Dec. 3, 2024, 6:54 p.m.
As the world prepares for a new administration in Washington next month, Russia and Ukraine are scrambling to solidify their positions ahead of inevitable negotiations.
President-elect Trump has boasted he will end the war in Ukraine days after returning to office. Few believe that he can obtain such a swift cessation of hostilities. However, many believe his administration will push Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table shortly after he reenters the White House in January.
With this in mind, both countries are angling for a better hand on the battlefield. Russia has used intercontinental ballistic missiles in the war for the first time. It enlisted the aid of North Korea’s military and changed its official nuclear posture to deter and intimidate Ukraine. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has lifted restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western weaponry and is working to get assistance to Kyiv as quickly as possible. However, many experts argue that Biden’s efforts haven’t been sufficient to give Kyiv the upper hand.
“What they are doing is reversing some bad policies that they had in place for a while,” said Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and special representative for Ukraine negotiations during the first Trump administration. “They had $61 billion approved earlier this year, and they didn’t move it quickly, so they had a lot of leftover money sitting around, which they are now trying to push out in the form of equipment and ammunition.”
Since Republicans won back control of Congress and the White House in the November elections, the Biden administration has been working overtime to deliver assistance to Ukraine before Trump takes office. Many feared that Trump, who has expressed skepticism about funding foreign wars, would cut off all aid to Ukraine. A growing number of congressional Republicans also oppose appropriating more funding for Ukraine’s defense.
Following months of wrangling, Congress passed a major supplemental funding bill for Ukraine in the spring. Lawmakers initially expected that package to fund Kyiv’s defense into early 2025. The Biden team has been moving to deliver all presidential drawdown authority—roughly $13.4 billion from U.S. munitions and weapons stockpiles—before the end of January. Still, some experts argue that goal is not feasible.
“Ukraine has spent years now urging the Biden team to deliver aid at this pace. Not only is there not enough time to deliver this much aid now, but the U.S. didn’t even spend the last three years building enough weapons to send,” said Doug Klain, a policy analyst at the organization Razom for Ukraine. “Experts have spent years urging the U.S. to dramatically scale up arms production to meet exactly this need. It didn’t.”
Some analysts estimate that the Biden administration will be able to deliver only about 25 percent of the presidential drawdown authority before Trump takes office. That means the incoming administration will decide how much of the remaining weaponry to send.
Biden also requested that Congress appropriate an additional $24 billion in aid for Ukraine before he leaves office. About $16 billion of that would go to replenishing U.S. stockpiles, which have dwindled due to the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Government funding expires on Dec. 20, and Congress will likely pass a new tranche of funding to avoid a shutdown. Lawmakers could include the $24 billion Biden requested in that spending bill. However, House Speaker Mike Johnson immediately threw cold water on the idea. While some of Ukraine’s advocates are working to gin up support for that package, its passage during the lame-duck period is a long shot.
Meanwhile, after months of resistance, the Biden team also allowed Ukraine to use the long-range weapons the West provided to strike deep into Russian territory. The administration even gave the green light for Kyiv to use antipersonnel mines on the battlefield, despite the objections of human rights groups. Still, some experts argue that these efforts are too little, too late.
“They are frankly leaving office having been weak and behind the ball for at least two years now, giving Ukraine this slow drip feed that has been enough to avoid losing but not enough to win,” said Josh Rudolph, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington. “If they really wanted to go out strong and help restore Biden’s foreign-policy legacy, which he is very proud of, they need to do more. The single biggest thing that they could do would be to seize as many Russian assets as they possibly can and transfer them to Ukraine before January 20, as authorized by the REPO Act.”
Ukraine, meanwhile, has suffered battlefield losses over the last several months despite Biden’s efforts. According to an assessment by a group of Finland-based open-source analysts, Ukraine has lost about 1,600 square kilometers of territory around the country's east since the beginning of September. It has also lost control of about 500 square kilometers of Russia’s Kursk region, which Ukraine occupied in a surprise offensive in August.
Over the summer, many analysts saw Ukraine’s decision to enter Kursk as a bold move that would give Kyiv more negotiating power. But three months later, as Russia unleashed North Korean troops onto the battlefield around Kursk, Ukraine had already lost an estimated 40 percent of the Russian territory it seized.
Given this reality, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has conceded that Ukraine might not regain all of its territory on the battlefield. Instead, he has floated the idea of possible diplomatic solutions to territorial disputes. That is a bitter pill to swallow for many of the Ukrainians who have lost family members or experienced atrocities at the hands of Russian soldiers while under occupation. Still, many Ukrainians, exhausted by three years of war, are coming to the realization that negotiations may be impossible to avoid. Volker noted that Zelensky is savvily mimicking Trump's rhetoric.
“I think Zelensky, quite wisely, has been aligning himself with what President Trump has been saying—'we recognize we’re not going to get all the land back militarily right now, so we’re going to have to live with a dispute over Russia occupying some of our lands, but we can at least end the hot phase of the war and the fighting, get into NATO and the EU, which will protect the rest of Ukraine,'” Volker said.
And there is also some potential good news for Kyiv: Trump has already named Gen. Keith Kellogg as special envoy for Russia and Ukraine.
In the months leading up to the U.S. elections, many feared that Trump would hand Ukraine over to Moscow without further thought. Several of his closest allies—Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and billionaire backer Elon Musk—have publicly advocated for peace plans that are favorable to Russia and have opposed sending more military aid to Ukraine. Trump himself has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin on numerous occasions. However, Kellogg’s appointment has sparked some hope that the next Trump administration may not immediately capitulate to Putin.
Kellogg has previously expressed deep mistrust of the Russians and argued that the U.S. should continue supplying Ukraine with weapons as long as Kyiv agrees to enter talks. He stressed that Ukraine should negotiate from a position of strength and said that long-term security arrangements should be made for Kyiv when the war ends. He also didn’t rule out Ukraine’s potential NATO membership.
“One thing that Trump is not going to want is a chaotic collapse à la Afghanistan on his watch,” said Rudolph at the German Marshall Fund. “Kellogg clearly understands that Putin still harbors those ambitions to drive a similar collapse in Kyiv, and he has an understanding that a deal that would leave Ukraine defenseless would just give Russia the time to rearm and try again.”
