Towards Victory In Ukraine: Zelensky Returns To America
Zelensky is back in D.C. this week to talk about how Ukraine plans to win the war. Accelerating developments offer a preview of Ukraine's strategy to defeat russia as the Kursk Campaign continues.
There are some weeks where news about the Ukraine War flows like water through a burst dam. Zelensky is in the USA to meet with American leaders and lay out how Ukraine plans to win the war with allied support.
Small wonder that Putin’s mouthpieces are running around talking about nuclear war again, especially with ammunition depots are blowing up deep inside of russia, taking out months of missiles and shells in a single go. Just another sign of Putin losing control.
On the ground, his campaigns aren’t over yet, but visibly weakening. This is how military collapse begins: slow, almost imperceptible at first, until eventually a fault line goes and the ground crumbles.
An Escalating Strategic Strike Campaign1
In Tver district, outside the town of Toropets, 500km from the Ukrainian border, some very apocalyptic scenes played out this week. The cause: a massive ammunition dump went boom:
A bystander could be forgiven for thinking this was a nuclear blast. Supposedly a couple months’ production of Kinzhal hypersonic missiles and a whole lot of North Korean artillery ammunition is gone, unable to hurt anyone.
The facility is big enough to be easy to pick out on Google Earth images, and the first wave of commercial satellites to pass over show damage to numerous bunkers. They were supposed to be able to withstand hits from aerial bombs, so that the relatively small warhead on a Paliantysia jet drone is apparently able to inflict critical damage is a very bad sign for the orcs. This is the sort of target that Scholz of Germany is clinging to his fancy Taurus cruise missiles to be able to threaten.
Air defenses were clearly insufficient - possibly because Ukraine so far has mainly targeted oil facilities and factories across russia. Some plans play out over months: Ukraine’s strategic strike campaign is partly driven by what drones are available, but also a desire to force Moscow into impossible dilemmas. Even if the orcs have a lot of air defense systems, trained operators are another matter. There’s also the burden of safely using them in friendly airspace.
For over two years Ukrainians have endured bombardments powered by depots like this one, allies making ever thinner excuses for not delivering long range weapons and a license to use them inside russia - or shutting down the airspace themselves. So Ukraine had to develop its own solution. The Tver facility wasn’t the only one Ukraine took down this week, either. Another sizable one got nailed when a train full of North Korean shells was arriving in Krasnodar Krai.
This is how strategic bombing is supposed to work: truly precise attacks against a critical node in the system. Moscow has to respond by some combo of beefing up defenses and scattering targets, which then makes them harder to defend. All downstream operations become less efficient. Better yet, no pilots had to risk their lives and the resource cost of thousands of small drones is still less than that you’d need to build and crew bombers.
Hint hint, United States Air Force. That fancy B-21 Raider project? Another white elephant like the F-35. I have to wonder if the AUKUS agreement didn’t just lock the UK and Australia into a similar military dead end, given that nuclear powered submarines could easily be obsolete by the time Australia ever gets one.
Unfortunately for Ukraine or anyone else trying to deter an enemy, being able to fire missiles or drones into hostile territory still doesn’t win wars, no matter how much money you throw at this capability. All it can do is raise the cost of doing business and force an opponent to choose where to commit its scarce resources. This can potentially make frontline fighting easier over time, much as opening a new front in Kursk has limited Moscow’s potential elsewhere.
But no major conflict is won without boots slogging through mud and blood to get to some objective on the ground, even if that’s just holding a single port to ensure a line of communication to the rest of the world. Drones and AI will only make this process simpler and safer, not replace people entirely. You still need ongoing physical verification by a living person to conclude an enemy has been left no space for tricks - a lesson Israel was forced to learn last year.
Much like having locks on cockpit doors would have prevented Al Qaeda’s attacks in 2001, Israel allocating sufficient personnel to maintain the prison walls it has erected around Gaza would have prevented the massacre perpetrated by Hamas. The unabashed brutality of Israel’s military and intelligence services since is a direct result of their great shame in having so miserably failed at their job - as if atrocities will fix that and not merely breed disdain.
