“He’s a brave man, and he’s putting up one hell of a fight.” President Trump about President Zelenskyy, 23 September 2025.
One of the things about studying war and living in Australia is that travelling anywhere to study contemporary conflicts means frequent, long plane rides. And while internet connectivity has certainly improved on long haul flights from the southern hemisphere to the north, sometimes it is nice to switch off for the 14 or even 18 hours that I can spend on a single flight to Europe or North America.
But what that means is that when I turn on my phone on arrival at a new destination, there are often big events that have occurred while I have been in the air. Such was the situation when I got off the plane in Austin, Texas yesterday afternoon. I was pleasantly surprised to see Ukraine had attacked more Russian oil infrastructure, this time in Novorossiysk, Bashkortostan, Bryansk and Samara. I was also pleasantly surprised to see more Ukrainian drones targeting Moscow.
I was a little surprised to see the former Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces offer a public critique of Ukraine’s 2024 Kursk operation, noting that “I don’t know the cost of such actions, but it is clear that it was too high.”
But perhaps the biggest surprise when I turned on my old iPhone was that the President of the United States, Donald Trump, had executed a rhetorical shift about the war in Ukraine.
The president’s narrative about the war in Ukraine, since returning to the Oval Office this year, has much in common with me on the golf course - all over the place! There have been so many changes in his position towards the war and towards leaders such as President Zelenskyy and the president of Russia, that it would have been easy to receive a severe case of policy whiplash since January.
As late as this August, Trump blamed Ukraine for the war. The Trump administration has frequently discussed the necessity of Ukraine having to trade land for peace. As Politico reported this August:
President Donald Trump said Russia and Ukraine will engage in “land swapping” that will be “good” and “bad” for both countries, a key part of his push to end the years-long war…Trump insisted that the Russian president, too, would likely have to give up some of the territory he has gained since invading in early 2022.
This is a position that Ukraine and many of its supporters find morally repulsive. And, by Ukrainian law, territory cannot be just ‘given up’. Further, such concessions to an aggressive authoritarian who launched this war for personal ideological reasons would amount to strategic self-sabotage by democracies. It would further provoke Putin and the cabal of his fellow dictators to engage in additional aggression against democracies in Europe and Asia.
So, when I emerged from my day long journey in different planes yesterday afternoon, it was somewhat of a shock to see a long social media post from President Trump that suggested that Ukraine could take back all of its territory, and more importantly, the Russians were weaker than many believed.
What does this mean for the trajectory of the war, and does it indicate a turning point in the Trump administration’s view of the war, its support for Ukraine as well as its engagement in European security issues?
