Zelensky's Victory Plan: Who Dares, Wins
Zelensky's Victory Plan: Who Dares, Wins
Reactions to the public unveiling of Ukraine's Victory Plan have been telling. That's to be expected from such a bold declaration of intent. Post title is taken from a special ops motto for a reason.
Introduction
Once again, the past few days have seen geopolitical developments overshadow fierce fighting in Ukraine. Zelensky finally revealed most of the details of Ukraine’s Victory Plan, and it’s pretty epic.
Boiled down to its raw essence, the thing is a gauntlet thrown at the feet of the entire Western World. Either Western leaders stand up for their vaunted values in Ukraine now, or they prove the entire concept of Western Civilization to be a malevolent fraud once and for all.
This is, of course, why Zelensky also chose this week to bring up that most taboo of topics: nuclear weapons. Oligarchs in Moscow and D.C. are equally alarmed, their mouthpieces in the press doing a wonderful job of making Ukraine impossible to ignore until the fandango blows over - probably when Israel eventually bombs Iran, this week or next, looks like.
Stefan Korshak wrote another great rundown of key events that I strongly recommend. I’m also a big fan of Don’s weekly rundowns on Sarcastasaurus. He collates a lot of the links to open source footage I use to get a feel for events on the ground, and I actually make sure not to read his weekly summary until I finish my own each Monday. It’s always useful to compare different threads of analysis that lack too much direct cross-contamination. Since he covers a lot of action at the tactical level, I mainly emphasize the operational and strategic unless I want to illustrate how these levels ultimately emerge from the tactical.
This week’s Rogue Systems Recon post will give an update on the key fronts, offer a deep analysis of what Zelensky’s Victory Plan is attempting to communicate, and briefly connect all of this to developments at the global level. North Korea is about to become an active and direct participant in the Ukraine War, so this thing just officially pulled in the Pacific region.
Weekly Overview1
The orcs are pushing pretty much everywhere they worry that Ukraine might build up forces and launch another surprise attack. It’s generally a bad idea to pour more resources into a failed plan, but that’s what Putin is politically compelled to do. To prevent ever having to retreat in the future, Putin keeps advancing, banking on his enemies’ will eventually crumbling. That’s usually a fatal gamble, especially when your main enemy has an incentive as strong as not being wiped out to rally behind.
At the same time, the orcs have been forced to pull many of their experienced formations up to Kursk in a bid to finally push Ukraine out. Far from a showy morale booster - though that was a nice side effect - the Kursk Campaign represents a bitter strategic blow that Putin’s prestige has not and now probably never will fully recover from. Moscow traded security in russia for prosecuting a pointless war on Ukraine.
He couldn’t totally ignore the threat that several crack Ukrainian brigades roaming posed. Part of the reason that I wrote so much these past weeks about the possibility of Ukraine further expanding Free Kursk was to highlight the strategic dilemma Putin is in. Send too few troops, and Ukraine could expand the border buffer. But dispatching too many would cut against the grain of the story Putin sells to his people about being in total control, Kursk just a minor terrorist incursion.
The greater part of power is what your enemy thinks you can do. Ukraine picked a fight on a front where it had numerous advantages, taking and holding a solid perimeter and only attempting to expand it where that would help better secure a flank.
While not over-extending, Ukraine has managed to pull the orcs into a series of engagements that appear to be inflicting a very healthy attrition ratio. As Moscow has begun running larger and better organized counteroffensives, Ukraine has slowly begun compressing the perimeter closer to Sudzha, which looks to have been the plan all along.
A week ago, Ukraine had just broken a major orc assault towards Sudzha from Korenevo, though not without losses. This attack was part of a pincer strike aimed at pushing Ukrainian troops back from the eastern outskirts of Korenevo, where Ukrainian forces at one point were threatening to surround the town and break through.
This is necessary for the orcs to protect their exposed troops stuck in Glushkovo, where Ukrainian strikes on pontoon bridges over the Seim made moving supplies extremely difficult. A second border incursion in this district also threatened ruscist positions, forcing Moscow to expend a great deal of effort clearing the area between Snagost and the international border.
It no longer looks feasible for Ukraine to fully cut off Glushkovo district. That means the western flank of the perimeter around Sudzha needed to contract a bit. Ukraine now appears to be in the process of falling back from Olgovka to where the defense line can be anchored in hills to the north of Sudzha and along the Snagost river closer to the international border.
