Yuliya Kazdobina on Ukrainian reaction to US setting a limit on where US made weapons can be used inside Russia.

Marking 1,000 days of war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells the EU it’s time to ramp up pressure.

Washington has reportedly allowed Ukraine to attack deep within Russia, a move that has provoked Putin.

Ukraine Air Force shares video of a former preschool teacher shooting down a Russian missile

The Ukrainian president also said his country "must do everything" to ensure the war ends next year.

Russia is launching mass drone strikes on Ukraine. A 14-year-old girl was one of the latest victims.

Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian targets have increased in frequency in the week since the U.S. election, killing civilians and destroying another dam. Russian troops continued to make incremental gains toward the city of Pokrovsk. The Russian army is preparing a new offensive, this time using North Korean troops. Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Donald Trump on his election but implied that he would have discussions only if the U.S. initiates talks, drops its sanctions, and refuses to offer any further support for Ukraine—accepting, in other words, a Russian victory. Meanwhile, Russian state television welcomed news of the election by gleefully showing nude photographs of Melania Trump on the country’s most-watched channel.

How will the new U.S. administration respond? What should the outgoing administration do?

In one sense, nothing will change. For nearly three years, many, many people, from the right to the left, in Europe and in America, have called for negotiations to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration repeatedly probed the possibility of negotiations. The German government endlessly proposed negotiations. Now a new team will arrive in Washington, and it will be demanding negotiations too.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

The new team will immediately run into the same dilemma that everyone else has encountered: “Land for peace” sounds nice, but the president of Russia isn’t fighting for land. Putin is fighting not to conquer Pokrovsk but to destroy Ukraine as a nation. He wants to show his own people that Ukraine’s democratic aspirations are hopeless. He wants to prove that a whole host of international laws and norms, including the United Nations Charter and the Geneva conventions, no longer matter. His goal is not to have peace but to build concentration camps, torture civilians, kidnap 20,000 Ukrainian children, and get away with it—which, so far, he has.

Putin also wants to show that America, NATO, and the West are weak and indecisive, regardless of who is president, and that his brutal regime represents some kind of new global standard. And now, of course, he also needs to show his country that nearly three years of fighting had some purpose, given that this costly, bloody, extended war, officially described as nothing more than a “special military operation,” was supposed to end in a matter of days. Maybe Putin could be interested in stopping the fight for some period of time. Maybe he could be threatened into halting his advance, or bribed with an offer of sanctions relief. But any cease-fire treaty that does not put some obstacle—security guarantees, NATO troops in Ukraine, major rearmament—in the way of another invasion will fail sooner or later because it will simply give Russia an opportunity to rest, rearm, and resume pursuit of the same goals later on.

Putin will truly stop fighting only if he loses the war, loses power, or loses control of his economy. And there is plenty of evidence that he fears all three, despite his troops’ slow movement forward. He would not have imported thousands of North Korean soldiers if he had an infinite number of Russians to replace the more than 600,000 soldiers whom he has lost to injury or death. He would not have paid American YouTubers to promote anti-Ukrainian propaganda if he wasn’t worried by the American public’s continued support for Ukraine. His economy is in trouble: Russian inflation is rising fast; Russian interest rates are now at 21 percent; Russian industries particularly vulnerable to sanctions, such as liquefied natural gas, are suffering. The Russian navy was humiliated in the Black Sea. The Russian military has still not recaptured territory lost in Russia’s Kursk province, conquered by the Ukrainians last summer.

When the next U.S. president, secretary of defense, and secretary of state take office, they will discover that they face the same choices that the current administration did. They can increase Putin’s agony using economic, political, and military tools and make sure he stops fighting. Or they can let him win, quickly or slowly. But a Russian victory will not make Europe safer or the U.S. stronger. Instead, the costs will grow higher: A massive refugee crisis, an arms race, and possibly a new round of nuclear proliferation could follow as European and Asian democracies assess the new level of danger from the autocratic world. An invasion of Taiwan becomes more likely. An invasion of a NATO state becomes thinkable.

