I’ve Watched America and Ukraine Switch Places
7 min read
“Ukrainians don’t care who will be president of the United States,” my boss, the editor in chief of one of the largest television stations in Ukraine, told me in 2012 as I headed overseas to cover the American election. I was at the Obama campaign’s headquarters, in Chicago, when the president gave his victory speech that year—but back then, Ukrainian television didn’t broadcast live at night, so my report didn’t air until the next morning, local time.
Covering the 2024 U.S. election for the Ukrainian media was an entirely different experience. People in Ukraine were following every turn. Multiple Ukrainian radio stations called me for reports from the rallies I’d attended in Saginaw, Michigan, and State College, Pennsylvania. Ukraine is at war, and the United States is its biggest provider of military aid; the future of that relationship was at stake. The contest’s eventual winner, Donald Trump, had promised to end the war in 24 hours—which Ukrainians understood to mean that he intended to sell our country out to Russia.
But for me, that was only one dimension of this election’s significance. I’ve covered five American presidential contests for the Ukrainian press, starting in 2008, and in that time, I feel that I have witnessed an American transformation that resonates uncomfortably with the Ukrainian past.
After Ukraine became independent, in 1991, our political parties were for decades run from the pockets of oligarchs. A handful of unimaginably wealthy men, each with holdings in media and industry, controlled factions of political representatives who competed almost exclusively with one another. Political campaigns lacked substance and consisted mainly of personal attacks. In the United States in 2008 and 2012, by contrast, the candidates had real constituencies and actual debates about health care and the economy. Many Ukrainians envied the strength of American institutions, media, and civic engagement.
Sure, I was a bit stunned when, at a 2008 John McCain rally in Columbus, Ohio, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger warned voters that socialism was on the rise and would destroy America the way it had his native Austria. I had just been to Youngstown, Ohio, where I’d interviewed laid-off workers who lacked basic health care; Austria, meanwhile, was a country I knew well, and it had one of the highest standards of living in the world. Why would an elected official peddle such nonsense to this enormous crowd? Still, American democracy seemed, to an outsider, like the picture of health.
The roles had all but reversed when I came back in 2016. Ukrainians had risen up in 2014 against the corrupt, Russia-backed government of then-President Viktor Yanukovych. Our transition wasn’t perfect, but we elected a government that was at last serious about reform. The Kremlin responded by occupying Crimea and assaulting eastern Ukraine, where it backed separatists in the Donbas region. A low-level war would continue in the Donbas straight up until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022. Even so, we were building up our democracy. Something was happening to America that seemed to point in a different direction.
That year, Americans were more divided than I’d ever seen them. And it wasn’t easy to talk with Republicans. Some Trump supporters told me that a European reporter could never understand their views on guns. One shut the door in my face at a campaign headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina, explaining that he didn’t trust the foreign media. I’d reported from the rallies of pro-Russian separatists in Crimea and the Donbas, who considered Kyiv-based journalists suspicious if not outright enemies, and I knew when to leave.
That feeling wasn’t the only disconcertingly familiar one. The worldviews of many Americans I talked with that year diverged starkly from the visible facts of their lives. Democrats scoffed that nobody would vote for Trump—but the excitement at his rallies was plainly evident. A man at a Trump rally in Wilmington, Ohio, complained to me about unemployment. Neither he nor anybody in his family had lost a job—in fact, the mayor of Wilmington told me that the town had more than 300 job vacancies. A retired prosecutor told me that the only media outlet he trusted was WikiLeaks. I was reminded of Russia’s coordinated disinformation campaign against Ukrainians: Since the start of the war, we’d been flooded with fabricated news. We had struggled to make the international press understand that high-profile politicians were simply inventing stories. Now something similar seemed to be happening in the United States.
As of this fall, Ukraine is two and a half years into an all-out war with Russia, and America is eight years into a style of politics that my American colleagues describe as substanceless. I listened for mentions of Ukraine at the rallies I attended, and heard none. The closest the candidates came was when Trump, in Pennsylvania, promised that his administration wouldn’t get involved in the affairs of “countries you’ve never heard of,” and Kamala Harris reminded a crowd in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that Trump had a strange fascination with Russia. Nonetheless, the Trump supporters I spoke with assured me that their candidate would bring an end to all wars, including the one in Ukraine. I heard this from Bill Bazzi, the mayor of Dearborn Heights, Michigan. And I heard it from rally-goers, including an elderly woman at a J. D. Vance event in Saginaw, who told me that she’d persuaded skeptical family members to overlook Trump’s personality and focus on his leadership qualities and ability to bring peace to the world.
Harris didn’t speak much about foreign policy at the event I attended in Ann Arbor, but she did warn her audience about the risk of fascism. That word surprised me. Since the full-scale invasion of our country, Ukrainians have frequently used it to describe the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin. The international media have been reluctant to pick up the term, perhaps because it is so heavily freighted with historical meaning. But now it has become part of the American political vernacular.
This American campaign season was rife with reminders of a politics that were once routine in Ukraine, and that we are now happy to be mostly rid of. We know very well, from our experience, what happens when billionaires own media platforms: They can withdraw endorsements written by their editorial boards and back political candidates in order to curry favor. In Warren, Michigan, I talked with a man who claimed that he’d earned $80,000 in one month for collecting signatures for Elon Musk’s petition to support the Constitution. In another echo, the Trump camp threatened that it would challenge the election results if they didn’t name him the winner: Ukraine has some experience with elections followed by months of litigation.
Some of the Americans I met on the campaign trail wanted to know if I found the situation in their country disturbing. Sure. But everything is relative. Americans are fortunate not to live through what we do in Ukraine. There were times in the past week when I’d be reporting in the Midwest and, because of the time difference, the air-raid-alert app on my phone would go off in the middle of the day, announcing another nighttime attack on my home city of Kyiv. In between interviews, I’d scroll through photos of the buildings hit, hoping not to see my family’s home.
Trump has won the contest for the U.S. presidency. If he withholds military aid, Ukraine may suffer huge losses on the battlefield and enormous civilian casualties. But one way or another, Kyiv is going to have to work with his administration. My time reporting on the campaign has convinced me that this election was not an aberration so much as a reality to be accepted. For the foreseeable future, the United States will turn inward, becoming a country more and more focused on itself. Outsiders will simply have to take this into account.
As for the threat of encroaching authoritarianism, I remain an optimist. Take it from a member of the generation of Ukrainians who successfully defended democracy: To capture a state requires not just a strong leader but an apathetic society. Democracy survives when citizens actively defend their rights on every level.
I saw a lot of that in Nevada and Arizona, where I spent the last two days of the campaign following canvassers. I went door-to-door with members of the Culinary Union of Las Vegas—a guest-room attendant, a cocktail server, and a porter—and listened as they urged residents to pay attention to the Nevada Senate race. In Phoenix, I followed a group of volunteers from California who’d spent weeks trying to talk with people they disagreed with. They told me they had knocked on 500,000 doors in Arizona. Friends in New York and Washington told me that they or their relatives had done campaign work outside their cities—writing letters, phone-banking. Even those critical of both candidates and the system itself cared deeply about the country; some who were alienated from the national races focused their energies on local ones. I have never seen anything like this in Europe, where elections are all about going to the polls once every few years.
One thing we have learned in Ukraine, confronted with foreign invasion and war, is that life goes on. The same will be true for America after November 5. I’m reminded of the time a foreign journalist asked a Ukrainian general how Ukraine would survive the winter. He confidently replied that after the winter, there would be spring.
