Everything Outlined in the Victory Plan is Absolutely Realistic for Our Partners – Address by the President

5 October 2024 – 20:22

I wish you health, fellow Ukrainians!

Currently, our teams – of Ukraine and of the United States, the teams of our other partners are working on preparing the Ramstein – substantive decisions, and, in general, next week’s meetings and negotiations. And this week can be positive for our defense, for our vision of how the war should end. We will do everything for it, we will do it one hundred percent. We will do it effectively.

In the coming days, there will be political consultations between our teams: government officials and diplomats. The military will also speak on the content of the Victory Plan’s military points. This is something that can rather quickly strengthen Ukraine, Ukraine’s positions – primarily, our frontline. And everything outlined in the Plan is absolutely realistic for our partners. The world has this resource for reinforcement that will allow us to move forward according to the Peace Formula.

This is our goal, our task – to guarantee Ukraine reliable peace and long-term security. This is possible only based on international law and without any bargaining over sovereignty or trading territories. Exactly as envisaged by the Peace Formula. Ukraine needs peace – real and just – guaranteed protection from war. This is possible only from strong positions. And only when both our people and our partners are truly united. This is what we are working for. I thank everyone who is helping us, and who, just like us, is ready to make next week historic in many ways.

And one more thing. I want to acknowledge our warriors, who are also, in a way, preparing the next Ramstein. In other words, they demonstrate what Ukrainians are capable of when they have enough weapons and sufficient range. I want to thank all the warriors of the Special Operations Center “A” of the Security Service of Ukraine – all those who demilitarize Russian military facilities. I want to thank you, guys, for destroying Russian military logistics, and especially for hitting Russian military airfields. This is the most needed thing. Every destroyed Russian military base, every destroyed Russian airbase, every destroyed warehouse with aerial bombs saves the lives of Ukrainians and provides real support for the front. And we will keep convincing our partners that our drones alone are not enough. More decisive steps are needed – and the end of this war will be closer. I am sure of it!

Glory to Ukraine!

President @ZelenskyyUa

We are preparing for the 25th Ramstein meeting on October 12, which will be the first to take place at the leaders’ level.

We will present the Victory Plan—clear, concrete steps towards a just end to the war. The determination of our partners and the… pic.twitter.com/keSiIp8xeu

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) October 5, 2024

President @ZelenskyyUa

We are preparing for the 25th Ramstein meeting on October 12, which will be the first to take place at the leaders’ level.

We will present the Victory Plan—clear, concrete steps towards a just end to the war. The determination of our partners and the strengthening of Ukraine are what can stop Russian aggression.

We extend our gratitude to everyone who is helping to defend our state, Europe, and the entire world.

The problem that President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians face is that President Biden and his team are not really dictating the policy and strategy decisions here, Putin is. Yesterday, Andrew Exum, who was Obama’s last Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy, had an essay published at The Atlantic regarding President Biden, his team, and the relationship with Bibi and the Israelis. This bit is very accurate and very enlightening: (emphasis mine)

President Joe Biden’s actions over many months suggest that Israel can determine when and where the United States goes to war in the Middle East. That is unacceptable, and the next American president must change this dynamic.

In one framing, the past 12 months have witnessed a remarkable display of America’s might and resolve in the Middle East—especially relative to our principal adversary in the region, Iran. Since October of last year, Israel has severely degraded Iran’s two most important affiliates in the area, Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran has lashed out directly only twice, with one ballistic-missile assault in April and another this month—both largely neutralized by U.S., Israeli, and allied air and missile defenses.

The United States, in contrast with Iran, has backed its principal affiliate in the region, Israel, to the fullest extent. It has shipped billions of dollars of military equipment and munitions to Israel over the past 12 months, on top of the roughly $3.8 billion it already provides annually; shared sensitive intelligence to allow Israel to target Hamas’s senior leaders and recover its hostages; and repeatedly deployed its own troops to defend Israel from assault. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertions that Israel stands alone are at once laughable and insulting.

