Karpaty village, Ukraine – It was Russian President Vladimir Putin who won the presidential vote in the United States, Ihor said gloomily.
“They’re celebrating in the Kremlin now,” the 29-year-old Ukrainian serviceman told Al Jazeera, withholding his last name and his unit’s location in accordance with military regulations.
“We’re not.”
To Ihor, the second coming of Donald Trump – who has repeatedly trumpeted his admiration for Putin – to the White House epitomises Ukraine’s mounting pessimism about its war with Russia.
The cabinetmaker from the southern city of Odesa volunteered to enlist in October 2022 after the outmanned and outgunned Ukrainian forces pushed the Russian army out of the northeastern Kharkiv region.
Months earlier, Moscow pulled out its forces from around Kyiv, all of northern Ukraine and the key southern city of Kherson, leaving hundreds of killed civilians.
US President Joe Biden visited Kyiv in February 2023, pledging $500m in military aid and telling Ukrainians that, “Americans stand with you, and the world stands with you.”
Reports suggest the outgoing US leader is rushing to send billions more to Ukraine before January when Trump will return to the White House.
As it stands, military expert Andrey Pronin thinks that Ukraine has enough military aid from the US to last for months.
“We have enough for about eight months,” said Pronin, a former serviceman who pioneered the use of war drones in Ukraine a decade ago and now heads a drone school that has educated hundreds, told Al Jazeera.
“And then we will make a deal with whoever [the US] tells us to,” he said.
But eight months may be too late.
“The US aid is ineffective, there’s objectively too little of it,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University told Al Jazeera.
Ukraine’s best option is Trump’s ceasefire deal with Putin in exchange for the recognition of Crimea as part of Russia and the lifting of most Western sanctions, he said.
“Otherwise, I’m afraid, by mid-next year, we will see Russian tanks on the ruins of [the eastern city of] Dnipro and [the southeastern city of] Zaporizhzhia,” he said.
If talks fail because of Putin’s ambitions, Trump may allocate sizeable military aid that could stop Russia – unless Zelenskyy “wastes it on yet another adventure”, he said.
“But that would depend on the situation in the Middle East and Taiwan,” he said.
To Ihor, Russia’s defeat was bound to happen within months, and Trump seemed like a political has-been embroiled in sex scandals and legal suits.
All Ukrainian forces had to do was to push southwards towards the Sea of Azov, bisecting Moscow’s “land bridge” to the Crimean peninsula, and all Washington had to do was to supply better weaponry and intelligence data.
“We were so certain it would happen in the spring or summer” of 2023, recalled Ihor, who was stationed just a dozen kilometres from Russian forces.
It did not.
‘With Trump, we’re not going to win the war’
While Trump was regaining political steam and Russia was ramping up its military-industrial complex despite Western sanctions, Ihor suffered multiple wounds and contusions and was hospitalised six times.
He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, head and stomach aches. His wife Olha lost her job in a children’s nursery that closed down because it did not have a bomb shelter.
Their seven-year-old daughter Lika sleepwalks from her bed to the corridor, holding her big-eared plush rabbit, a gift from her dad, after hearing late-night air raid sirens following the “be between two walls” safety rule.
Ihor is horrified by the idea that all the suffering his family is going through will be in vain.
“Trump will force us to stop the war on the condition that Russia gets everything it had occupied,” he said referring to the Republican’s obscure plan that lacks details and evidence.
In another corner of Ukraine, in the idyllic village of Karpaty in the Carpathian Mountains, Oleksandr is equally pessimistic.
“With Trump … we’re not going to win the war,” the bearded chiropractor told Al Jazeera.
“Maybe Trump will stop this meat grinder, otherwise we risk losing people and the war,” Oleksandr said, referring to the horrendous losses of manpower and the draconian campaign to forcibly conscript men of fighting age.
Kyiv cannot afford to be picky.
It will have to collaborate with Trump’s yet-to-be-formed administration despite his unpredictability, according to the ex-deputy chief of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“He promises one thing and does another,” Lieutenant-General Ihor Romanenko told Al Jazeera. “It will be complicated, somewhat unpredictable, but we will still keep on working.”
He said that Trump may postpone his pledge to end the war “even before he becomes president” until January, when he takes over from Biden.
And Biden still has a chance to help Ukraine.
“Will he try to go down in history not with the failed Afghanistan [war], not with the incoherent aid to Ukraine, but with something way more substantial for America?” Romanenko asked rhetorically.
Trump was the first US leader to supply Ukraine with Javelins, highly effective portable antitank systems, back in 2019, when Kyiv was fighting Moscow-backed rebels in the Donbas region.
The supplies, however, “were not dictated by his love towards Ukraine but by domestic politics”, Romanenko said.
And then the biggest bone of contention in the US-Ukrainian ties came up.
Trump froze supply while trying to strong-arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who held a hefty sinecure at Burisma, a Ukrainian national gas producer.
The pressure resulted in Trump’s first impeachment as Zelenskyy, a comedian with no political experience, tried not to get bogged in the political quagmire.
On Wednesday, Zelenskyy sounded almost sycophantic.
“I value President Trump’s approach towards ‘peace through force’ in global affairs,” he said in a statement. “This is the principle that may practically make just peace in Ukraine closer.
“We impatiently await the era of the strong United States of America under decisive leadership of President Trump. We rely on constantly strong bipartisan support of Ukraine in the USA,” he said.
