DONALD Trump will put his own interests before Ukraine and hand Russia unacceptable concessions, Ukrainians in Scotland have said.
Speaking to The National after the US president intervened in the war in their homeland, Ukrainian nationals raised fears that negotiations between Vladimir Putin and Trump would see their country carved up and their own voices excluded.
On Wednesday, Trump said he had had a 90-minute phone call with Putin in which the pair agreed to visit each others’ countries and immediately open negotiations with a view to end the war in Ukraine – which began in February 2022 after Russia launched a full-scale invasion.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth has said that it is “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine will be able to regain the land it has lost to Russia – comments which have caused concerns.
Dr Yevgen Gorash, an aerospace engineering research fellow at the University of Strathclyde, said he was “sceptical” that the US would produce a good outcome for Ukraine.
“[Trump’s] not building anything. He's disrupting and destroying international relations,” Gorash said.
“I believe that for most Ukrainians, they really wanted Ukraine to be in the centre of these negotiations, but it looks like it's a conversation just between the US and Russia. It even excluded Europe.”
On Thursday, seven European countries – including the UK, France, and Germany – and the European Commission said that there could not be a lasting peace in Ukraine without Europe’s involvement in peace talks.
Dr Kateryna Kostrova, who is studying for her second postgraduate degree with the University of Edinburgh’s international development program, said she believed that Trump’s involvement would “inevitably delay any prospects for sustainable peace”.
“His personal plans are less important than the fact that the Kremlin sees him as a supporter who could help pressure Ukraine into making completely unrealistic concessions to Russia,” Kostrova said.
Speaking from a train en route to Kyiv, where she will visit family, Kostrova raised similar fears to Zhdankina and Gorash.
“It is highly unlikely that Trump will advocate for Ukraine’s interests in negotiations,” she said.
“His recent actions – and not only recent – suggest a prioritisation of US benefits over Ukraine’s sovereignty.
“So, in this situation, Europe must increase its efforts and aid to Ukraine. Otherwise, in the next five to 10 years, it will face much greater costs to contain Russia, along with the unpredictable and extremely dangerous risk of a full-scale war on European soil.”
“Russia just bit by bit, piece by piece, Ukrainian village by village, town by town, as long as it takes, if it's going to take another 100 years, that's what they're going to do, throw millions of people and all their resources at destroying Ukraine,” he said.
Larysa Zhdankina, who came to Scotland as a refugee after the Russian invasion began in 2022, highlighted a contradiction she had felt after hearing of Trump’s intervention.
“Finishing the war is the dream of Ukrainians, the first thing Ukrainians want, but at the same time they're afraid of it,” she said. “There is no understanding about what will happen next.
“They [political leaders] talk about money, the economy, but there is no talk about ordinary people, how they should live in Ukraine, how they can guarantee a future for their children in return for this agreement.”
Zhdankina, who worked in Ukraine’s Constitutional Court before the war and is now a visiting academic at the University of Glasgow, said that she feared a scenario where negotiations would happen without Ukrainians in the room.
“The scenario where Ukraine should submit or just accept some treaty, I think should not be allowed,” she said.
“I hope that they will have the language of democracy, not the language of ultimatum.
“I think we should be sure that in this situation all of them will behave in the best interests of Ukrainians, because, as Trump mentioned, he is the president of the Americans, not Ukrainians.
“Of course his policy will provide on behalf of the Americans, not Ukrainians.”
“Any and all the negotiations between the different countries should include the best interests of Ukrainians – not only Ukraine as a state, but people and human beings and their rights,” she said. “It is the most important and essential thing they should take into account.”
Asked whether Ukraine might cede land to Russia to negotiate peace, Gorash said the country may not have a choice.
“We've heard interviews from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he mentioned that Ukraine doesn't have the military resources right now to recapture all that 25% of the land that is under Russian occupation.
“We need a bigger army, we need more weapons. We need more resources. We need more effort and more help from European countries and the US.”
Asked the same question, Kastrova said: “I think that there are people who will agree to such terms to end the war, because we have lost a lot of people, people are tired, migrants want to go home.
“However, I believe that Ukraine has to reestablish its internationally recognized territorial integrity, including regions such as Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, which were part of Ukraine upon its independence.
“But achieving this goal requires much more than military actions; it necessitates inflicting sufficient strategic damage on Russia to compel a withdrawal. This involves a combination of military, economic, and diplomatic efforts to weaken Russia’s capacity and will to maintain its positions within Ukraine.”
Stephen Gethins, the SNP’s foreign affairs spokesperson at Westminster and a former international relations professor, said that Trump’s call with Putin had led to celebrations in the Kremlin.
"Ukraine cannot be bullied into losing land to Putin's brutal invasion and the UK must wake up to a new reality that demands a much closer relationship with Europe as the United States becomes an increasingly unreliable ally,” Gethins said.
"There must be a red line that rewarding violence is never acceptable.
“To give into Putin and cede Ukraine’s territorial integrity leaves us all in peril and our European allies understand this – it's time for the UK to get over itself with its outdated Brexit isolationism and work as closely as possible with the rest of Europe on our common security."
