JD Vance’s appointment as vice president will send chills down Ukraine’s spines

Adding to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s concerns as he contemplates the likelihood of another Trump presidency, Vance argued that the United States should encourage Ukraine to reach a peace deal with Russia and that kyiv should be willing to cede land to its invader.

“It ends like almost all wars: when people negotiate and each side gives up something they don’t want to give up,” Vance told reporters in December, adding: “No one can explain to me how it ends without some territorial concessions from the 1991 borders.”

Vance, who served in the Marines, also dismissed concerns that Ukraine’s territorial concessions – an unthinkable notion for kyiv – would not be enough for Russian President Vladimir Putin and that the rest of Europe could be at risk.

“If you look at the size of the Russian armed forces, if you look at what it would take to conquer all of Ukraine, let alone push further and further west into Europe, I don’t think this guy has shown the capability to accomplish those imperialist goals, assuming he has them,” Vance said, according to NBC News.

In February, Vance wrote an opinion piece for the Financial Times suggesting that Europe had been too dependent on the United States and that the region should shoulder the burden of defending its neighbor Ukraine.

He also echoed Trump’s view that NATO members in the region were not spending enough on defense — a charge that analysts say has been valid in the past. But the situation is improving, and NATO said last week that 23 of 32 allies were now meeting the goal of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense.

“The US has provided a security blanket to Europe for far too long,” Vance writes in the FT.

“As the US defense budget approaches $1 trillion a year, we should think of the money as European money. doesn’t “The money spent on defense is not what it really is: an implicit tax on the American people to keep Europe safe.”

“Nothing in recent history demonstrates this more clearly than the war in Ukraine,” he said, adding that America has been “asked to fill the void at enormous expense to its own citizens.”

That was the three-word response Timothy Ash, an emerging markets strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, gave via email Monday after learning that Vance had been chosen as Trump’s running mate.

Ash has previously questioned Vance’s position on Ukraine and the idea that Europe should take responsibility for helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia.

In response to Vance’s opinion piece in the FT in February, Ash warned that “the stark reality is that without very immediate US military support and supplies, Ukraine could lose the war, or at least a much larger chunk of territory, large enough to call into question its own viability as a state.”

“Vance and his colleagues should ask themselves what this would mean for Europe and the United States, in terms of transatlantic security,” Ash added.

When Vance made his Ukraine comments to reporters in December, Zelenskyy was preparing to meet with members of Congress on Capitol Hill to press them to pass a $61 billion aid package that his country badly needed as its forces began to run out of artillery and ammunition.

The aid was finally approved in April, offering Ukraine a lifeline as Russia launched a new offensive in the country’s northeast. Since then, and as aid has trickled down to the front lines, Ukraine has continued to ask its international partners for more aid, air defense systems and fighter jets to help turn the tide of the war.

But that prospect remains distant and the fighting remains intense. After nearly two and a half years of fighting, the war has faded from the international press and internal political upheavals and priorities have demanded the attention of Ukraine’s NATO allies.

Asked Monday about his thoughts on a possible Trump administration after the U.S. election, Zelensky told reporters that Ukraine has “good relations” with both Democrats and Republicans.

“In Utah (where Zelensky visited last week for the National Governors Association meeting), we met with Republican senators, and they respect Ukraine and me. I know Trump’s views on how to end this war. If he becomes president, we will continue the work. Most of the (Republican) party supports us,” Zelensky said.

One of Ukraine’s biggest concerns is the US presidential election and whether, as polls suggest, Trump will win a second term in November..

Trump has always had an ambivalent attitude toward the war in Ukraine and continued aid. During his term from 2017 to 2021, the former president displayed increasingly warm relations with Russian President Putin. He has already said that he would end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” if he were in office, without providing details on how he would do so.

The comment, however, bodes ill for Ukraine, suggesting that Trump might be tempted to withdraw additional aid.

Seeking to secure and “Trump-proof” NATO aid to Ukraine, the military alliance meeting in Washington last week reaffirmed its long-term support for Ukraine and the country’s ambitions to join the Western defense bloc.

The specter of a possible Republican administration also loomed over the gathering, with analysts saying the alliance was likely nervous about a possible change in the direction of U.S. policy under a potential Trump presidency.

“We don’t know who will be elected, but what we do know is that the likelihood of Trump being elected has increased,” Guntram Wolff, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank, told CNBC last week.

“Donald Trump would mean a major break with some NATO policies, especially on the issue of Ukraine and support for Ukraine. There are rumors that peace plans have been proposed by thinkers around Trump that would involve Ukraine giving up a lot of territory and having to negotiate with Russia,” he said.

Wolff said such a move would be a “dangerous path” to follow because it “would embolden the Russian dictator Putin and leave open the question of who will guarantee Ukraine’s security after this. So I think there’s a lot at stake here,” he added.

For now, analysts see little chance of a ceasefire, or any willingness by kyiv to seek one with Russia, as the war is still in an “active phase” in which both sides believe they have a chance of defeating the other.

“Russia has recently laid out its demands for any kind of ceasefire that are very maximalist, there wouldn’t be a lot of room for negotiation at that level, and I think that sends a signal that negotiations are not imminent or something that either side is considering in the short to medium term,” Anna Gilmour, head of country risk and geopolitics at Verisk Maplecroft, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” last week.

“I see this, along with NATO’s continued support for Ukraine, as a sign that we are not going to see an end to the fighting.”