Yet few people in the Middle East, or at home, would view the United States as particularly strong at the moment in the region. The reason is that the Biden administration has made abundantly clear over the past year that it has chosen not to dictate the terms of its own Middle East policy. It has repeatedly allowed Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leadership to do so instead.

In April, Israel conducted an air strike in Damascus on a facility adjacent to the Iranian embassy. The United States received no warning about the strike; Biden and his advisers were caught unaware. The strike killed seven Iranian officers. Then Iran and its affiliates in the region launched a barrage of missiles at Israel. But the United States and several of its partners—most notably Jordan, France, the United Kingdom—helped blunt the attack with a coordinated display of air and missile defenses.

With that, a Rubicon had been quietly crossed. Israel had always boasted that a generous supply of U.S. arms allowed Israel to fight its own fights, and that no American soldier had ever been asked to fight Israel’s battles for it. But America has tens of thousands of troops semipermanently garrisoned in the region, in part to respond to contingencies involving Israel, and by interceding to thwart the missile attack, American troops were fighting directly on Israel’s behalf.

The same dynamic that Exum has described in regard to Israel is very similar to the one between the US and Ukraine. At one level the US, led by Biden and his senior natsec team look strong. They’ve added new members to NATO, they’ve sent a large amount of money and material to keep Ukraine from being overrun by Putin and Russia’s genocidal re-invasion. What they’ve also done is dribble support out with significant restrictions to prevent the war escalating. Biden and his team have let Bibi drive the US decision-making in regard to Israel and we have a similar situation regarding Ukraine. The difference is that Bibi freely gets to cross every one of Biden’s red lines, while Biden is too scared to cross any of Putin’s. The results, however, are the same. Decisions are being made for the US not in DC, but in Jerusalem and Moscow.

The other major difference is that President Zelenskyy is publicly very grateful for all the support, while Bibi has gone out of his way to repeatedly claim Israel is on its own, no one, not even the US supports it, etc.

Regardless, this is what President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians are up against. Until they can figure out how to win the fight with President Biden and his senior natsec team and get them to stop letting Putin dictate the terms of US support, they’re going to be stuck trying to grind this out with just enough support to not lose, but not enough to win.

Ben Hall of the Financial Times has more on this.

Welcome back. Ukraine has scaled back its war aims. Although it remains committed to recovering the lands seized by Russia over the past decade, it regrettably lacks the manpower, weaponry and western support to do it.

Ukraine’s new strategy — presented by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to US leaders last week — is to ask its allies to strengthen its hand, militarily and diplomatically, to bring Russia to the negotiating table.

Western diplomats and increasingly Ukrainian officials have come round to the view that meaningful security guarantees could form the basis of a negotiated settlement in which Russian retains de facto, but not de jure, control of all or part of the Ukrainian territory it currently occupies. I’m at [email protected]

Land for Nato membership
To be clear, neither Kyiv nor its supporters are proposing to recognise Russia sovereignty over the one-fifth of Ukrainian territory it has illegally grabbed since 2014. To do so would encourage further Russian aggression and severely undermine the international legal order.

What is envisaged is tacit acceptance that those lands should be regained through diplomatic means in the future. Even that, understandably, is a sensitive issue for Ukrainians, especially when presented as the basis of a compromise with Moscow. Ceding land to gain Nato membership may be the “only game in town”, as a western diplomat told us, but for Ukrainians it remains a taboo, in public at least.

What is being more openly discussed is the nature and timing of the security guarantees Ukraine will need to underpin a settlement.

In Washington Zelenskyy restated his pitch for accelerated membership of Nato.

The problem is the US is against moving beyond the agreed position of the alliance that Ukraine’s “future is in Nato”, that its accession is on an “irreversible path” and that it will be invited to join “when allies agree and conditions are met”. It fears that offering a mutual defence guarantee under the Nato treaty’s Article 5 before the war is over would simply draw in the US and its allies.

