Will the bloodshed end in Ukraine as the US Presidential Election race finishes? - Patrick Mercer
It was a nasty, calculated blow for President Zelensky. He’d spent months fashioning his ‘Victory Plan’ plan which was going to be revealed at last month’s Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting in Ramstein.
Indeed, the whole point of the meeting was that Kiev’s boss would publicly present his plan - his blueprint showing how Russia could be beaten back and then forced to negotiate. But, his friends let him down with a series of flimsy excuses being used to postpone this vital meeting.
The trouble was, the plan spoke some hard truths - truths that would have put Biden, Trump and Harris on the spot just weeks before the US elections and certainly opened fissures in NATO unity. Well, perhaps it was all too risky for the West to consider at such a febrile time, but the result was President Zelensky having to tout his plan round a series of capitals where he received the predictable answer - including in London - that everyone would love to help, but such aid had to be ratified by other partners. Yet again, the can was kicked down the road.
Then, to add further difficulties, the situation on the frontlines has significantly deteriorated. I’m getting bored with writing this, but too many Western commentators talk about a ‘stalemate’ on the battlefield: it’s a comforting illusion, but it’s not true. One reasonably unbiased blogger has even assessed October 25-26 as the ‘worst 24 hours for Kiev’s troops since the beginning of the war’. It’s a fact, with uncharacteristic speed, the Russians have seized a series of towns and villages across the Donbas, are pinching off the Kursk pocket whilst simultaneously outflanking the Ukrainians’ remaining, defence lines.
It’s now even being suggested that Ukraine’s battered forces must pull back to the west of the Dneiper’s great, natural barrier and hunker down there. They would have to cede their lost territory and could then only keep their enemy at bay across the expanse of the river whilst they waited for the cavalry to arrive. Well, we’re not there yet, but the endless optimists who say that the Russians are simply being drawn in whilst making themselves vulnerable to a Ukrainian counter attack are starting to look pretty stupid.
If this is a bleak picture, it’s underlined by the details of the Victory Plan. There are a couple of elements which are still being kept secret, but the bones of it are clear. The simplest part is that more money should be given to Kiev with those funds largely underwriting the development of joint Allied-Ukrainian defence industries which allow Kiev to make her own weapons on her own soil. To an extent, that’s already happening.
But, the key is that Ukraine should be invited to join NATO immediately, ignoring the rules which lay down that no new supplicant will be admitted if they are at war. That would certainly cause Moscow to think that such an admission would bind the rest of NATO to come to their partner’s aid: not just to talk, but to shed blood. Clearly, that would be the start of the next world war and none of the Allies - even unilaterally - has done more than give lip service to the proposal.
Slightly more nuanced is the idea of lifting the ban on the use of long range missiles to fire deep into Russia. This issue has been under discussion for months but it’s been made more complex by the idea that NATO weapons should be deployed into Ukraine along with Western crews who would have to be present in much larger numbers in order to fire them. Obviously, they would be vulnerable to the Russians.
There’s also been further speculation that NATO troops would relieve those of Kiev, allowing Ukrainians to regroup and refit. Deliberately ambivalent, some are saying that this would be a ground holding role only - a sort of ‘blue beret’ operation where direct confrontation with Russia would be avoided and that feeds into another plank of the plan. Kiev has said that once victory has been won, an experienced and much larger, indigenous army would be able to relieve Western forces of garrison duties in whatever new cold war followed.
Well, very little has been accepted by the Allies. Some have dodged the issue saying that everything depends upon the new US President, but Mr Zelensky has let it be known that if the plan is rejected, he will simply continue this brutal war with no prospect of a negotiated peace. The next American President may take that decision out of his hands, of course: meanwhile, the Russian reaction has been predictably blunt.
Whatever acceptance Moscow might have shown towards negotiations in the past came to a slamming halt when Ukraine sent her troops into Kursk in August. That incursion caused Mr Putin to state unequivocally that the four regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia - which were declared to be part of the motherland in September 2022 - are utterly non-negotiable. This is a huge chunk of Ukrainian land and when the details of the Victory Plan were revealed, President Putin simply repeated that there would be no compromise either now or any time in the future.
Clearly, any stalemate in Ukraine is now diplomatic rather than military. Despite this, Donald Trump has said that he will bring the war to an end within 24 hours of taking office and, whilst Kamala Harris’s position is less clear, I have no doubt that her administration would be equally keen to stop the bloodshed.
There’s now a huge urgency for the killing to cease: I say good luck and godspeed to whoever wins in far off America.
Patrick Mercer is a former MP for Newark and Army colonel.