For over two and a half years, a semi-proxy war has been raging in Ukraine. In a proxy war, two powers avoid direct conflict by fighting through weaker intermediary partners. The Russia-Ukraine war is a semi-proxy war because one power, Russia, is directly involved, while the other power, the U.S. and its Western partners, fights through the Ukrainian intermediary. Ukraine was in a position to attain its goals in the first weeks of the war when it initialed the draft treaty in Istanbul. Since then, when the U.S. discouraged those talks and promised Ukraine all the military support it needs for as long as it needs it, Ukraine has been fighting as a Western proxy in pursuit of U.S. goals, including maintaining U.S. hegemony and asserting NATO’s right to expand wherever it pleases.
The danger of a proxy war is that you have to win it to stay out of it. When your proxy loses the war, the war is lost to the power who is executing it unless they are prepared to directly enter it themselves.
The current seemingly irreversible trajectory suggests that Ukraine has lost the semi-proxy war. After promises of the weakening of Russia, the reclamation of all of Ukraine’s land, and total victory, as well as the billion upon billions of dollars that was spent to achieve that and the thousands upon thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who were wounded or killed fighting to achieve that, the Western public is being prepared for the lost semi-proxy war.
The clearest evidence of the public preparation for defeat is the changing narrative in the mainstream media about Russian territorial gains. Territorial gains were never the measure of Russia’s winning the war. The proper metric was never Ukraine’s loss of land, but Ukraine’s loss of soldiers and weapons: a war that Russia was always winning. But that metric has now reached the point at which the war can now begin to be also measured in loss of land. Loss of troops and weapons has now reached the critical point at which Russia can begin to more easily secure the Donbas.
Misrepresenting the metric, the mainstream press talked always of static frontlines that hardened into a stalemate in which neither side could take the advantage. As Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed, and they ran desperately short of the weapons to fire and the soldiers to fire them, the media began to talk of slow Russian advances: the adjective “slow” was always included.
But on October 31, The New York Times ran an article with the headline “Russia’s Swift March Forward in Ukraine’s East.” The simple replacement of “slow” with “swift” signaled the start of the preparation of its readership for Ukraine’s loss and the loss of the semi-proxy. The Times article now informed its audience that “Ukraine’s defensive lines buckled” over two months ago. It now told them that the Kursk offensive “weakened” Ukraine’s defenses in the Donbas and that “Russia’s attacks gradually weakened the Ukrainian army to the point where its troops are so stretched that they can no longer hold some of their positions.” The Times told its Western audience that “serious personnel shortages” and stretched defensive lines allow “Russia to quickly advance whenever it finds a weak spot.”
What’s worse, The Times goes on to say in its preparatory eulogy that as Russia captures fortified Ukrainian cities in the Donbas, they then encounter “largely open terrain with sparse Ukrainian defensive lines” and find themselves “well past the old frontline and its extensive minefields, which halted the previous offensives” before closing with the final preparation for the Western public: “Russia has enough force left to exploit any weaknesses in Ukrainian lines.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been on a desperate multi capital tour to prevent this concessionary change. Plan A was selling his Ukrainian Victory Plan. But that has now failed. Zelensky asked for an immediate and unconditional invitation for Ukraine to join NATO during the war. But he received no such invitation. He asked for permission to fire Western supplied long-range missiles deeper into Russia. But he received no such permission. Zelensky asked for a nonnuclear deterrence package that included a not public plea for Tomahawk missiles with their 1,500 mile range. But he received no such package. The New York Times reports that the Biden administration rebuffed that request as “totally unfeasible.”
The Ukrainian Victory Plan has died. The last hope for saving Plan A seems to be Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence reports of 10,000 elite North Korean troops heading to Ukraine disguised in Russian uniforms. With North Korean troops fighting Ukraine and South Korea warning that it could send weapons to Ukraine in response, Zelensky is arguing that “There is only one conclusion — this war is internationalized and goes beyond the borders” of Ukraine,” as if the West sending weapons had not already crossed that line. The insertion of North Korean troops could be used to do what the Victory Plan could not: draw in Western troops or at least allow the firing of Western long-range missiles into areas of Russia hosting North Korean troops.
