KYIV—If Donald Trump was quick to claim victory in the early hours of Wednesday—well before nervous networks dared to call the election—then Volodymyr Zelensky was equally quick to congratulate him.
Even as Trump was wrapping up his victory party in Florida, the Ukrainian president sent a message looking forward to an “era of a strong United States of America under President Trump’s decisive leadership” and praising his commitment to the “‘peace through strength’ approach.”
It was a carefully planned statement from the Ukrainian leader, who knows as well as anyone the threat a second Trump administration could pose to the future of a sovereign Ukraine if Trump acts on his threat to cut off military aid and the funding Kyiv relies on to fight off an illegal Russian invasion.
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On the streets of the Ukrainian capital, faced with nightly drone and missile attacks from inside Russia itself, there was no such caution. News of Trump’s victory prompted not joy but panic–despite his promise that he could bring peace to Ukraine “within 24 hours” once he’s back in power.
“Trump’s victory is terrible news,” said Anzhela Zalevadna. “Our life is going to be even more ruined.”
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more ruined life than that of Zalevada, who escaped with her 9-year-old son Ruslan to Kyiv from the southern city of Mariupol as it came under siege at the start of the war in February 2022. Ruslan, who had just been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, had to witness a massacre as the Russians razed his hometown.
Once in Kyiv, Zalevada did her best to rebuild her life and got a job as a librarian at Ukraine’s biggest children’s hospital, Okhmatdyt. Then, on July 9 this year, the war caught up to them again as a Russian missile slammed into the building as part of a coordinated strike on hospitals across the country.
“Both Ruslan and I were in the library, all of a sudden it was dark, full of dust, we were climbing from under the rubble and Ruslan screamed: ‘Mom, war, war again!’” she recalled on Wednesday.
Although Trump was the first American president to sanction the transfer of lethal weaponry to Ukraine—a move Barack Obama resisted—he famously clashed with Zelensky in a 2019 phone call when he pressed the newly elected Ukrainian president to mount an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
After losing to Biden in the 2020 election, Trump attacked the president for the billions sent to Ukraine in military aid and funding and persuaded his acolytes in Congress to block all funding to Kyiv for more than nine months, allowing Russian forces to gain the upper hand in a counter-offensive along front lines in southern and eastern Ukraine.
“Every time Zelensky comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion dollars. He’s the greatest salesman ever,” Trump said in June at this year’s first presidential debate with then-Democratic nominee Biden. “The money we’re spending on this war, it should have never happened. I will have that war between Putin and Zelensky settled, as president-elect, before I take office on January 20th. I’ll have that war settled.”
Since the Russian invasion, Ukraine is thought to have suffered around 200,000 military casualties, almost half of them fatal. On Wednesday, in the freezing cold wind, 24-year-old Mykola was smoking by Kyiv’s Wall of Remembrance, looking for the pictures of two close friends killed in Eastern Ukraine.
“The last thing that Trump and his voters are worried about is our lives, casualties, our brothers freezing in trenches on the front,” he told The Daily Beast. “Yes, we are worried about Ukraine’s future; we are on our own now.”
As many Ukrainians, art gallerist Nataloia Zabolotna, said that she had been counting hours since the news of Trump’s victory. “We live in a situation of uncertainty, while Russian bombs continue to fall on our cities every single day,” she told the Daily Beast. “A lot of lives might be destroyed before Trump’s inauguration and how many will die after he comes to power?”
“And if U.S. support is cut?” she added. “We count human lives, children’s lives. Trump should realize that, he promised the entire world that he would stop this war; he has to fulfill his promise, if it was not an empty one.”
A U.N. human rights report last month put the number of civilian deaths in Ukraine at around 12,000, although local experts say the real death toll is far higher.
Meanwhile, popular disillusionment with the war is growing, and Ukrainians are asking themselves what they can do to persuade a new Trump administration to continue to help them.
“We should not be lame, begging and asking Washington for aid. We should have a strong, clear, well-articulated strategy,” Yuriy Butusov, one of Ukraine’s leading independent analysts told the Daily Beast. “So far we only have shown the Victory Plan, which has only one word ‘plan’ but no real steps for ending the war.”
Two decades ago Butusov founded Censor.Net, an online publication read by millions of Ukrainians. “In January we are going to see Trump’s concrete deeds, the new administration’s agenda for Ukraine, and if it’s going to mean cuts to aid that would mean it’s time for us to mobilize and formulate our clear strategy, which we still don’t have.”
Meanwhile, Zalevada, who fled Mariupol with her young son, takes only night jobs. “I make a bed for Ruslan on the floor in the hallway, because Russia bombs us every night. And I know that Trump will help the other side, not Ukraine, so our lives will be even more horrible. Even more ruined.”
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