There are just over two months left until Donald Trump replaces Joe Biden as head of the United States and in that time things can still happen many things in Ukraine that trigger tension between Russia and the West or move towards a conclusion of the conflictas the Republican leader who won the November 5 elections promised so many times during his campaign.
For example, the still President Biden has announced that he will accelerate before January 20, when his term ends, the sending of weapons and money to Ukraine. Biden intends complete the delivery of an arms aid package for nearly 6 billion dollars, of the amount approved in April by the Congress of his country after a six-month Republican blockade.
That last amount approved by Congress was 61 billion dollars. Previously, there were four other large aid packages to Ukraine since the start of the war, reaching a total of $175 billion. Of this sum, the US has given Ukraine directly about 106,000 million dollars, of which 69,800 million were for weapons.
A few days ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky complained that only 10% of US aid had actually reached their country. If Trump were to now cut off this tap of military aid and for the state budget of Ukraine, disaster would be certain, since European aid does not exceed half of the aid delivered by the United States.
But even these last $6 billion promised by Biden they might arrive late to the battlefield. Putin is making it clear, with the inexorable Russian advance in eastern Ukraine, that he is no longer content with the territories taken from kyiv and that his intention is to protect his conquests and even open new fronts in the face of an eventual negotiation promoted from the White House.
Trump wants to buy time
In the midst of these circumstances, the winner of the presidential elections held last Tuesday, Donald Trump, tries buy time in a conflict that has indicated many times that it is not in Washington’s interestespecially when Iran or China appear as major challenges.
Since last year and especially in the middle of the electoral campaign, Trump has reiterated time and time again that his intention when assuming the presidency of his country, and even pulling the strings before November 20, is end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.
Although this deadline is very difficult to achieve given the state of the conflict (the Kremlin itself described such a promise as an “exaggeration”), Trump could announce the end of Washington’s aid to kyiv, which would have serious repercussions on the position of Ukraine, which could end its efforts to recover the fifth part of the country in Russian hands, and could also doom European support.
Now everything depends a lot on the contacts that Putin and Trump can maintain directlywho They have always been characterized by a cordial relationship and very different from the one Biden had with the Russian leader.
Trump’s mysterious call to Putin
As reported on Sunday by the newspaper Washington PostTrump called Putin on the phone last week, after winning the election. This information indicated that Trump advised Putin “not to escalate” the war. And, in an apparent warning message, Trump would have reminded the Russian president that the US still has a significant military presence in Europe. Trump would also have expressed, according to such news, his interest in moving towards “the prompt resolution of the war in Ukraine.”
However, this Monday the Kremlin denied that such a conversation took place and even less so that Trump threatened Putinas that newspaper insisted, citing sources close to the American president-elect.
“It is pure fiction, false information. There was no conversation,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov. According to the Russian presidency, the last telephone conversation between Trump and Putin took place in July 2020, half a year before the then US president ended his term.
It’s Trump’s turn, but Putin has better cards
Whether the conversation occurred or not, Putin’s roadmap It is not enough at this time to take seriously a warning about the nearly 100,000 American soldiers stationed in 275 bases in European territory.
This deployment includes the 20,000 troops with which the US reinforced its presence in Europe after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A figure in any case very far from the 300,000 soldiers that the Pentagon had stationed in Europe during the Cold War.
Such a volume of troops on European soil, most of them integrated into NATO military structures, It represents a waste for the United States that Trump has already indicated that he wants to reduce, so that the European countries are the ones who assume the burden.
Nor does Putin seem willing to comply with the other “recommendation” that Trump made to him if the conversation were true, that is, to stop the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
Rather the opposite is happening. Just as Biden wants to get as much military assistance as possible to kyiv before Trump comes to power, Putin has ordered to maximize the offensive launched by his troops since the beginning of the year in Donbas, especially in the Donetsk region. At the same time, it is testing the weak points of the Ukrainian defenses in the areas of the Zaporizhia and Kherson regions that kyiv still controls.
One of these waves of attacks takes place in Kurájove, a town in Donetsk that It has already been practically taken over by the Russians in the last few days.
Russian attacks are also very persistent against Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Drones have been the main protagonists since March of the Russian raids against the Ukrainian electrical system, supported in smaller numbers by missiles and gliding bombs.
The damage is extensive and now They are focusing on energy distribution systems and not just energy generation. They want to leave Ukrainians without heat and in the dark in the middle of winter. There are also fears that Russia is conserving its missiles for a large-scale bombardment against the main Ukrainian cities and thus sink the morale of the civilian population just when the news from the war front is not at all encouraging.
Europe does not want Trump’s express peace, which suits Russia
Moscow’s intention is to go to an eventual negotiating table promoted by Trumpkeeping under its control the territories annexed during the war, plus the Crimean peninsula, taken in 2014.
Trump could guarantee Russia a delay of many years in Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO, as well as Ukrainian neutrality. The renunciation of membership in NATO and the loss of up to a fifth of its territory to Russia would mean de facto the admission of Ukrainian defeat in the war.
For this reason, the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, who is also about to leave his position after being one of the champions of supporting Kiev with weapons against Moscow, He was opposed to the “express peace” proposed by Trump.
On his last visit to the Ukrainian capital, which ended this Monday, Borrell affirmed that peace must be “just and sustainable,” and not ending the war “as soon as possible, no matter how.” He also stated that Russia should pay compensation for the invasion. A situation that could only occur if it were this country that lost the contest, which does not seem to be the case.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius was also against a “hasty agreement” for peace. In a forum organized by the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, The German president predicted that a Ukraine defeated by Russia and out of NATO would mean in the future “a constant source of new conflicts in Europe.”
In kyiv, the head of EU diplomacy opted, on the contrary, for a Ukraine integrated into European structures and that, once the war was over, can supply weapons to European armies thanks to all the investments in its defense industry that the West is making. The Spanish politician forgot to mention that Russia would never allow such an arsenal of European armies on its southern border.
Borrell insists on greater Western involvement in the war
Driven by his idea that peace in Ukraine can only be achieved through war and Russian defeat, Borrell again asked that Ukraine be authorized to attack military targets, especially air bases, on Russian territory with the long-range Western missiles that the Ukrainian army already has and those it may receive. According to Borrell, such a step is an action of legitimate defense. Moscow has equated it to a declaration of war.
But not even Ukraine’s great Western ally, Joe Biden, has dared to give the green light to kyiv’s use of these missiles against Russia. AND don’t expect trump to do it. This permission would allow the war to be prolonged, but it would not guarantee Ukrainian victory, a hope already quite distant, and it would push Moscow to redouble the harshness of its attacks.
It would also imply that Whoever gave that order would become a sworn enemy of Russia, something that also does not pass through Trump’s geopolitical plans, more favorable to trade wars, for example with China, than to hot conflicts with no signs of a solution such as the one in Ukraine, especially if at any moment another major conflict could be declared in the Middle East against Iran.
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