“If you can really stop the war in one day, come to Kiev and do it.” Volodymyr Zelensky's invitation is far from courtesy and sounds like a challenge from a man who does not believe in easy solutions. The recipient is Donald Trump, former American president – and favorite for the Republican nomination for the November elections – who has repeatedly claimed to have the right recipe to “find an agreement in 24 hours” on the war. “Please, Donald Trump, I invite you to Ukraine,” the Ukrainian president said. “Maybe he has a real idea and he can share it with me.”
Zelensky's statement is not a new one, the controversy with Trump has been going on for months. But the Ukrainian leader's challenge entails risks, because although relegated – for now – to election campaign slogans, Trump's declarations reveal a clear disinterest in the Ukrainian resistance: his party has already put a spoke in the wheels of the funds allocated to military aid for Ukraine in the US Congress. And the almost certain Republican candidate has already made it clear that he wants to close – or at least reduce – the American taps for the country invaded by the Russians, if he is re-elected.
Speaking in Davos earlier this week, Zelensky tried to dismiss fears of a decline in military funding if Trump returns, arguing that “one man cannot change an entire nation.” And the official Ukrainian position remains open, with Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba underlining Kiev's intention to “work with whatever reality presents itself after the American elections”. But it is clear that a Republican victory would bring a completely different air to the conflict, far from the close embraces and promises of unwavering support of Biden and Zelensky. The Ukrainian president has every reason to distrust the tycoon: if his clear resistance to military aid were not enough, Trump boasts a history of explicit praise towards Vladimir Putin, judged an “intelligent” man for having occupied “a vast area, a large piece of land with many people” suffering only relatively minor impact from the sanctions. And in a speech after his landslide victory in the Iowa caucuses this week, the tycoon said that “Russia would not have attacked” if he were in the White House, because he and the Russian president “get along very well.”
You have until November to find out what the future of American policy on Ukraine will be. Meanwhile, Zelensky is confident of receiving new military aid packages from partners – the US and the EU – in the “coming weeks and months”. Because “the battlefield simply cannot wait”: the war rages and Kiev is fast approaching the second anniversary of the invasion. Two years of battles and loss of life at the front which seem to have also exasperated the Russian people, at least some of them: the wives of the soldiers engaged at the front have returned to ask in the streets, in front of the electoral headquarters of the Russian president, for the return to their husbands' home. “I would like to know when Putin will issue a decree that my husband will have to be at home,” is Maria Andreyeva's desperate request. “Do we have to squeeze everything out of our kids, squeeze the last drop of life out of them?” A sadly rhetorical question in Putin's Russia.
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