But some of Ukraine’s allies say this need not be the case. “There are ways of solving that,” Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian who stood down as Nato secretary-general this week, told my colleague Henry Foy in a farewell Lunch with the FT interview.

Stoltenberg pointed out that the security guarantees that the US provides to Japan do not cover the Kuril Islands, four of which Japan claims as its own but which are controlled by Russia after being seized by the Soviet Union in 1945.

He also cited Germany, which joined Nato in 1955, despite being divided. Only West Germany was covered by the Nato umbrella.

“When there is a will, there are ways to find the solution. But you need a line which defines where Article 5 is invoked, and Ukraine has to control all the territory until that border,” he said.

From Bonn to Kyiv
The West German model for Ukraine has been discussed in foreign policy circles for more than 18 months.

Dan Fried, a former US assistant secretary of state for Europe, was one of the first to make the argument in this piece for Just Security. Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to Nato and Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Stoltenberg’s predecessor Anders Fogh Rasmussen and FT contributing editor Ivan Krastev have made similar arguments.

The idea is also gaining traction in official circles.

“I don’t think that full restoration of control over the entire territory is a prerequisite,” Petr Pavel, the Czech president and a former Nato general, told Novinky a Právo newspaper.

“If there is a demarcation, even an administrative border, then we can treat [that] as temporary and accept Ukraine into Nato in the territory it will control at that time,” Pavel said.

Most proponents acknowledge that Moscow would hate this idea. Sceptics fear it could provoke an escalation. Nato membership would guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty and allow it to pursue its western orientation, goals that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is determined to destroy.

Perhaps the most persuasive argument came from the US cold war historian Mary Sarotte in this piece for Foreign Affairs.

Sarotte’s contention is that the terms of Nato membership can be adapted to suit individual circumstances. Norway pledged not to house a Nato base on its territory when it became a founding member. West Germany’s strategy was to make clear its borders were provisional. It had to tolerate division indefinitely but not accept it, and renounce the use of force to retake East Germany.

Ukraine should, she wrote, define a military defensible border, agree to not permanently station troops or nuclear weapons on its territory unless threatened with attack, and renounce use of force beyond that border except in self-defence.

Nato membership under these terms would be presented to Moscow as a fait accompli, Sarotte added. But there would still be an implicit negotiation: “instead of a land-for-peace deal, the carrot would be no [Nato] infrastructure for peace”.

The bear does the poking
Other analysts argue West Germany is a bad parallel because its borders, though provisional, were recognised by both sides. In Ukraine they are being fought over every day.

Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, head of the German Council on Foreign Relations, told Foreign Policy’s Anchal Vohra last year “you have the potential of all kinds of problems emanating from the revisionism of both sides. For example, it will be up to Vladimir Putin to define Article 5, whether some of his poking falls below or above that threshold.’’

There is also the big question of whether the US, let alone its European allies, would be prepared to make the force commitments necessary to defend a Ukraine inside the alliance. While France has warmed to the idea of faster Ukraine Nato accession, German chancellor Olaf Scholz is firmly opposed, fearing his country could be drawn into another war against Russia.

In the US, the Biden administration has so far refused to budge on accelerating Kyiv’s membership. Would a Kamala Harris presidency treat it differently? Could Donald Trump imagine the West German model as part of his proposed “deal” to end the war? Could Zelenskyy sell it to his people?

There are many obstacles still on Kyiv’s Nato path. But the west patently lacks a strategy for Ukraine to prevail.

As Sarotte concludes, following the West German route “would be far preferable, for Ukraine and the alliance, than continuing to put off membership until Putin has given up his ambitions in Ukraine or until Russia has made a military breakthrough. This path would bring Ukraine closer to enduring security, freedom, and prosperity in the face of Russian isolation — in other words, towards victory.”

