“Everyone in Ukrainian society received this as a shock. It was extremely harsh, detached from reality, and deeply painful,” Rabbi Meir Stambler, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine and one of the country’s foremost communal leaders, told me. “There was always some uncertainty about what Donald Trump’s return to power would mean. Some had little hope from the outset  — Trump had never been particularly warm toward Ukraine during his campaign. The pessimists predicted that he would cut off economic aid. But there were also those who believed he would at least seek peace, that he would try to broker a deal between both sides. Both views were understandable. But to go from that to saying that Ukraine started the war, or to calling a democratically elected president a ‘dictator’ — and claiming he has only four percent popular support — is terrifying.”

Rabbi Webber put it more bluntly. “We, as believing Jews, know that everything is ultimately for the best. But the shared feeling among many in Ukraine is one of anger toward the United States.”

Colonel Pablo Khazan, a Jewish officer in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, reacted strongly to the president’s remarks, saying his words were “clearly disconnected from reality,” but they have had no “tangible effect” — so far.

“Ukraine continues to receive support from the United States, and it remains uncertain whether that support will actually be cut off,” Khazan said. “And we are deeply grateful to the American people, the US Armed Forces, and the US government for the immense support they are providing to protect Ukraine and Europe.”

“But Trump’s statements pose a serious threat to democracy — not just in the United States, but in the broader civilized world — because they undermine global stability. If the Trump administration legitimizes the Russian dictatorship and shifts blame to Ukraine for starting the war, that would be a complete distortion of reality.”

In conversations with Ukrainians, that sense of disbelief comes through with every word. The idea that the United States — the country they had relied upon as the ultimate guarantor of their survival — might suddenly turn its back on them is almost too much to process. Trump’s words have not just shaken their confidence in American support; they have shaken their understanding of world order itself.

Resurgence of Patriotism

Against the backdrop of the disillusion and betrayal Ukrainians feel toward Trump, a renewed sense of patriotism and loyalty to Zelensky is brewing. It’s worth noting that the Trump administration demanded that Kyiv hand over $500 billion worth of profits from Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as compensation for US wartime assistance — an arrangement the Ukrainian president flatly refused.

One of Trump’s most inflammatory remarks was labeling  President Zelensky a “dictator” and claiming that he had the support of “only four percent of the population.” Ironically, the biggest beneficiary of his comments was Zelensky himself. Before Trump’s statement, polls indicated that roughly 50 percent of Ukrainians supported their president (a far cry from four percent, but still only half the nation). After Trump’s words, that number surged to nearly 70 percent.

“It’s fascinating,” says Rabbi Moshe Webber. “People didn’t trust the government. They had faith in Trump, as if he were the Mashiach. They believed that with Trump’s arrival, the war would come to an end. Now they realize that not only is he not bringing peace, but he’s leaving us stranded, abandoning us. So patriotism, which has been at an all-time low, has seen a dramatic revival. There’s a growing sense of national identity and an understanding that we must defend what is ours because no one else will. Without meaning to, Trump has restored Ukrainian national pride. Even Zelensky’s popularity has skyrocketed — he’s now perceived as the man who had the courage to stand up to the United States.”

Rabbi Meir Stambler echoes this sentiment about the “Trump bump” that Zelensky has enjoyed, and adds that Ukrainians appreciate his tenacity in looking out for their country’s interests.

“We’ve been at war for three years, and even though there is faith among both Jews and non-Jews, and everyone understands that we are on the right side, people are exhausted. There are casualties every day, families torn apart, and a profound sense of despair. But in the last few hours, everything has changed. People now see Zelensky as a unifying leader. They see him as someone who genuinely cares about Ukraine’s future. Think about it: The president of the United States arrives, and you’d assume we should bow down and give him whatever he asks for. But he asks for our natural resources, and against all odds, Zelensky refuses to give them up. He’s a Jew who insists on reviewing the contract, sees that it’s not in Ukraine’s best interest, and refuses to sign what the US demands.”

Yaakov Pinchas Sinyakov, a chaplain in the Ukrainian army, was on the front lines when I reached out to him. “I speak to soldiers every day, and I see that they believe in G-d, and they believe in our president,” he told me. “The most important thing is that the soldiers are convinced. They are prepared to keep fighting and defend our borders.”