Moscow is already trying to pierce this zone and reach Malaya Lokna, but suffering severe losses. After the orcs mount a big 50+ vehicle attack like the one a couple weeks back, they spend a few weeks trying smaller scale pushes while new equipment is accumulated. Weather is becoming an impediment to operations on both sides, with the impact tied to how dependent a unit is on drones.
I expect that Ukraine’s buffer in Kursk will slowly shrink into the new year. Enough orcs have accumulated to make expanding it more costly than it’s probably worth, and Ukraine will probably be better served pushing into russia somewhere else by early 2025.
Interestingly, though the adjacent Kharkiv front has barely moved in weeks, an incursion over the international border by Ukrainian forces appears to have taken place in Belgorod. Geolocated footage shows rockets fired from russia landing in a forest area near the village of Zhuravlyovka, and Ukraine’s 92nd Brigade knocked out a number of armored vehicles in the vicinity, possibly after luring a ruscist quick reaction force into range.
It’s ironic seeing all the criticisms made of Ukraine’s Kursk Campaign when Moscow’s push into Kharkiv this year has been such a mess. In an operational sense, Kursk and Kharkiv are closely linked, Ukraine rotating a fair few battalions assigned to brigades on this front through Kursk. Moscow remains stuck in several border villages, and Vovchansk is a ruin, much of it a no-mans land.
As I predicted back in spring, Moscow’s Kharkiv offensive didn’t go any better than a couple of Stalin’s during the Second World War. It got nowhere near the rear of Ukrainian forces defending Kupiansk, and as a consequence the orc offensive against it failed. Ukraine may actually get an opening to push into Belgorod to establish another buffer zone in the future.
Another potential option is a strike far east of Belgorod to the north of Kupiansk. If Ukraine could reach Valuyki, about twice as far into russia as the Kursk Campaign made it, a vital logistics and supply node supporting the front in occupied Luhansk would be removed. That could pave the way for a rapid push out of the Kupiansk bridgehead.
Moscow’s goal in this area now appears to be to use the Oskil and Zherebets to limit the combat power required to maintain the defense. If Putin could push Ukraine all the way back to the Siverski Donets river by Izium he would dearly love to, but despite a few advance fingers reaching the Oskil and Zherebets, Ukraine is holding out pretty well.
South of the Siverski Donets, along an arc of front from Siversk to Pokrovsk, Moscow is still trying to grind forward. Some progress has been made towards Siversk over the past few weeks, but most of it south of the mining complex at Bilohorivka which dominates the area, boding poorly for the orcs thanks to the way 81st Airmobile handles itself.
Of greater concern is what looks to be a firm bridgehead over the canal that guards Chasiv Yar from the west. There are two, technically, but a smaller one on the northern edge of the town itself may still be tenuous. The one to the south is more concerning, because it’s on the direct road to Kostiantynivka. If both are extended into mutually supporting pincers, they could force Ukrainian troops out of positions that have held up well against frontal attacks. We’ll see where this stands in another week.
The enemy is also pressing hard in Toretsk, trying to advance through the concrete structures of the central area as well as Zabalka, a suburb to the south. Ukraine seems to have launched some local counterattacks in Zabalka, likely aiming to prevent the orcs from establishing a second supply route to their positions in the center of town.
The combat among the high rises is reported to be extremely intense, teams going back and forth from structure to structure, whole blocks effectively under nobody’s control. There are reports that Ukraine is employing a scorched earth strategy, letting orcs take up position in high rises then pinning them down while engineers plant charges to demolish the structures outright.
On the Pokrovsk front, the orcs are still stalled in most sectors, though slowly creeping around Selydove and Hirnyk-Kurakhivka. If past pattern holds, Ukraine will be forced out of both in a matter of weeks, but the orc advance beyond will slow even more. Putin’s troops still have a very long way to go in this direction before they pose a threat to Pokrovsk from the south. Fierce attacks continue on the more direct road, but Ukrainian troops are fending them off.
There are losses, of course - an experienced drone operator with 68th Jager was recently killed in action. And for every name that makes it into the English-language press, there are a dozen others.
