With U.S. President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in near open conflict, there is still no substantial pro-Trump camp in Ukraine. Trump is widely unpopular among Ukrainians for his insistence that Zelensky accept a peace deal with Vladimir Putin that is seen as tantamount to capitulation. Also at play, though, are the Ukrainian elite’s long-standing ties to the U.S. Democratic Party and the unprecedented centralization of political life in Ukraine since the 2022 invasion.
Ukraine’s political elite has mostly counted on the support of the Democratic Party since the Maidan Revolution in 2014. At the time, the new government in Kyiv desperately needed Western aid, and found a reliable partner in then president Barack Obama, a Democrat.
The revelations around the pro-Russian Party of Regions’ “black ledger” brought Ukraine’s leaders and the Democratic Party even closer together. In 2016, Ukraine discovered that Paul Manafort—an American political consultant who worked for Ukraine’s exiled former president Viktor Yanukovych from 2007 to 2012—had received large, secret payments from the Party of Regions. The scandal forced Manafort to resign as chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign, and became the first in a series of domestic political controversies related to Ukraine.
The scandals that followed—over the involvement of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, in the energy company Burisma, and Trump’s 2019 impeachment then acquittal over his infamous phone call with Zelensky—only strengthened Kyiv’s bond with the Democratic Party. Zelensky tried to no avail to patch things up with the Republican Party during his trip to the United States in 2024, ahead of that year’s presidential election, and today, the White House’s occupants are deeply biased against not only Zelensky but the Ukrainian elite at large.
The flip side is that Trump does not have any influential allies in the Ukrainian political class. After reports emerged recently that representatives of the White House had secretly conferred with Zelensky’s opponents, all his major rivals publicly denied meeting with Trump’s people, fearful of drawing public ire.
Rather than unsettle and divide the Ukrainian elite, American pressure has had the effect of consolidating its support for Zelensky. Even so, Zelensky remains sensitive to any suggestions that his rivals are courting Trump. Poroshenko was blocked from traveling to a Florida conference organized by the Republican Party, and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko has faced similar problems.
Zelensky is not the only obstacle to the Ukrainian elite building bridges with Trump. Civil society is also firmly opposed to a rapprochement with the U.S. president, particularly after his dismantling of USAID and broader cuts to U.S. foreign aid.
The public has no desire for Kyiv to make nice with Trump either, with 73 percent of Ukrainians taking the view that his presidency has been bad for their country. The share of Ukrainians who expect Trump to force an unjust peace on Ukraine has increased from 31 percent to 55 percent since December 2024, meaning there is no political case as yet for aligning with Trump.
That said, Trump is not a total pariah among Ukrainian politicians. Some are trying to flirt with the U.S. president in the hope that he might oust Zelensky, or at least weaken him enough to create openings for his less prominent rivals. The most notable of those is Zelensky’s former adviser Oleksiy Arestovych, who left the presidential administration in January 2023.
In the first year of the war, Arestovych proved to be an effective spokesman for the presidential administration, to the extent that at one point, he was the second most trusted official in Ukraine after Zelensky. However, after a series of scandals forced his resignation and ultimately his departure from Ukraine, Arestovych became vocally critical of his former colleagues. These days, he is actively supportive of Trump’s line on Ukraine, and appears to see the U.S. president as his ticket back into politics.
Several high-profile members of parliament, formerly of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, have joined Trump’s cause, too. Oleksandr Dubinsky—who helped get Zelensky elected president in 2019 by working to discredit Poroshenko and was rewarded for his efforts with a seat in parliament—is one.
Dubinsky is widely perceived as a lobbyist for Ihor Kolomoisky, the Ukrainian oligarch and former Zelensky patron. During the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Kolomoisky bet on Trump, offering dirt on Biden in exchange for immunity.
In 2021, Dubinsky was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for disinformation after releasing kompromat on Poroshenko in which various American politicians were also named. Zelensky had no choice but to distance himself from Dubinsky, who was expelled from Servant of the People and later arrested for treason and collaboration with Russia.
Dubinsky is still in detention, but remains a visible figure. He intends to return to politics, expects to make his comeback after Zelensky’s fall, and, like Arestovych, may be counting on Trump to bring it about.
Arestovych and Dubinsky are household names in Ukraine, but they wield negligible political influence within the country and are purely opportunistic in their support for Trump.
There are also Ukrainian conservatives who, like Trump, are genuine in their hostility to what they call liberal globalism, from Dmytro Kukharchuk—a leader of the radical right-wing National Corps party and an officer of the Azov Battalion who already in 2019 railed against “the surrender of Ukraine to Soros and the Rothschilds”—to Ihor Smeshko, a former presidential candidate and the founder of the Strength and Honor party.
Yet for all its ideological affinity with Trump, Ukraine’s right is wary of embracing him. Their concern is that on the issue that matters most—U.S. support for Ukraine—Trump cannot be trusted. For American and many European ultraconservatives, Trump and Putin may be lodestars of “traditional values,” but the Ukrainian right will not tolerate sympathy for Moscow in any shape or form.
Aligning with Trump makes more strategic sense for the remnants of Ukraine’s pro-Russian camp, who share his aim of striking a peace deal favorable to Russia and his enthusiasm for the defense of traditional Christian values.
Among them, Yuriy Boyko—the leader of the Platform for Life and Peace, the successor party to the pre-2018 Opposition Bloc—has compared the toppling of Confederate monuments in the United States to the removal of monuments to Soviet-Russian historical figures in Ukraine. Vadym Novynskyi, a billionaire former member of parliament from the Opposition Bloc, is also a longtime Trump supporter. He is a major patron of the banned Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, whose cause has also been taken up by some American conservatives.
With Zelensky on the outs with the White House and his most prominent rivals unable to take advantage, the opportunity to curry favor with Trump is there for the likes of Boyko and Novynskyi. Still, they must act with caution, having already discredited themselves with much of Ukrainian society and with the constant threat of treason charges looming.
Ukraine’s pro-Trump camp, then, is fragmented, peripheral, and more opportunistic than genuine in its embrace of the U.S. president. Even with the situation on the front worsening and dissatisfaction among Ukrainians rising, the outlook for Trump’s Ukrainian supporters is unlikely to improve in the near future.
So far, Trump’s actions have served only to inspire the Ukrainian elite to rally around Zelensky and turn the Ukrainian president into a symbol of national resistance, against not only Russian aggression but also U.S. betrayal. Zelensky’s people understand this well. As they look ahead to Ukraine’s next elections, they are optimistic that the Trump effect will extend Zelensky’s rule, not end it.
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