The kernel of the long-awaited “victory plan” for Ukraine that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy introduced this fall goes something like this: If you give me what I’ve been asking for — membership in NATO and permission to fire Western missiles deep into Russian territory — I could end the war by next year.
The demands are not in themselves new. The urgency is in the timing: The American election, and what President Joe Biden does before he leaves office, will have serious consequences for the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Actual membership in NATO is not in the cards for Ukraine until the war is over. The North Atlantic Alliance has already declared that Ukraine is on an “irreversible” path to membership, but that is as far as it is likely to go for now. Firing NATO missiles deep into Russia, however, is something a growing number of members have signaled they would allow.
Not Biden, at least not yet. NATO weapons striking inside Russia, he fears, would take Western participation in the war to a new level. It would also cross a red line that Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn. Long-range strikes against Russia, Putin has declared, “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia.”
A growing chorus of NATO members disagree, and have urged the United States to give Ukraine the green light. Russia, they argue, has no compunction about using weapons from China, North Korea or Iran against Ukraine. “Are you telling me that Putin is not using — is not throwing — everything he has at Ukraine?” Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal.
The next president
Whatever decision Biden takes (or avoids taking) in his last weeks in office will create a reality that the next president will have to deal with.
If Kamala Harris wins, she has broadly pledged to continue the Biden administration’s military and economic support — $174 billion pledged since the war began in February 2022, including $61 billion approved by Congress in April. A Harris administration, however, would face increasing resistance from some Republicans and Democrats to all-out support, and it would be easier for Harris to continue actions already taken by her outgoing administration than to order new ones.
Donald Trump is the greater concern for Ukraine. He has said he would end the war in 24 hours should he win the presidency. He has not explained how, but given his mysteriously chummy relations with Putin, the terms would not be favorable to Ukrainians. Still, reversing a policy on long-range strikes would not be easy even for Trump, given that the American public, including many Republicans, still strongly supports Ukraine.
Ukraine already possesses missiles from NATO members, including American ones that can strike up to 190 miles inside Russia, and it has used them against Russian targets in Crimea. But that’s occupied Ukrainian turf. Ukraine has also taken the war into Russia with Ukrainian drones and commando operations against military targets and with its military incursion into the Kursk region, which the Ukrainians largely still hold.
But firing American, British or French missiles deep into Russia would involve the allies directly in offensive operations on Russian soil, a level of confrontation that Biden has tried to avoid from the outset. That may be close to changing. When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the White House in September, European officials said the president was on the verge of giving a green light.
Whether firing into Russia would in itself change the course of the war is dubious. Other high-tech weapons that the United States and NATO initially resisted sharing — HIMARS artillery, the Abrams tank, F-16 fighter jets, the ATACMS surface-to-surface missile — did not prove decisive.
The major requirements in a fight that stretches along hundreds of miles of terrain are artillery and manpower. Ukraine has said it needs 20,000 shells a day for its Western artillery systems, but it has been getting nowhere near that many.
A powerful pledge
The importance of acquiring sophisticated Western weapons, however, is not only in what they can do on the battlefield. A new commitment from the United States and its allies would also demonstrate to Putin that they have not lost interest in the war or faith in Zelenskyy, as he anticipated they would.
A pledge of impressive modern weaponry could also be helpful to Zelenskyy in demonstrating to his nation that if he does enter into negotiations with Russia, it will be with the West at his back. Zelenskyy remains publicly committed to recovering all Ukrainian territory, and the notion of ceding any land to Russia in a cease-fire remains something of a taboo in Ukraine. But public opinion polls have shown this absolutist stance weakening, and support for negotiations would likely be higher if Ukraine had a stronger bargaining position.
Then there’s the reality on the ground. Russia now occupies about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory and is steadily creeping deeper into the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine, which includes provinces Putin has formally declared to be part of Russia. Russia is also battering Ukrainian cities and power plants with relentless drone and missile strikes, promising a terrible winter. Putin appears unperturbed by the Russian lives and money he is expending on his crusade to bring Ukraine back into his fold.
Whether Putin is prepared to enter serious talks is anybody’s guess. But Western policymakers agree that that’s the only way his cruel war will come to an end. Biden may not be the president to make the congratulatory call to Zelenskyy when peace is declared, but he can help keep him in the fight until it happens.
Serge Schmemann, a former Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times, is a member of its editorial board.
