'Don't count on his help': Russians and Ukrainians in the US brace for a second Trump presidency

As the US celebrates its last Thanksgiving before Donald Trump begins his second term as president, many Ukrainians and Russian dissidents living in the country are questioning what Trump’s second term will mean for the war in Ukraine — and their own futures.

“I think that Trump will try to make a dirty deal, to stop the war at any cost, which means at Ukraine's cost, because it's the easiest way,” says Dmytro Vovk, a Ukrainian law professor, who fled the war in his home country at the end of 2022.

Sitting in a brightly lit café filled with Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations in downtown New York, Vovk tells Euronews that he decided to leave Ukraine with his wife and two daughters after Russia targeted the northeastern city of Kharkiv, where they lived.

“Our apartment building was hit…there's a hole in the building,” he recalls. “My older daughter, for her, it was quite a tough period. She perceived it very harshly. It was all these questions, are we going to die? And so on and so forth."

Vovk and his family are among the 6.7 million-odd Ukrainians who have fled the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. More than 270,000 have ended up in the US, according to government figures.

Vovk, who comes from a “secular Jewish, Russian-speaking” family, gained entry into the US through an academic visa to teach at the Yeshiva University in New York. He doesn’t see himself as a “refugee” per se. While he believes this provides him and his family some security, he worries for the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have entered the US through the Uniting for Ukraine (U4U) scheme.

“There is a chance that Trump will just revoke these programs for Ukrainians,” posits Vovk. Ukrainians are one of the 16 groups of refugees eligible for “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) under US law, granting them the right to work and social security.

In his first term, Trump tried to revoke the programme for certain groups, and with the hard-right, anti-immigration activist Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff, many fear he will go even further this time round.

Peace, but at what cost?

However, it is the war back home in Ukraine that Vovk is most concerned about.

“Trump was very clear on Ukraine, and J.D. Vance was even clearer,” he exclaims, referencing a ‘peace plan’ proposed by the vice president-elect which would cede land to Russia, and grant Putin a “guarantee of neutrality” under which Ukraine would not join NATO or other “allied institutions” — perhaps including the EU.

Doug Klain, from the Ukrainian Advocacy group Razom for Ukraine, struck a less fatalistic tone during an interview from their headquarters in Washington.

“We’ve worked with then-Senator Vance’s office over the Years,” he tells Euronews, adding that “he’s a really interesting person, actually quite intelligent and understands the conflict.”

Announcing that the organisation was working to ensure the “insurance” of getting as much aid and military assistance committed to Ukraine by the Biden administration before Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, Klain conceded that members of the Trump team had been resistant to helping Ukraine, not least Vance and X owner Elon Musk.

Nonetheless, he remained hopeful.

“J.D. Vance has been quite flexible in his views over the years, and hopefully this time too.”

The long way round

A day after meeting with Vovk, Euronews spoke to Alexander Borochkin, a Russian dissident and refugee who fled from Russia to the US last year after speaking out against the invasion.

“I did some public posts on social media…it was a matter of personal safety,” he says.

Borochkin was a university lecturer in economics in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod before being forced out for his opposition to Russian actions in Crimea in 2018. After the full-scale invasion in February 2022, he says, he “was morally prepared to leave” his native country.

Unable to travel directly to the US, he took “a route that’s not encouraged in any way", flying first to Mexico and spending five weeks on a US government app — which he suspects contained "intentional bugs" — trying to get a meeting with US border officials to claim asylum.

After he eventually got an appointment, Borochkin says that he crossed the port of entry “where there is a river … and one must cross the beach by foot”.

He crossed with five other Russians and asylum seekers from Central and South America. From the border he headed north to Oregon, a Democratic-leaning state where he had the benefit of already knowing people.

The former academic noted how the final years of the Biden presidency have already seen the introduction of much stricter immigration controls.

“If someone tries to repeat my way, it is just technically not possible,” he says, explaining that people on Russian dissident Telegram channels are giving up trying to come to the US because of the six-month waiting periods they will face in Mexico.

Still, he fears things will only get worse under Trump.

His sentiments were echoed by Dmitri Glinski, who has run a Russian pro-democracy organisation in New York for over two decades.

Citing the controversial anti-immigration proposals contained in Project 2025 — a radical right-wing policy program that Trump previously distanced himself from before appointing several of its key authors to his new administration — Glinski told Euronews he was pessimistic about the next four years, which he said “will be challenging for any organisation concerned with immigrant rights, human rights, and democracy in America”.

"However, I don't think fear is a helpful approach."

Rolling the dice

Despite the long history of comments about Ukraine made by Trump and members of his senior team, not everyone Euronews spoke to is pessimistic.

“I believe that Trump will familiarise himself with intelligence research, and he will be forced to correct his claims made during the election,” says Borochkin.

It is part of a wider sentiment explained by the spokesman for Razom.

“Under Biden support was a trickle, just enough to survive," he said. "Trump represented a roll of the dice, a lower floor but a higher ceiling”.

This sense of possibility, along with widespread social conservatism, led many Ukrainians to hope Trump might win the election.

“There was some sort of hysterical optimism about Trump. Which is, in my view, based on nothing,” Vovk says of certain Ukrainians he follows, smiling and shaking his head.

“I know people of Ukrainian origin who are Trumpers, and I was trying to ask them, ‘do you see the problem, this Temporary Protected Status of Ukrainians and so on?'”

According to him, their replies told a consistent story: they don’t believe Trump will actually revoke their immigration status or follow through on any threats for funding Ukraine. But amongst Ukrainian refugees and those still in the country, he says, the mood is less positive.

“There is significant frustration. People are very tired”.