Professor Francis Fukuyama is a world-renowned American philosopher and researcher in politics and international relations. He has always been a staunch supporter of Ukraine.

Prof Fukuyama strives to convince American thought leaders of the importance of supporting Ukraine, especially now, in times of war. He is involved in a programme at Stanford to train future Ukrainian leaders. He is also a frequent visitor to Ukraine. However, Fukuyama openly admits that support for Ukraine in the US has waned.

We met in Kyiv on the sidelines of the annual Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference to talk about realistic ways of ending the war, and what would compel the Russians to make concessions.

"Donald Trump is not the United States"

Professor, you're a frequent traveller to Ukraine and it’s good to see you again. Unfortunately, the overall sentiment in the US is not pro-Ukrainian. More and more Americans are opposing Ukraine's victory.

I don't think it's a large number.

There is an extreme right wing of the Republican Party that’s turned against Ukraine, but even among Republicans, I think the support is still there.

When Speaker Johnson allowed his caucus to vote for the aid package, a majority of Republicans voted for it, with a large majority of Democrats.

It’s just that we have this extreme right wing that's extremely loud, and their voices somehow dominate a lot of the discussion.

The composition of Congress will change next year, but it sounds as if public support for Ukraine is diminishing.

The problem is that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. He does not like Ukraine, and therefore his fanatical followers will repeat anything he says.

But first of all, Donald Trump is not the United States.

Hopefully he's going to go down to a pretty solid defeat in November, and then we'll have to see how Kamala Harris handles Ukraine. But she does not have any of his hostility to Ukraine.

How do Americans see the end of the war with Russia? And what do you see as a victory?

There are divisions within the American public on this, obviously.

The extreme right in the US has basically taken the Russian line that says the war has to stop.

If you listen to the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump was asked, "What do you think about the war?" and he says it has to end. What he means by that is it ends on Russian terms, where Russia gets to keep what it has taken and you get some kind of a ceasefire.

But she [Kamala Harris] was very clear that that's not an acceptable outcome. And for the Democrats, the goal of the war is still for Ukraine to win.

You shouldn't take too seriously the things that Donald Trump's followers say. They don't represent the whole American people.

Let me slightly disagree with you. Even in Washington, I did not get a sense among ordinary Americans that they want to see Ukraine win. The idea of ending the war is definitely supported by the vast majority in D.C., let alone Texas.

To say Ukraine should win is a very abstract thing, and I think that the real policy choices come down to what level of risk Americans think they’re willing to take in order to have Ukraine win. The real issues right now have to do exactly with what kind of weapons you get and what use is going to be made of them.

We supply ATACMS and F-16s. Are they allowed to hit targets in Russia?

I can assure you, ordinary Americans have no opinion about this whatsoever. They’re willing to talk about abstractions like "Ukraine should win", "There should be peace." But if you ask them, "Should the range of an ATACMS be limited to 100 km, or should we extend it to 300 km?" they have no idea.

In general, many Americans would be happy to see the Biden administration lift some of the restrictions that they’ve placed.

"The extreme right actually likes Russia better than Ukraine"

What is behind these restrictions? The explanations about an "escalation" are not convincing.  We’ve seen every move that we were warned would lead to escalation – and nothing happened. We’ve seen Kursk – and nothing happened. So why these restrictions?

You’d have to ask President Biden.

I think the danger of escalation is really pretty minimal.

Do you think Kamala Harris will act differently if she wins?

We don't know. Part of the problem with President Biden is that he has very long experience in foreign policy.

His judgment has actually not been that great in all circumstances. I think he made a lot of mistakes, for example, in Afghanistan and Iraq. He wanted to split Iraq into three different countries, which in retrospect would have been a terrible idea.

But because of that long experience, he has a lot of confidence in his own judgment about foreign policy, and that makes him less flexible than somebody with less experience.

So we'll just have to see how she does if she is elected.

Unfortunately we see – and this is not limited to the United States, it’s the West's position overall, not just Biden’s – that Ukraine is being gently pushed towards certain concessions, because negotiations in the near future mean concessions. This pressure is gentle, but it’s there. What's behind this?

Leaders are feeling political pressure.

We live in democracies, and not every decision that leaders take is supported.

So one of the things that’s going on in every democracy is that some parties – the AFD in Germany, the National Rally in France, and the Republican Party in the United States – have turned against Ukraine.

There’s growing explicit opposition to Ukraine coming from extreme right-wing populist parties.

People are tired.

I don't think that they're tired.

I mean, these parties are ideological. They actually like Russia better than Ukraine. It’s a very strange psychology.