Of course, on the other side there is the ongoing spectacle of the orcs throwing hundreds of lives away in wasteful assaults. These still happen frequently between Kurakhove and Velyka Novosilka, and crack brigades like 46th Airmobile and 79th Air Assault keep wiping them out. This sector has seen quite a few orc attacks this week in an apparent bid to capitalize on taking Vuhledar, but progress has been minimal. I expect the distance between settlements will make this front very difficult for orcs trying to advance come winter.
The islands of the Dnipro delta are back in the orc crosshairs, though fighting here has never gone well for them. Over the past year the entire southern theater of the conflict, what I term everything west of Mariupol, has turned almost static. Moscow launches a few probing attacks, and Ukraine wipes them out. These look set to intensify as winter weather bites elsewhere. Overall, the pattern is consistent with a plan to keep Ukraine from launching its own offensives.
Ukraine’s strategic strike campaign continues apace, hitting more airfields and military factories. Moscow has sent a lot of drones and a few missiles, but no massive waves. In fact the sortie of ships into the Black Sea is no longer a reliable predictor of impending strikes, as Kalibr cruise missiles coming in from the Black Sea haven’t performed well since Putin’s fleet was forced from Crimea; there may be issues reloading launchers in Novorossiysk.
The Ukrainian strategic vengeance campaign also scored another apparent kill, a ruscist aviator involved in an attack that killed Ukrainian civilians found dead in russia. Another sign of how nasty this war will become the longer it lasts.
In support of their flailing on the ground, Putin’s allies abroad have lately been amplifying their efforts to portray Ukraine’s military as corrupt and hopelessly inept. You can always tell when orcs and their allies sense they’re in trouble. Every incident that goes their way is spun as evidence of pervasive Ukrainian weaknesses despite the front lines hardly moving. They’ve got a huge amount of faith in their ability to influence morale, apparently emboldened by recent polls in Ukraine and abroad showing increased skepticism of Zelensky’s government.
Like American partisans, they misunderstand what the polls are really saying. Generally speaking, if more than about 55% of a population agrees on anything, that’s a solid majority. Anything beyond about 66% agreement suggests a social dynamic causing a population to respond to the perceived identity of the pollster, introducing bias into results. That social research in Ukraine has shown a drop in Zelensky’s approval and public determination to win back all of Ukraine’s territory since 2022 mostly indicates that people who always had doubts now feel freer in voicing them.
A similar caution is warranted when interpreting social media posts, even by soldiers. When you’re in the field, everything sucks: your commanders are idiots, food is rotten, gear is junk, and everyone you work with is a moron. The moment actual combat begins, a well-drilled team snaps into action as if none of this matters.
That’s not to say soldier griping should be ignored - it’s actually invaluable data that ought to be systematically collected via app (is Griper taken?), deidentified, and studied. But a grain of salt is required, because you’re never getting the whole picture, and a lot of times people don’t know all that they think they do in the heat of the moment.
With there being broad agreement across Ukrainian society that the war must continue until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored, Zelensky has no choice but to carry on, as Ukrainians also don’t want elections held until it’s over. Allies abroad have to respect the will of Ukraine’s people, and self-interest - to say nothing of common sense or justice - demands that Ukraine’s security be non-negotiable.
The endless efforts to divide Ukrainian society look pretty doomed. If anybody thinks they’re getting out of the consequences of this war by pushing Ukrainians to give up, they’re delusional.
Ukraine’s greatest strength stems from the fact that its government serves its people, with doctrine, tactics, and technology all shifting in a direction that renders a great deal of prior experience and standing assumptions about how a military should operate moot. This needs to be kept in mind when trying to evaluate what’s happening on the ground and why, as well as what comes next.
Ukraine is presently working to degrade the enemy’s combat potential and deployed power at a rate that should leave it incapable of effectively covering the entire line of contact by 2025. That will create openings that Ukraine’s fully revitalized and equipped forces to exploit.
Moscow is in fact helping Ukraine achieve this goal by pressing reckless offensives through summer and into fall. The drain on troops is so severe that North Koreans are being sent, Moscow apparently trying to disguise them as Buryats - a Central Asian ethnic group decimated by prior mobilization waves. The number slated to appear near the front in November almost exactly matches the gap between what Moscow can train each month and the casualties Ukraine is inflicting.
