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Guest Essay

By Andrey Kurkov

Mr. Kurkov is the author, most recently, of “The Silver Bone,” a novel. He wrote from Kyiv, Ukraine.

The residents of Kyiv have not slept properly in more than two months. Most nights there are Russian drones, and sirens sound from early evening until late morning. We know that during an air raid we should leave our beds and go into the halls to get away from the windows, but sometimes, these days, we just pull the covers over our heads.

On the night of Nov. 5, I didn’t sleep at all, but it wasn’t because of air raid sirens. When it seemed clear that Donald Trump would win the U.S. presidential election, the mood on Ukrainian social media and among friends turned overwhelmingly negative (when it wasn’t outright disbelief: My publisher, who lives in Kharkiv, insisted for more than 30 minutes that something was surely wrong with the data).

The war was effectively over, people said. Mr. Trump would halt all American military aid and Ukraine would be forced to cede large swaths of territory to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. I told myself that Ukrainians have a tendency toward pessimism. That Ukraine is the front line against Mr. Putin’s project to make Russia great again, a........

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