Follow this authorMarc A. Thiessen's opinions

But that threat will be empty if Putin has already all but won on the battlefield by the time Trump takes office. For Trump’s warning to be credible, Ukraine needs to hold on to the territory it has taken back since Russia’s full-scale invasion two years ago. Even better if Ukraine is on the offensive.

Trump does not share the hostility that some on the anti-Ukraine right maintain toward President Volodymyr Zelensky and his country. Quite the opposite. During a 2022 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump called Putin’s invasion appalling. “It’s an outrage,” he said, “and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur.” He called Zelensky “a brave man.” During a CNN town hall event last May, he said, “I have a very good relationship with President Zelensky because, as you know, he backed me up … with the phony impeachment … when he said the president didn’t do anything wrong. And Trump told Bartiromo in July: “I know Zelensky very well. I felt he was very honorable because when they asked him about the perfect phone call that I made, he said it was indeed, he said it was.”

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Unlike the anti-interventionist right, Trump has shown that he will flex American muscle against Russia. During a 2019 Oval Office interview, he told me that he ordered U.S. military forces to kill hundreds of Russian Wagner Group fighters in a February 2018 firefight in eastern Syria, and authorized a covert cyberattack against Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg-based troll farm that spearheaded Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He imposed crippling sanctions that halted construction of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline with Germany — until Joe Biden took office and greenlighted the project to please Berlin.

And don’t forget: Trump provided Ukraine with lethal aid while he was in office. “I sent a massive number of antitank busters,” he told me. “I sent them military equipment and [President Barack] Obama sent them nothing” but nonlethal aid. He’s right. After Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, the Obama-Biden administration refused Ukraine’s request for weapons, instead sending blankets, Humvees and night-visions goggle. (“One cannot win a war with blankets,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko complained to Congress at the time.) In December 2017, however, Trump approved the transfer of $47 million in Javelin antitank missiles. Those weapons might have saved Ukraine........

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