Friday briefing: How will Trump handle the Ukraine war?

Good morning. The fallout from Donald Trump’s election will be felt far beyond the US, and perhaps nowhere more rapidly than in Ukraine.

Trump frequently bemoaned the cost of American military support during the campaign, repeatedly saying that he could end the war in “one day”. That is highly improbable, but Moscow and Kyiv are now preparing for a very different approach from Washington – and the White House is already planning to rush billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine in the last two months of Joe Biden’s term.

One measure of how rapidly the diplomatic parameters have changed: last night, Vladimir Putin congratulated Trump on his election, called him a “courageous person”, and said that Russia is ready to talk. Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was at a meeting of European leaders in Hungary, where the continent’s leaders said that they could no longer rely on the US as a guarantor of their security.

Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison, is about how Trump might try to end the war – and what the consequences will be, in Ukraine and beyond, if he succeeds. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Climate crisis | The world is still underestimating the risk of catastrophic climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse, the UN secretary general has warned in the run-up to Cop29, acknowledging that the rise in global heating is on course to soar past 1.5C (2.7F) over pre-industrial levels in the coming years.

2. Economy | The Bank of England has cut interest rates from 5% to 4.75%, but said that Rachel Reeves’s budget will complicate its battle against high inflation. Mortgage borrowers were warned that rates would come down more slowly than anticipated as a result.

3. Germany | The centre-right opposition leader Friedrich Merz has called for an immediate vote of confidence to be held in parliament after the collapse of the ruling coalition led by the chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

4. UK politics | Labour MP Mike Amesbury has been charged with assault after an incident following a night out. He was suspended by the party and lost the Labour whip on 27 October after a clip was published by MailOnline.

5. Health | Dozens of health and children’s groups have urged ministers to tackle obesity by imposing taxes on foods containing too much salt or sugar. New levies based on the sugar tax on soft drinks would force food manufacturers to reformulate their products, they claim.

In depth: ‘Trump wants to be a winner more than anything’

Immediately after Trump’s victory speech on Wednesday morning, the Ukranian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, sent his congratulations. “I appreciate President Trump’s commitment to the ‘peace through strength’ approach in global affairs,” he wrote on X. By the evening, he had sent the same message by phone.

“It’s a campaign of flattery,” Emma said. “‘Peace through strength’ is Trump’s own phrase. Zelenskyy’s calculation appears to be telling Trump that he can secure his own place in the history books if he supports Ukraine.”

Prone to flattery though Trump plainly is, Zelenskyy’s gambit is in competition with the president-elect’s less helpful instincts: his admiration for Vladimir Putin, an aversion to using American resources abroad, and what appears to be an intuition that Ukraine’s independence is a nonsense. “Trump made it very clear that he thought, you know, that Ukraine, and certainly Crimea, must be part of Russia,” his former adviser Fiona Hill said earlier this year. “He really could not get his head around the idea that Ukraine was an independent state.”

Here are some of the ways Trump’s second term could drastically shift the course of the war.

How much does Ukraine rely on American support?

It is indispensable. The US has been by far the biggest donor of military aid since the war began, about 43% of the total; the next biggest donor, Germany, is responsible for 12%.

France and Germany’s defence ministers have already said that Europe will “fill this gap to be more credible in terms of deterrence”, and a $39bn EU loan announced in September is one indication that it intends to try.

“But Europe just doesn’t have the stockpiles of weapons, or the manufacturing capacity, on the scale Ukraine needs them,” Emma said. “The only country that does is the US. And American technology is embedded in European weapons and equipment. So they will need American approval to transfer any of that technology in the future.”

What approach should we expect Trump to take?

Zelenskyy’s flattery of Trump may be the only option available to him, but there are good reasons to think that Trump could be persuaded to abandon his position: he has plenty of form for it. “The strategy has clearly coalesced around the idea that he wants to be a winner more than anything,” Emma said. In June, Zelenskyy told the Guardian that if Trump imposed a bad peace deal on Ukraine, he would risk being a “loser president”.

But if Trump believes that he can present an enforced peace deal as a victory regardless of its terms, few in Kyiv believe that he will not pursue it, Emma said. “There is already a realistic understanding in the political class there that some sort of territorial concessions will have to be made,” she said.

Without ongoing American military assistance, Ukraine would enter any talks in a much weaker position. A deal imposed on the basis of the current military situation would involve the acceptance of de facto Russian control of nearly a fifth of the country.

What would the consequences of ceding territory to Russia be?

“The hard line for Ukraine is that, if they are making such a major concession, it needs to be for concrete security gains,” Emma said. There is good reason to demand unbreakable guarantees: the Minsk agreements signed to end the fighting in the Donbas region in 2014 simply allowed Russia to regroup and plan for the 2022 invasion.

