Asked if He Wants Ukraine to Defeat Russia, Trump Doesn’t Say Yes

“Do you want Ukraine to win this war?”

In response to that straightforward question put to Donald Trump twice during Tuesday night’s debate with Kamala Harris, the former president responded with more than 400 words, but not one of them was the one Ukrainians wanted to hear: “Yes.”

Mr. Trump repeated his claim that he can end the war between Russia and Ukraine “before I even become president,” without explaining how. He declined to say if defending Ukraine was in America’s national security interests, insisted he knew how to negotiate with Vladimir Putin and invoked the specter of nuclear war.

His refusal to voice support for Kyiv’s effort to beat back Russia’s invasion was certain to deepen the sense of anxiety for many Ukrainians keenly aware that without robust American military assistance, they could lose the war.

While the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has maintained it is ready to deal with either a Harris or Trump administration, many Ukrainians fear that Mr. Trump’s plan to end the war would involve ending American military support. That would leave Ukrainians with a terrible choice: keep fighting and lose slowly, at great cost, or negotiate a peace plan on unfavorable terms.

In a reflection of how closely the American election is being followed in Ukraine, the debate was aired live — at 4 a.m. local time — by Ukraine’s public broadcast network.

Mr. Trump’s comments were lampooned in a social media post by Illia Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian author and commentator. He likened Mr. Trump’s stance to forcing a cancer patient to stop chemotherapy and leaving them to “rot in indescribable pain until death to ‘prove the point.’”