Swimming against the tide
Swimming against the tide
Zelenskyy’s pleas for more help from the west fall on mostly deaf ears as momentum on the battlefield remains with Russia.
Winter is coming in Ukraine, for the third time amid its war with Russia. And if Ukraine’s prospects were not rosy before President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s trip to the United States last week, they are outright bleak given its results. Discussions at the UN and meetings scheduled between Zelenskyy, the Biden/Harris team, congressional leaders, and the Republican candidate in November’s elections, Donald Trump, are by no means unimportant for the outcomes of the conflict. But it is unlikely that they will constitute the pivotal moment in accelerating the pace towards a Ukrainian victory that Zelenskyy might envisage.
Two main items were on Zelenskyy’s agenda: Shoring up support at the UN for his peace plan and getting the US to support his strategy for victory in the war against Russia. On both items, the results are mixed at best, further compounding Ukraine’s already precarious situation.
At the UN, Zelenskyy made a passionate appeal in his speeches to the General Assembly and the Security Council for forcing Russia to make peace on the basis of the core principles of the UN Charter – restoring Ukraine’s full sovereignty and territorial integrity within its 1991, internationally recognised boundaries – which would require the full withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.
Zelenskyy’s vision to achieve this is via a second global peace summit. This time he wants Russia to participate after the first effort in Switzerland in June achieved very little.
Given the current situation on the battlefield and the steady – albeit slow and costly – gains Russia has been making over the past several months, this is clearly a non-starter for Moscow.
An alternative joint initiative by China and Brazil, launched last June just before the Swiss-hosted first so-called global peace summit on Ukraine, envisages a ceasefire along the current frontlines. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, pushed the plan during his speech at the UN general assembly on September 24, as did China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi.
Like previous proposals from China and Brazil individually, as well as from Indonesia, a group of African states and Saudi Arabia, the joint Brazilian-Chinese plan calls for a ceasefire along the current frontlines. Negotiations would then follow. This would freeze the current status quo and leave it up to subsequent negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv to find a settlement that may, or may not, restore Ukraine in its 1991 boundaries. Ukraine fears, rightly, that this would effectively amount to Kyiv giving up territory illegally annexed by Russia. It would not guarantee any fruitful negotiations but give Russia time and space to regroup and rebuild its armed forces for a likely future escalation. None of this is acceptable to Ukraine and its allies as Zelenskyy made clear in his speech at the UN.
China’s previous effort to promote this joint initiative with Brazil just before the peace summit in Switzerland last June, did not go very far. It may not go much further this time either. But attention and resources are now much more focused on the Middle East and – to a lesser extent – the civil war in Sudan. So the very fact of this plan’s resurrection may be enough for Russia and its allies to prevent the rest of the world from uniting behind the western-backed Ukrainian proposal for a second global peace summit.
This is clearly a concern for Ukraine. Zelenskyy, with a clear eye on countries in the global south, not only rejected the proposal but also argued that forcing Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia would be akin to reimposing a version of the brutal colonial past of the Soviet era on his country.
Add to that the fact that the Russian President Vladimir Putin has made any negotiations contingent on Ukraine recognising the illegal Russian annexation not only of Crimea in 2014 but also of four regions on the Ukrainian mainland that Russia only partially occupies at the moment, and any talk about negotiations, let alone an actual settlement, is pure fantasy.
This is where Zelenskyy’s victory plan comes into play, the only problem with it being that it does not seem to be much of a plan. It “envisages quick and concrete steps by our strategic partners … from now until the end of December” and centres on the delivery of more Western military aid, permission to use long-range missiles against targets deep inside Russia, and an official invitation to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
While Zelenskyy managed to get Biden to authorise a total of US$8 billion in further security assistance, no progress has been made on lifting restrictions that the US and other allies are placing on Ukraine’s use of Western military aid against Russian territory. On this latter point, the western alliance remains divided – and the US is particularly sceptical of its strategic value. The prospect of Ukraine joining NATO continues to be a remote one, not least as it would require the consent of all 32 current member states.
Putin’s insistence that Russia will respond by using its nuclear arsenal if it detects any western missiles crossing its border will have added to western uncertainty and hesitation. Putin’s renewed nuclear sabre rattling, announcing changes to Russia’s military doctrine on the use of its nuclear arsenal on September 26, just before Zelenskyy’s meeting with Biden, was clearly timed as a signal to the West to think twice: How much support to Ukraine might be too much?