The strategic theater in any war is about limiting the enemy’s generation of combat power at the front. Ideally, you want the enemy to produce it only to have it lost or crippled just before it can enter the fight. Warehouses of any size are immediately upstream of all frontline logistics work; ultimately stuff has to be stored somewhere between the factory and end user because the unpredictability of demand pretty much negates the potential of just-in-time logistics.
Ammo dumps are even better targets than factories because they’re easier to destroy. They’re right up there with oil depots - also flammable and inevitably required in a war - along with rail junctions and bridges. Next targets in line are specialty infrastructure like power plants, factories, and refineries. Airfields, long-range air defense sites, vehicle parks, and headquarters or troop concentration centers in the deep rear are in the same league.
Symbolic political stuff like government buildings is towards the bottom of the list, and anything remotely civilian should be off limits, even if the enemy is using people as shields. If they’re going there, they’ll pay for it in other ways - plus people are always potential sources of information, even inadvertently, and their presence tends to slow down enemy operations. Besides, living civilians are potent hostages - dead ones are just an atrocity that fuels resistance.
Ironically, Ukraine’s need for advanced missiles is declining thanks to domestic innovations. ATACMS, Storm Shadow, and Taurus weapons are still highly useful and desirable, of course, as Ukraine could easily receive and quickly use several hundred of each with tremendous combined impact. But the excuse of not giving them to Ukraine because Moscow might escalate is getting extraordinarily thin.
As ever - if Moscow is truly willing to escalate, this is bound to happen eventually regardless of anything Biden, Scholz, or Macron does. Better to call the bluff now while Putin isn’t panicking after a future military catastrophe spawns an internal power struggle.
I’ve begun the piece by focusing on the strategic front because it’s become apparent in recent days that what Ukraine has been doing since at least August has been part of a prelude to Zelensky’s visit. Ukraine needed a visible success before Zelensky came to reveal his Victory Plan to Biden, Harris, and Trump, something that would shatter the artificial and false narrative that Ukraine is doomed.
Overview Of The Fronts2
Ukraine’s Kursk Campaign remains at the heart of this, a deliberate message that also makes for a sound military operation. As Ukraine burns up Moscow’s combat power at one end of the equation, by seizing the initiative in a new front here Syrskyi forced the orc generals into revealing the limits of their reserves and their real priorities.
The past week saw Moscow’s much anticipated counteroffensive in Kursk grind to a halt without securing any substantial gains. Ukrainian troops met attacks on both flanks of Free Kursk with counterpunches of their own, giving up a little bit of ground on the eastern flank while trading some on the western flank in exchange for expanding a new incursion south of Glushkovo. The orcs reached the state border south of Snagost, but now they’re in a pocket vulnerable from three sides.
I had been wondering what brigade was committed here; it turns out that 21st Mechanized has entered the fight. Readers might recall that I’ve been keeping an eye on the 21st, one of the brigades Ukraine established in 2023 to receive NATO armor along with 47th Mechanized and 82nd Air Assault. Partially trained in Sweden, it chopped half its tank brigade to the 47th for most of 2023. Now its surviving 2A6 models are back with their Strv.122 cousins, though at least one was recently lost in Kursk. Those CV-90s are tough, though - no wonder Ukraine plans to manufacture them locally in partnership with Sweden.
Loss-wise, at least seven of thirty-one Abrams have been destroyed in service with the 47th, as many abandoned after suffering damage. Not sure how many were recovered and repaired, as the 47th has been pulling back for months. Ukraine still hasn’t received more Abrams, though a batch of 59 retired Australian models is reportedly under consideration. Funny how the Aussies, who are up for a war on the side of the USA at the drop of a hat and have a bit of a moat to rely on, are clinging to old helicopters, tanks, and jets.