I can honestly tell you right now that what is being proposed above is not going to work. The Biden administration isn’t going to go for it. If Trump is reelected it will be irrelevant as he’ll cut Ukraine off from US aid and give Putin a green light to complete his genocidal re-invasion. We don’t really know what a Harris administration will do yet. Regardless, this isn’t going to fly in Ukraine. Right now a lot of EU member state leaders are hiding behind Biden and only stepping out into the sunlight, like Scholtz, on occasion.

If they do this, you know exactly where russia will test Article V. https://t.co/sxkehYpZqw

— SK Media🇺🇦 (@SpaghettiKozak) October 5, 2024

And that’s before we even begin to really focus on what we’d be condemning these occupied Ukrainians too:

And these are not all of the cities that Russian bombs have wiped off the map in Ukraine during Moscow’s full-scale invasion. Hundreds more cities, towns and villages have been reduced to rubble. And Russian forces are still pressing toward others like Pokrovsk… https://t.co/5FjrOiW7zF

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) October 5, 2024

The video of russians murdering a Ukrainian POW, unarmed and tortured, with his hands tied, should serve as a stark reminder to Western partners who want to normalize relations with russia at any cost: forcing Ukraine into capitulation will bring this terror much closer to you.

— Olena Halushka (@OlenaHalushka) October 4, 2024

The perpetual cycle when dealing with Putin and Russia. “You were right. We should have listened to you. But we are going to keep making the same mistake and still aren’t going to listen to you now.” https://t.co/WhX8JCIT1N

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) October 5, 2024

I feel seen.

Robin Brooks at the Brookings Institution has been doing yeoman’s work documenting how Russia is evading sanctions via transshipment through the central Asian states, which is something we discussed would happen way back in March of 2022.

Thailand’s exports to Kyrgyzstan have started booming. The issue here isn’t Thai exports per se. The numbers involved are small. Instead, the issue is that every country in the world is doing this and it’s getting worse. When you add it all up, the transshipment racket is huge… pic.twitter.com/WHEz4q5fGE

— Robin Brooks (@robin_j_brooks) October 5, 2024

If you ever wondered what you’d have done to stop Hitler, you’re doing it now. https://t.co/utIyR79fC4

— Darth Putin (@DarthPutinKGB) October 5, 2024

And that’s not counting what is being sourced through North Korea:

Around half of the artillery shells used by Russia, approximately 3 million annually, come from North Korea, according to The Times. Despite many shells being considered defective, their sheer quantity has enabled Russia to make steady advances, including the capture of Vuhledar… pic.twitter.com/7inUyCqsB2

— NOELREPORTS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 (@NOELreports) October 5, 2024

Around half of the artillery shells used by Russia, approximately 3 million annually, come from North Korea, according to The Times. Despite many shells being considered defective, their sheer quantity has enabled Russia to make steady advances, including the capture of Vuhledar in Donetsk. In early 2024, during Putin’s visit to Pyongyang, a defense pact was signed between Russia and North Korea.

https://thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/north-korea-supplies-half-of-the-shells-used-by-russia-in-ukraine-d3fkhppjs

From The Sunday Times:

Half of the shells used by Russia — about three million a year — are being supplied by North Korea, according to western intelligence.

President Putin travelled to Pyongyang earlier this year to sign a defence pact with Kim Jong-un and the Kremlin has become dependent on the shuttered authoritarian state to maintain its advances in eastern Ukraine, intelligence sources say.

Although many of the shells are believed to be faulty, the sheer quantity has allowed Russia to make steady gains, most recently capturing the eastern Ukrainian city of Vuhledar.

Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, warned in September that shipments of North Korean shells were tilting the war in Russia’s favour. “Our biggest problem from all these allies of Russia is from North Korea. Because with the volume of military products that they supply, they actually affect the intensity of the fighting,” he said.

During the initial years of the war, Russia’s allies appeared reluctant to actively supply Moscow with weapons. However, Putin’s efforts to build an anti-western coalition appear to be paying off and are having an impact on the battlefield.

