Inside Ukraine’s Effort to Win Over Donald Trump

Many nations keep a nervous eye on U.S. presidential races, but none have as much at stake this time as the people of Ukraine. For them, the outcome could determine how their war against Russia ends, and their leaders have spent months vying for the support of both candidates. The effort, which culminates with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the U.S. this week, has involved priests and billionaires, highly paid lobbyists, and a former British prime minister.

As of Sunday, when Zelensky arrived to begin his trip, some officials in his entourage seemed to be tempering their expectations. No matter who wins in November, one of them told me, “things will get worse for us.”

In their view, the victory of Kamala Harris would likely prolong the policies of the Biden administration, which Zelensky and his advisers see as overly cautious and indecisive in standing up to Russia. Trump’s victory, on the other hand, offers both risks and opportunities for the Ukrainians, according to four people familiar with their outreach to the candidates.

“There is a level of hope for Trump,” one of them told TIME in Kyiv before Zelensky's visit to the U.S., requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive issues of wartime diplomacy. “Of course we could be mistaken. We don’t know how divisive he will be with the West at large. He might weaken it… But someone has to stop this war, and Kamala Harris does not seem like she would play that role. Trump in theory could make some drastic moves, at least that’s our perception.”

This week, as Zelensky met with world leaders at the United Nations in New York, Trump's rhetoric turned against him, and he began taunting Zelensky at his campaign rallies. The attacks surprised the Ukrainians, because only two months earlier, during a cordial phone call in July, Trump promised Zelensky that he would support Ukraine. "So who is the real Trump?" asked a member of the entourage traveling to the U.S. with Zelensky this week. "It's still an open question."

Given how tight the U.S. presidential race remains, the Ukrainians cannot afford to stop engaging with either candidate. They have tried since the summer to build bridges to the Trump campaign, holding numerous meetings with senior Republicans and former Trump administration officials. Among the most prominent has been Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director and Secretary of State, who has expressed interest in joining a possible future Trump administration. In recent months, he has met several times with senior Ukrainian officials, helping them understand the dynamics of the U.S. presidential race and the Trump campaign's evolving stance on the war in Ukraine. In mid-September, Pompeo met with Zelensky in Kyiv and offered some practical advice on how to advance Ukraine's diplomatic strategy: appeal to America’s interests, not its values.

“It has to be good old-fashioned greed,” Pompeo told TIME in Kyiv after his meeting with Zelensky. “It has to be a good old-fashioned, commercial, profit-driven, incentive-forming, risk-taking, entrepreneurial model that delivers that sustainable place for Ukraine.” Appealing for American help in the defense of Ukraine’s democracy or its survival as a nation would not be likely to secure Trump's lasting support. “It can’t be a donor base,” Pompeo explains. “It’s not, ‘Hey, we had a donor conference.’ Those are interesting, and they get things rolling perhaps. But they are wholly unsustainable.”

In trying to deliver that message to Trump and his supporters, some of Zelensky’s Republican allies have pointed to the resource wealth Ukraine could offer the U.S. after the war. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, hammered on this point in a video he recorded with Zelensky in Kyiv earlier this month. “They’re sitting on a trillion dollars of minerals that could be good to our economy,” said the Republican from North Carolina. “So I want to keep helping our friends in Ukraine.”

Zelensky, who absorbed that remark with a polite smile, has so far avoided such direct appeals to U.S. economic interests, preferring instead to argue that Ukraine is defending not only itself but the entire free world against Russian attacks. He hoped to deliver this argument to Trump in person, and Trump said last week that he would "probably" meet with Zelensky during his visit to the U.S. Their teams had discussed the idea of a meeting at Trump's estate in Mar-a-Lago, according to two officials close to Zelensky. But the Ukrainians set that possibility aside, as it could be seen as an endorsement of Trump’s campaign.

