Volodymyr Zelensky has, quite bravely, been playing the part of a military commander, but he’s never had a workable strategy for winning or even ending the war. Donald Trump’s pragmatism is forcing Zelensky to face reality, which may ultimately save Ukraine from having Russia seize it inch by inch in the coming years.
In the Age of Chivalry, bravery won wars. At the Battle of St. Jacob an der Birs in 1444, Swiss freedom fighters suicidally fought a much larger French invading force, outnumbered 20-to-1, resisting down to the last man. This persuaded the French to stop waging war on the Swiss, in awe at their sacrifice. Those days are gone. When the last Ukrainian soldier is dead, Putin will not pause to admire the selfless courage with which they fought and fell.
Putin’s mafia state will simply raise its flag over whatever Ukrainian cities it’s captured. Then, the Russians will bring in predominantly Muslim migrant workers from Central Asia to replace the former indigenous population of those places, rebuilding them according to the Kremlin’s totalitarian logic. This has already happened in the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was captured in mid-2022. If the war rages on for years to come, it may happen in Kyiv, Kharkiv, or Odessa, too.
Image created using AI.
In Spring 2022, Zelensky won the hearts of the world with his “I need ammunition, not a ride” decision to stay in Kyiv and spearhead the capital’s defense. Lion-like bravery, though, is no substitute for strategy. And beyond a PR strategy, strategy is something Zelensky never had.
Zelensky campaigned for President in 2019 based on naïve promises about quickly ending the conflict with Russia over eastern Ukraine. He was propelled to victory by Eastern Ukrainian oligarchs, whose media outlets promoted him. After Zelensky’s election triumph, European leaders hastily set up a meeting between him and Putin in Paris.
On the eve of that meeting, Zelensky first donned his now-infamous military-style wear at a TV talk show, and said that he wanted to bring back from the meeting a “feeling that everybody really wants gradually to finish this tragic war.”
The problem with conducting diplomacy based on feelings, not facts, is that they may not be reciprocal. At the meeting, it turned out that Putin was not ready to end Russia’s involvement in Eastern Ukraine on terms acceptable to the majority of Ukrainians. Contrary to the fears of some Ukrainian conservatives at the time, Zelensky also refused to accept terms that would have ended the conflict in Putin’s favor.
With a deal out of reach, Zelensky did not pivot to preparing his country for the intensified Russian aggression it was now likely to face. Instead, he stood paralyzed, like a deer in the headlights. The best he could come up with was a vague proposal to hold a referendum on building a Trump-style border wall around the Russian-occupied parts of Eastern Ukraine. Legally, Ukraine’s president would not have needed to hold a referendum to authorize building defensive fortifications. In any case, no referendum was ever scheduled and no wall ever built.
In January 2022, when Western leaders first publicly warned about an imminent full-scale Russian invasion, Zelensky did very little to respond. He did not call up military reservists until February 23. He did not close the country’s borders. He did not even order basic defensive measures in those cities likely to be Russia’s first targets.
It’s not about hindsight. As Ukrainian defense analysts acknowledged as early as 2021, any Russian invasion of Ukraine was always going to focus on Melitopol and Kherson. These two key cities in Southern Ukraine were the closest to the already Russian-occupied Crimea.
It was also widely acknowledged that Putin dreamed of creating a land bridge between Russian-occupied parts of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, a quest that would have been impossible without the strategically located Melitopol. It was also no secret that Russia wanted to capture the seaside metropolis of Odessa to cut off Ukraine from the sea entirely and erase its sovereignty.
In May 2014, Russian-funded groups of rioters had already tried once to seize Odessa, in May 2014. For Russian forces to get from Crimea to Odessa, Kherson is the first stop—and also the most formidable natural barrier, as the very wide Dniepr river flows through the city, crossed by only one road bridge and one rail bridge. The roads from Crimea to these cities also feature numerous shorter bridges over irrigation canals and other bodies of water.
Rigging and blowing up these bridges would’ve been the obvious way to mount an effective defense, slowing down Russian advances by weeks or months, as Ukrainian officials have repeatedly acknowledged. Yet, Zelensky failed to get it done.
When the invasion got underway in February 2022, Russian tanks were able to roll into Melitopol and Kherson easily, just days after the start of the invasion. Despite months of warnings about Russian forces amassing in Crimea, Zelensky had not deployed any of Ukraine’s combat-experienced light infantry brigades to these key cities, the nearest to Crimea. Instead, he kept them stationed in exposed cities like Mariupol in Eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region, where they were sitting ducks for Russian encirclement.
In the end, the task of defending Melitopol and Kherson fell to a few hundred self-organised civilian volunteers, with little government support and no defensive fortifications at hand. Forgotten by Zelensky’s government, some of the volunteers struggled to find even basic firearms or ammunition for their heroic, but hopeless, last stand. Russian invaders mowed them down in no time.
Zelensky’s inability to think ahead cost Ukraine vast areas of territory in the first days of the invasion.
Since then, Ukraine’s brave soldiers have managed to stop the hemorrhaging of land. Eventually, they managed to take back Kherson from the Russian occupiers, though Melitopol’s status remains unchanged. What hasn’t changed as well is Zelensky’s inability to formulate a clear long-term strategy for Ukraine.
Over the past years, Zelensky’s team rejected one well-meaning peace proposal after the other, instead of engaging constructively. When Musk tweeted his impractical, but heartfelt, peace proposals in 2022, one of Zelensky’s handpicked diplomats quite literally told him to “f*** off.”
In 2023, senior NATO official Stian Jennsen made the more viable proposal that Ukraine should cede some territory in exchange for the ultimate Western security guarantee, NATO membership. His sensible proposal was met with a torrent of outrage from Zelensky’s team, and he was forced to apologize for his suggestion.
Zelensky didn’t just turn down credible international peace offers. He also failed to tackle the biggest hurdle Ukraine currently faces: Ukraine’s military recruitment crisis. The fine for evading a draft summons is only a few hundred dollars (25,500 UAH, roughly 600 USD), an amount “insufficient to motivate” compliance, as Ukrainian media have noted. In parliament, Zelensky’s party blocked proposals to freeze the bank accounts of draft dodgers.
Without such effective legal tools to incentivize widespread compliance, desperate draft officers have to prowl the streets, looking to snatch up random evaders.
Since 2019, Zelensky’s entire strategy has boiled down to a single deus-ex-machina assumption: Sit back, do little, and let the conflict roll on, while hoping that a Black Swan event in Russia either topples Putin’s regime, or makes Putin unable to carry on the war, so Ukraine obtains a full victory, a strategy that is neither sustainable nor honest.
Trump is putting realism back in the equation because, ultimately, only Putin can end his invasion. Trump’s pragmatism has already forced Zelensky and his European allies to seek actual defense policies, abandoning wishful thinking about Putin’s impending overthrow. In the end, Trump may save many freedom-loving Ukrainian soldiers from a worse fate than that of Swiss freedom-lovers at St. Jakob in 1444.