Broadly speaking, I evaluate Ukraine’s optimal strategy as a continued slow withdrawal wherever Moscow attacks for the next four to six months. Logistics will get less and less efficient the farther Moscow’s armies are pulled from their supply bases, while the reverse is true for Ukraine. Every time the orcs take a tree line they reinforce that seeming success, meaning that orc officers are prone to throwing soldiers into traps. Since Moscow doesn’t even count casualties, inefficient behavior is incentivized.
So: pull them in and grind them down. Let them experience winter in dugouts under drone attack and shell fire while Ukrainian troops shelter in networks of tunnels and basements under frontline settlements. Dirt does wonders for dispersing a thermal signature. If the enemy is determined to impale himself, let him!
Provided that the necessary support from abroad arrives in the quantities it should have two years ago, a comprehensive counteroffensive effort leading to victory is absolutely possible in 2025. It represents nothing less than a callous denigration of the tens of thousands of Ukrainians who have fallen to suggest that Ukraine should trade away its land for false promises of peace now.
Zelensky’s Victory Plan: Throwing Down The Gauntlet2
It’s the war in Ukraine that will determine the course of humanity’s future for at least the next generation. This is the true hinge point of modern history, the point where the species collectively decides whether any sort of common ethic truly connects us beyond blood vengeance.
There is sufficient material strength in the world’s democracies to re-establish the idea of a true international order based on principles of justice and mutual security. If it isn’t mobilized and effectively applied throughout 2025, the last chance will be lost.
Here’s the harsh truth: some of Ukraine’s partners abroad, particularly the United States and Germany, have been fighting to wedge Kyiv into a position where it is forced to accept another frozen conflict. Zelensky just made it crystal clear that he won’t let them.
The time has come for all of Ukraine’s self-proclaimed friends and defenders of global democracy to prove where they stand. Either Ukraine gets what it needs to win the war in 2025, or the fight transforms into something resembling the Arab-Israeli conflict: a never-ending nightmare that feeds itself for generations to come.
This war will only end when the regime in Moscow no longer has any desire to occupy Ukraine. This is only happening when any pain the ruscist regime seeks to inflict is reflected right back on the orcs. Pain wins, once it’s felt by the right people.
Fear of what this might mean for their parochial interests is what has always held most of Ukraine’s allies back from offering their full and unrestrained support. The excuses about the risk of nuclear escalation are a self-justifying smokescreen, a convenient way to make any policy critique calling for tougher action look irresponsible.
They are putting off short-term risk of pain for long-term certainty of much more. Just as the impacts of climate change will mostly be felt when today’s leaders are no longer in a position to be held accountable, the same is true of geopolitical collapse.
Scientifically speaking, this is a simple collective action problem. The solution is always binding institutions that don’t let leaders renege on promises.
And that’s at the heart of Zelensky’s Victory Plan: it’s a holistic statement of what resources are needed to achieve a just and sustainable end state. Western bureaucrats accustomed to thinking everything is negotiable are bound to hate it.
Asking for more equipment and the ability to strike deep into ruscist territory is the most predictable part. The same is true of the request for an invitation to NATO, which everyone now knows is actually just a signal, not a meaningful commitment. If NATO can’t even offer a simple open-ended invitation to join at a future date, Ukraine has to expect that NATO will always put off membership or even fail to apply the vaunted Article 5 in a meaningful way.
After all, NATO leaders are choosing to interpret shooting down inbound ruscist drones and missiles - even ones that cross into NATO territory - as a potentially escalatory act. That’s madness, an invitation for Putin to launch an actual surprise attack at some point, but this is simply how the contemporary national security elite thinks nowadays. They’re mandarins serving oligarchs: solving problems isn’t in their DNA, managing them forever is, because it’s a lot more profitable.
Naturally Zelensky’s plan requests at least a partial air shield, which is only sensible. More real-time sharing of data is a smart ask too. If NATO had any sense, its standing AWACS patrols would already run over western Ukraine. NATO sensors are already continuously looking deep into russia to spot potential threats, and if they notice data Ukraine can make use of, they should send it over without delay. This already happens semi-covertly, but Ukraine could do a lot more to protect its infrastructure from missile and drone strikes with airborne radars constantly operating a safe distance from russia or Belarus.
