There is an air of desperation around Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky these days as he tries to convince his Western allies, the United States in particular, that he has a realistic plan to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to give up his maximalist goals and sue for peace.
Zelensky is visiting the U.S. visit to tout his “Ukrainian Victory Plan,” which he says outlines “necessary steps” to give Ukraine “the strongest possible position to bring about a real, just peace.”
The Ukrainians have amazed the world with their bravery, tenacity, and ingenuity on the battlefield, and have accomplished more than anyone, including Putin, anticipated when Russia invaded with more than 200,000 troops in 2022, expecting to capture Kyiv and depose Zelensky in a matter of days.
“Over and over, Ukraine has stood up to Putin's aggression and atrocities,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a meeting of Ukraine’s allies in Germany this month.
“Russia has paid a massive cost for Putin's imperial fantasies,” Austin noted, with more than 350,000 troops killed or wounded, 97 Russian combat aircraft destroyed, and Russia’s vaunted Black Sea Fleet forced into ignominious retreat after 32 ships were sunk or seriously damaged and out of commission.
But while Ukraine’s public relations arm excels at crafting a narrative constantly highlighting its underdog successes, it’s equally good at concealing its military setbacks.
When one of its newly acquired F-16s crashed this month, killing a top Ukrainian pilot, the rumor was it was accidentally shot down by friendly fire from a Ukrainian Patriot missile battery.
Ukraine acknowledged the loss but released no details, insisting the crash was under investigation.
And while Ukraine keeps a running tally of Russian losses, its casualty figures are a closely guarded state secret.
“A confidential Ukrainian estimate from earlier this year put the number of dead Ukrainian troops at 80,000 and the wounded at 400,000,” the Wall Street Journal reported a few days ago, citing “people familiar with the matter.”
The fact is that, after more than 2 1/2 years of fighting, what has become a grinding war of attrition, suffering relentless bombing of its cities, civilian infrastructure, and energy grid, Ukraine’s fortunes are flagging, and despair is starting to erode its once-unshakable resolve.
“We don’t have a choice. If we stop fighting, we’ll stop existing,” one soldier who nearly lost a leg and a hand to a drone-dropped grenade while defending the besieged town of Pokrovsk told David Ignatius, a foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post, who visited a recovery center in Kyiv earlier this month.
“Listening to their stories, you realize that Ukraine is bleeding out,” Ignatius wrote. “Its will to fight is as strong as ever, but its army is exhausted by a ceaseless drone war that’s unlike anything in the history of combat. The Biden administration’s rubric of support, ‘as long as it takes,’ simply doesn’t match the reality of this conflict. Ukraine doesn’t have enough soldiers to fight an indefinite war of attrition.”
Ukraine’s audacious foray into the Kursk region of Russia last month, the brainchild of Zelensky’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, was ostensibly designed to draw Russian forces away from the front lines at Pokrovsk, which it eventually did.
But while Zelensky said the operation was intended to “turn the tables” and “bring the war home” to the Russian people, it was also needed to boost domestic morale by countering the narrative that Ukraine was stuck in a stalemate with the prospect of victory slowly slipping away.
After an eight-month stretch in which Ukraine got little in the way of fresh arms and ammunition due to House Republicans blocking U.S. military assistance, Ukraine’s military was running on fumes, outgunned, outmanned, and slowly losing ground to a Russian army whose commanders cared little about the mounting body count of disposable Russian troops.
“What we did during these all eight months, everybody has to understand, we used all we could,” Zelensky said in an interview on CNN . “We needed 14 brigades to be ready. … We didn't equip even four.
“They don't have artillery, they don't have artillery rounds,” he said. “To compare the number, Russia uses 12 rounds. We used one. One to 12. It doesn't matter how many brigades stand in one direction if half of them are not equipped. So, you just lose a lot of people.”
In a fiery speech at the annual Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv, Zelensky dropped any pretense that the war was going well.
“We are now in the third year of this full-scale war,” he said, "and after so much killing and destruction in Ukraine, after so many Russian war crimes, after so many terrorist strikes, Putin can still afford to destroy life in Ukraine as he pleases, can buy and produce missiles, bombs, and artillery, can even afford to issue ultimatums to the world. And he expects the world to give in to his madness.
“When you say at important closed meetings with partners that we need air defense, it is difficult, really difficult, to hear the same answer every time, ‘We are working on it,’” he said before also expressing his frustration that President Joe Biden refuses to grant Ukraine permission to use U.S. long-range missiles to strike deeper into Russia.
“There simply cannot be any unanswered questions about why Ukraine needs sufficient long-range capability,” Zelensky railed. “Putin doesn’t need any permissions or approvals for long-range strikes.”
Russia has been pounding Ukraine for months with thousands of missiles and winged glide bombs, flattening cities and towns it doesn’t have the manpower to capture and control.
“Putin is pushing forward in a sort of attritional pyrrhic campaign of taking village by village,” Richard Moore, chief of the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, said at a conference in London this month. “As he goes forward, when he takes those, there's nothing left. That's why I deliberately used the term ‘pyrrhic.' There is nothing left because everything is utterly destroyed. That is the Kremlin way of war — that's what they did in Grozny, it's what they did in Aleppo, and it's what they're doing now.”
Why, Zelensky keeps asking, if the U.S. and its allies could shoot down Iranian missiles to defend Israel as they did in April, why can’t NATO do the same to save the innocent lives of Ukrainian civilians?
“When we raise this issue with our partners, which we do constantly, to be honest, everyone tries to talk around it,” Zelensky complained. “They're even afraid to say, ‘We are working on it.’ They're afraid even of those words. That’s the truth.”
Meanwhile, Putin has his own plan for victory.
In the short term, he’s hoping former President Donald Trump will win the November election and deliver on his promise to bring the war to a quick close on Putin's terms.
“I think what this looks like is Trump sits down, he says to the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Europeans, you guys need to figure out, ‘What does a peaceful settlement look like?’” Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), said in a recent podcast interview with former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan.
“And what it probably looks like is something like the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine — that becomes like a demilitarized zone, it’s heavily fortified so the Russians don’t invade again,” Vance said. “Ukraine retains its independent sovereignty. Russia gets the guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine, it doesn’t join NATO, it doesn’t join, you know, some of these sort of allied institutions.”
“This is exactly what Putin wants,” Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, posted on X .
But if that doesn’t work out, Putin’s long-term plan is to increase the size of his military and simply wait out the West, according to Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the Ukrainian intelligence chief, who also addressed the Yalta conference.
Russia, Budanov said, is also experiencing a manpower shortage and anticipates another full year of war, with a decisive victory coming sometime in 2026.
“Ukraine needs help on all fronts, economic, political, and military, and it needs that help now. The Biden administration should recognize that there is a chance that the next four months of aid to Ukraine will be the last major American help to that country,” foreign policy analyst Fareed Zakaria said, referring to a second Trump administration less friendly to Ukraine.
“The greatest fear in Ukraine, however, one that I heard often and from many people, both in government and on the streets, is not about their resolve, but rather the West, and in particular, the United States,” Zakaria said on his CNN program . “One Ukrainian who preferred to remain anonymous told me … “We will keep fighting, but we worry that we will be fighting alone.”
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In his Q&A with Zakaria on the stage at the Yalta conference, Zelensky conceded that his victory plan does not assure an end to the war, but “it would help.”
“I can’t give 100% that it will stop Putin, no,” Zelensky said. “But it will make Ukraine stronger. And I think push Putin to think about how to finish the war.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com .
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