In many ways, the US and Ukraine couldn’t be more different: while the US is a relatively old and federal democracy with a large population and economy, Ukraine is a young unitary democracy whose population and economy are only a fraction of that of the US. The Ukrainian party system is extremely unstable while the US equivalent consists of two major parties which have dominated politics for more than 150 years. Many other distinctions could be listed.
Notwithstanding these differences, the US of 2025, under newly elected President Donald Trump, and Ukraine in 2010, under then newly elected President Viktor Yanukovych, bear similarities in several striking ways. Nine years ago, US and Ukrainian politics became strangely linked through the notorious political figure of Paul Manafort. A prolific campaigner and manipulator for authoritarian rulers across the world, Manafort had been a relevant actor in Kyiv in 2004-10, and six years later shot into the limelight in Washington. He played a role in the rise of both controversial figures – Yanukovych in Ukraine, and Trump in the US. Manafort’s engagements with Yanukovych (over several years) and Trump (over several months) preceded their spectacular victories in the presidential elections of 2010 and 2016 respectively.
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Moreover, the political advances of Yanukovych and Trump have also become similar with both having received support from Russia during critical electoral campaigns. For sure, Moscow’s involvement in both Ukrainian and US pre-electoral politics saw differing levels of intensity and results. In Ukraine, the Kremlin was always a crucial participant of domestic affairs until 2014, and Moscow employed a multitude of secret as well as not so secret agents and instruments. Nevertheless, the Kremlin’s constant subversion of Ukraine’s polity was insufficient to secure pro-Russian Yanukovych’s victory in the presidential elections of 2004, in whose conduct Moscow was deeply involved.
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In the US, in contrast, it was the 2015-16 presidential bid of Trump and his public appeal to Russia “to find the 30,000 emails [of his Democratic competitor Hilary Clinton] that are missing” which motivated the Kremlin to intrude in the contest between Trump and Clinton. While the Kremlin directly and openly interfered in Ukrainian domestic affairs, Moscow’s engagement with Trump was more secretive and indirect. It did not – as far as we know –amount to a full-blown political collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin, unlike the many occasions of collaboration between Moscow and pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians.
Nevertheless, the meddling of Russia’s special services in the 2016 US electoral campaign was massive, as documented in a five-volume report of the US Senate’s Select Committee on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 US Election published in 2019-2020. Whether Russia’s activities of 2016 altered the narrow result of that year’s presidential election or not, and whether Trump thus owes his political rise to Moscow, we will never know for sure. What is clear is that the 2016 US electoral campaign would have developed differently without Russian involvement. Something similar can be said about the entire history of domestic Ukrainian politics until 2022.
Intriguing congruencies between Yanukovych and Trump
The biographies of Yanukovych and Trump reveal similar patterns. Both men’s approaches to politics are transactional, cynical, patriarchal, and not burdened by the constraints of values, norms and ideology. When elected presidents in 2010 and 2016 respectively, Yanukovych and Trump were both convicted felons whose known infringements of the law did not – as would have been the case in most other democracies – prevent a nomination for head of state, by their political organizations, i. e. Ukraine’s Party of Regions and the US’s GOP. Moreover, there are certain parallels in the ways Yanukovych and Trump tried to gain and keep power.
In 2004, then being Ukraine’s prime minister, Yanukovych attempted to become president via large scale electoral fraud in the second round of Ukraine’s fourth presidential elections since 1991. This attempted illegal power grab was prevented by Ukraine’s Supreme Court which declared the election results invalid and ordered a repeat of the voting – which Yanukovych predictably lost. In early 2021, as the outgoing 45th US president, Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential elections by, among other things, instigating a mob to storm Washington’s Capitol Building and prevent Congress to formalize the victory of Joe Biden. This attempted coup was prevented by Washington’s police and Congress, which went on to validate the election results. In the aftermath, Moscow has publicly supported Yanukovych and Trump in their non-recognition of their electoral defeats of 2004 and 2020.
In spring 2010, former PM Yanukovych eventually won Ukraine’s presidential elections against an incumbent female prime minister with less than 50% of the vote. While Yanukovych received 49.3%, Yuliia Tymoshenko collected 46.0%. Fourteen and a half years later, Trump won the 2024 US presidential elections against an incumbent female vice president, also with less than 50% of the vote. While Trump received 49.8% of the popular vote, Kamala Harris collected 48.3%.
Both Yanukovych’s and Trump’s victories in 2010 and 2024 were, at these points in time, less helped by Manafort and/or Russia. Instead, they were both mainly a result of the ineptitude of Ukrainian and US democratic electoral strategists and campaigners. These two momentous votes could arguably have been won by the two democratic female contenders had their political allies and managers behaved more cooperatively.
In particular, the two incumbent presidents, Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko and the US’ Joe Biden, did not help Tymoshenko and Harris sufficiently to win their respective contests. Yushchenko refused to endorse Tymoshenko in the second round of Ukraine’s 2010 presidential elections whereas Biden withdrew far too late his candidacy from the US presidential race of 2024. Yushchenko and Biden thus became partly complicit in the fateful electoral triumphs of the anti-democrats Yanukovych and Trump.