But it’s Zelensky’s bold vision for Ukraine’s place in Europe after the war that really makes me go wow. Integrating Ukraine’s mineral wealth with Europe is only natural - that’s how the proto-EU got it start after World War Two. But allies deploying a credible deterrence package on Ukrainian territory - that’s big. It could mean just missiles, but probably demands personnel to help use and maintain them. That means any ruscist attempt to attack them risks casualties that could trigger an open war with NATO members.
Yet another key point is the most fascinating of all, and it’s making a few heads come close to exploding in D.C.: Zelensky is proposing that Ukrainian soldiers replace Americans in Europe after the fighting in Ukraine is over!
Unless you know what to look for and keep in mind that a high profile speech like this was carefully designed, it’s incredibly easy to overlook how brutally Zelensky just eviscerated Biden, Scholz, and every other wishy-washy Western leader. Zelensky is implying that the future of European security is one where richer countries like the UK, Germany, and France contribute wealth and industrial capacity instead of bodies to the collective defense of Europe. Rather than the old saw about NATO keeping Berlin down, D.C. in, and Moscow out, the mission will shift to keeping Moscow down, D.C. out, and Berlin in.
It’s brilliant, sensible, and entirely doable. War has a way of stripping away illusions, and Ukraine is fighting for survival - Europe too. Laying out a vision of how the future can be better often matters more than satisfying every bureaucrat’s craving for details that will let them cushion the impact of any shocks on their interests.
The time has come for all the people who bleat about freedom, democracy, and Western values to put up or shut up forever. Choose your adventure: appeasement and a brief false peace before a far more terrible plunge, or pushing hard, now, while the beast is weakened, so that another generation need not be sacrificed to atone for the mistakes of their elders.
It’s important to be skeptical of government - and the news, too. Everyone has their own interests and perspective. I have no doubt that Ukraine’s leaders have made, are making, and will continue to make mistakes. I very much doubt that many others would do better in their place. And there are moments when leaders make public policy commitments that are inherently binding. Zelensky is essentially laying out the two alternatives: Ukraine’s victory, or a war that never ends.
When Zelensky told the Americans in 2022 that he needed “ammunition, not a ride,” after ordering his military to “inflict maximum casualties” in defense of Ukraine, he was creating a reality that manifestly differed from what many of Ukraine’s self-proclaimed friends abroad visibly wanted. They chose to define “protecting Ukraine” as the supply of small anti-tank weapons while Putin’s orcs rolled into Irpin and Bucha and massacred the inhabitants. These arms helped, but were woefully insufficient, and it was the self-sacrifice of thousands of Ukrainians that truly saved the country.
Most of us living in the oligarchic farce our dear high priests call the “Western World” are so used to being told that compromise is a virtue that we’ve forgotten the inherent indivisibility of security. So long as the regime in Moscow is animated by the belief that Ukraine is part of its empire, it will keep trying to absorb the country and threaten anyone who is friendly to it. Sooner or later, this situation will explode into the apocalyptic war that world leaders so greatly fear.
The exact same imperialist, colonial logic about the “russian world” that Putin has made his dismal empire’s explicit foreign policy poses a direct threat to the USA and the Constitutional rights of all Americans. If he believes, as he now has every reason to, that Alaska or even a chunk of the West Coast belongs to him, only the rest of Americans’ willingness to risk a nuclear apocalypse stands in his way.
And when you get right down to it, the same escalation-fearing excuses for not giving Ukraine the full support it needs and deserves would probably be applied to California. Why would New York City’s rich risk having all their assets get turned into radioactive ash when Putin is “only” demanding the West Coast (this time)?
Western leaders are, in failing to stand up for Ukraine, telling their own citizens that we are disposable. The only reliable way to avert an awful future where powerful people dispense with the rest of us as they will in a kind of neo-feudalism is the repulsion of Putin’s forces from Ukraine. That is the so-called Western World’s one job right now: everything else is a sideshow.
Those who claim that the Victory Plan “lacks details” that “contains nothing new” or is just a “laundry list of demands” are, I’m afraid to say, serving oligarchs in either Moscow or D.C. There are and have always been three sides in this fight: Moscow’s, D.C’s, and Ukraine’s. And it’s Ukraine that’s on the side of the rest of us, not the other two. It’s Ukraine that’s really fighting for universal values like freedom, democracy, and self-determination, just like Ukrainians and so many other peoples in eastern Europe did a hundred years ago, before the rise of Nazi and Soviet tyranny overwhelmed them.
