Today, President Zelensky informed the nation at the Ukraine 2024 Independence forum in Kyiv that his government was preparing a “plan for victory” to submit to President Biden, Vice-President Harris, and Former-President Trump.
Kyiv Independent described it as a “proposal” and said he would present it during an upcoming meeting with the three politicians in early September.
According to the Ukrainian President, his military offensive in Russia’s Kursk Oblast has some place in this victory proposal, along with a diplomatic solution with Russia to be made through “pressure,” and an economic aspect of which Zelensky revealed no details.
The president also said the proposal would include the participation of Ukraine “in the global security infrastructure,” per the Independent, who reported the same day that Kyiv had submitted a list to the Pentagon of targets inside Russia that they want to fire upon with the longest-range missiles the US has provided – the 300-kilometer ATACAM System.
Analysts have swung back and forth trying to pin down exactly what Ukraine hoped to achieve by diverting more than 1,000 of her best-armed, best-equipped forces to invade the Russian border area of Kursk – an area with little strategic importance – at precisely the time that Kyiv and Moscow were both signaling that ceasefire talks could be on the horizon.
Initial speculation was that it would pull Russian forces away from Ukraine’s front in Donbas to repel the invasion because to do otherwise would be a political embarrassment for President Putin. The New York Times speculated that it wasn’t so much to force battlefield changes as to try and gain greater leverage for the upcoming ceasefire talks.
While Russia hawks all over the Western media celebrated Ukraine’s speed and decisiveness in claiming a largely unimportant 1,000 square kilometers of territory as a grand humiliation, they quickly had to admit that the move came with great risk – that it would deplete to a dangerous degree Ukraine’s Donbas defenses which had been flagging for weeks and which were now facing the loss of the key city of Pokrovsk.
The Financial Times reported that for the first time since the US reauthorized another $61 billion in military aid, Ukrainian defenders were being told to ration artillery shells – precisely because shells had been diverted for Zelensky’s incursion into Kursk.
The Kyiv Independent reported that even as late as 72 hours into the Kursk incursion, there was extremely scant coverage of it around Ukraine or Russia, and US officials later admitted they were not informed about it ahead of time.
With Zelensky’s announcement that the Kursk incursion was part of his “Victory Plan,” it seems the attack that has so dangerously diminished his eastern front was indeed to claim some sort of bargaining chip. While it remains to be seen if he can win over Western leaders with the surprise attack, it has soured the taste of ceasefire dialogue in the mouths of Kremlin officials, who said on Monday that such talks were “no longer relevant”.
Zelensky’s mentioning of Ukraine being part of the “global security infrastructure” is not the first time Ukrainian officials touted themselves for such a role. Throughout the war, the integration with the Ukrainian state and Western defense industries has robustly expanded.
Last year, President Zelensky hosted Ukraine’s first International Defense Industries Forum during which he promised to establish a “special economic regime for the defense-industrial complex”. 250 firms from 30 countries attended.
In 2022, a source familiar with Western intelligence on the war told CNN that Ukraine is “absolutely a weapons lab” for new, untested NATO equipment, with Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov saying government takeovers of several companies will help Kyiv “to be like Israel,” referring to Tel Aviv’s defense industry.
Andrew Corbley is founder and editor of World at Large, an independent news outlet. He is a loyal listener of Antiwar radio and of the Scott Horton Show. Reprinted with permission from World at Large.