By way of comparison, only two of fourteen Challenger 2s from Britain have been recorded as destroyed, none abandoned, and the survivors are still with the 82nd in Kursk, though spare parts are reportedly hard to come by. That makes Challenger 2s the best-performing foreign tank in Ukraine, based on provision to permanent loss ratios as assessed by Oryx.
One of ten Strv.122s (Leo 2A5s) was lost with another six damaged, many likely recovered, given that Ukraine hasn’t lost a lot of ground near Terny where they have until lately been deployed. Seven of 21 Leopard 2A6s have been destroyed with another half a dozen damaged, mostly reportedly repaired, the majority of losses coming back in 2023 when the 21th chopped its Leo 2A6s to the 47th.
Eleven Leopard 2A4s have been destroyed and another ten damaged out of forty delivered but another thirty-three were pledged earlier this year. The new ones appear to be joining the new 155th Mechanized Brigade, which Militaryland.net says is also getting French Caesar wheeled howitzers. If they’re equipped with modern IFVs like the Bradley, Marder, or CV-90 and APCs of the Stryker, VAB, or M-113 class, they’ll be a tough force, assuming effective training and leadership.
While I’m talking tanks - Ukraine is also beginning to field quite a few old Leopard 1s after putting them through a pretty hefty upgrade. I’ve been critical in the past of the decision to give Ukraine over 150 Leopard 1s - just under 60 have been delivered - because they’re as old as the T-62s everyone has rightly mocked the orcs for digging up.
Thankfully, however, Ukraine didn’t just ship them straight to the front. Instead, the Leo 1s have been given substantially more armor, probably making them as survivable as the T-64 which remains Ukraine’s workhorse. Their reverse gear is superior, allowing the tank to back away from a fight instead of turning around to escape, presenting its vulnerable rear armor to the enemy. The 105mm gun is smaller than the 125mm used by a T-64 or 120mm on an Abrams or Leopard 2, but reported to be extremely accurate at a longer range than older Soviet tanks can match.
I’d much rather Ukraine be getting every Leopard 2, Challenger 2, and Abrams in stock, but a Leo 1 is better than nothing. Right now it’s essential to boost Ukraine’s fighting strength as much as possible quickly to ensure Ukraine can attack when and where it sees fit.
Back to the 21st - it’s appearance on the Kursk Front begs the question of whether a the second wave of Ukraine’s Fall Campaign has already begun. One half of Ukraine’s second phase could be the defeat of Moscow’s Kursk counteroffensive followed by taking Glushkovo district south of the Seym river.
The 21st was part of a successful and largely under-covered fight to stop the orcs from reaching Lyman through Terny, north of the Donbas urban belt still held by Ukraine. I’ve been wondering if it had moved for some time not only because of the lack of footage, but the fact that something like 20% of Moscow’s ground attacks of late have been in the Terny area. Moscow has now made a clear habit of hitting any area where a brigade rotated out.
The 21st heading to Kursk along with the deployment of several brigades to Pokrovsk suggests that Ukraine has committed to holding its ground in Kursk and counterattacking in Pokrovsk once Moscow’s offensive effort peters out. Ukraine has proven adept at moving brigades around a localized to surprise local orc commanders with an intense counterattack, and that’s what the situation in Pokrovsk calls for.
The Pokrovsk front has seen Moscow’s efforts to advance closer to the town itself mostly repelled, save for the low-lying town of Hrodivka, while a difficult battle is still underway near the Vovcha river north of the Kurakhove reservoir. Putin’s orcs are visibly determined to secure the M-30 highway, eliminating the danger of a Ukrainian counterattack on the Pokrovsk bulge from two flanks. Ukrainsk has fallen, with ruscist forces advancing north of Tsukuryne.
To take Pokrovsk, Moscow will need to control the southern approaches, which means moving up the Solana valley through Selidove. This in turn demands that the orcs clear Hirnyk and Kurakhivka, which are protected by the Kurakhove reservoir to the south and a fairly steep slope west along the Vovcha. Moscow has to sweep down from the north along the ridge line before pushing farther west.
