Ukraine has a victory plan — but what does victory mean?

As he prepares to travel to the United States to address the UN general assembly on Wednesday and meet President Biden in Washington, President Zelensky says he will be unveiling a plan for victory in the war with Russia.

This is forcing the West to come to terms with a question it has studiously tried to avoid: just what does “victory” mean?

Zelensky’s plan is said to cover Ukraine’s security, its relationships with the EU and Nato, continued military and economic assistance and postwar reconstruction.

The Americans say that they have had sight of some of the general contours of the plan and consider it practical. It is not yet clear, however, whether it is a broad outline of how Kyiv would like the war to end (and what it wants from its allies), or a detailed roadmap to reaching that state.

 

 

Zelensky’s ten-point peace plan, announced in November 2022, included a demand that President Putin submit himself to a war crimes tribunal. There was never any likelihood that Moscow would accept it, but it was as much as anything else designed to lock in western support for Ukraine and prevent its less committed allies from pressing Kyiv to make concessions in the name of a deal.

Keeping allies in line

This new plan will have the same subsidiary goal. As a German diplomat recently grumbled to me, “I don’t know whether it will bring victory over the Russians, but it is probably meant, as much anything, to force us to stay in line.”

Zelensky has rejected any ceasefire, any “freezing of the war or any other manipulations that will simply postpone Russian aggression to a later stage”. His influential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak likewise rejected ceding any territory to Russia.

Western support for Ukraine, for all its high-flown rhetoric, is limited and uncertain. This is precisely why Zelensky is unveiling his plan in this manner.

The US government is hesitating to permit the UK and France to allow Ukraine to use the Storm Shadow missiles they supplied to hit strategic targets deep inside Russia. Although London is still confident that the permission will be forthcoming, perhaps this week after Zelensky’s trip to the US, it is being regarded in Kyiv as a powerful illustration of the conditionality of western support.

 

 

Ukraine must constantly work at cajoling, exhorting and browbeating its allies not simply to maintain and extend their assistance but also not to pressurise Kyiv it into making concessions it is unwilling to make.

There is, of course, still the possibility that Donald Trump — who claims he would end the war in “24 hours”, perhaps by imposing a ceasefire on both sides — will be elected in the US.

War fatigue

Behind the scenes there is considerable and widespread “Ukraine fatigue”, especially in Europe. While some nations such as Poland and the UK still seem firmly committed to maintaining support for Ukraine, elsewhere there is a growing sense that it may be time to end the war, even if this means creating an “ugly peace”.

In part this is because the West has never properly considered what victory means. Does it simply mean expelling Russian invaders? Preventing Moscow from imposing limits on Ukrainian sovereignty? Or, at the other extreme, delivering such a catastrophic blow to Russian morale and war-fighting capacities that it cannot pose a renewed threat in the foreseeable future? Reading western politicians’ statements, one can find all these definitions, and more.

 

 

Instead of resolving these contradictions, the West has hidden behind the empty mantra that it is for Ukraine to decide, even while imposing its own constraints on the nature of aid it offers and how it may be used. Unwilling directly to address its divisions about how this war ought to end, it has not come to terms with several key dilemmas.

Land for peace

There is considerable scepticism, even among Ukraine’s most outspoken allies, that Kyiv will be able through military means to regain every piece of occupied territory.

Even a self-confessed Ukraine hawk from a Polish think tank admitted to me: “Ukraine’s borders have often shifted over time; the real struggle now is to ensure the future Ukraine’s [borders] move as little as possible.”

Besides, regaining territory in itself does not end the war, it merely shifts the front line out to the national border. Without some kind of negotiated settlement, Russia would be free to reconstitute its forces behind that frontier and attack all over again.

The unpalatable implication is that if Ukraine continues to refuse to accept any territorial losses — which is, after all, its right — then this becomes something of a forever war.

After a certain point, a degree of exhaustion will set in, and the war will probably oscillate between episodes of brutal fighting and temporary ceasefires, but it will not end. Is the current level of western support, so far worth more than £170 billion, sustainable?

The EU, Nato or going nuclear

 

 

Given that Ukraine cannot deliver Moscow the kind of knockout blow that would ensure it cannot be a threat in the future, it will rightly expect serious and credible security guarantees for any peace with its larger, and probably resentful, neighbour.

It is eager to join the European Union, but although its treaty does include mutual security guarantees, Kyiv does not take them very seriously. Crucially, neither does Moscow, which matters, as deterrence requires credibility.

Instead, Ukraine regards Nato’s article 5 guarantee of mutual assistance as the only guarantee that has the necessary authority. However, there is little real enthusiasm in the alliance to let Ukraine in. At its summit in July, members affirmed that “Ukraine’s future is in Nato” and that Kyiv was on an “irreversible path” to membership — but again gave no sense of a timeline, simply promising an invitation “when allies agree and conditions are met”.

However, Nato members may be forced to make that invitation to avoid an even more unpalatable outcome: a Ukraine that decides it needs its own nuclear capability as the final guarantor of its security.

Defining ‘victory’

 

Essentially, this is a war of endurance. Putin calculates he can bleed Ukraine into exhaustion and outlast western commitment. Kyiv hopes that by expanding the war and inflicting greater and greater costs, Moscow will be unable or unwilling to continue.

What constitutes a victory for Ukraine? With neither side able to deliver a knockout blow, to some, a real victory would be an end to the killing and the emergence of a sovereign, prosperous and West-looking Ukraine, even if it means abandoning contested, depopulated, largely ruined territories in the southeast to Moscow. The first step to that would probably be a ceasefire.

Yet there is no sign that Zelensky is thinking in these terms — or could survive politically if he were. Quite the opposite; as a Ukrainian official admitted, “Zelensky is still the only real national leader — but he knows that the nationalists have never really liked him, and would do what they could to claw him down if he started talking about concessions.”

His Kursk incursion now looks as if it was devised to make an open-ended ceasefire less palatable to Putin, because it would leave a chunk of Russian territory in Kyiv’s hands.

Right now, then, it is as hard to see any meaningful road to “victory” as it is to define it.