President Volodymyr Zelensky unveiled his much-publicized five-point “victory plan” in an address to Ukraine’s parliament on Wednesday. Coming in the midst of a deepening military and social crisis in the country, the strategy for “success” announced by the head of state in Kiev consists of a massive escalation of the war against Russia.
Zelensky insisted this week that with authorization from his Western backers to launch missiles deep into Moscow’s territory, tens of billions of dollars in additional aid and an invitation to join NATO, he will deliver “peace through strength.” In reality his “victory plan” risks transforming Ukraine, Europe and eventually the entire planet into a wasteland.
In a lengthy interview on September 22 with New Yorker magazine, timed to coincide with a White House visit, Zelensky rejected any sort of diplomatic solution to the war.
Zelensky declared, “Any negotiation process would be unsuccessful if it’s with Putin or with his entourage, who are all just his puppets.” He insisted that attaining victory means “you have to prepare a plan without the Russians” and that his “plan spells out what our partners can do without Russia’s participation.” In short, neither the existence of the current occupant of the Kremlin nor the country of Russia itself are included in his blueprint.
This fate will extend to the masses of Russia. Speaking of Kursk, the region of Russia bordering Ukraine that Kiev’s army has invaded, Zelensky noted that the Kremlin has yet to liberate the region and promised the same outcome to the population of Russia’s two largest cities. They will, he states, get what they deserve.
“And people in Moscow and St. Petersburg—far from Kursk—saw that, if one day the Ukrainian Army showed up there, too, it’s far from certain they would be saved. That’s important. That’s also a part of this operation: long before the war gets to these places, or there’s some other crisis, Russian people should know who they have placed in power for a quarter century, with whom they have thrown in their lot,” stated the Ukrainian president.
Aware that there is no support in the United States for total war, Zelensky was at pains during the interview to argue that Ukraine’s “victory” on the basis of his plan would prevent the US from being dragged into a global conflagration. But in attempting to make this argument, he admitted the very opposite.
Speaking of the prospect that Russia might have, if Ukraine had failed (or does fail), pursued Poland, a NATO power, the Ukraine president stated, “this would have been a disaster, a gut punch for the United States, because then you’re definitely involved full scale—with troops on the ground, funding, investment, and with the American economy going to a wartime footing.” What Zelensky did not note in his remarks, and which the interviewer also failed to point out, is that key to Zelensky’s “victory plan” is Ukraine’s entrance into NATO, with the very “total war” from which he insists his country has “shielded America” materializing.
As Zelensky’s senior aide Mykhailo Podolyak said of the “victory plan” in an interview on Tuesday, “What this plan says is, ‘Stop looking at what is going on with this infantilism.’ If we do ten times more than now, use enough resources, we will have a massive upscale of the war in the Russian territory, and social changes in Russia will follow.’” The war would also expand into more regions of Russia including Moscow and “make Russia look as it should look: helpless, running somewhere screaming in terror,” Podolyak warned.
Concurrent with a September 25 trip by Zelensky to Washington to drum up support for his war aims, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed changes to his country’s nuclear doctrine whereby Zelensky’s roadmap to “success” would be considered a “joint attack” by NATO and raise the prospect of a nuclear strike in response.
And even though the grave implications of what the Ukrainian leader is demanding are already evident, still much of what he intends is being concealed from the public. Despite claiming in a video address earlier this week that the full scope of the “victory plan” would be released, “sensitive details” of it remain classified to the public, according to the head of Zelensky’s office Andriy Yermak. Several other of the president’s advisors confirmed this fact.
The Ukrainian president spent the last week drumming up support for his war aims among his imperialist backers. Zelensky met this past Thursday and Friday with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in London, and later that same day French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. Just prior to this, Macron visited 2,300 Ukrainian soldiers being trained in eastern France. The French leader has already pledged another $3.3 billion of military aid to Ukraine this year.
Zelensky’s rapid-fire trips were organized at the last minute after US President Joe Biden postponed a trip to meet with Zelensky in Germany, ostensibly in order to oversee the response to Hurricane Milton.
Earlier in September, Zelensky visited the White House to disclose details of the plan to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, US officials were generally unimpressed with Zelensky’s strategy. While the US ruling class has fully backed the war and the Democratic Party has made the destruction of Russia its central goal, officials such as US Senator Lindsey Graham have bristled at Zelensky’s failure to force even greater numbers of Ukraine’s youth into the war by lowering the draft age all the way down to 18, the draft age in the US.
Zelensky, who is ruling under a state of emergency in defiance of presidential term limits, has imprisoned political opponents of the war, including socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, who has been imprisoned since April 25.
The greater the crisis his regime faces, the more crazed become Kiev and NATO’s war plans. Zelensky announced his “victory plan” as opposition within Ukraine to the war grows, the situation at the front deteriorates and the population of the already-impoverished, debt-strapped country sinks deeper into destitution.
Desertions, draft evasion and anti-war sentiment are increasingly widespread in Ukraine, according to media reports. The invasion of Russia’s Kursk region has thus far failed in its aim to take pressure off Ukraine’s eastern front. Moscow has continued steadily to gain territory in the Donetsk region and is now closing in on the strategically important mining city of Pokrovsk, which serves as a logistics hub for the Ukrainian army.
Earlier in October, Russian forces captured the town of Vuhledar, also a crucial center of transport and logistics, after an 18-month-long battle. With its capture Russian forces will now be able to use railroads to move supplies north out of Crimea, further undermining the remaining holdouts of Ukrainian forces in the Donetsk region.
Simultaneously, with winter approaching, Ukraine’s energy situation is expected to worsen. Fifty percent of its energy infrastructure has already been destroyed, and Russia has ramped up its missile attacks in recent months. Rolling blackouts are now a regular part of daily life in many areas of Ukraine, and it is unclear how many will be able to heat their homes in the upcoming winter.
Under pressure to fund the war and make loan payments to foreign lenders, Ukraine is further squeezing its population, 29 percent of which, according to the World Bank, are in poverty.
Facing a deficit of $35 billion in the upcoming year, parliament voted last week to adopt a major tax increase, the first of the war. The law increases the tax from 1.5 percent to 5 percent for individuals, hikes payments from the self-employed and small businesses, and imposes a 50 percent tax on banking profits and a 25 percent tax on the profits of financial companies. The latter two will use a combination of legal means, fraud and corruption to evade these measures.
An overwhelming proportion of Ukraine’s budget is spent on the military, with the country’s finance ministry acknowledging on October 10 that “all non-military state budget expenditures are financed exclusively with the support of Ukraine’s international partners.” Kiev has been systematically cutting different forms of social expenditures over the last year, limiting eligibility for various types of welfare payments, including those for internally displaced people, and axing funding for healthcare.