Even assuming that Ukraine is forced out of Hirnyk, Kurakhivka, and Selidove by November, the orcs still have almost as far to march on this axis to reach Pokrovsk as they’ve come from Avdiiva in six months. The terrain south of Pokrovsk isn’t ideal for the defender once pushed back from the Vovcha, but it’s not great for attacking, either, with few settlements to use as bases for the next lunge. As winter starts to bite and cover comes off the trees, accumulating troops for the infantry rushes Moscow relies on now will get tough.
I’ve been bullish on Ukraine’s prospects in the Pokrovsk sector in a broad sense even as Ukrainian troops have fallen back because their job is getting easier. It might not feel like it, but the average power of each successive orc attack wave is declining. There’s a very good chance that pressure from Putin to achieve visible success will drive the offensive too far, opening the Pokrovsk front up to a major reverse.
There’s an argument to be made for Syrskyi acting like a matador, letting the orcs commit to what looks like the opportunity for a big win before darting aside and unleashing a rapier thrust. Brutal, but effective - and also risky. Yet sometimes the obvious move is the winner, the enemy only surprised by their inability to survive the punch when it finally lands.
Moscow’s focus on the southern flank of Pokrovsk has been joined by a newly intensified effort to take Vuhledar. Here Putin’s forces continue to wage a desperate campaign to push Ukraine a little further away from Volnovakha and its crucial rail junction. This will make defending against a Ukrainian counteroffensive in this sector much easier. An attempt to surround the garrison in Vuhledar and force Ukraine out of the well fortified position is underway.
It would be frustrating to lose Vuhledar after such a long and successful defense, but even if Ukraine doesn’t send reinforcements to stabilize the situation and retreats from Vuhledar this won’t represent a major defeat. This area is sparsely populated and far from Ukraine’s logistics centers, mostly valuable for the threat it poses to ruscist positions in occupied Donbas and its ability to absorb combat power before Ukraine retreats.
Were Ukraine forced to slowly pull back here as it has on the neighboring Avdiivka front, this pace would have Ukrainian forces holding a line stretching from Velyka Novosilka to Kostiantynopil next spring. In just about the best case scenario from Putin’s perspective, March would see Moscow stuck here and on the edge of Pokrovsk, critically short on resources. Despite pushing Ukraine away from Volnovakha, Huliaipole to the west should still serve as an excellent staging ground for an assault towards the Azov Coast.
The slow wind-down of most orc ground operations along the entire southern flank of the theater is a sign of the trouble Putin is in. For much of this year Moscow threw bodies at Robotyne, trying to undo Ukraine’s progress from 2023. Eventually the ruins fell into the gray zone, little left to fight over, as the orc offensive waves petered out.
Aside from skirmishing near Huliaipole and Moscow throwing a lot of bodies away attacking Ukrainian positions on islands in the Dnipro delta, the fighting on this long stretch is done by drones. Moscow has been amping up an outright drone terror campaign in Kherson, attacking civilians about as often as anything military. Both sides keep skirmishing over some oil rigs that the orcs keep installing surveillance equipment on, which led to a Su-30 jet being taken down by a shoulder fired SAM a few weeks back.
But where Moscow used to maintain a high pace of probes and raids just to keep Ukrainian troops occupied, now huge sections of the front are relatively quiet, save for shelling. This allows Ukraine to cover large areas with relatively few and lightly armed troops - always true in less important areas before, but now it looks to be the rule. The south seems to be where Moscow often sends broken formations to recover.
Toretsk in the east, on the other hand, continues to experience heavy fighting, with the recent counterattack by the Azov 12th Brigade in Niu-York done to extract troops who had been surrounded by the orcs. They pulled back after, Ukraine slowly losing its last footholds. Of greater immediate concern is an orc push through Ukrainian defenses into the center of Toretsk, though at present they don’t appear to have firm control anywhere.