[Karl Marlantes and Elliot Ackerman: The abandonment of Ukraine]

In the final two months of his presidency, Joe Biden, together with Ukraine’s European allies, will have one last chance to push Russia hard, to respond to the extraordinary Russian–North Korean escalation, and to stabilize the Ukrainian front line. This is Biden’s last chance to allow Ukraine to carry out long-range strikes against targets inside Russia. Although the Russians can strike any target, military or civilian, anywhere in Ukraine and at any time, the Ukrainians have been limited to their own drones. They have had some startling successes—their drone operations are now the world’s most sophisticated—including hitting military factories all over Russia, and several targets in Moscow this week. But to stop attacks on their cities and to prevent the Russian military from moving troops and equipment toward their borders, they need to be able to use missiles to hit air bases and logistical hubs inside Russia too.

Even more important is the question of money. Biden must press upon the Europeans, as a matter of urgency, the need to transfer frozen Russian assets to Kyiv—not just the interest but the capital. This money—more than $300 billion—can be used to purchase weapons, rebuild the country, and keep the economy going for many months. Most of this money is in European institutions whose leaders have delayed making final decisions about it for fear that Russia will retaliate against European companies, especially French and German companies that still have assets in Russia. But now time is running short: Perhaps the Trump administration will preserve sanctions on Russia, but perhaps it will not.

Biden’s team says it will expedite the delivery of the remaining weapons and resources that Congress has already designated for Ukraine. The goals should be to stabilize the front lines and prevent a collapse in Ukrainian morale; to provide long-term support, including spare parts so that repairs and maintenance of existing weapons systems can continue; and, most of all, to hit the North Korean troops in Kursk. It’s very important that the North Korean leadership perceives this escapade as a catastrophic failure, and as quickly as possible, so that more troops aren’t sent in the future.

After that? The choices, and the stakes, remain very similar to what they were in February 2022. Either we inflict enough economic pressure and military pain to convince Russia that the war can never be won, or we deal with the far more ominous, and far more expensive, consequences of Ukraine’s loss. Biden has a few more weeks to make a difference. It will then be up to Trump to decide whether he will help Ukraine to succeed and to survive, or whether he will push Ukraine to fail, along with the broader democratic world.

Democrats will spend the next four years debating why the party suffered a sweeping defeat last week. Maybe it was inflation, or the culture wars, or Joe Biden’s hubris, or podcasts, that drove voters in every swing state to the Republican presidential nominee. At least one theory, however, can already be put to rest: Elon Musk did not “steal” the election for Donald Trump.

In the weeks and months leading up to the election, Republican officials and operatives architected a second “Stop the Steal” campaign, ready to deploy should their presidential candidate lose. Musk laid much of this groundwork himself, for instance by aggressively promoting the false narrative that the Democrats had brought foreigners into the United States to vote illegally, among other falsehoods. Yet following Trump’s election, it was the left sowing doubts: “#donotconcedekamala” and “Trump cheated” both trended on X. One post on Threads read, “20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own,” and pointed to Musk, Peter Thiel, and Vladimir Putin as likely culprits. “If anyone could fund a massive election fraud scheme it’s Elon musk. He also has motive,” Dean Obeidallah, a progressive radio host, posted to Threads and X on Friday. Such posts have been viewed tens of millions of times.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

There is no evidence to support these claims—but they’re still fundamentally different from the original “Stop the Steal” movement. Democratic leadership, for example, is not repeating these conspiracy theories, nor is there a coordinated attempt to amplify, validate, or act on them. (Obeidallah himself eventually clarified his position, writing on his Substack yesterday that although skepticism is healthy, “there is currently no credible, objective evidence of fraud or any other criminal conduct” suggesting that the outcome was illegitimate.) In fact, the 2024 election was by all accounts extremely secure. There is no evidence that foreign interference affected the results, nor did any domestic conspiracy materially hurt election administration. “Our election infrastructure has never been more secure,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a statement on November 6. “We have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.” Top officials in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, all key battlegrounds, have said the election was safe, free, and fair.

That hasn’t stopped some Democrats from implying otherwise. Musk, as one of Trump’s most vocal supporters and an extremely online enemy of the extremely online left, has become an obvious target. Maybe the world’s richest man hacked the election with his Starlink satellite network; maybe Democratic ballots were systematically not counted; even if the mechanism is unclear, the math isn’t mathing. Even if such suspicions are raised in good faith, they are counterproductive. Musk—who is now close enough to Trump to have joined him on a recent call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—is dangerous. His willingness to amplify brazen lies in order to help advance the outcome he wanted was on display for months leading up to the election. But the misinformation about him or any major Republican figure stealing the election obscures and diminishes the actual threat at hand: The authoritarian bent in American media, business, and politics that Musk represents has profoundly warped many Americans’ political discourse, trust in one another, and grip on reality, all without needing to mess with any ballots.

