John Pilger reported in Mint Press News one of the demands they sent to the U.S. as a condition for not invading Ukraine was to restore “the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons”.

You do not need to take my word for it, this is something Trump administration nominees have previously criticized him for before conveniently memory-holeing it. Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in 2019 that “Trump’s rejection of agreements such as the INF arms control treaty between the US and Russia will worsen the new Cold War and bring the world closer to nuclear war” and said that “Trump does everything he can to prove he’s not Putin’s puppet—even if it brings us closer to nuclear war”.

Trump’s pick for Head of Health and Human Services Rober F. Kennedy Jr. said the Trump administration “forced Zelensky to sabotage” the Minsk 2 agreements after “It was already signed”. RFK Jr. also said that Trump “bragged about arming Ukraine more than Obama did”, “walked away unilaterally from the INF treaty” and “exacerbated tensions between Ukraine and Russia”.

Some may argue that Trump was forced into supporting these policies to prove he was not a “Russian agent” and while the Russiagate hoax was certainly used to push him in a more hawkish direction toward Russia, in the end, he bent the knee to the neocons.

Why are people so certain he will not do the same this time and continue the war in Ukraine, contrary to his campaign promise just like he ramped up tensions with Russia last time after campaigning on better relations?

There is already evidence that Trump will go along with neo-cons on Ukraine. Journalist Michael Tracey reported that in April of this year, Trump secretly gave Republican leadership his blessing for them to pass a 100 billion dollar arms package to Ukraine. According to Lindsey Graham the package “would not have passed without Donald Trump” and Republican speaker Mike Jhonson bragged that Trump “championed” the bill and was “100 percent united” with him in his support for it.

Trump’s Administration Picks Signal Support For The War.

Some of Trump’s team has publicly stated what the Ukraine policy will be going forward, which looks far different from what his supporters expect. Take Mike Waltz, for example, Trump’s national security advisor.

He is often portrayed as an opponent of the Ukraine war but as late as June of 2023 he was defending the war. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said the U.S. should “provide the beans and bullets to the Ukrainians”, argued that the “best thing to do to defend Taiwan is to see Ukraine be successful” and defending the proxy war because he thought “if Putin is successful in Ukraine” he would “realize his dream of a revisionist, revanchist, old Soviet Union”.

Furthermore, Mike’s “solution” to ending the war in Ukraine is to actually ramp it up. He told NPR earlier this month that his plan to end the war by “enforcing the actual energy sanctions” on Russia and “taking the handcuffs off of the long-range weapons we provided Ukraine”. In other words, Waltz's solution to “end the war” is to further sanction Russia and allow Ukraine to strike Russian territory, further escalating tensions and likely the war.

Many believe that the Biden administration’s recent support for allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with U.S.-supplied long-range weapons is a way to kneecap Trump’s Ukraine policy, but based on Mike Waltz's statements it could very well be an advancement on the Trump administration’s eventual policy. As Journalist Aaron Mate put it:

While Biden’s decision could be seen as an attempt to box in Trump and undermine his pledge to end the war, it is equally possible that the outgoing president is implementing his successor’s eventual strategy.

Furthermore, Trump’s pick for deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka is a hardcore Russia hawk and supporter of the Ukraine proxy war.

On a Twitter Space earlier this year he said that “the Ukranians will fight to the last not man, to the last twelve-year-old who can actually lift an AKM” and said that there “wasn’t an offramp” to the war saying there “is not an offramp for KGB killers”.

A recent article in the Grayzone from Max Blumenthal and Kit Klarenberg found that Seb Gorka has close connections to Chris Donnelley, the head of a British intelligence cutout called the “Integrity Initiative” which “engages very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal contact and tries to influence them”. According to the article, the Integrity Initiative’s political goal is to “escalate a simmering new Cold War” with Russia.

According to Arthur Bloom in the American Conservative, Gorka met with Chris Donnelley for dinner during his first stint in the Trump administration while Donnelley’s Integrity Initiative was trying to “engage discreetly with governments, based on trusted personal contacts” to push a more hawkish approach towards Russia.

When contacted by Bloom, Gorka referred to Donnelley as a “friend”.

In an interview with “Times Radio” Gorka signaled what the Trump administration's “diplomacy” to end the war in Ukraine will look like. In the interview, he said he would “give one tip away that the president has mentioned” He said the administration’s strategy would be to “say to that murderous former KGB colonel, that thug who runs the Russian Federation you will negotiate now or the aid we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts”. In other words, the Trump administration’s Ukraine strategy is not to sit down and negotiate peace talks, but to threaten to ramp up the war if Russia does not accept his proposal.

Easy to say it is hard to see how this kind of bluster would actually bring the war to an end and will almost certainly ramp it up, further continuing the death and destruction in Ukraine and bringing Russia and the U.S. closer to nuclear confrontation.

Final Thoughts

I hope I am wrong, and Trump will actually follow up on his campaign promises and end the proxy war in Ukraine. However given his past policies, and statements from top administration officials it is unlikely he will end it and it is actually very possible that he will ramp the war up even farther than the Biden administration has.