The visions of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and that of the Head of the President’s Office Andriy Yermak about Ukraine’s prospects are greatly deverging from reality, this has become obvious during and after the recent official visit by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the United States between 22-27 September.
During the visit, the Ukrainian side has presented to its US supporters an ambitious vision of the future of the war-torn country in almost rosy colours – both the President and his right-hand man showed a picture very far from the real situation in Ukraine which was left in Kyiv during the five-day visit. The truth and the reality were left on the battlefields of Eastern Ukraine and also in the chaos of the Ministry of Defence in Kyiv.
The parallel existence of these two very different realities has become evident not only from the President’s speech to the Congress and his interviews, but also from Yermak’s speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Zelenskyy spoke about the situation on the front and elements of his Victory Plan at a meeting with a bipartisan delegation of the US Congress. In addition, in an interview with ABC News, Ukraine’s President said that the end of Russia’s war against Ukraine was closer to an end than many people think. At the Summit of the Future in UN, Zelenskyy noted that Ukraine was preparing for the second Peace Summit.
Yermak stated that Ukraine’s Plan for Victory, presented by Zelenskyy in the US, contains a clear vision of the steps to be taken to ensure a just and lasting peace. Andriy Yermak also noted that Ukraine’s invitation to NATO was part of the Victory Plan and encouraged partners to ignore Russia’s threats of escalation.
However, just as the Ukrainian President and the head of the Presidential Office were painting an illusory picture in the US of the situation on the battlefield and the future of Ukraine, further changes were already on the agenda in the Ukrainian MoD, which were dictated not by the bright situation but by serious problems. These problems, however, were not touched on by Zelenskyy and Yermak in the US for some reasons.
A week after the dismissal of two deputy chiefs of the head of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov on 20 September, Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umierov has announced the dismissal of four of his eight deputies. He explained that the decision on personnel changes had been made in the context of the fact that ’the system of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine – the Armed Forces, Defence Intelligence of Ukraine and the State Service of Ukraine for Special Operations – has a closed perimeter during martial law’, and therefore ’all processes inside must be clear and controlled’, and ’any external or internal attempts to influence them are unacceptable’. He also said that the defence procurement system is being reformed. According to media reports, the decision to dismiss the two deputies of Budanov at Defence Intelligence, was not coordinated with Budanov himself or on Budanov’s initiative. At the same time, unconfirmed information was spreading online that the Office of the President – that is Andriy Yermak – is planning to relieve Budanov of his post.
Sad as it is, it has to be acknowledged that, Zelenskyy’s Victory Plan is nothing but an attempt to re-phrase existing demands and requests, specifically for the Western partners. The most important element in this package is the aspiration to NATO membership, which poses a real risk to the Alliance from a country which has been fighting Russian aggression for two years.
Contrary to what its name might suggest, the Victory Plan is not reminiscent of any conventional military plan with such traditional components as defining war objectives and specific combat actions, as well as setting deadlines for the fulfilment of these objectives. The Victory Plan proposed by Zelenskyy and Yermak is nothing more than just another attempt to get money and weapons. Over the past two years, the Ukrainian President and the head of the Presidential Office have understood the mindset of Western supporters so well that they have realised that all they need to do is re-brand the existing requests, give the new package a name that sounds good and the partners will immediately be ready to approve another arms and financial aid package for Ukraine.
This time, however, they were wrong in their calculations, as their Victory Plan was met with a certain scepticism both in the US and EU Ukraine’s Western supporters seem to have finally realised what kind of game the Ukrainian leadership is playing. In Washington, it has become clear to Zelenskyy that something more than a re-branding of previous demands was needed to preserve Western support. At the same time, President of Ukraine also should be careful not to lose the sympathy of the entire Western international community because of his empty rhetoric.
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