Believing that Musk rigged this November’s outcome has become, at least for some, easier than accepting the truth: Trump, an openly racist and misogynistic candidate who tried to overthrow the government and has said he wants generals like those of the Third Reich, just won the Electoral College and is poised to claim the popular vote in the United States. Yet fantasies about election fraud are dangerous this time around, not because they will actively undermine or mount a physical threat to democracy, but because they blunt, and even willfully ignore, reality. This is Trump’s party now, everyone knows it, pundits should know that everyone knows it, and the GOP still won back control of the Senate and will likely claim a narrow majority in the House of Representatives. As of Friday, Trump had improved his vote margin in more than nine out of every 10 counties with near-complete results, including many progressive strongholds. Fixating on fraud disregards the material factors that brought the nation and its citizens to this choice, and detracts from the daunting work that must be done to recover.

[Read: Voters just didn’t believe in Biden’s economy]

And Elon Musk, “hacking” aside, played a substantial role in Trump’s reelection campaign by spreading and normalizing a wide range of hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories. He has been the spearhead of a growing segment of the ultra-wealthy technocratic class that rapidly coalesced around Trump this year. The far-right rhetoric about voter fraud that Musk has amplified helped trigger a wave of death threats against election officials. He is trying to single-handedly replace objective sources of information and reporting with his white-supremacist social network, degrading America’s information environment to the point that it has become unclear how, exactly, to change anyone’s mind about anything.

It is not surprising that suspicion about the election has cropped up. Conspiracy theories frequently emerge around election time, and they have for decades. These Democrats are not being uniquely, or even especially, whiny or hypocritical. Before Trump decried a “steal” in 2020, Democrats blamed Russian trolls and Facebook in 2016. (In that case, to be clear, U.S. intelligence officials did find evidence of Russian interference—but not evidence that it was what decisively swung the outcome in Trump’s favor.) Four years prior, Trump called Barack Obama’s victory a “total sham,” and in 2008 John McCain’s campaign was reportedly collecting reports of “Election Day irregularities” before his overwhelming defeat. Both times, a poll found that roughly half of Republicans thought the election was stolen. In 2004, some Democrats blamed shenanigans in Ohio for John Kerry’s exit-poll-defying loss, and in 2000 the culprit was then–Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the state’s infamous “hanging chads.”

Yet Trump’s political foes should be striving to prove that cognitive flexibility, grounded in reality, is possible. Anyone who believes in democracy, registered Democrat or not, should accept the results—and, instead of retroactively fixating on polling and data, focus all their energy on the economic, social, political, and other aspects of people’s lives that caused this outcome, and on how to make those people’s lives better.

Europeans should pay Donald Trump the compliment of believing what he does and says, not what they desperately want to hear. He has clearly indicated that he wants the United States out of the Ukraine war as soon as possible. Both the president-elect and his most important supporter, Elon Musk, have reportedly been in frequent contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Vice President–elect J. D. Vance has outlined a “peace” deal with Ukraine that would serve Russian interests. American aid to Ukraine, which has been vital to the beleaguered country’s ability to resist Russia’s ongoing invasion, could stop not long after Trump is inaugurated. European nations must accept this reality and make their own plans—not just to support Ukraine in its existential fight but also to protect their own security as America’s global role shrinks.

Perhaps the best that Ukraine and its supporters can hope for is that Trump doesn’t walk away from NATO and allows European states to purchase U.S. weapons for Ukraine. This minimal position might represent a victory of sorts for Europeans who believe in democracy and the transatlantic alliance—but it would still signal a historical break. The United States will likely stop leading the global opposition to Russian aggression, and perhaps stop caring about the results of the largest war in Europe since 1945. Indeed, the president of the United States will be closer personally to the head of Europe’s largest dictatorship than to any of the continent’s democratically elected leaders.

