Ukraine cannot afford to approach Donald Trump like it approached Joe Biden. 

    Ukraine must rethink how and where it communicates to break through the noise, particularly with conservative audiences. This means stepping beyond American legacy media and meeting voters where they are: podcasts, town halls, social media influencers, and news outlets that shape opinion in today’s Republican Party. 

    The reality is that Ukraine’s struggle has become entangled in America’s partisan divide. 

    Following the February fallout at the White House, it was clear that Volodymyr Zelensky and his team should have changed strategy and tactics. Obligatory moral appeals won’t work on a transactional leader like Trump, but offering him the legacy of being the president who ended a war, like Teddy Roosevelt did in 1905, without costing American lives, just might, especially given Trump’s craving for a Nobel Peace Prize.

    The uncomfortable truth for democrats is that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, served on the board of Burisma, an energy company widely described as Ukrainian, but it is a pro-Russian firm. 

    When Donald Trump and his team sought political leverage in 2019, they focused on this connection in hopes of uncovering damaging information. They saw Biden’s affairs with Burisma as corrupt. 

    However, as journalist JP Lindsley noted, “Both the New York Post and the New York Times in the past week have called Burisma a Ukrainian company. But as I have consistently reported, Burisma is, in fact, Russian.”

    The Wall Street Journalhighlighted how Donald Trump’s fraught relationship with Ukraine began during his 2016 campaign, when he appointed Paul Manafort, a former lobbyist for Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, as his campaign manager. After Volodymyr Zelensky’s landslide victory in 2019, Trump and his allies pushed an unfounded theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election and sought investigations into Hunter Biden’s ties to Burisma. 

    The Burisma incident happened under the former president’s tenure, and Petro Poroshenko and Zelensky were swept into it. The Democrats also pushed unfounded conspiracies about Trump via the Steele Dossier, which negatively impacted the party later.

    Tensions heated when it was suggested that Trump asked for political favors during a call with Zelensky, triggering his first impeachment. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton noted that Trump never forgave Zelensky for the fallout. 

    Trump was then acquitted in February 2020. Since then, Ukraine has become a proxy for broader cultural and political divides in the U.S. Among Trump’s MAGA base, support for Ukraine has often been framed as a Democratic cause, leading to a surge in isolationist rhetoric.

    A growing number of conservative influencers are now promoting a revisionist view of history, such as portraying Winston Churchill as a villain rather than a hero of the Second World War. Figures like Tucker Carlson have amplified these ideas, which revive old isolationist thinking from the “America First” movement. 

    This shift in political attitudes is amplified by the growing dominance of right-leaning voices in the online media. A recent Media Matters study found that nine of the ten most popular online shows are right-leaning, with right-wing podcasts and streamers reaching audiences nearly five times larger than their left-leaning counterparts. 

    Take Joe Rogan, for example, who refused an offer from Zelensky to come on his popular podcast. 

    Zelensky and his team had grown used to working with Biden and the American media landscape during that time, believing they were defending his legacy and the international order. However, Trump chose a campaign of pressure on Ukraine, asking for little to no concessions from Russia.

    “Zelensky knew how to speak to liberals in America because they shared values and were already supportive of Ukraine’s cause,” said Treston Wheat, chief geopolitical officer at risk consultancy Insight Forward. 

    “However, the Trump administration is full of nationalists who want ‘America First,’ believe in transactional relationships, and are not swayed by claims of morality,” said Wheat.  

    Taras Kuzio, a political science professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, said, “My biggest concern is the complete absence of official Ukrainian efforts in conducting information warfare in the West. Ukrainian officials and opposition leaders rarely publish op-eds or contribute to specialist media outlets.”

    Not all agree that the communication strategy of the Ukrainian government has been ineffective. “Western audiences and politicians now have a far better understanding of Ukraine, thanks to the highly effective public diplomacy efforts of both the Ukrainian government and civil society,” said Maria Popova, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University.

    In Trump’s worldview, he wants to back clear winners and desires power which is fixated on transactional gains. Therefore, he was convinced that Russia, one of the world’s superpowers, is worth doing business with, even as it sends soldiers in crutches and wheelchairs to the frontlines. Russia would then be invaded by Ukraine via the Kursk Oblast in August 2024, requiring North Korean soldiers to assist, as the Kremlin’s “special military operation” drags into yet another year. 

    In addition to Chinese officers on the ground, North Korean troops are gaining modern warfare experience in Russia. Showing Trump that he can weaken the axis of evil and take the credit provides a promising path forward. 

    Former UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace claimed that Trump is “more interested in the fanfare” of a deal than Ukraine’s long-term future. If that’s true, Ukraine must focus on wooing the Republican base and Congress to ensure that any future deal swings in its favor. 

    Ukraine should build on its successes by adopting a communications strategy that reflects today’s media landscape. That means moving beyond legacy outlets and requires engaging major influencers, speaking in clear and relatable terms, and reframing the war not just as a moral imperative, but as a fight aligned with core American interests and values: strength, sovereignty, and resistance to tyranny.

    There is also a transactional benefit, framing support for Ukraine as an opportunity to showcase Trump’s leadership in delivering a definitive defeat of Putin. This is in direct contrast to Biden, who only offered Ukraine the maximum of the minimum effort required to fight a much larger power. 

    For a leader who prides himself on winning negotiations, Ukraine offers Trump a unique opportunity to craft “the ultimate deal,” one that ends a war on America’s terms, weakens authoritarian adversaries, and restores U.S. prestige, all without committing U.S. troops to a foreign war. 

    Russia will remain one of the United States’ primary competitors on the world stage, making a weakened Kremlin all the more strategically valuable for the future.