North of Toretsk, Ukrainian forces have been forced to withdraw a bit on the Chasiv Yar front, an orc assault along the southern flank seizing a narrow bridgehead over the canal. This joins another narrow one seized to the north, the pair part of a long-delayed ruscist attempt to envelop Ukrainian positions here that isn’t going very well.
Notably, 93rd Mechanized Brigade, which briefly appeared on the Pokrovsk front some weeks back, hasn’t been highly visible there since. It had previously been working southeast of Chasiv Yar, right where Moscow’s latest advance hit. I have to wonder if Moscow didn’t spot the move, and whether this large and experienced formation isn’t up to something interesting near Pokrovsk.
North of Chasiv Yar, the Siversk bulge has been fairly quiet, Moscow losing some positions northwest of Bakhmut and taking some near Vyimka. Beyond, the Terny sector is attracting a lot of orc heat, the orcs managing to enter Nevske, north of Terny, and Makiivka, further away still. 66th Mechanized and Third Assault have been working in this area, and the orcs are only just reaching the edge of a slope that ought to prove difficult to take, so we’ll see if momentum builds or they are pushed back.
Closer to Kupiansk, the orc breach near Pischane is slowly creeping to the Oskil river at Kruhialivka. This is another one of those not great, but not terrible situations, Ukrainian forces on the east bank to the north and south having their own supply sources and in no danger of being cut off.
The ruscist offensive plan in Kupiansk was thrown into disarray by Ukraine’s defeat of the Kharkiv incursion this spring. Without being able to drive behind Ukraine’s defense line along the Oskil, Moscow’s chances of taking Kupiansk are low. Here Ukraine has had some good news, finally clearing the orcs out of an aggregate plant that is more or less the last functioning position in the ruined town.
Vovchansk is basically gone, but Moscow wasted thousands of lives for nothing. There’s still a chance of a sustained push to Lyptsi farther west that could bring Kharkiv into artillery range, but as likely is a Ukrainian counterattack that drives the enemy back to the border - even beyond. With reserves formerly allocated to this front now being decimated in Kursk, if a surprise Ukrainian counterattack began here it could potentially defeat forward orc units then drive into Belgorod.
To take advantage of Moscow’s period of weakness before it can come up with a means of shoring up its strength again, Ukraine’s partners need to move fast and hard to fully equip Ukraine’s forces without limits.
The Air Campaign3
Some very interesting aviation news has emerged lately. In France, around thirty young pilots have been training on the Alpha Jet, a neat little aircraft that doubles as a a light multirole combat aircraft. Some have graduated, though how many is unclear.
This cohort, when fully trained up, should be able to proceed to F-16s or any other NATO-standard jet. At the same time, news has emerged that Ukraine has decided to acquire spare parts for older Gripen jets that Sweden plans to retire in favor of a newer model. Mirage 2000s previously promised by France are undergoing upgrades to let them launch ground strikes, probably with Storm Shadow missiles.
Ukraine is also talking about acquiring Eurofighter Typhoons, a highly advanced interceptor capable of launching very long range Meteor air to air missiles. It was built to hunt Sukhois and MiGs and is an expensive jet, plus Ukraine would wind up with old models from Britain, but if fielded alongside Gripens next year would dramatically change the equation in the skies.
Thanks to the usual D.C. bureaucratic nonsense, competition with Israel and Taiwan for F-16 parts and pilot training slots, and whatever other factors the public isn’t allowed to know about, Ukraine will wind up with just a single F-16 squadron this year and maybe a second in all of 2025. Adding a squadron of European jets and AWACS systems would let Ukrainian pilots go toe-to-toe with the enemy, numbers insufficient to secure air superiority but enough to reach temporary parity over select fronts.
It now also appears that Ukraine is going to get JSOW glide bombs, which while some aviation analysts are frustrated aren’t the long-range JASSM cruise missiles do have several upsides. Foremost is a likely lack of targeting restrictions, since their maximum unmodified range is just 70km, no more than a HIMARS. There are a lot of them floating around that are set to be retired or have already been, so no but we might need it for China excuses.