“That can’t just be Trump telling them that Putin has told me he’s not going to invade again: it’s hard to see what it could be other than Nato membership. And Putin will not accept that,” Emma said. Meanwhile, Politico reported in July a source saying that Trump “would be open to something foreclosing Nato expansion” altogether.

However Trump presents such an agreement, “it will be broadly perceived as a loss for America”, Emma said. “And it will have huge implications more broadly when Russia’s actions basically mean the end of the post world war two consensus on not taking territory by force.”

She points to China’s longstanding ambitions to seize control of Taiwan: “Beijing has been pretty open about its desire to challenge the existing world order. There is no doubt they are watching what happens in Ukraine, and whether the west has the cohesion, the motivation and the financial capacity to stand by their allies.”

What changes before his inauguration?

One of the dangers of floating a deal on the basis of a “frozen conflict” – an armistice that simply maintains the frontline where it is when the deal is signed – is that it incentivises Russia to be as aggressive as possible before Trump takes office in the hope of maximising its gains, Emma said. “There would be no reason for them to hold anything back.”

While Ukraine continues to insist that there can be no peace while Russia holds any of its territory, parts of the “victory plan” it has been selling to western leaders appear to be premised on the same principle – that it can maximise its position by heightening the costs of the conflict to Russia. “The ‘victory plan’ is really about entering talks from a position of strength,” Emma said. “Senior sources have told me that that’s about dismantling the Russian logistics chain that brings men and ammunition to the border, and hitting major ammunition storage facilities.”

The Biden administration has imposed restrictions on the use of its weapons deep inside Russian territory, which means Ukraine cannot use US weapons to attack key infrastructure in the country. But with work towards a surge in aid already under way and the prospect of a renewed Russian assault, Emma said that “you would have thought that one obvious thing for Biden to do would be to lift some of those restrictions to allow that”.

Isn’t the end of the war worth the cost?

There is a reasonable argument against all of this: that if Trump’s intervention ends a war that has ground on without significant progress and led to the loss of many thousands of lives on both sides, it is worth any cost.

This is obviously worth taking seriously, and the fact that Trump may be the engine of an end to the war should not discount it. “The scale of the loss – which is visible everywhere, in the graveyards and constant funeral processions and maimed young men – is enormous,” Emma said.

Emma pointed to a source from Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk province, who told her that if giving up the region was the price of ending the war, “I wish the Russians would just take it: I have nothing left there, and the people who are still there are Russian in spirit.” On the other hand, she noted: “Those living under occupation in places that have been taken more recently, like Mariupol, would take a different view.”

There is no easy consensus within Ukraine, but by and large, “people there are very aware of what life is like in Russia, and they don’t want that for them, or their children or future generations”, Emma added. If Trump enforces a peace deal that leaves open the possibility of a Russian return, “that will make them feel like those deaths were pointless”. And if there is to be a price for peace, they are entitled to hope that the American president would make it as low as possible.

What else we’ve been reading

• Pokémon cards are back … in digital form, thanks to a new mobile game. The good news? It’s great. The bad news? It’s so great you may never put it down, writes a nostalgia-riddled Keza MacDonald. Charlie Lindlar, acting deputy editor, newsletters

• In this extract from her introduction to a new collection of writing by the late anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber, Rebecca Solnit writes beautifully about a radical thinker who believed ordinary people had the power to change the world: “David wanted to put these tools in everyone’s hands, or remind them that they are already there.” Archie

• Donald Trump has “pledged to wage war on planet Earth”, writes George Monbiot in his column this week, and there’s one thing that can stop him: “a devolution of politics to the people, the creation of a genuine democracy that cannot so easily be captured”. Charlie Lindlar

• Keir Starmer’s often-repeated slogan “smash the gangs” is no more useful an idea than “stop the boats”, writes Refugee Council chief executive Enver Solomon, because it does nothing to address the underlying causes of the refugee crisis. That, he suggests, makes it doomed to failure. Archie

• It’s Elizabeth Hurley’s turn to answer Guardian reader questions, and she is disarming as always. “If I were Queen, I’d outlaw air fresheners in cars – they’re all disgusting,” she says (correctly). Charlie

Sport

Football | Amad Diallo scored two second-half goals to help Manchester United beat Paok 2-0 and earn a first Europa League victory of the season. Elsewhere, Victor Osimhen’s double helped Galatasaray to a 3-2 win over Tottenham, and Chelsea thrashed Armenian side Noah 8-0 in the Europa Conference League.

Formula One | Formula One drivers have demanded the FIA stops treating them like children in a damning indictment of the governing body’s policies and its president, Mohammed Ben Sulayem. Their complaints include recent dressings down for swearing and rules about “matters as trivial as the wearing of jewellery or underpants”.

Football | Lee Carsley handed debut international call-ups to Southampton’s Taylor Harwood-Bellis and Newcastle’s Lewis Hall, as England’s interim manager named his final squad ahead of next week’s Nations League ties with Greece and the Republic of Ireland.

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