Colonel Khazan says with American support or without it, Ukraine will continue fighting — even if it comes down to using sticks and stones. “Ukraine will continue to fight because Russia’s war against Ukraine is an existential battle for survival. If we do not defend Ukraine, the Russians will invade us — and then they will move on to other parts of Europe. No one knows who will be next. If Russia conquers Ukraine, it will not stop there. It will push further into Europe. No one can predict whether Poland, the Nordic countries, or any other nation will be next. No one knows what Russia’s true ambitions are.”

Above all else, emphasizes Colonel Khazan, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have a commitment to their people. “Our soldiers must continue doing what they are doing now. As soldiers, we must defend our people — the citizens of Ukraine. And we are doing our best to protect our homeland. Because we have no other homeland. We have no other choice: We must defend our country.”

Russian Escalation

One major grievance among Ukrainians is that Trump has emboldened Russia to escalate its attacks against Ukrainian targets with unprecedented ferocity.

“We must consider the message this sends to Russia,” Rabbi Webber says. “Over the last five months, there have been attacks, but nothing beyond the usual. Since the day Trump began turning against Ukraine, there have been relentless, nonstop Russian assaults. You can’t help but wonder: What has he done? Does he actually want to destroy Ukraine?”

He also highlights the growing confusion among Ukrainians. “Many now hear Trump echoing Putin: ‘We’re going to take down Zelensky. Zelensky is a dictator.’ The feeling here is that nothing is guaranteed anymore. US support is no longer a certainty. Many feel that the Western world is no longer with Ukraine.”

Rabbi Stambler concurs. “From the moment Trump showed sympathy for Russia and aligned himself with Putin, the Russians have been attacking with far greater intensity. No mercy, across the entire country. They left half of Odessa without electricity.”

Still, despite the dire situation, Ukrainians remain hopeful that the American position is not entirely set in stone. They also believe that Europe may step up its support. In fact, on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion, European leaders reaffirmed their support for Ukraine and renewed their commitment to providing economic aid to Kyiv.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt in the world about who the aggressor is and who the victim is,” Rabbi Stambler asserts. “That much is clear. And I believe the war will now shift to a diplomatic stage. The physical fighting may end soon. But there is a crucial shift happening: At the start of the war, the US took the lead. Now, Zelensky is managing something unthinkable — Europe. Europe is not weaker than the US. Its problem is that it is deeply divided. There is no strong leadership. And here comes Zelensky, a young politician with no formal diplomatic training, forcing Europe to step up.”

That faith in Europe is likely misplaced. In theory, European states have the economic heft to take up slack from the United States in backing the Ukrainian war effort. But they’ve taken a backseat to America so far, and there is the undeniable fact that they are short of weapons themselves, and have little to spare for Kyiv.

But Rabbi Stambler thinks that ultimately American rhetoric will prove more bark than bite. “I am certain things will turn out fine. I am confident that Europe will provide more assistance and that, ultimately, the Americans will resume their support — Trump will realize who Putin really is. Additionally, I trust that US senators, both Democrats and Republicans, will not allow America to abandon Ukraine to Russian aggression.”

Chaplain Rabbi Sinyakov also believes that Europe will step up its game, though he qualifies that their involvement will be driven less by altruism and more by fear of Russia. “It’s true that there is social tension today, and the future depends on many factors. But one thing is clear: Europe is afraid of having Russia as a neighbor, and it will act accordingly. I don’t know if it will be enough, but we will see a more active stance from Europe. In fact, we’re already seeing European leaders move quickly in response to Trump’s remarks.

“Ukraine has done nothing wrong in this war. It has merely defended its borders. We are on the side of good, and I believe Trump will eventually realize that he’s supporting the wrong side.”

Colonel Khazan agrees that Europe’s involvement is driven by pure self-interest: Its leaders understand that if Putin starts with Ukraine, he won’t stop until he has his sights set on the entire continent. “We have allies in Europe, and there are European nations invested in Ukraine’s survival. Because if Ukraine falls, Russia will not stop — it will turn its attention to other countries. This is not just about Ukraine. The Russians seek to dominate all of Europe. This is a war between Russia and the civilized world.”

Rabbi Webber takes a more pragmatic approach, seeing Trump’s actions as part of his familiar “Art of the Deal” strategy.

“Since the start of this administration, we’ve seen that Trump likes to negotiate by beginning with an extreme position,” Webber notes, suggesting that this may just be an opening gambit. And if the US ultimately withdraws its support? “There is no doubt that Europe will step up,” he asserts. Not out of love for Ukrainians, but because “they won’t allow Putin to claim victory. However, we also shouldn’t discount a change in the US stance.

