KYIV, Ukraine — After almost 30 months of war with Russia, Ukraine’s difficulties on the battlefield are mounting even as its vital support from the United States is increasingly at the mercy of changing political winds.
A six-month delay in military assistance from the U.S., the biggest single contributor to Ukraine, opened the door for the Kremlin’s forces to push on the front line. Ukrainian troops are now fighting to check the slow but gradual gains by Russia’s bigger and better-equipped army.
“The next two or three months are going to be probably the hardest this year for Ukraine,” military analyst Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment said in a recent podcast.
Lurking in the background is another nagging worry for Ukraine: how long will Western political and military support critical for its fight last?
On Monday, former President Donald Trump chose Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate for the Republican ticket in November’s U.S. election, and Vance wants the United States to attend to its own problems — not necessarily a war thousands of miles away on a different continent, even though he has said Putin was wrong to invade.
That view dovetails with Trump’s own stance. Trump has claimed that if elected, he would end the conflict before Inauguration Day in January. He has declined to say how.
Meanwhile, Hungary‘s pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — whose country holds the European Union’s…
