President Donald Trump has completely upended America’s position on the Ukraine-Russia war, shocking the foreign policy establishment by turning on the fledgling democracy while making friendly overtures to Russia, Ukraine’s invader.
What Americans really think of Trump’s Ukraine policy
Republicans in Washington are now talking more like their voters about Ukraine.
Nicole Narea covered politics at Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic.
The US has provided about half of the total $136 billion in military support Ukraine has received from its allies since Russia invaded in 2022. But this week, Trump made the abrupt decision to pause all US aid to Ukraine and end the two countries’ intelligence-sharing relationship following an explosive Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
That has come as a shock to the foreign policy establishment in Washington and to US allies around the world, who have long seen defending Ukrainian sovereignty as key to protecting European security and Western democratic ideals. Even Trump’s own Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime Ukraine supporter, has reportedly been caught by surprise by the dramatic changes coming from the White House.
Outside of Washington, however, US support for Ukraine was never as popular with voters as it was with elected officials. And many Republicans and independents are cheering Trump on, having long been skeptical of funding a foreign war.
Trump isn’t necessarily reacting to public opinion, having personal reasons for distancing himself from Zelenskyy: Recall the infamous 2019 phone call with the Ukrainian president that led to Trump’s impeachment. But Trump’s posture toward Ukraine is emblematic of his transactional, isolationist approach to US foreign policy that seems to resonate with broad swaths of the US electorate — if not Beltway elites.
How Washington and US public opinion diverged and converged again on Ukraine
Immediately following Russia’s invasion in 2022, Ukraine had fierce defenders even among Republican members of Congress, and Americans broadly supported Ukraine on a bipartisan basis. That March, 42 percent of Americans thought the US wasn’t providing enough aid to Ukraine, including 49 percent of Republican-leaning voters, according to a Pew Research survey.
Within a few months, however, that support started to wane among Republican voters. By that fall, only 16 percent of Republican-leaning voters thought the US wasn’t providing enough support; 32 percent thought it was offering too much.
In 2024, poll after poll showed support for Ukraine further collapsed among Republicans and independents.
That coincided with Trump’s growing criticism of Ukraine and the European response to the war on the 2024 campaign trail. He pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office, as well as to force European nations to pay the US back for its billions in military aid to Ukraine. He claimed that Zelenskyy was a “salesman” who had persuaded the US to offer unending financial support to Ukraine. And he continued to threaten to withdraw from NATO, which would leave Europe without security guarantees in the face of an emboldened Russia.
Since his reelection, Trump has gone even further in echoing Russian talking points, accusing Zelenskyy of being a “dictator without elections” and falsely claiming that Ukraine started the war. Zelenskyy was elected in 2019, and elections have not been held in Ukraine since the Russian invasion because the country remains under martial law.
Polls conducted in the last month show stark partisan divides on whether and under what conditions the US should help Ukraine, with Republicans and independents backing Trump’s approach in large numbers.
In a CBS/YouGov poll, 68 percent of Republicans and 49 percent of independents said that the US should not send military aid to Ukraine. Only 28 percent of Democrats said the same.
A Gallup poll found that 54 percent of Republicans, 56 percent of independents, and 84 percent of Democrats had a favorable view of Ukraine.
A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that majorities of Republican and independent voters approve of Trump negotiating directly with Russia to end the war in Ukraine. Democrats and independents, however, mostly did not support leaving Ukrainian and European leaders out of those discussions, whereas Republicans did.
The poll also found that most Republicans and independents think that any security guarantees for Ukraine should be contingent on the country sharing its revenues from mining rare earth elements with the US, whereas most Democrats disagree. Neither a majority of Democrats nor independents said that they think that Ukraine should be forced to make territorial concessions as part of a peace deal; a majority of Republicans did.
Former Russia hawks in the GOP have gone quiet
Republican lawmakers and administration officials, meanwhile, have fallen into line behind Trump’s agenda.
Republican lawmakers are opposing another round of Ukraine aid as part of budget negotiations. Even Rubio thanked Trump for “putting America first” on X after the Oval Office meeting with Zelenskyy and criticized the Ukrainian president for trying to “Ukraine-splain on every issue” in an interview with ABC.
Other former Ukraine defenders in Congress have since changed their tune. They include Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who recently suggested that Zelenskyy should resign, and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who pushed former President Joe Biden to send more weapons to Ukraine before later claiming that Biden “tempted” Putin into invading Ukraine.
That’s brought them closer to the views of everyday Americans. But it may come at a price — not just for Ukraine, but also for the Western world order, which Europe may now stand alone in defending against Russian aggression.
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