The US midterm elections have shifted the balance of power in Congress, delivering a massive blow to Donald Trump and his Republican party. This has implications both at home and possibly abroad, including for US policy towards Ukraine; an issue that was hardly mentioned during the campaigns.
But even if Ukraine did not figure much in the election, the question in US politics of what to do about the war has not gone away. Indeed, in the weeks and months before the result was announced, Trump had been busily rowing back on US support for Ukraine. This was despite much opposition, even from some Republicans.
Crucial intelligence to Kyiv about Russian strikes was cut off, before later being reinstated, while critical military aid was reduced. Trump also decided to suspend several sanctions on Russia.
This move was denounced by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as only helping Russia, but justified by Trump as being “in the national interests of the United States” and also a decision that might help his party’s electoral chances by reducing gas prices.
In the end, none of this helped Trump and the Republicans. Yet few commentators believe that the midterm results, disastrous though they have been for Trump, will have very much impact on his foreign policy outlook and his policy towards Ukraine in particular.
“The Trump administration’s foreign policy is like a car going down the highway,” said James Green, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform and former Congressional aide in Washington, recently. “Congress has the ability to slow that car down, maybe make it put on a turn signal, but it’s going to be very difficult for Congress to change the overall route over the next two years.”
In part, this has to do with how foreign policy is determined in the US. Congress is not without some influence. It can hold hearings, subpoena executive branch officials, as well as exercise control over the purse. Yet as commander-in-chief and head of state with a vast foreign policy bureaucracy supporting him, the president retains significant foreign policy powers.
The Democrats are also unlikely to make Ukraine front and centre after the midterms. They will have other more important fish to fry, the most critical being how to make sure they come up with a candidate and programme that will win them the White House in 2028.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic party leader in the House of Representatives, has called the midterms result a ‘mandate for dramatic change’. Emily Curiel / EPA
Yet Ukraine is a cause which many Democrats and quite a few Republicans have championed for some time. Nor are they likely to forget what ordinary Americans think about Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin.
The war in Ukraine may not be something they think about on a daily basis. On the other hand, as the Pew Research Center showed in 2025, 67% of Americans distrust Putin while six in ten view Russia as an enemy.
Democrats may not wish to become embroiled in a European war. But having just scored a sweeping landslide victory, they may well calculate there is a good deal of political mileage to be had now in escalating their attack on a weakened Trump if his foreign policy towards Russia and Ukraine continues in their view to reward an aggressor while making the victim of that aggression look like an obstacle to a settlement.
Pushing for a peace deal?
If the midterms result presents a series of opportunities for the Democrats, while posing a challenge to Trump, it also presents Putin with a possible opportunity. The Russian leader may well try and exploit Trump’s domestic position by offering some kind of settlement that would allow the US president to claim a victory.
US, Chinese and Russian officials have already been holding talks about a summit when the heads of state travel to China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit later in November. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has said Russia hopes to finalise the meeting in the coming days.
Trump is similarly keen on such a meeting. He told reporters in October that Ukraine would be discussed at the meeting, adding: “I would meet in order – anything I can do to end the war, whether somebody is there or not, whatever I can do to end the war.”
This might sound reasonable enough. However, deciding the fate of a sovereign country which won’t be at the negotiating table, and coming to some kind of “great power” deal with two authoritarian countries that involves Ukraine losing 20% of its territory, is almost certainly something an emboldened Democratic party in Congress will not take lying down.
Nor, according to most military experts, would it be wise to concede anything to Russia when its war against Ukraine appears to have run into the ground. According to the Institute for the Study of War, Russia may have “secured a temporary advantage in the skies over Ukraine through their jet-powered drones and the shortage of Patriot missiles that can intercept their ballistic missiles”.
But as the institute also points out, unless western military aid dries up entirely, a Russian victory is by no means inevitable. A war that most experts, including the CIA, predicted would be over in a matter of months is thus likely to go on.
Trump is unlikely to change his mind about Russia and Ukraine. Russia in his mind’s eye will continue to be regarded as a potential partner, and Ukraine a country that has taken assistance from the US and given “absolutely nothing back except grief”.
But now, with his back to the wall politically and the Democrats in charge of Congress in a country that has just passed a decisive verdict on his presidency, shaping his own agenda in relation to Russia and Ukraine is likely to prove more difficult.
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