Fortunately - as is always true in wartime - it’s Ukrainian personnel working in squads, platoons, and companies who have the final say in the shape the future takes. What most keep trying to tell the world is that they can win this thing - they just need the damned resources now sitting idle abroad! Asking for them does, in fact, constitute a comprehensive plan for victory.
I mean, are critics expecting Ukraine to lay out a timeline of where fresh brigades will be deployed next year? A grand master plan for the physical liberation of all territories? A list of each military site in russia that will be attacked and the preferred order?
Zaluzhnyi tried jointly planning an offensive from the ground-up with NATO partners in 2022 and 2023. It didn’t work, mostly because excuses were constantly made for not giving Ukraine everything it desperately needed - including air support. But there was another problem: the subtext in support for Ukraine leading up to the 2023 Counteroffensive was that this was it. Ukraine was being equipped to conduct a single, specific operation.
Moscow saw it coming and prepared accordingly. Though at extreme cost, it was able to counter the small number of modern vehicles Ukraine could field, crippling Ukrainian tactical mobility. That’s why Ukraine needed and still needs more and better equipped formations capable of replacing inevitable losses of gear. And better training and leadership too, of course, but those are more a matter of organization.
And you can’t plan well enough to get organized if you don’t know how much gear you’ll receive. It also helps to have enough modern equipment that it can be spread around instead of concentrated in a few units whose presence reveals intent to make a move.
Zelensky chose this moment to lay out what Ukraine needs to win in 2025 for a reason: too many self-described experts abroad and the rest of the chattering classes - especially in the West - have become distracted. Part of the problem is Putin’s determined propaganda efforts designed to induce this effect, but another is pure fatigue. Perhaps the biggest of all, though, is the fact that many in the West can’t conceive of a world without russia, and they know it could go the way of the USSR so very easily.
One of Zelensky’s most important jobs throughout this war has been to sustain a narrative that Ukrainians can believe in but that also preserves Ukraine’s independence in every respect. Prior to him, Ukraine’s pro-West leaders had largely been classic loyal oligarchs who did not push their allies hard enough because of a desire to preserve lucrative foreign connections.
That is the root of an escalating effort within Ukraine and abroad to portray Zelensky as corrupt, inept, or a simple salesman. After 2014, a chunk of Ukraine’s oligarchs chose to align fully with the USA, which is why families like the Clintons and Bidens became so interested in Ukraine. Certainly Zelensky has his own oligarch ties - no politician survives without some - but it’s pretty hard to imagine a guy in his position having the time to safely enjoy the benefits… now or possibly ever. A lot of ruscists will hate him forever.
D.C.’s discomfort with Zelensky’s middle path between all-out embrace of the West’s agenda for a subservient Ukraine and surrender to Putin’s empire has been evident since the start of his administration. Before the war his comedian roots were played up by Western media, the narrative rendering him a quirky side player in the grand theater of Trump’s political shenanigans. After the all-out phase of the war started and he broke through the noise by offering the kind of Churchillian leadership a lot of folks in the West crave, the narrative became positively fawning - for a time. The tone shifted again when Ukraine proved it might actually win, causing Putin to aggressively rattle his nuclear saber back in 2022.
Why does this happen? No conspiracy is required, though a lot of people come to believe that’s what’s going on. Journalists and pundits simply herd around conventional wisdom because it’s generally safer, especially on matters of foreign policy - ask the wrong questions, and you’ll stop being invited to briefings and press conferences.
Zelensky has proven deeply problematic for power players in both D.C. and Moscow. Many who have been going after Zelensky lately are deploying rhetoric that looks suspiciously similar to what the oligarchs who catered to the USA before Zelensky have always insisted about him. Politics sadly never stops, even when survival is at stake.
This serves as the backdrop for Zelensky’s comments about nuclear weapons this past week. To be clear: Zelensky did not threaten to develop nukes. He was speaking in the context of Ukraine’s choice to pursue NATO membership, which as a nuclear alliance obviates the need for most members to build a nuclear arsenal. Yet by bringing up the topic he deliberately reminded the world that Ukraine - like Japan, South Korea, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Poland, Iran, and a host of other countries - could become nuclear powers in about a month.
