Ukraine faces its darkest hour
Returning home from the US, Zelenskyy faces Russian
advances, an exhausted society and the prospect of winter energy shortages
Ben Hall and Christopher
Miller in
Kyiv and Henry Foy in Brussels
https://archive.vn/cZknq
In a command post near the embattled eastern Ukrainian
city of Pokrovsk, soldiers of the Separate Presidential Brigade bemoan the
dithering in Washington about whether Kyiv can use western missiles to strike
targets inside Russia.
If only they were able to fight “with both hands
instead of with one hand tied behind our back”, then Ukraine’s plucky troops
might stand a chance against a more powerful Russian army, laments an attack
drone operator.
Surrounded by video monitors showing the advancing
enemy, the battalion’s commander says his objectives have begun to shift.
“Right now, I’m thinking more about how to save my
people,” says Mykhailo Temper. “It’s quite hard to imagine we will be able to
move the enemy back to the borders of 1991,” he adds, referring to his
country’s aim of restoring its full territorial integrity.
Once buoyed by hopes of liberating their lands, even
soldiers at the front now voice a desire for negotiations with Russia to end
the war. Yuriy, another commander on the eastern front who gave only his first
name, says he fears the prospect of a “forever war”.
“I am for negotiations now,” he adds, expressing his
concern that his son — also a soldier — could spend much of his life fighting
and that his grandson might one day inherit an endless conflict.
“If the US turns off the spigot, we’re finished,” says
another officer, a member of the 72nd Mechanised Brigade, in nearby Kurakhove.
Ukraine is heading into what may be its darkest moment
of the war so far. It is losing on the battlefield in the east of the country,
with Russian forces advancing relentlessly — albeit at immense cost in men and
equipment.
It is struggling to restore its depleted ranks with
motivated and well-trained soldiers while an arbitrary military mobilisation
system is causing real social tension. It is also facing a bleak winter of
severe power and potentially heating outages.
“Society is exhausted,” says Oleksandr Merezhko, chair
of the foreign affairs committee of the Ukrainian parliament.
At the same time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy is under growing pressure from western partners to find a path
towards a negotiated settlement, even if there is scepticism about Russia’s
willingness to enter talks any time soon and concern that Ukraine’s position is
too weak to secure a fair deal right now.
“Most players want de-escalation here,” says a senior
Ukrainian official in Kyiv.
The Biden administration is aware that its present
strategy is not sustainable because “we are losing the war”, says Jeremy
Shapiro, head of the Washington office of the European Council on Foreign
Relations. “They are thinking of how to move that war to a greater quiescence.”
Most threatening of all for Kyiv is the possibility
that Donald Trump wins next month’s US presidential election and tries to
impose an unfavourable peace deal on Ukraine by threatening to withhold further
military and financial aid. Trump repeated his claim last week that he could
rapidly bring an end to the war.
Ukraine’s staunchest supporters in Europe may wish to
keep it in the fight but lack the weapons stockpiles to do so and have no plan
for filling any void left by the US.
Kyiv confirmed it was laying the groundwork for future
talks in spectacular fashion when its troops seized a swath of Russia’s Kursk
region in a surprise cross-border incursion in August. Zelenskyy said the land
would serve as a bargaining chip.
And last week, in an attempt to shape the thinking of
his allies, Zelenskyy visited the US to market his so-called “victory plan”, a
formula for bolstering Ukraine’s position before possible talks with Moscow.
Zelenskyy described it as a “strategy of achieving peace through strength”.
Stepping into the maelstrom of the US election
campaign, he held separate talks with President Joe Biden, vice-president
Kamala Harris and her Republican opponent, Trump, to make his case.
At one point, Zelenskyy’s US mission veered towards
disaster after he was criticised by Trump for resisting peace talks and
censured by senior Republicans for visiting a weapons factory in the crucial
swing state of Pennsylvania accompanied only by Democratic politicians. But in
the end, he persuaded Trump to grant him an audience and salvaged his visit.