There may be North Korean troops in Russia. Or there may not. Or they may be there in some role other than combat. NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte has confirmed that North Korean troops are in Russia and that they have been deployed to the Kursk region. The Pentagon has also confirmed that some of the North Korean troops have received Russian uniforms and that some of them have already entered the Kursk region.
But neither of them has offered any evidence. There is no reason to believe Russia needs foreign reinforcements, as the Times article on Russia’s swift march forward testifies. The North Korean presence would also not be any kind of game changer. The Russian armed forces likely grow by about 30,000 volunteers a month. 10,000 North Koreans would translate into only about ten days worth of soldiers. It is also odd that NATO and the Pentagon have knowledge that the North Korean troops are elite troops, of the movement of those troops, and that they are disguised as Russians. With that kind of detailed knowledge, it would seem to be advantageous to call Russia out and put the proof on the table.
Neither the Ukrainian Victory Plan nor the North Korean troops are likely to save Plan A. The problem is that there is no Plan B, as Zelensky recently said. “I said it will work. If you have an alternative,” Zelensky complained, “then please, go ahead.”
The semi-proxy war is lost. The U.S. and NATO are unlikely to send troops even if North Korea has. That necessitates a Plan B that addresses, not how to win the war, but how to lose it. It will be very hard for the United States, NATO and Zelensky to concede that the war is lost: too much was promised, and too much has been lost. The existential stakes the U.S. claimed were too great to give them away.
What Ukraine and the West now need is not a new military approach to winning the war but a new narrative approach to winning the war.
And, for Ukraine, since there is no Plan B, that might still be accomplished with Plan A. There may be two planned outcomes for the Ukrainian Victory Plan. If it works, then Ukraine continues the war; if it fails, Ukraine pursues a peace with an out for Zelensky.
A version of the failure contingency plan was first suggested by Ukraine’s former Prosecutor-General Yury Lutsenko, though Lutsenko presents it as the intended plan and not the contingency plan. Lutsenko suggested that, should Zelensky’s improbable maximalist Victory Plan be rejected by the West, Zelensky can then go back to Ukraine and remind Ukrainians that the West pushed Ukraine from a promising diplomatic track to a dangerous war track with the promise of whatever they need for as long as it takes to push Russia out of Ukraine. He can then say that he outlined for the West the needs that the current battlefield reality necessitated and that the West betrayed Ukraine by not giving them what they need or what they were promised.
Zelensky can then complain that Ukraine cannot continue the war without U.S. support and move toward peace talks with Russia, all the time placing the blame on the United States.
He could then open negotiations on an agreement based on the Istanbul agreement similar to the one that Putin recently proposed. He could agree not to join NATO in exchange for firm and realistic security guarantees and agree to withdraw from an agreed upon portion of the territories annexed by Russia without legally recognizing Russia’s annexation of those territories, as suggested by Putin’s proposal and recently implied by Zelensky when he said that “No one will legally recognize the occupied territories as belonging to other states.”
Russia can claim victory because they prevented NATO expansion to Ukraine: the key reason they have given for going to war. Ukraine can adopt the narrative that they are victorious because they have survived as a largely intact sovereign state who stood up to their giant neighbor and who is free to pursue their hoped for Western orientation complete with membership in the European Union. The U.S. and their Western partners can adopt the narrative that it was all worth it because Putin’s alleged territorial ambitions were stopped at the eastern regions of Ukraine and a sovereign Ukraine and Europe are saved from his plan to re-establish the Russian empire.
Truth may be left thin and wasted by the new narrative. But perhaps that version of Plan A, in the absence of a Plan B, could finally bring an end to this terrible war that has already been lost.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