To minimize the spread of nuclear weapons and the risk of a future nuclear exchange, Ukraine has to be allowed to defeat Putin’s assault. It was only possible in the first place because Ukraine’s allies have bought into his nuclear threats, so the demonstration that these are ultimately futile must be made. This dovetails with the necessity of proving that military aggression doesn’t pay off any more, that borders have some useful purpose beyond merely delineating the turf of different mob bosses.
Nuclear weapons have been granted a mythological, almost divine status because this is convenient for those leaders with access to them. The nonsensical theory of the “Nuclear Taboo” is actually a backhanded celebration of those countries that already have this semi-mystical power, a way to prevent honest public debate about their utility and purpose.
The real reason countries that could go nuclear choose not to a combination of cost and lack of proven deterrent effect. For generations most countries have been content to pretend that nukes meant no more wars of conquest because proliferation will be basically unstoppable once enough countries fear invasion. Geopolitics went into a relatively quiescent phase during the Cold War, memory of how bad conflict could get restraining the two surviving global empires, the USA and USSR, from pushing too far beyond their respective spheres. Now war is once again a game for powerful fools.
By talking about nukes, Zelensky raised the specter of a return to geopolitics according to the old rules. If one country cannot trust allies to stand with it when facing down invasion, if security is seen as divisible, the entire idea of a global community bound by common rules breaks. In that case, Ukraine and everyone else who can will go nuclear - covertly, at first, to preserve ambiguity in the hopes that alone deters attack. But eventually every tinpot dictator and even a few large corporations will have them, and accidents will be inevitable.
The choice is clear and must now be made: back Ukraine to victory over russia, or a whole lot of people get to live through some pretty awful times. There aren’t any quick or easy ways out of the mess the democratic world is in. It’s going to take innovation at the ground level backed by international structures that can take good ideas and scale them up to fix problems everywhere.
The first step is giving frontline personnel what they need to fight and survive. First resources, then improved doctrine, and finally more properly trained personnel. If Ukraine’s partners will get up and do their bit, Ukrainian soldiers will find a way forward. That’s the Victory Plan. That’s all it needs to be.
Strategic Brief3
If it hadn’t been for North Korea sending troops to fight Ukraine and Zelensky setting a veritable swarm of cats among the bureaucratic pigeon flocks by mentioning nukes, Israel might have swallowed up the media’s full attention this week. Victims of the massacre Hamas perpetrated last year finally got some justice when Sinwar encountered Israeli troops in southern Gaza.
So much for Israel’s strategy of bombing everything in sight to somehow release hostages held underground: good old fashioned soldiering is what got him. Not that decapitating groups seems to accomplish much. They always reorganize and come back worse - or get replaced by something even more terrible.
Sinwar’s legacy is transforming Gaza into a giant suicide bomb: determined to die a martyr, he got his wish. But far from a victory, Israel’s slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians has cemented Hamas as the soul of Palestinian resistance for decades to come. Members still emerge to offer what civic services they can whenever Israeli troops leave an area; facing the prospect of a guerilla war, starving north Gaza is reportedly Netanyahu’s new plan. There will be another Sinwar.
Hezbollah meanwhile is sending drones into Israel with lethal effect, even hitting Netanyahu’s summer house. Haifa and the northern parts of Israel that Tel Aviv is invading Lebanon to make safe are being hit harder than ever by rocket barrages. The ground assault into southern Lebanon is proceeding at a snail’s pace, afflicted by tunnels and Hezbollah ambushes.
The Israeli attack on Iran is still pending, but seems more likely than not to come this week. A leaked American assessment actually looks genuine, as opposed to the typical New York Times quoting anonymous sources routine, and suggests that Israel is planning to launch ballistic missiles from the ground and sky to avoid sending many aircraft deep into Iranian airspace. Fingers crossed Israel hits military targets that Iran can say were undamaged, resulting in its retaliation being small enough that the newly THAAD-augmented defenses hold and everything settles down.
The North Korean involvement in Ukraine deserves a fuller treatment, but from my understanding of the geopolitical dynamics it looks as if Kim Jong Whatever aims to get some combat experience for his officers while making Putin indebted to him. Kim has been putting on a big show of blowing up roads linking North and South, part of his recent move to essentially declare that the South is no longer part of Korea at all.
