Moscow drew one lesson from America’s midterms, and it is not the one Europe would choose. Bloomberg reported on election day that the Kremlin no longer believes Donald Trump can deliver Kyiv on Russian terms. It plans to intensify strikes and to press a weakened president for more sanctions relief on the model of October’s diesel deal. The strikes have already begun. A Russian attack on an aid point in Zaporizhzhia killed at least 33 people on November 2, and that night 17 ballistic missiles and nearly 300 drones hit energy facilities in ten Ukrainian regions.
The election itself went badly for the man Moscow has been dealing with. Democrats took both chambers of Congress and flipped Senate seats as far afield as Texas, Kansas and South Carolina. The Washington Post traced the swing to anger over prices and the war in Iran. That is the same anger the White House tried to defuse by leaning on Kyiv. For a month Washington pressed Ukraine to halt its refinery strikes so that diesel, at $6.35 a gallon in late October, would stay off the ballot. It licensed Russian diesel imports, waived the Graham Act sanctions and opened talks on delisting the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The first tanker of Russian diesel has still not found an American port that will take it. Kyiv resumed its strikes four nights before the vote and hit the Yaroslavl refinery, Russia’s fifth largest, with roughly 124 drones on election morning.
Europeans should not read Tuesday’s result as relief. The levers Washington used on Kyiv were never Congress’s to pull. They were the threat to cut intelligence sharing, the throttled Starshield link that left Ukrainian interceptor drones blind above 100 mph for ten days, and a Patriot supply that Zelensky puts at 12 missiles a month against 35 fired in October. All three stay with the president. A Democratic Congress can hold hearings and appropriate money, but it cannot make the White House spend that money or restore an intelligence feed. Overriding a veto takes two-thirds of both chambers, and several Republicans most willing to defy Trump on Ukraine, Mitch McConnell and Thom Tillis among them, are leaving Congress in January.
That is where the Kremlin’s timing comes from. The new Congress convenes on January 3. Until then, delisting Putin’s investment fund or widening the diesel license needs only a Treasury signature. Three-way talks open in Abu Dhabi on November 10, and Dmitry Peskov has already called European participation “impossible.” Trump lost Congress on Tuesday. He kept the Treasury’s pen, and Moscow has about eight weeks to make use of it.
Kyiv will not supply the signature Moscow is really after. Trump said on October 10 that Ukraine should get “a new leader who can make a deal.” The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology then recorded trust in Zelensky rising from 43 percent to 62 percent within three weeks, and its analysts tie the rise to American pressure. The same pollster found 61 percent categorically opposed to giving up the rest of Donbas. The only electorate that punished its leaders this autumn was the American one.
The signature Moscow cannot skip
The Treasury license lifts American restrictions only. The EU ban on Russian refined products stands, and on October 12 EU ministers added 1,569 listings, the largest package since 2022. About €210 billion of Russian central bank assets is frozen indefinitely in the bloc, most of it at Euroclear. Any settlement that involves sanctions relief or reconstruction money needs Europe’s consent, which is precisely why Moscow wants Europe out of the room. Xi Jinping does not agree with Moscow on this point. According to Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Xi called the war a European conflict in which Europeans must sit at the table, and he showed no interest in a Ukraine summit at Shenzhen.
Europe has not yet acted like a party holding a veto. Alexander Stubb and Jonas Gahr Støre each spoke to Putin for 90 minutes on October 27, on behalf of their own countries, while Mette Frederiksen and Ulf Kristersson openly questioned the point. Putin is hearing Europe in several voices at once, and he is listening for the weakest of them.
The repair is cheap, and it can be made this week, while American and European officials meet in Brussels on security guarantees. The EU should name a single envoy for the talks and state one condition in public: no European sanctions relief and no movement on the frozen assets for any text Kyiv has not signed. This will not stop Washington from striking its own bargain with Moscow before January. It will make that bargain worthless on the money Moscow most wants back.
Watch Abu Dhabi on November 10. If the Russian delegation asks for its investment fund before a ceasefire and the Americans carry the request home, the Kremlin will have read Tuesday correctly. If Brussels has already put its condition on paper, Moscow will find that the president it is hurrying to deal with can sell only half of what it came to buy.