Instead, the Ukrainians asked to meet Trump on more neutral ground, for example, on the set of a U.S. television network for a joint interview. This option was still under discussion when Zelensky landed in the U.S., according to one of the Ukrainian officials. But the first public event of the trip appeared to change the tone of these discussions. On Sunday, Zelensky visited an arms factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the city where President Biden was born and grew up.

Touring the facility alongside the state's Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, Zelensky expressed gratitude to all American workers who are helping produce weapons for Ukraine. But the optics of the visit upset Trump and his allies, and their talks about a possible meeting with Zelensky broke down. "It seems he took offense," one of the Ukrainian officials says of Trump. The problem, he added, seems to have been the choice of venue: the hometown of the incumbent U.S. President in a hotly contested battleground state.

On Monday, the day after Zelensky's trip to Scranton, Trump held a rally in Pennsylvania, where he unveiled a new attack line against the Ukrainian leader, referring to him as the world's "greatest salesman" for managing to convince the U.S. to send aid to Ukraine. Trump also told the crowd in Pennsylvania that Zelensky wants the Democrats to win in November: "He wants them to win this election so badly." The following day, at a rally in Georgia, Trump used a similar line against Zelensky. "Every time he comes to the United States he walks away with $100 billion," he said, drawing loud jeers from the crowd. "But we're stuck in that war unless I'm president," Trump added.

Such remarks have caused concern among observers in Ukraine, including some inside Zelensky's team. Still, they see no choice but to continue trying to appeal to the Republican candidate and win his support. "Of course we hear all this," one of the Ukrainian officials close to Zelensky said of Trump's recent remarks. "But we still have to try." Their main hope, he added, is that Trump's views on the war are not yet settled, and that his unpredictable nature could leave room for his position to swing Ukraine's way.

Back in Kyiv, Zelensky’s allies have spent months trying to influence Trump’s views on the war. Leaders of the country’s vibrant community of Baptists have reached out repeatedly to Trump’s evangelical allies on Capitol Hill, including House Speaker Mike Johnson. Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire on good terms with the Zelensky administration, hired Trump’s former aide Kellyanne Conway as a lobbyist in Washington for a fee of $50,000 per month. According to official filings with the Justice Department, Conway will advise Pinchuk’s foundation on “the current state of views on Ukraine among US elected officials, candidates, experts, and opinion leaders.” The lobbying agreement expires on Nov. 14, about a week after Election Day, unless both sides agree to extend it.

In mid-September, about a week before Zelensky’s arrival in the U.S., Pinchuk hosted an annual summit in Kyiv that attracted a range of influential guests from the U.S. and Europe. While working on the program, Pinchuk appealed to Boris Johnson, the former British Prime Minister, to convince Trump to participate via live video link. “Unfortunately I failed completely to get that,” Johnson said at the conference.

Instead, Trump sent a brief video message that he apparently filmed aboard his private jet while flying to a campaign event. “The war with Russia and Ukraine would never ever have happened if I were president,” Trump said in the video, drawing a few groans from the audience in Kyiv. “One of the first things I want to do is get that war settled with Russia and Ukraine.”

But he has not put forward any detailed plan for achieving that. Earlier this month, Trump’s running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, suggested a “peace settlement” that would entail Ukraine ceding vast amounts of occupied territory to Russia. “The current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine, that becomes like a demilitarized zone,” Vance said on a podcast that aired on Sept. 11.

That vision for ending the war alarmed many in Kyiv. “He is too radical,” Zelensky said of Vance in an interview with the New Yorker. “For us, these are dangerous signals, coming as they do from a potential Vice-President." He added: "I should say that it hasn’t been like this with Trump." During Zelensky's phone call with Trump in July—their first conversation since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022—the Ukrainian leader came away reassured. “His message was as positive as it could be,” Zelensky said.

It encouraged the Ukrainians to believe they could win Trump over, or at least balance out the views that Vance has brought to the Republican platform. But, as Zelensky admitted on the eve of his trip to the U.S. this week, getting Trump to understand the war will be enough of a challenge. “My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how,” he told the New Yorker. “With this war, oftentimes, the deeper you look at it the less you understand.”