President Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” on the campaign trail. But 100 days into his administration, his Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently suggested the United States might soon back away from peace deal negotiations altogether.
And on Monday, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a temporary ceasefire next week after Trump said he thought Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy would give up the Crimean Peninsula as part of a truce deal. Zelenskyy has previously said Ukraine could not give up its claim.
Ukrainians are still looking for a peace agreement amid the uncertainty, said Vsevolod Petriv, president of the Boston chapter of the Ukrainian Congress Committee.
“But everybody’s pretty skeptical of exactly what motivates our current administration in terms of what they envision as a peace agreement,” Petriv told Boston Public Radio on Monday.
More than three years after the invasion, Ukrainians initially hoped that Trump would offer more help than former President Joe Biden so the country could preserve its borders and fend off Russia, Petriv said. But in February, when Trump confronted Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, he says many people’s hopes were dashed.
“That really cemented people’s opinion against [Trump] and also increased Zelenskyy’s popularity,” said Brian Nolen, the founder of the Bedford, N.H.,-based aid group NH4Ukraine, who just returned from a yearlong stay delivering aid to the front lines.
Zelenskyy’s approval rating in his country rose by 10 percentage points in the days after the Oval Office visit, according to a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
Petriv said it remains to be seen whether Ukraine can salvage its defense against Russia if the United States completely pulls its support. European support will be important — and Europe, especially the Baltic states, have a vested interest in keeping Russia out of Ukraine, he said.
“Europe is afraid that if he [Putin] comes in there, what’s gonna stop him from coming after the rest of us?” Petriv said.
In Kharkiv, where Nolen now lives part-time while doing aid work, he said life appears relatively normal, despite the air-raid sirens.
“In Kharkiv, they go off all the time. People basically just ignore them. They carry on with their soccer games,” he said. “If you went into an air-raid shelter every time there was an air-raid alert you’d never get anything done.”
But there are other signs of the four-years-long war. Like in Kharkiv, where students continue in-person learning at fortified, underground schools.
“It’s pretty twisted if you think about it, that you have to do that,” Nolen said. “There’s going to be a lot of trauma, a lot of scars for decades coming from this war.”
Youth organizations are trying to move children to western Ukraine and out of the direct war zones, Petriv said. And dealing with mental health issues of soldiers returning from the war is becoming a bigger issue, he said.