Ukraine can probably update them with simple rocket motors to greatly extend their range. If an F-16 can fire off a couple weapons from low altitude 25km behind the front and have them travel 100km, Ukraine suddenly has a direct answer to Moscow’s glide bombs.
Also, the cause of the crash that took the life of Moonfish and led to a surge in orc-backed propaganda about how Ukrainians aren’t ready for F-16s has been officially revealed. After shooting down an inbound cruise missile and turning to engage another target, the aircraft passed through the debris cloud left by the prior kill. Either Moonfish was knocked unconscious or something critical on the jet broke too quickly for him to recover or eject.
I’m sure that many will be quick to question the official story. It has the sad, banal ring of truth to me, though. I’ve actually been skeptical of the Patriot shootdown explanation from the beginning. Yes, missiles can jump targets and operators can make mistakes when trying to distinguish between a cruise missile and jet. But there still aren’t that many Patriots, and using one to hit a cruise missile or drones is a waste unless there’s no other option - which the presence of the F-16 was.
Another missile system could absolutely have been the cause, but nobody said NASAMS or IRIS-T: the rumor specifically stated a Patriot mishap. The greatest danger of friendly fire in Ukraine likely comes from teams with shoulder-fired missiles, because it’s much harder for them to understand what’s flying overhead than someone in a control vehicle who should be able to see where all airborne F-16s are thanks to integrated networks. F-16s on missile and drone hunting missions will want to fly at high altitude to make full use of their radars and the range of their missiles - this also helps anyone operating a long or mid-range SAM verify their target.
Sometimes, stuff happens and it’s nobody’s fault. Wait, strike that: it’s the fault of Putin and everyone who supports him. Direct your fire accordingly.
Geopolitics
Fortunately, evidence is beginning to accumulate of serious staffing and equipment crises throughout the ruscist military machine. These imply an inability to maintain the fighting at the present levels of intensity much past the middle of 2025. The war won’t necessarily end, but major offensives will be out of the question.
Putin’s generals appear to have been telling him for over six months now that existing mobilization efforts were insufficient to cope with casualty rates. Personnel loss rates have been on a steady upswing, exceeding 8,000 per week since the latest round of offensives began in May. Total assessed intake of mobilized is around 30,000 per month. If you’re only replacing losses, the overall quality of the force is almost certainly declining. If you’re not even able to reach that level, crisis is inevitable.
Equipment stockpiles are also draining much faster than they can be replaced. Cold War depots are more than half empty, implying a critical threshold has been passed where the cost and time involved in restoration of each new additional unit skyrockets. On multiple fronts ruscist assaults are using improvised civilian vehicles to move troops to the zero line, with major concentrations of tanks and troop carriers now rare on the battlefield.
This is exactly how the autumn phase of a system looks before it plunges into winter. Not all the orc brigades will be ineptly led, staffed by mobiks, and equipped with 1950s castoff gear. But more and more will, creating new opportunities for Ukraine to take advantage of. In short, it’s the fall of 2022 all over again, only on a much bigger scale. A point will be reached, probably within a year, where Putin’s war machine loses the ability to keep up with the new crises Ukraine is able to generate.
Zelensky is in the US this week to make this case and lay out what Ukraine’s partners must do to avoid the grievous error of 2022. Then, aid came late and in insufficient quantities to take advantage of the vulnerability Moscow revealed by losing to Ukrainian counterpunches in Kharkiv and Kherson.
Ukraine has fought tooth and nail since the 2023 Summer Campaign disappointed expectations to reproduce exactly this scenario. Ukrainians have managed to get here despite an active, sustained, and utterly ruthless campaign by the American foreign policy establishment to force Kyiv into accepting a bitter peace that will only lead to another war.
This claim sounds like propaganda, I know, especially to anyone who has paid attention during two decades of War on Terror and as US maintains active complicity in Israel’s self-destructive violence, but sadly, it’s the truth: Putin won’t stop coming now. His regime represents a cancer on humanity, the latest incarnation of the European imperialist spirit seeking colonies to exploit and people to enslave.
