Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has reaffimed his firm refusal to cede any territory, resisting U.S. pressure for a painful compromise with Russia as he continued to rally European support for Ukraine.
“Undoubtedly, Russia insists for us to give up territories. We, clearly, don’t want to give up anything. That’s what we are fighting for,” Zelenskyy said in a WhatsApp chat late Monday in which he answered reporters’ questions.
“Do we consider ceding any territories? According to the law we don’t have such right. According to Ukraine’s law, our constitution, international law, and to be frank, we don’t have a moral right either.”
OK. This would be an actual concrete plan. Now it’s going beyond “stand with Ukraine” cheer leading and moving on to something we could actually do.
The obvious potential paths would be:
A) try to convince the current US administration to massively change their policies
B) replace the current US administration
C) make up the shortfall without the US
“A” seems like a total pipe dream. “B” seems likely but not soon enough for Ukraine. A quick search suggests the US has spent about $100B so far. So (back to the cocktail napkin) other sympathetic nations would need around $1T over the next 3 years for “C”. Not infeasible, but it’s pretty close to a total war commitment on the part of the EU and a few allies.
I don’t think it’s a great strategy. One of the basic principals of warfare is momentum. Russia has much more of it than Ukraine does. Countering that directly is very expensive. Breaking the momentum first and then countering can be much more effective. Russia demonstrated a very effective strategy in this conflict; defense in depth. With the help of the EU, Ukraine could create a deep DMZ with multiple lines of trenches, overlapping artillery positions, hardened communications, drone support, etc. That defensive barrier would give them the breathing room to build out a robust logistics network and even start planning for a second counteroffensive.
Part 2 would be to actually start a feasible counteroffensive towards Zaporizhzhia or Donetsk to cut the Russian forces in half. From there, Ukraine would have momentum and Russia would have to work on breaking it.
edit: formatting