Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky intends to present President Joe Biden with “our plan for Ukrainian victory” in the Russia-Ukraine war in a last-ditch appeal for Washington to back Kyiv’s strategy before the U.S. election.
“The plan is ready,” Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv, per a WarTranslated translation. “I think it would be fair if I first introduce the plan to the U.S. president. Its success depends on him — whether they’ll give us what’s in the plan or not, whether we’ll be free to use what’s in this plan.”
Zelensky has appealed to Biden for more and faster deliveries of advanced U.S. weapons for the last 30 months, a diplomatic process that often involves a number of refusals by Biden’s team before a breakthrough. The latest iteration of that cycle centers on the long-range missiles, which Biden has provided to Ukraine on the condition that the Ukrainian forces not use them to strike military targets beyond a certain range of the Ukrainian border. If Biden refuses to scupper that ban, Zelensky has signaled that he won’t take no for an answer — at least, not Biden’s alone.
“Since everything can be delayed, I think I’ll introduce this plan in September,” he said. “And it will be right, I think, to pass this plan both to Kamala Harris and Donald Trump since we don’t know who will be the president of the United States, and we really want to implement this plan.”
Zelensky said the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast is “one of the elements” of the plan. “The second is Ukraine’s strategic place in the world’s security infrastructure,” he continued. “The third element is a powerful package to force Russia to end the war through diplomatic means.”
The Ukrainian incursion into Kursk came just months after Biden loosened a ban on the use of U.S. weapons to strike targets in Russian territory. He adopted that policy shift in response to Russia’s exploitation of the U.S. policy, as Russian forces launched punishing attacks on a major Ukrainian border city from Russian territory, confident that Ukraine would not be able to use U.S. weapons against them. Still, the surge of Ukrainian ground forces into Russian territory seemed to catch both Moscow and Washington by surprise.
“They have focused the Russian mind quite substantially,” Janis Kazocins, who retired as a general from the British army before ending his government career as national security adviser to the Latvian president from 2016 to 2023, told the Washington Examiner. “They did not ask us permission because it did not directly breach the guidelines that have been put down, specifically, about long-range weapons.”
Russian officials responded Monday by launching one of the single-largest missile and drone barrages of the war. Most of the ordnance was intercepted, but enough of the barrage reached its targets, including the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Plant, to force a Ukrainian energy company to announce emergency power outages.
“So it was one of the biggest, but I expected something worse than that to happen,” Ukrainian Parliament foreign affairs committee Chairman Oleksandr Merezhko told the Washington Examiner in a phone interview after the attack. “To me, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s reaction, it was trivial. It was predictable like that, and it was not as scary as it could be.”
Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials maintain that the operation has demonstrated that Putin’s threats of escalatory retaliation are hollow. And Merezhko hopes that Biden, now that he is not running for reelection, will prove more amenable to Ukraine’s requests.
“They have nothing to lose,” Merezhko said. “They have nothing to lose, but they will go down in history … and historians are very cruel people, and they know everything. Sooner or later, they will be writing about what kind of decision was taken by Biden, whether it was right or wrong … and our closest allies, like [the] Baltic states, like Poland, they understand it. You don’t have to explain to them, but for some reason, you have to persuade and explain to the current administration.”
Still, it is far from clear that Biden’s team will interpret the Kursk operation the way Zelensky hopes it will.
“At the same time, the people who were urging caution will say, ‘Now’s the time to be even more cautious,’” Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and special representative for Ukraine, told the Washington Examiner.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The try-and-try-again tenor of Ukraine’s request for the weapons can be frustrating, but Merezhko is trying to keep an even keel.
“No expectations, no disappointments. … The situation recurs constantly, and you keep asking, but you don’t lose hope it will happen,” Merezhko said. “I’m trying to follow, like, Stoic philosophy in this regard, and that is my kind of life philosophy.”