Time and again his type emerges to trouble global affairs, and it’s always true that the sooner their material power is broken the better. The cost of delay is always higher in the end, appeasement and hesitation leading straight to the disaster leaders most fear. We Americans got sucked into a War on Terror that portrayed itself as a repeat of the fight against fascism, so we’re numb to the real thing when it’s right in front of our faces.
This is what opens up the public to the dangerous illusion that the fighting in Ukraine is just another war, but with a chance of ending the world. Consider how many times Putin and his allies abroad have insisted that supporting Ukraine would lead to a nuclear World War Three. This hasn’t come to pass not because Ukraine has been restrained from crossing Moscow’s alleged Red Lines by Biden’s wise guys, but the fact that Putin isn’t suicidal.
If he goes nuclear - beyond the test that some are suggesting he’s readying - all bets are off. That will irrevocably collapse the world system because of the fetish leaders have made of nukes. Even if they don’t want to, they will be compelled to demonstrate their own capabilities or risk literally every world power that can going nuclear to ensure it is always able to stalemate any opponent.
While this world might sound stable, it won’t be, because powerful people always gamble. Sooner or later someone will screw up the delicate dance, and if just a few dozen cities were ever to burn, the short term impact on global agriculture would make climate change look petty.
Avoiding this tragic outcome is why Zelensky’s Victory Plan is such a big deal. Just as Ukraine’s personnel on the ground and in the sky are doing their bit on whatever front they’re assigned to, so is Zelensky. His is geopolitical: he is the face of Ukraine to the world, the only individual with the visibility and credibility to stand in front of the US press and explain to Americans why Ukraine winning the war advances America’s own national interests.
Biden’s only chance of a legacy not ranked somewhere between poor Jimmy Carter and the tragic James Buchanan Jr. is full backing for Ukraine without delay. The former was a decent man utterly overwhelmed by the challenges of the late 1970s, the latter an inept hack who averted America’s last chance to avoid a civil war.
Zelensky’s rhetoric is sharpening, and he has a right to press his case. In war no one can take anything for granted, and the risk of the US becoming totally paralyzed by partisan squabbling is very real. Ukraine is staring down the barrel of Putin’s dream: a USA riven by partisanship and unable to continue sending aid because nothing can get past Congress.
He’s potentially just a few months away - in truth, he’s already there, as Biden is terrified to do anything that might lose Harris a single vote. Even as his efforts to get Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire in Gaza have literally blown up time and again, he won’t take the necessary step of pulling aid because Israel is too popular among Americans - weakness on top of weakness that is bleeding over onto Harris. He’s afraid to do more for Ukraine despite the danger of Trump abandoning it out of a misguided desire to avoid driving voters skeptical of foreign involvement to Trump.
That’s only possible because of the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing failure to champion Ukraine’s cause: this has produced a narrative gap Trump’s fake desire for peace seeks to fill. A couple years ago Ukraine was all the media talked about, and always as if victory was weeks away. Then that suddenly stopped - a lot of people naturally wonder why.
Now the ongoing war in Ukraine and any apparent lack of political vision for how to help Ukraine win the thing poses a threat to Harris. All she seems to offer is more of the same, telling the queen of saccharine confessionals Oprah Winfrey about how she’d shoot at anyone breaking into her house. Then, being a Democrat, her campaign rushed to insist that she was joking.
This election is absolutely shaping up like a repeat of 2016 and 2020, with the best forecasting technique probably being to take a simple average of the two. Come September in US presidential campaigns, each candidate tries to appeal to the few real swing voters while also signaling to their much larger base that the entire future is at stake.
They’re playing a very delicate, deliberate game of being as much to as many people as they can get away with. The goal is to appeal on a personal level to demographic groups that all have their own ideas about what policy the government should prioritize.