This could be a show designed to lull Seoul into a false sense of security, but the South Koreans, like the Poles, take their defense very seriously after experiencing the boot of foreign colonization. Now that Seoul’s future is manifestly brighter if Moscow fails in Ukraine, Putin might just have unleashed the wrong tiger. North Korean troops are probably disciplined and effective tactically, but if led by the usual orc idiots their life expectancy won’t be long enough for that to matter very much.
As far as American politics goes, it has been gratifying to see American allies recognize the warning signs. Trump is the favorite to win, and Harris isn’t breaking through with the right audiences.
Exactly as I’ve been predicting, the latter days of the American presidential election are seeing swing state polls slide inexorably towards Trump just as they did in 2016 and 2020, no October Surprise required. Ah, Nate Silver, if your poor readers only knew how easy it was to correct the flaws in your models… but one goes to a fortune-teller for the experience, not science.
The US election is almost guaranteed to be close, likely coming down to a few thousand votes in three to five states. There will probably be another popular vote-electoral college split. Congress will be closely divided, with the question being whether the Democrats control the House. Even if Harris ekes out a win thanks to better relative turnout, Trump will challenge the result, so it’s off to the races on that front.
Democrats, notably, have revived the rhetoric about fascism that swiftly disappeared after that assassin’s bullet clipped Trump earlier this year. Whatever the justification, there is a natural consequence that few appear to grasp.
What are ordinary citizens supposed to do if, as numerous prominent voices allege, Trump is a fascist who will shred the Constitution? To any current or former service member who took the oath to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic, those are fighting words. I keep asking Democrats at what threshold violent resistance will be acceptable, but none are willing to answer, implying that they lack one.
It’s frankly irresponsible to make certain claims if you aren’t willing to back them up. It’s the ultimate expression of crying wolf, guaranteeing that if and when a fascist does seize power and trash the Constitution no one will believe the people issuing dire warnings. Those who trusted them the first time around and got burned won’t risk it a second time.
One way or another, someone’s bluff is set to be called in early November, and it’s hard to be sure what lies on the other side. The safest bet is to presume dysfunction. Future funding for Ukraine is unlikely to pass Congress.
If Trump does win, at least that should prompt Biden to release a veritable flood of military aid to Ukraine. Many Democrats and loyal The Atlantic readers will no doubt prove willing to sacrifice Ukraine in the end, but in the short run they’ll want to do everything possible to help Ukraine succeed so that if it doesn’t, Newsom, Shapiro, or some other wonder boy governor imitating Trudeau and Macron can blame the Republicans. The parties might not stand for what they used to, but the names of the brands and their need to play off each other is unlikely to ever change.
Unless, my standing theory that the USA is ultimately facing its own post-Soviet moment is proven correct. When you couple sharp, apparently irreconcilable partisan differences rooted in cultural expression with a persistent geographic divide, you’re looking at the birth of entirely separate countries. Especially when the West Coast is approximately twice as rich as the Red States whose welfare states our tax dollars subsidize…
Conclusion
Ukraine is still alive despite everything that has been thrown at it by a much larger and better equipped foe. That’s evidence in and of itself that russia has become nothing more than a bad idea backed by inherited Soviet hardware the present generation of leaders barely know how to use.
Unfortunately, as those of us who have been writing about this wretched conflict for the past three years have been warning, the longer it goes on the bigger it is bound to become. When geopolitical fault lines activate, it’s like a chain reaction: one crisis bleeds into another. Israel’s wars and now North Korea’s involvement in Ukraine are part of the same process. This is the Ragnarok of the Postwar Order.
Preventing - or, if necessary, winning - a war with China depends on Ukraine’s victory. Good on you, Australia, for finally sending your old M1A1 tanks. Your 49 beats the USA’s 31. Minus losses, that should equip not one, but two full battalions.
I’m not a good enough writer to coin or borrow a word to adequately describe what happens when sardonic humor meets with sincere appreciation. But I get the sense that anyone who has ever spent time as an enlisted soldier understands the feeling well. I suppose you might call it optimistic skepticism. Which almost seems to be the default among the Australians I’ve known.
As grim as the situation looks, key trends are moving in the right direction. Shells are relatively plentiful on the Ukrainian side, while the annihilation of several strategic depots has impacted ruscist guns. Ukraine continues to lead the drone evolution race, with interceptor drones appearing more often. If the world’s democracies will dig deep into the inventories and step up, the good guys can win this thing.
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