KYIV, Ukraine — “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?”
In response to that straightforward question put to Donald Trump twice during Tuesday night’s debate with Kamala Harris, the former president responded with more than 400 words, but not one of them was the one Ukrainians wanted to hear: “Yes.”
Trump repeated his claim that he can end the war between Russia and Ukraine “before I even become president,” without explaining how. He declined to say if defending Ukraine was in America’s national security interests, insisted he knew how to negotiate with Vladimir Putin and invoked the specter of nuclear war.
His refusal to voice support for Ukraine’s effort to beat back Russia’s invasion was certain to deepen the sense of anxiety for many Ukrainians keenly aware that without robust U.S. military assistance, they could lose the war.
While the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has maintained it is ready to deal with either a Harris or Trump administration, many Ukrainians fear that Trump’s plan to end the war would involve ending U.S. military support. That would leave Ukrainians with a terrible choice: keep fighting and lose slowly, at great cost, or negotiate a peace plan on unfavorable terms.
In a reflection of how closely the U.S. election is being followed in Ukraine, the debate was aired live — at 4 a.m. local time — by Ukraine’s public broadcast network.
Trump’s comments were lampooned in a social media post by Illia Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian author and commentator. He likened Trump’s stance to forcing a cancer patient to stop chemotherapy and leaving them to “rot in indescribable pain until death to ‘prove the point.’”
“Yeah, the cancer is technically gone, but that doesn’t make one a great doctor who managed to tame the terrible disease,” Ponomarenko wrote to his more than 1.2 million followers on the social platform X. “It makes one an incompetent murderer and a moron.”
Harris, for her part, said the Biden administration had steadfastly supported Ukraine and maintained close U.S. ties to NATO allies. She said Putin, the Russian leader, “would be sitting in Kyiv right now with his eyes on the rest of Europe” if Trump had been president during the war.
“The reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up, and that’s not who we are as Americans,” she said.
In Moscow, Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, did not seem impressed by what he had heard about either candidate’s remarks.
“Of course, we noticed that both candidates mentioned our president and our country,” Peskov said at a regular news briefing, then added, “The United States as a whole, no matter which party the candidates come from, retains a negative attitude and an unfriendly attitude toward our country. The surname Putin is used as, let’s say, one of the tools in the domestic political fight in the United States. We really, really don’t like it. We still hope that they will leave our president alone.”
Trump’s comments came as little surprise to Ukrainians, given how often he has expressed similar sentiments on the campaign trail. But the debate offered a stark display of how deeply entwined Ukraine’s fate is with the result of America’s elections in November.
An anodyne statement about the debate by Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, reflected the great efforts Ukraine continues to take to avoid offending either candidate. “The teams have done good preparatory work,” he wrote on X Wednesday morning. “Emotionality is optimal and rationality in the arguments is evident. The positions of the candidates are clear.”
But headlines in Ukraine focused on the dangers a Trump presidency would pose. The website of the RBC-Ukraine broadcaster quoted Harris mocking Trump’s “friendship” with Putin, saying the Russian leader “would eat you for lunch.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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