Political campaigns slice and dice the electorate into little clusters they then try to appeal to each as if they are members. In making her gun comment, Harris was trying to humanize herself to rural people and folks without a college education who are primed to see any liberal from California as afraid of guns. But in America’s culture wars, the Good Guys are supposed to see guns and people who use them as the root of all evil, so a Harris rep had to immediately swoop in to assure liberals that she was only kidding.
Unfortunately for traditional politicians, the Network Age makes the old game painfully visible. What’s more, people are so riled up that trying to imply you’re one of them is very, very dangerous. It can easily trigger an uncanny valley effect, a term taken from robotics to describe how people will react very negatively to shapes that look almost, but not quite, human. On the other hand, if you make a robot look like something from Star Wars, people may even demonstrate affection for it.
Relative turnout among different demographics and their concentration in key states are what determine the result of American elections nowadays, not the choice of some mythical swing voter. It’s the real secret of campaign strategy. For anyone interested, the new Cook Political Report Swingometer is a pretty neat tool, allowing a user to look at what would happen if turnout among key groups changed in 2024 relative to 2020.
Long story short: the question each campaign is concerned with right now is how much groups that tend to be aligned with them bother to show up, as well as their margin of victory, in each swing state. Harris is desperate to keep college educated Democrats - the heart of the party now, and still disproportionately White - terrified of Trump while simultaneously telling voters without college degrees that she also cares about whatever their interests are.
Trump has gained ground - not much, but enough - among Black and Hispanic voters to throw Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona back to Republicans this fall, especially if overall turnout among these groups slips relative to 2020, as it probably will. When running my default planning scenario assuming a small drop in turnout and slight shift towards Trump, I noticed that these four states are projected to sink Harris. What do I see when I check the polls? They are where the warning signs in the polling data are clearest.
Harris winning the popular vote by three to four million but losing the electoral college by a single state would be my bet, if I had to make one, at this point. The next-most likely scenario is her winning the electoral college by a single state, leading to a legal nightmare as Trump contests the result. Then we’re on track for the Supreme Court throwing the election to Congress, where Trump will probably be able to get 26 state delegations to give him the win.
If Harris does manage to take office, the Senate will still be a legislative roadblock, Republicans dominated by claims that she stole the election. The Supreme Court is already poised to knock down any federal programs Red America dislikes for a generation. An end to an era may be at hand, the presumption of a working federal government gone.
Zelensky’s trip to Washington has a lot more riding on it than most people realize. If Biden cannot be persuaded to change course, to recognize the lunacy of giving Ukraine only intermittent and insufficient spurts from the firehose FDR used as a metaphor before Biden was born, it will be up to the rest of the world’s democracies to face the future without America.
Trump has keen political instincts when it comes to what Americans not typically heard by the political machine are feeling. He’s latched onto Kennedy Jr. and the joke of a peace plan Kennedy and Vance are pushing because he senses weakness. Biden and Harris have not matched their rhetoric about Ukraine with action to match. They thus cede vital ground to Trump, and there’s only one solution at this stage.
It’s time for a renewed public embrace of Ukraine accompanied by visible shifts in rhetoric and action. Ukraine’s swift victory must be embraced as the USA’s formal policy, and arms deliveries must flow. Before the election, not after.
Because let’s face it: if half the rhetoric about the threat Trump poses to democracy and the Constitution spouted by Democrats the past eight years has been true, there will be hell to pay if he loses, starting in November. If Putin and Xi are serious about dividing America, the period between the election and inauguration will be their time to play.
The future will not forgive Biden, Harris, or America if they fail to rise to the occasion now. It’s one of those moments where you’ve got to go all-in, or go home.
Zelensky is offering a precious last chance to change course and embrace Victory. If American leaders turn away and make excuses now, all anyone will have to offer when America needs aid someday will be deserved contempt.
You don’t get to spend upwards of a trillion on defense every year then give Ukraine less than 5% when its survival is on the line. Unless, of course, like so much of Putin’s power, it’s all a bluff. In that case, woe unto you when China comes to play.
Strategic Strike Campaign
The Fronts
Air Campaign