The actual changes in the nuclear doctrine may be few and far between, but they will create enough uncertainty in Western policy circles to continue the current course of self-deterrence that provides just enough aid to Ukraine to avoid a military defeat at Russian hands.
Equally concerning from a Ukrainian point of view is the prospect of a return of Donald Trump to the White House after the presidential elections in the US on Nov 5. A Zelenskyy-Trump meeting did eventually take place at the tail end of the trip, but only after much acrimony in the run-up to it. Questioning whether Donald Trump really has a credible plan to end the war, Zelenskyy triggered the notoriously short-fused Republican contender into lashing out at him at campaign rallies, accusing Zelenskyy of refusing to make a deal and expressing doubts about Ukraine’s ability to win the war.
Meanwhile, a recent opinion piece penned by Robert F. Kennedy Jnr and Donald Trump Jnr for The Hill, an influential political newspaper, urges that Ukraine be pushed to make a deal with Russia to prevent nuclear escalation.
And Trump’s running-mate J.D. Vance has made clear his opposition to the US continuing to supply aid to Ukraine if elected in November. Thus, there is a very real prospect that Washington may soon cease to be Kyiv’s most important global ally.
Unsurprising, but even more deeply disconcerting for Ukraine is the fact that Trump continues to envisage that he “can work out something that’s good for both sides”, implying a deal between Moscow and Kyiv that would see Ukraine make significant territorial concessions to Russia and potentially close off any route to NATO, and possibly even European Union, membership.
Such an outcome looks indistinguishable from what would likely result if the joint proposal by China and Brazil were to be pursued. Either outcome would substantially reward Russia for its aggression against Ukraine.
Taken together, the lukewarm support for his victory plan and the certain prospect of a very unfavourable negotiated settlement leave Zelenskyy with few options but to struggle on and avoid an outright military defeat. Achieving even this minimal outcome will be difficult: even if more decisive western support were suddenly forthcoming, it is unlikely that it would offset other disadvantages that Ukraine and its allies are facing on the battlefield and beyond.
The momentum on the battlefield, if slow, remains with Russia. Zelenskyy’s risky gamble of invading Russia’s Kursk region in early August has not really paid off. Ukrainian units that would otherwise be available to hold the line against Russian advances in Donbas are tied down in Kursk still holding on to most of the ground seized in August but under heavy pressure by Russian counter attacks. This might still provide a useful bargaining chip in future negotiations, but it equally makes them less likely for this very reason: Putin will hardly agree on a freezing of the current front lines if this involves acknowledging the loss of a small, but symbolically important part of Russia.
Ukraine continues to lack materiel and manpower, while Russia remains well-supplied by Iran and North Korea and has just announced a further enlargement of its armed forces by 180,000 combat troops. In addition, Putin has now also ordered the recruitment of 133,000 conscripts in the annual autumn draft. That the Russian president is doubling down on his war effort is also obvious from a proposed record defence budget for next year of $145bn, up 25% from this year’s already sizeable defence spending. Increasing manpower and financial commitments also send a clear signal that Putin is planning for anything but a swift conclusion of the war against Ukraine.
Moreover, relentless Russian attacks against Ukraine’s energy network over the past months have caused substantial damage that the country has found difficult to repair. Lacking in adequate air defence capabilities, this is unlikely to improve anytime soon and does not bode well for the morale of Ukrainian civilians during the coming winter months.
This is also likely to have a knock-on effect on frontline troops who are already affected by low morale after a gruelling more than two-and-a-half years of war and many of whom are open to the idea of negotiations with Russia.
All of this explains the urgency behind Zelenskyy’s push for more and more decisive western support in the coming months, and his pleas to the wider international community to back efforts for a just peace for Ukraine. But it also indicates that Russia and its allies have, for now, done enough to further frustrate any progress towards a Ukrainian victory both on the battlefield and at the negotiation table.
The best that can be hoped for is now that Kyiv and Washington, and the wider network of Western supporters, recognise that the aspirations for a defeat of the Russian aggression and the reality of it being possible on the basis of current strategies are dangerously far apart. It is not too late yet to change course on the path towards otherwise almost inevitable disaster, but time to do so is running out fast.
This is an updated and expanded version of an earlier article for The Conversation published on September 26, 2024, and a commentary for Channel News Asia published on October 1, 2024.
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