“It was not a triumph. It was not a catastrophe,” the
senior Ukrainian official says of Zelenskyy’s US trip. “It would be naive to
expect the applause we got two years ago,” the official adds, referring to the
president’s address before Congress in December 2022, for which he received
multiple standing ovations and declared that Ukraine would “never surrender”.
Yet the Ukrainian leader left Washington empty-handed on two central
issues: US permission to use western weapons for long-range strikes on Russian
territory; and progress on Ukraine’s bid to join Nato. The Biden administration
has resisted both, fearing it could encourage Moscow to escalate the conflict,
potentially drawing in the US and other allies.
US officials were unimpressed by Zelenskyy’s “victory
plan”, which includes requests for massive amounts of western weaponry.
An adviser who helped prepare the document says
Zelenskyy had no choice but to restate his insistence on Nato membership
because anything else would have been perceived as a retreat on the question of
western security guarantees, which Ukrainians see as indispensable.
Despite Washington’s misgivings, the ability to strike
Russian territory is also central to Zelenskyy’s victory plan, says the
adviser. While US officials have argued that Russia has already moved strike
aircraft beyond the range of western missiles, Ukrainian officials insist there
are plenty of other targets such as command centres, weapons caches, fuel
depots and logistics nodes.
Destroying them could disrupt Moscow’s ability to wage
war, show Russian leader Vladimir Putin that his objectives of seizing at least
four whole provinces of Ukraine are untenable and disprove his conviction that
the west will lose interest in supporting Ukraine.
“Russia should not be overestimated,” says Andris
Sprūds, Latvia’s defence minister. “It has its vulnerabilities.”
Although Zelenskyy’s victory plan restated old
objectives, its real significance is that it shifts Ukraine’s war aims from
total liberation to bending the war in Kyiv’s favour, says the senior Ukrainian
official.
“It’s an attempt to change the trajectory of the war
and bring Russia to the table. Zelenskyy really believes in it.”
Multiple European diplomats who attended last week’s
UN General Assembly in New York say there was a tangible shift in the tone and
content of discussions around a potential settlement.
They note more openness from Ukrainian officials to
discuss the potential for agreeing a ceasefire even while Russian troops remain
on their territory, and more frank discussions among western officials about
the urgency for a deal.
Ukraine’s new foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, used
private meetings with western counterparts on his first trip to the US in the
post to discuss potential compromise solutions, the diplomats said, and struck
a more pragmatic tone on the possibility of land-for-security negotiations than
his predecessor.
“We’re talking more and more openly about how this
ends and what Ukraine would have to give up in order to get a permanent peace
deal,” says one of the diplomats, who was present in New York. “And that’s a
major change from even six months ago, when this kind of talk was taboo.”
The Ukrainian foreign ministry said: “No territorial
compromises were suggested, discussed, or even hinted at during any of the
meetings.”
Ukrainian public opinion also appears to be more open
to peace talks — but not necessarily to the concessions they may require.
Polling by the Kyiv International Institute of
Sociology for the National Democratic Institute in the summer showed that 57
per cent of respondents thought Ukraine should engage in peace negotiations
with Russia, up from 33 per cent a year earlier.
The survey showed the war was taking an ever heavier
toll: 77 per cent of respondents reported the loss of family members, friends
or acquaintances, four times as many as two years earlier. Two-thirds said they
were finding it difficult or very difficult to live on their wartime income.
Life is about to get even tougher. Russia has
destroyed at least half of Ukraine’s power-generating capacity after it resumed
mass drone and missile strikes against power stations and grid infrastructure
this spring.
Ukraine faces a “severe” electricity deficit of up to
6GW, equivalent to a third of peak winter demand, according the International
Energy Agency. It is increasingly dependent on its three remaining operational
nuclear power plants, the IEA noted. Were Russia to attack substations adjacent
to these plants — despite all the obvious dangers — it could cause Ukraine’s
power system to collapse, and with it heating and water supply. Central heating
facilities in large cities such as Kharkiv and Kyiv are also vulnerable.
Another source of tension is mobilisation. Under new
legislation, millions of Ukrainian men have been compelled to register for
possible service or face hefty fines. At the same time, many Ukrainians know of
men who have been randomly stopped at metro or train stations, often late at
night, and carted off to mobilisation centres, a brief period of training and
then the front line.