“One way or another, one thing is certain: Russia will not conquer Ukraine.”

Quotes:

“Many of us believed that by mid-February, flights would resume, and the country would be fully open again. There was widespread euphoria — people were talking about how Trump would solve everything”

— Rabbi Moshe Webber

“he asks for our natural resources, and against all odds, Zelensky refuses to give them up. He’s a Jew who insists on reviewing the contract, sees that it’s not in Ukraine’s best interest, and refuses to sign what the US demands”

—Rabbi Meir Stambler

“Ukraine has done nothing wrong in this war. It has merely defended its borders. We are on the side of good, and I believe Trump will eventually realize that he’s supporting the wrong side”

—Yakov Pinchas Sinyakov

Ukraine Hits Hard Realities

By Rafael Hoffman

AS promised, President Donald Trump has moved quickly to jump-start preliminary talks with Russia, with the two nations’ representatives holding discussions in Saudi Arabia last week aimed at ending the three-year-old war in Ukraine. As expected, that initiative came with gruff breaks from prior American norms, along with stern warnings to parties who could stand as impediments to the deal President Trump seems intent on achieving. Europeans have been completely frozen out of the discussions, and are scrambling to mount a response.

First in line was Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky who President Trump said had “better move fast” before his country slips away in a war that has shifted to Russia’s advantage.

While talks are still in very early stages, the president’s seeming eagerness for terms that Russian president Vladimir Putin will accept leave open questions over what a diplomatic solution could look like and whether it is truly within reach.

In February 2022, Ukraine awed the world, halting Russia’s invasion and pushing its forces into retreat. Later that year, bolstered by robust funding and arms shipments, mostly from the US, Ukraine counterattacked, expelling Russian troops from the outskirts of Kharkov and from the city of Kherson.

Since then, however, even with aid continuing to flow, the war has ground to a bloody stalemate, the odds tilting in Russia’s favor.

“The Russians are grinding forward, even though Ukraine’s lines are not collapsing,” says Peter Rutland, professor at Wesleyan University and Russia expert. “It’s still a war of attrition.”

Such a war favors Russia, with its much larger reservoir of manpower — despite whatever qualitative edge Ukraine might gain with its Western-supplied armaments.

Historically, Russia has a high tolerance for human battlefield losses. Mr. Putin concentrated recruitment and conscription efforts in remote rural areas as a strategy for maintaining support for the war and his government in urban centers.

“[Putin’s] succeeded in buffering the bulk of the Russian population from the war,” says Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served in various roles in the Obama and Clinton administrations. “In most of Russia, life goes on as normal, so from that perspective, he can keep [the war] up for a while.”

Economic impacts have made their mark, though. Consumers face runaway inflation rates, partially because of international sanctions and Russia’s own wartime spending. Other troubling indicators, such as increases in corporate debt and high interest rates, contribute to market woes.

Russia has minimized the effects of sanctions by selling oil to China and India. Still, shipping costs cut into Russia’s oil profits, and a return of its pipeline transfers to Europe would boost its economy.

A Seat at the Table

Despite his professed desire to help the US fight Islamic terrorism after 9/11, the Bush administration regarded Mr. Putin, a former KGB official, with suspicion. The Obama administration famously attempted a “reset” with relations with Moscow. But Putin played his own strategic interests close to the vest. With his seizure of Crimea and support of Russian-speaking separatists in Ukraine in 2014, it became clear the US had underestimated Putin. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 made him a pariah. The Biden administration leveled stiff economic sanctions on Moscow.

While at this point Mr. Putin would welcome sanctions relief, many feel the greatest leverage America holds in drawing him to the table is the very act of giving him a seat there.

“The principal motivation [for a deal] comes from a desire to get reinstated and restore some measure of good standing,” said Dr. Kupchan.

For those who support Ukraine and sympathize with its struggle, none of Mr. Putin’s likely asks in a deal with be easy to palate.

For much of the conflict, Ukraine has defiantly insisted that complete withdrawal of Russian soldiers from its borders is a prerequisite to diplomacy. Yet after two years of relatively stable Russian control of four regions in eastern Donbas and the southeast, most feel acquiescence to Russia’s presence there is not a negotiating tactic, but a reality. What might become a sticking point is if Mr. Putin insists that Ukraine or the West formally recognize his control of these areas.