The biggest similarities between Yanukovych and Trump are, however, their close ties to some of their countries’ plushest tycoons as well as both men’s readiness to disrupt their countries’ domestic orders and foreign relations. Yanukovych in 2010 and Trump in 2024 had both the open and manifest support from their countries’ respectively richest men, Rinat Akhmetov and Elon Musk, respectively, as well as from a number of other super-rich oligarchs.
In 2010-2013, Yanukovych tried to recreate the Ukrainian plutocracy that had emerged in the 1990s, after the break-up of the Soviet Union. In contrast, Trump is currently engaged in installing a type of isolationist oligarchy that would seem to be entirely novel to the contemporary US (or, in some ways, take it back to the 19th century).
In 2010-2013, Yanukovych undermined Ukraine’s fledging democracy, Western integration and emancipation from Russia’s tutelage with a series of political turnabouts. Among others, he initiated, in 2010, a change of the Constitution to his advantage, and deleted the aim of Ukraine’s NATO membership from the Law on the Fundamentals of National Security. In late 2013, he refused to sign an already-initialed Association Agreement with the EU.
As is well-known, this last-minute delay to the start of Ukraine’s European integration triggered a protest on Kyiv’s Independence Square that became known as the “Euromaidan” (European square). Yanukovych tried to violently suppress this dissent and thereby turned the, at first, small-scale protest into a country-wide uprising, with millions of participants. The Euromaidan grew into a bloody stand-off and eventually the historic Revolution of Dignity which resulted in the flight of Yanukovych from Kyiv, his removal from the post of president by Ukraine’s parliament, the restoration of the Constitution amended under Yanukovych, and the signing of the Association Agreement with the EU.
It should be noted that Russia’s occupation of Crimea and war against Ukraine had already started on Feb. 20, 2014. Moscow’s military attack on Ukraine, with regular Russian troops, began thus before all of the latter events happened, and not, as is widely believed, in reaction to them).
How Trump’s presidency might play out
What is currently happening and may soon happen under Trump’s presidency in the US is distinct from Ukraine’s trajectory of development under Yanukovych. As the polities and societies of the US and Ukraine are dissimilar, these differences should be of no surprise. Yet, on an abstract level, the 47th US President is currently making an attempt to change the direction of American domestic and foreign affairs in a way that is similar to what Ukraine’s fourth president tried to do in his country in 2010-13. Under Trump, US political institutions and international relations are, it appears, currently experiencing transitions whose depth is increasingly rivaling that of Ukraine’s redirection under Yanukovych.
The million-dollar question, becoming more salient with every passing week, is whether the finale of Trump’s presidency may eventually look like that of Yanukovych’s. To be sure, a full impeachment of Trump that would be equivalent to the Ukrainian parliament’s removal of Yanukovych from the office of President of Ukraine in late February 2014 will have a politically different result.
Trump would be merely replaced by Vice-President J.D. Vance, who is ideologically close to Trump. In contrast, Yanukovych was, for three months, replaced by Parliamentary Speaker Oleksandr Turchinov who had been opposed to Yanukovych. Turchinov became Ukraine’s interim president until the newly elected regular President Petro Poroshenko, also a politician who had been opposed to Yanukovych, took over in June 2014.
Despite these and many other distinctions, the future trajectory of US political developments could resemble that of Ukraine in 2010-14. Increasingly anti-democratic, disrupting, pluto- or/and autocratic as well as ultimately unpopular policies by the Trump administration could lead to mass demonstrations reminiscent of Ukraine’s uprising against Yanukovych’s policies and behavior, in late 2013. In a worst-case scenario, the stand-off between the Trump administration and a country-wide protest movement could turn violent, and lead to clashes as bad, worse or even far worse, than those of Ukraine, in early 2014.
The international repercussions of such a domestic escalation in the US could be significantly greater than the tragic aftereffects of Ukraine’s internal destabilization 11 years ago. Based on earlier prepared plans, the Kremlin in February 2014 swiftly took advantage of Kyiv’s reduced ability to react to Russian miliary expansion. When Russia annexed the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in March 2014, it started, according to Jakob Hauter, a delegated inter-state war in mainland Eastern Ukraine, in April 2014.
Being the world’s most potent military super-power, the US does not have to fear foreign invasion, occupation and annexation by a foreign country, as long as the US does not break apart. Yet, US mass protests like those in Ukraine in late 2013 and their escalation as in early 2014 would have repercussions far beyond the US. Should the Trump administration’s current disruption of political institutions, economic relations, and foreign ties continue, American civil society may sooner or later react, in some ways, similar to Ukraine’s in 2013.
Whether this will also lead to deep changes within the US government, constitution and foreign affairs, as happened in Ukraine in 2014, remains to be seen. Domestic turmoil in the US will, even if tumultuous and violent, not make it as vulnerable as Ukraine became in early 2014. What nevertheless seems certain is that internal destabilization in the US would have far-reaching international repercussions which could eventually be even more tragic than those of Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity eleven years ago.
Dr. Andreas Umland is an analyst at theStockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS) of theSwedish Institute of International Affairs (UI).
The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.