Opinion: Why Trump’s Withdrawal Benefits Ukraine (2025)

While counterintuitive, the withdrawal by President Donald Trump of the United States from peace negotiations – and even from materially supporting Ukraine – may be beneficial to Ukraine and its allies.

That is a conclusion many senior decision-makers and policy analysts in Ukraine have come to and it has several reasons. It’s also a position that challenges the mistaken legacy tendency of seeing Ukraine and the war through Western eyes still fixated on Russia as some great power, which it no longer is.

In terms of how Ukraine benefits from American withdrawal at the policy and, potentially, military operational levels, the first way is that it creates strategic clarity. It removes any lingering illusion about where the United States under Trump stands with regard to the war.

Where “clarity is king,” it is now crystal clear that the Trump Administration unambiguously seeks some new global deal with Putin’s Russia at its core – there are no remaining ifs, ands or buts. We can speculate about the drivers for this new “Détente by Donald,” but they’re likely to be hidden from public view given the Mafia-like ethos of both the American and Russian administrations.

In turn, Ukraine and its political and military leaders now know exactly where they stand and therefore how to proceed on all fronts of the war. They no longer need to make any substantive or symbolic investment in American-led so-called peace talks which have, at times, sounded and looked like a standover racket and Presidential Ponzi scheme.

Ukraine can now unconditionally focus on its own self-determined strategic goal: ending the war by making it untenable for Russia to keep fighting it. Expressed another way, Ukraine no longer has to meaningfully engage with an erratic American President who increasingly seems to be a Russian dupe or worse.

A key way that strategic clarity is expressed is Ukraine’s prosecution of drone warfare. With high-tech, long-range drones that can travel 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) and autonomously self-adjust using AI, Ukraine has been destroying Russia’s cash cow – its oil industry. Around 20 percent of Russian oil production capacity has now been eliminated.

No longer needing to looking over the shoulder at Washington DC, that trend will now grow. Ukraine manufactured more than a million drones in the last year and has plans for 4.5 million more in the next 12 months. This week, it undertook its largest drone strike of multiple targets inside Russia during the course of the war.

Secondly, as elsewhere noted, it puts Europe’s position and role with regard to Ukraine into sharp relief, including the scale of its support, engagement and coordination. European leaders can no longer hide behind previous American support for Ukraine. If for no reason but their own forward defense, they now have to make greater military investments via Ukraine. That is now rapidly occurring via new unilateral and multilateral packages of military and other support for Kyiv. The latest tranche of military aid is worth $24 billion, with half coming from Germany, which has at previous times been ambivalent about support. Europe has now overtaken the US as the largest contributor to Ukraine’s cause.

Indeed, the silver lining of “America First” for Ukraine’s cause is “Europe at Last.” In addition to conventional packages of military materiel, European support has fast evolved to include offers of peacekeeping forces, more F-16s and discussions about closing Ukraine’s skies, massive investments in Ukraine’s own defense industry production, and moves to reallocate to Ukraine the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets in European financial institutions.

American withdrawal also underscores for Ukrainians the greatest lesson of their 20th-century history. That while allies are valuable, they cannot be relied on. This is best illustrated by the Budapest Memorandum, which saw Ukraine give up its nuclear weapons for American security pledges that vanished. Ukraine’s leaders know very well that self-reliance and self-sufficiency must be the primary basis of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

To that end, Ukraine’s military production is booming; it will be at $30 billion in the next twelve month compared to $1 billion in 2022. On some accounts, around 40 percent of weaponry used is domestically produced including 95 percent of drones.

Quality is just as important as quantity here. The Ukrainians have fundamentally changed warfare in favor of drones, which now account for 80 percent of Russian casualties. It explains why over the last six months, the largest ever infantry assaults by Moscow have yielded miniscule gains of territory.

And that’s where the perception of Russia of some in the West needs to change. The objective reality is that three years of invasion has gained the Kremlin massive casualties and costs while utterly failing to achieve the core objective of eliminating Ukrainian statehood and national identity.

While this speaks to Ukrainian resilience and resourcefulness, it also points to the fact that modern Mafia-controlled Russia is closer to medieval Russia than to the USSR. Putin doesn’t helm a global power; he presides over a petrol station that bankrolls a largely unmotivated military and doesn’t redistribute wealth to millions of Russians who don’t have indoor plumbing.

Even that edifice is at risk. With petrol prices falling in the last month to $50 per barrel while its government budget is modelled at $70 per barrel, Russia is under extreme pressure. It is now likely around $3 billion short of budget revenue per month and may not be able to pay its soldiers in the short term.

(It is largely unknown and deplorable that, despite sanctions to the contrary, Australia is the world’s largest importer of Russian petroleum production via the “laundromats” of East Asia.)

Ultimately, Donald Trump wants to change the world order and deal Ukraine out in the process. As a result, Ukrainians will have to be even stronger protagonists of their own future. They are ready and not surprised.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.