As Trump's return threatens to end U.S. support for Ukraine, allies scramble to fill the gap

As Ukraine's allies gathered in Halifax on Friday for the International Security Forum, president Peter Van Praagh acknowledged the foreboding many felt following the election of Donald Trump.

"Judging from today's reports and traditional and social media, we might be forgiven for believing that Ukraine can no longer win the war against Russian aggression," he said. "This widespread forecast is not true."

"It was not true when all the experts said the same thing on February 24, 2022, the date Putin invaded, and it is not true now," he added, promising a conference that would "change this doom-and-gloom narrative."

The meeting represents one of the best chances for those still committed to Ukrainian victory against Russia to try to find ways to stymie Trump's declared intention of pushing Ukraine into peace talks that almost certainly would end with the loss of a large part of its territory.

Those allies face a difficult, perhaps insurmountable, task. But already, some of Trump's predictions about how the world and the war would respond to his election victory are turning out differently than he expected.

One of Trump's campaign promises was that he would end the Ukraine war before taking the oath of office.

"I will get it settled before I even become president," Trump claimed during his only debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. "If I win, when I'm president-elect, what I'll do is I'll speak to one, I'll speak to the other.

"They respect me. They don't respect [President Joe] Biden."

He repeated the claim in an interview on the podcast PMD: "I think the world's going to behave, and I think I will settle Russia-Ukraine while I'm president-elect."

But peace has not broken out. Instead, there has been a wave of escalation.

Far from quailing at the prospect of a Trump presidency, Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized the use of a new nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) called Oreshnik ('the hazel") in response to a Ukrainian missile attack on Russia.

Putin also went on national television to tell Russians that "a regional conflict in Ukraine previously provoked by the West has acquired elements of a global character," and marked the 1000th day since Russia's full-scale invasion by signing changes to Russia's nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

The escalation has not surprised observers of this war, or of wars generally, said former Canadian defence official Andrew Rasoulis, now with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

"It's very predictable," he told CBC News. "As often is the case before wars come to an end and negotiations set in, the fighting sometimes can be heaviest at that point as both sides try to strengthen their positions before they actually sit down.