As right-wing populists rise again, cracks appear in West’s support for Ukraine

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Two weeks ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was welcomed as a hero at the United Nations, the White House and the House of Commons. Since then, he’s been forced to watch from afar as Western solidarity in support of Ukraine has begun to show serious cracks for the first time in more than 20 months of war.

Last weekend alone saw Kyiv potentially lose the support of a key ally in Central Europe, while – almost simultaneously – a shutdown of the U.S. government was averted only when a new tranche of military, economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine was cut from the proposed spending package that was finally approved by Congress.

Topping it off, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, posted a social-media meme Sunday that mocked Mr. Zelensky for his repeated requests for more assistance to combat the Russian invasion of his country.

Mr. Musk’s attack was the culmination of a weekend that began with the party of Robert Fico – a former prime minister and right-wing populist with pro-Russian views – winning the largest share of seats in Slovakia’s parliamentary elections.

Mr. Fico campaigned on the slogan “Not a single round” – promising to end Slovakia’s military assistance to Ukraine. If he succeeds in forming a new government, he could form a bloc with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to hold up European Union aid to Ukraine as voters across the West increasingly ask their politicians to focus spending on domestic priorities instead of a foreign war.

Ukraine has also become a campaign issue in Poland ahead of that country’s Oct. 15 elections, with the ruling Law and Justice party recently threatening to stop sending military support to Ukraine after Mr. Zelensky took Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the World Trade Organization over their bans on importing Ukrainian grain. A Russian naval blockade of the Black Sea has forced Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain producers, to export more of its production overland, in the process forcing down prices for farmers in Central Europe.

Even more worrying for Ukraine is the fact that U.S. military support has become part of that country’s culture wars, with Republican representatives and senators questioning why Washington is funding one side in a foreign war that increasingly looks to have reached a stalemate. Ominously, the Republican House leadership denied Mr. Zelensky’s request to address a joint session of the House last month so he could make his pitch for continued help.

On Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden convened a call with 11 leaders, including the prime ministers of Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom and Italy, the presidents of Poland and Romania, the Chancellor of Germany and the Foreign Affairs Minister of France, to reassure them of continued U.S. support for Ukraine. The chiefs of the European Commission, the European Council and NATO also took part in the call.

“All of us, leaders, we are determined to continue supporting Ukraine,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told a news conference afterward. “President Joe Biden began with telling us about the situation in the U.S. and what is the real political situation around Ukraine. He assured us that there is backing for the continuing support for Ukraine, first of all for the military support. He said that he will get that backing in the Congress.”

In the background to all this is the possibility that former president Donald Trump – the Republican frontrunner who has long spoken of his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin – could win back the White House in November, 2024.

The sense that Western support is something that can no longer be taken for granted hangs over the large-scale counteroffensive that Kyiv launched in June. While the campaign has thus far fallen short of its initial aims, Ukrainian officials have sought to portray their relatively small gains in the southern Zaporizhzhia and eastern Donetsk regions as significant, emphasizing that Ukraine retains the initiative on the battlefield and that the counteroffensive is continuing.

Mr. Trump, who was impeached in 2019 over his attempts to coerce Mr. Zelensky into helping his re-election bid, has been one of the loudest critics of U.S. military support to Ukraine. He has suggested he would instead seek a peace deal that would see Russia keeping some of the Ukrainian territory it has seized.

During his visit to the U.S., Mr. Zelensky challenged Mr. Trump to make public his plan to end the war. In an interview with CNN, he said that if Mr. Trump’s plan is “to take the part of our territory and to give Putin, that is not the peace formula.” Ukrainian officials insist the war can only end when all Russian soldiers have withdrawn from their country, arguing that any peace deal that falls short of that would only be the prelude to another Russian attack.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an aide to Mr. Zelensky, was even sharper in pushing back against Western critics who claim to know what’s best for Ukraine – specifically Mr. Musk. “Any silence or irony towards Ukraine today is a direct encouragement of Russian propaganda that justifies mass violence and destruction,” Mr. Podolyak wrote on his X account. “Unfortunately, not everyone and not always, being significant media figures thousands of kilometers away from the epicenter of the war, is able to realize what the daily bombardments and the cries of children losing their parents are.”

But Kyiv’s troubles continue to mount. Even Canada, whom Mr. Zelensky hailed in his Sept. 22 speech as “always on the bright side of history,” has been a source of problems for Ukraine lately.

The scandal over Parliament’s salute that day to Yaroslav Hunka – a Ukrainian who fought in a Nazi division during the Second World War – is unlikely to dent Canada’s support for Ukraine in the short term. However, the footage of Mr. Zelensky, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the rest of the House applauding Mr. Hunka – without being told his full background story – was a gift to the Kremlin’s propaganda machines, which has for years sought to portray the modern Ukrainian government as somehow linked to those who sided with Germany against the Soviet Union some eight decades ago.

There are also questions in Kyiv about the extent to which Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, whose party currently has a wide lead in opinion polls, shares the U.S. Republican perspective on support for Ukraine.