The Times revealed in September that Iran has shipped 200 ballistic missiles to Russia, while China has hosted and assisted a Russian defence company in building long-range drones. Western officials believe there is “clear evidence” that China is playing an increasingly active role.

Despite the recent gains, Russia is suffering a high casualty rate of 1,200 soldiers a day in Ukraine, western officials assessed. It includes 480 casualties a day in the battle for Pokrovsk, the key garrison town in Donetsk that looks increasingly vulnerable to Russian capture.

 

Here’s more on the Russians’ criminal treatment of Ukrainian POWs:

English subtitles included

— Nastya Stanko (@StankoNastya) October 4, 2024

Here’s the full video. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but proceed as if it will have disturbing and graphic imagery.

Kherson:

#Kherson #DroneAttacks

Today,

🔴4 injured by a drone attack on an ambulance in a suburb

🔴A man, 55, killed by a drone

🔴Men, 59, 60, injured by a drone

🔴3 more injured

🔴An attack on a bus with 20 passengers, all civilians

🎥My report from a market today. pic.twitter.com/Zl6Wt13p0f

— Zarina Zabrisky 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@ZarinaZabrisky) October 5, 2024

The Avdiivka-Pokrovsk Axis:

Russia’s equipment losses over the past year on the Avdiivka-Pokrovsk axis have been extraordinary. https://t.co/iX2vh3BZOO

— Rob Lee (@RALee85) October 4, 2024

Here’s more on the downed Russian heavy drone in Konstantynivka:

So Russia was, apparently, testing its supercool top-secret Inokhodets swarm-slave jet drone [“Russian Skyborg”] above the Donbas frontline but it went astray and kinda tried defecting to Ukraine🙃 so they killed it midair – with the debris falling in UA-controlled area. https://t.co/XFXoGlnC3x

— Alex Panchenko (@AlexPanchenko2) October 5, 2024

✈️💥A brief description of the entire incident with the crash of the Russian aircraft in one post:

About two hours ago, reports began to appear in both Ukrainian and Russian sources about the downing of an aircraft in the Konstantynivka area, Donetsk front.

Almost immediately… https://t.co/iG5vdbCb73 pic.twitter.com/A8f72z7fdh

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) October 5, 2024

✈️💥A brief description of the entire incident with the crash of the Russian aircraft in one post:

About two hours ago, reports began to appear in both Ukrainian and Russian sources about the downing of an aircraft in the Konstantynivka area, Donetsk front.

Almost immediately after this, in a short time, a number of photos and videos from the site of the wreckage followed. According to the published material, it became clear that this was a Russian aircraft that crashed on territory controlled by Ukraine.

However, at first, an erroneous conclusion was made that the wreckage belonged to a Su-25. A small detail that some immediately noticed was an atypical camouflage pattern that had not previously been seen on Russian Su-25s.

Then followed the publication of a number of videos by various sources showing that the aircraft was shot down by friendly Russian fire from another aircraft, as well as videos of the wreckage falling to the ground. The shape of the falling wreckage did not match the shape of the Su-25 fuselage.

As a result, with the publication of even more material and clearer photos of the wreckage, it was finally established that the downed aircraft was a Russian Sukhoi S-70 Okhotnik-B stealth heavy unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV).

🧵More videos and photos of the crash site, moment of friendly fire incident and falling debris available in attached thread

/7. Sukhoi S-70 Okhotnik-B – is a Russian stealth heavy unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV). It is known that only two of these were built. pic.twitter.com/FidKt0b3dU

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) October 5, 2024

Here’s the full text of the quoted tweet:

/6. Downed Russian aircraft was not a Su-25 but S-70 drone.

Russian sources associated with Russian military aviation confirm that it was a drone which was shot down in a friendly fire incident:

“All our planes and crews are home. Alive, healthy and safe. Well, the fact that we have one less drone, that happens. That’s what testing is for.”

And then there was one…

That’s enough for tonight.

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