[Anne Applebaum: The case against pessimism]

Those leaders should have started preparing for another Trump presidency long ago. They had been warned. But for the past year many Europeans have been surviving on hope. Surely the American people won’t vote for Trump, particularly after the January 6 insurrection. The prudent assumption now is that the U.S. will no longer guarantee Europe’s security from Russia and other threats. Leaders should envisage a world where NATO no longer exists—or where the United States is no longer the leading force in the alliance.

In some ways, this is more scary psychologically than in practice. Europe—which is to say, the democratic countries enmeshed in institutions such as NATO and the European Union—has the economic and technological resources to underwrite a serious defense effort. It has a large and educated enough population to staff modern armed forces. It also has some strong and growing military capabilities. For instance, European states either have received or will receive in the coming years as many as 600 F-35 fighters—the most advanced and capable aircraft in the world. Such a force could dominate the skies against a clearly inferior Russian opponent.

Yet Europe also has many weaknesses. It has developed a shockingly large number of military-hardware systems but then only builds a small number of each. This boutique way of addressing military capability has been exacerbated by a weakness in investing in logistics and a limited ability to produce supplies and equipment quickly and reliably enough to sustain a war effort.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 prompted a lot of dramatic talk. The continent had supposedly reached a turning point—a Zeitenwende, in the phrase of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. But Europe has frittered away much of the past two and a half years, making the smallest and most incremental of changes even as a grotesque war raged to the east; even as Russian forces regularly attacked civilian targets; even as military technology, particularly relating to drone systems, raced forward. European defense spending has only crept up. Even now, a number of NATO states fail to meet the alliance’s agreed-upon target of spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. The United States, even after a significant decline in defense spending after the War on Terror, spends 3.5 percent. Two percent—a standard set in 2014, when European states felt far more secure than they currently do—won’t cut it now.

[Read: I’ve watched America and Ukraine switch places]

Scaling up defense systems quickly will be difficult, but it is essential. In the meantime, the highest priority from the European perspective should be to keep Ukraine supplied and in the fight in case Trump pulls the plug on American military support for Kyiv. Europe can provide more ammunition and more ground-based air-defense equipment. It can give Ukraine long-range weapons, such as German-made Taurus cruise missiles.

Just as important, European democracies can work with Ukraine to upgrade and expand its drone capacity—and in doing so help establish that industry elsewhere in Europe. Europe and even the United States have much to learn from Ukraine about unmanned aerial vehicles. The innovation cycle in Ukraine is quick; major advances take mere months or even just weeks. In this dynamic environment, where homegrown Ukrainian technology looms so large, few Western systems are of much use if sent whole. What Ukraine needs is the ability to mass-produce the drone technology that its engineers develop, working with European partners. That will require specialized components and equipment—and Europe can help with that.

If the United States abandons Ukraine, European states can start taking steps that the Biden administration, in its excess of caution, did not allow. The four most powerful states in Europe today—the U.K., France, Germany, and Poland—could give Ukraine their blessing to attack any Russian military targets. After all, Russia is using its weapons—and those provided by its allies, such as Iran, to attack targets in Ukraine; the American refusal to let Ukraine use Western systems against military infrastructure in Russia itself makes no sense.

European countries could go still further, by openly deploying their forces at least to western Ukraine. They could take over air-defense responsibilities—shooting down Russian missiles and drones without directly killing Russian soldiers. European forces could also openly assist in training Ukrainian forces in Ukraine and assist with air defense and training. Moves like these will reassure the Ukrainian people that they are not alone if the U.S. withdraws—and that their future is in Europe.

To be sure, the continent suffers from a collective-action problem. French President Emmanuel Macron asked this week, “The question we, as Europeans, must ask ourselves, is: Are we ready to defend the interests of Europeans?” Detractors might ask why he was raising the issue only now. In Germany, Scholz’s government appears on the verge of collapse. Even if it survives, it likely lacks the boldness to move decisively to help Ukraine.

And yet the greatest obstacle is a mental one. After decades of expecting the United States to act wisely and forcefully in defense of the broader democratic world, Europe needs to start thinking and acting on its own and in its own interests. Trump’s return means that things previously inconceivable must be faced. And in Ukraine, a new Europe can be born.

Ukrainian refugees are moving into a temporary housing development branded an eyesore by locals.