Zelensky’s “Victory Plan” Is Old Wine in a New Bottle | Opinion

Hundreds of world leaders and diplomats have spent the week shaking hands, giving speeches, and hobnobbing with each other at the annual United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan. The affair is equally parts boring and ritualistic, even if it also happens to be one of the best opportunities a leader has to make a name for themselves on the international stage.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, of course, is in a different league. He’s already a household name around the world, a man who shooed off the Americans when they offered to airlift him out of Kyiv during the first days of Russia’s invasion. Zelensky has become the poster-child of the underdog fighting off a stronger adversary. One can say the same thing about Ukraine, whose resistance against a larger Russian army has not only surprised Russian President Vladimir Putin but also many U.S. officials, who assumed the Ukrainians would fold within a few days of the war.
Even so, wars aren’t won on which side has the best personality. They’re won on mass. On this metric, the Russians have the advantage. Putin has more fighting-aged men to throw into the cauldron and more bombs to chuck at the problem. All of this doesn’t necessarily guarantee success—what the Russian army has in materiel advantages, it lacks in the quality of its command. The number of strategic mistakes the Russian army has committed over the last two and a half years—the failure to capture Kyiv, getting pushed out of Kharkiv in a manner of days, a forced retreat out of Kherson, sacrificing tens of thousands of men to capture a mid-sized city like Bakhmut—are too numerous to count. But those embarrassments don’t offset Russia’s tactical gains over the last few months. Moscow’s strategy is consistent—pummel Ukraine’s defensive lines to the point where they have no option but to withdraw further west.
Zelensky knows all of this, which is why he has spent the last week giving interviews and traveling throughout the United States touting the same three messages. First, the world shouldn’t give into a brutal dictator like Putin because it would be the end of the so-called rules-based international order. Second, Ukraine can still win the war. And third, because Ukraine can still win the war, the U.S. and the rest of its partners need to send additional military aid and loosen the restrictions on how Ukraine uses the weapons in its possession. The latter item refers to Kyiv’s long-standing request to employ the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) deeper into Russia so Russian airfields, ammunition plants, and oil facilities can be struck on a more consistent basis.
Related to all of this is Zelensky’s self-proclaimed “victory plan,” which the Ukrainian president has carried with him to Washington. While the full plan hasn’t been divulged, senior U.S. officials who are familiar with its contents don’t see anything original or innovative in it. As one told The Wall Street Journal on Sept. 25, “I’m unimpressed, there’s not much new there.” From what we can grasp, the “victory plan” is less a “plan” and more a continuation of Zelensky’s lobbying campaign to keep U.S. arms flowing in perpetuity. It’s highly unlikely the plan will deviate much from his November 2022 peace proposal, which could best be described as terms of surrender for the Russians, including withdrawing from every inch of Ukrainian territory, paying for Ukraine’s reconstruction, and handing over its officers and soldiers for war crimes trials.
Unfortunately for the Ukrainians, those terms are as delusional today as they were two years ago. Zelensky may continue to insist the Russians can be defeated wholesale, but some of his backers in the West don’t have the same confidence. Therein lies one of the fundamental divergences between Kyiv and Washington—the former is firmly committed to a maximalist end-game, whereby Putin is humiliated on the battlefield and forced to concede defeat; the latter is increasingly doubtful that Ukraine possesses the capacity and capability to liberate all of its land. The facts on the ground, including a slow but steady Russian advance in Donetsk, the Ukrainian army’s high attrition rate, and Putin’s propensity to escalate the fighting rather than dial it down suggests the West has a more realistic assessment of the situation than the Ukrainian government does.
Zelensky remains adamant that he understands the war will likely end through a diplomatic solution. He has talked about the necessity of inviting a Russian delegation to the next multilateral Ukrainian peace summit, which is a sea-change from his previous position of treating talks with Moscow as a waste of time. The word “peace” is coming out of Zelensky’s mouth more frequently than ever. And in his address to the U.N. General Assembly this week, he spoke of the need to force Russia into a peace process.
Yet at face value, Zelensky’s interpretation of a peace process still revolves around Putin signing on the dotted line and pulling his forces out of Ukraine without a single Ukrainian concession in return. That’s simply not how a realistic peace process works—and until the Ukrainian government comes to this fairly obvious conclusion, it’s difficult to see how the war will end anytime soon.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.