Trump’s latest move could prove to be a devastating blow for Ukraine
The IndependentWhen Donald Trump announced his choice for vice-president on the first day of the Republican Party’s convention, the name – JD Vance – drew only mild surprise. There, Vance is known primarily as a leading light of the US Senate’s efforts to block Joe Biden’s $61bn aid package for Ukraine. Beyond this bare ambition, however, Trump has said little about how he would go about ending the war, which has led to questions about how different his Ukraine policy might really be from Biden’s. In selecting Vance, however, Trump has chosen someone with a coherent idea of US foreign policy and a clear rationale about how help for Ukraine does – or rather does not – fit into that. Whether Volodymyr Zelensky could survive such a turn in US policy, and what a post-war Ukraine might look like, is unclear.