There is growing explicit opposition to Ukraine on the part of the extreme right, and for various reasons, the populist right has been gaining ground in a number of countries, including the Republican Party in the United States.

"Russians haven't really experienced the war. If you can make them do that, that would be important"

How do you personally see Ukraine’s victory?

I don't think that you are going to have a kind of 1945 victory where Ukraine marches into Moscow and Putin kills himself. That's not going to happen.

And I also think that the ability of Ukraine to liberate the whole of the 1991 territorial extent is going to be very difficult at this point. But I also don't see politically how it could be possible for any Ukrainian leader to actually sign a peace agreement that gives away one inch of Ukrainian territory.

So I think realistically, what we are talking about are the conditions for a ceasefire, not a peace agreement.

That's a very complicated thing, because I do think you can have a situation where you do have a ceasefire, but you actually don't agree to territorial losses.

That's really what we ought to be thinking about. Because it's pretty unlikely at this point that every inch of territory is going to be liberated militarily.

That means that the war is not ended, but paused, and it will be resumed either by Ukraine or by Russia. So, which one?

That's why NATO membership is important.

Ukraine is not going to resume the war under those conditions. It’ll be Russia, and so in order to deter them, that’s why you need it.

Ukraine could: if Ukrainian territories are not liberated, we will do everything possible to regain them.

That's true. But there are pretty powerful incentives for that not to happen.

Right now one of the big issues is the Russians keep shooting missiles at Ukraine. You have to have some way of stopping that.

Better air defences are part of it, but that’s not a stable situation. If ten years from now, the Russians still send 100 missiles there, 100 here, that's not a workable ceasefire, right?

So you need some agreement that people will actually stop actively shooting at one another. And then you have to have a way of deterring the resumption of a full-scale war after that point, and that's where NATO becomes very important, or some equivalent of NATO membership – some kind of pretty solid military guarantee.

What incentive could there be for that temporary solution? Even a ceasefire would be a concession. What would force the Russians to make those concessions?

You obviously have to increase the pain that Russia is suffering.

One of the pain points is Crimea. With appropriate long-range fires, you can really make Crimea uninhabitable by the Russian military.

I'm quite supportive of Ukraine's ability to strike into Russia itself, because I think they’re vulnerable – their civilian population hasn't really experienced the war, so if you can make them do that, that would be important.

Russia’s not going to agree to a ceasefire unless it feels compelled to do so,

and right now they’re not feeling enough pain for that to happen.

Is it realistic to reach that point under Putin? I doubt it.

If that's the case, then the war is just going to continue. And it may. We don't know.

I hope a Black Swan will emerge and Putin will be replaced. It seems like the only solution. Don't you think so?

Even under Putin, if they feel enough pain, they will give up.

For example, they’ve got severe manpower shortages right now. That's part of the reason they haven't been able to really respond to the Kursk intervention.

"The extreme right are not worried about the consequences if Russia wins"

Finally, let’s talk about the United States after the elections. How do Americans view the US’s role in the new world?

Americans tend to think of themselves as a dominant power. Most Americans are aware that the internal polarisation in the United States has weakened the country very greatly.

There is a wing of the Republican Party that is isolationist. They don't want America to play a big role in global politics. They don't like alliances.

They don't like Ukraine, but they also don't like NATO. They don't want to be tied down in Asia with Japan and Korea.

This used to be the dominant kind of ideology of the Republican Party up until World War II. And now it's coming back under the leadership of Donald Trump.

That vision of America does not include it being a global superpower, using its power to stabilise things around the world. So that's something new, but it's only a part of the American public.

But do America and Americans understand the consequences of even a partial Russian victory?

You have to understand that for the extreme right in the United States, they believe that Russia is a Christian country, that it's part of Western civilisation, that Ukraine is promoting this liberal gay rights ideology. They're actually on the Russian side.

They actually want the Russians to win.

That is a very small part of the right, but it's gotten more powerful in recent years.

It's not that they don't understand that Russia is going to go further if they defeat Ukraine. They want that to happen!

They want that to happen, so they’re not worried about those consequences.

So the vast majority just does not have a clue about this?

I am not sure that they don't have a clue.

I think the majority of Americans, if you ask them [whether] they want Russia to win, a great majority will say "no".

But the question is: are you willing to pay another $60 billion for that to happen, as opposed to spending that money on poor Americans or other American needs?

At that point they say: No, no, we should take care of our own people before we take care of Ukraine.

Sergiy Sydorenko,

Video by Volodymyr Oliinyk,

European Pravda