IN Russia’s narrative, the prospect of NATO offering membership to Ukraine was a key cause for the initial invasion, and forswearing that eventuality is likely one of Mr. Putin’s prerequisites for a truce. Ukraine and European leaders chafe at the idea of letting Moscow dictate Kiev’s geopolitical alignment. Last week, however, new American defense secretary Pete Hegseth argued that as the idea of admitting Ukraine to NATO is nowhere on the realistic horizon, allowing it to stand in the way of a settlement is foolish.

Other likely Russian demands, largely laid out in a draft Moscow offered shortly after the invasion, include even heavier lifts, including a declaration of Ukrainian neutrality, caps on the size of its military, and elections or the outright removal of Mr. Zelensky.

“Russia feels it can’t lose, they want the war to continue and want to occupy all of Ukraine or at least take the Black Sea coast,” says Professor Rutland. “Their ambitions go beyond cashing in the chip they already have. But Putin sees a golden opportunity now in the first weeks of Trump momentum, where he has maximum leverage over Europe that he might not get again.”

A Moment of Reckoning

Even with Ukraine not likely to be a party in the early stages of talks shaping up in Saudi Arabia, it will ultimately fall to its leaders to accept or reject a deal.

Even amid high losses, a winter of power outages, and other daily difficulties for civilians, for the first year of the war, most Ukrainians favored fighting until all their territory was restored, saying there could be no workable compromise with Mr. Putin.

Yet as the war became more static, support for that maximalist position has slipped. A 2023 Gallup poll showed 27% support for a negotiated peace, and that number climbed to 52% last year.

“The longer the war goes on and the more destruction and killing there is, the numbers of those expressing an openness to negotiating and territorial concessions has risen, but not to a majority — it’s around 50%,” says Gerard Toal, professor of government and international affairs at Virginia Tech who has conducted several surveys of Ukrainian opinion and identity.

Support for a negotiated settlement runs higher in regions close to the front lines and among people who have lost homes in the struggle.

There is good reason to believe, however, that support for a settlement runs deeper than those polls indicate. Technical difficulties in reaching a representative swath of the population during wartime are significant, and pressure to support Ukraine’s patriotic struggle make many hesitant to publicly embrace any compromise with the enemy.

There are other signs that enthusiasm for the war is waning, including increasing recruitment challenges and reports of desertion and corruption in the military.

But that doesn’t mean that a peace deal with Putin will be an easy sell. In a country that was once deeply divided over how closely it should identify with Russia, the invasion rallied Ukrainians widely against Moscow, a trend that began with fighting in 2014. Most Ukrainians squarely blame Putin for the subsequent years of suffering and destruction.

“Ukraine feels righteous anger at its victimization,” says Professor Toal. “Europe agrees with that, and it’s a huge motivation.”

Still, with Ukraine’s war effort largely bankrolled by Washington, if the Trump administration backs up a ceasefire offer with a threat to pull the plug, Mr. Zelensky would face difficult options.

“There could come a time when Ukrainians are not ready to go along and want Zelensky to play a spoiler role,” says Professor Toal. “But if supplies are running out and Europe is not able to back them up, at a certain point, he’ll face a moment of reckoning.”

Redefining Success

Toward the end of the Biden administration, most in the West quietly acknowledged that the strategy of isolating Russia had not altered its behavior. Yet even as Ukrainian military victory looked increasingly unlikely, there was little policy shift from the administration’s line of supporting the war effort for “as long as it takes.”

The arguments against a deal that partially rewards Russia’s invasion remain. First, there is a basic sense of injustice. Beyond that is the initial motivation for Western support, which is that if Mr. Putin gets his way in Ukraine, Russia’s expansionist aggression will continue.

Dr. Kupchan questions that narrative.

“People say if Russia isn’t defeated, Putin will keep going, and if he’s stopped, he’ll never do this again,” he says. “But this view is naïve. Putin will do this again, no matter what happens in Ukraine. This is what he does. He takes a bite out of Georgia and Ukraine. He messes around in Central Asia. He sends Russian forces to Syria, and then they show up in Africa. This is how he plays, and he’ll run it until he’s dead.”

Despite the bitter pills Ukraine and the West would have to swallow in a negotiated settlement, Dr. Kupchan feels that the opportunity for a ceasefire should take precedence.

“The most important near-term objective is to stop the death and destruction,” he says. “Ukrainians, along with the US and European allies, need to redefine success, and that new definition of success should be negotiating a deal that leads to an outcome in which the 80% of Ukraine that is still free is under Kyiv  control, and not under Russia’s thumb. That’s a success story.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1051)