“It is perceived as abusive, worse than if you are a
criminal, where there is at least due process,” says Hlib Vyshlinksy, director
of the Centre for Economic Strategy in Kyiv. “It tears people apart. The real
enemy is Russia, but at the same time they fear a corrupt, abusive enrolment
office doing the wrong thing.”
If Ukrainians have warmed to the idea of negotiations,
a majority — 55 per cent according to a KIIS polling in May — remain opposed to
any formal cession of territory as part of a peace deal.
“People want peace but they are also against
territorial concessions. It is hard to reconcile them,” says Merezhko, the
chair of the foreign affairs committee.
However, the KIIS survey shows the share of
respondents opposed to any territorial concessions has dropped sharply from a
peak of 87 per cent early last year. It also found that Ukrainians might be
open to a compromise whereby, in return for Ukrainian membership of Nato,
Russian maintains de facto control over occupied parts of Ukraine, but not
recognised sovereignty.
Other polls suggest Ukrainians are still confident of
winning and will be disappointed by anything other than total battlefield
victory. The biggest domestic problem for Zelenskyy might come from a
nationalist minority opposed to any compromise, some of whom are now armed and
trained to fight.
“If you get into any negotiation, it could be a
trigger for social instability,” says a Ukrainian official. “Zelenskyy knows
this very well.”
“There will always be a radical segment of Ukrainian
society that will call any negotiation capitulation. The far right in Ukraine
is growing. The right wing is a danger to democracy,” says Merezhko, who is an
MP for Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party.
As the KIIS polling shows, making any deal acceptable
that allows Russia to stay in the parts of Ukraine it has seized since its
first invasion in 2014 will hinge on obtaining meaningful western security
guarantees, which for Kyiv means Nato membership.
“The most important thing for us is security
guarantees. Proper ones. Otherwise it won’t end the war; it will just trigger
another one,” says a Ukrainian official.
“Land for [Nato] membership is the only game in town,
everyone knows it,” says one senior western official. “Nobody will say it out
loud . . . but it’s the only strategy on the table.”
Nato membership remains Ukraine’s key goal, but very few of the
alliance’s 32 members think it is possible without a full, lasting ceasefire
and a defined line on the map that determines what portion of Ukraine’s
territory the alliance’s mutual defence clause applies to. The model floated by
some is West Germany’s membership of the alliance, which lasted more than three
decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification with the east.
“The West German model is gaining traction
particularly in the White House, which has been the most sceptical about Nato
membership,” says Shapiro of the ECFR. “The Russians would hate that, but at
least it could be some opening gambit for a compromise.”
But even that would require a vast force deployment by
the US and its partners that any US administration, Democratic or Republican,
would probably balk at, given Washington’s focus on the threat from China. One
question would be whether European powers would be willing to shoulder more of
the burden.
And would Russia accept Ukraine’s entry into the
alliance, an alignment with the west it has been trying to thwart militarily
for a decade? Many on both sides of the Atlantic say it is unlikely.
“I don’t think Russia would agree to our participation
in Nato,” says a senior Ukrainian official.
Anything short of full membership is unlikely to be
enough to stop the Kremlin’s military aggression. “Even if we get a Nato
invitation, it will mean nothing. It’s a political decision,” adds the senior
Ukrainian official.
In what could be his last trip to Europe before
standing down as president, Biden will chair a meeting of Ukraine and its
allies in Germany on October 12.
A western official briefed on Zelenskyy’s talks in
Washington said there were tentative signs that Biden might agree to advance
the status of Ukraine’s Nato membership bid before he leaves office in January.
As he left the US this weekend, Zelenskyy said that
October would be “decision time”. The Ukrainian leader will once again plead
for permission to hit targets inside Russia with western-supplied munitions,
knowing that it is one of the few options for bringing hostilities to an end.
“It’s about constraining Russia’s capabilities” and
piling on pressure to get them to open talks, says the senior Ukrainian
official. “It’s a real chance if we are thinking about resolving this war.”
