The Biden Administration is reportedly working on a long-term plan for supporting Kyiv that does not anticipate significant territorial gains by the Ukrainian military from Russia in 2024, The Washington Post reported 26 January.
The new 10-year (!) plan will seek to de-emphasize winning back territory and instead focus on fending off new Russian advances while strengthening the country’s defense and economy.
The hope is now to help Ukraine hold its position on the battlefield, but ’put them on a different trajectory to be much stronger by the end of 2024 (…) and get them on a more sustainable path,’ said one of the several unnamed anonymous sources.
The Washington Post reported that this new plan is part of an international effort by nearly three dozen countries to provide long-term security and economic support to Ukraine. According to the anonymous sources, countries in this group are committed to this plan both out of necessity, given the disappointing results of the 2023 counteroffensive, and conviction that a repeat of similar efforts in 2024 would bring the same outcome.
Reminder:
Reports of Western countries encouraging Ukrainian leadership to negotiate an end to the war by ceding territory to Russia have grown in frequency since August of last year, particularly as Putin allegedly claims to be open to ending the war on the condition that Russia absorbs currently occupied Ukrainian territory.
Kyiv said categorically that a full Russian withdrawal is a condition for any talks. Ceding territory to Russia clearly violates President Zelenskyy’s 10-point Peace Formula.
On 29 January, there were several reports in the media about President Zelenskyy’s plans to dismiss Valery Zaluzhnyy from the position of the Commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces. These publications appeared after Zaluzhnyy, in a coloumn for CNN, has drawn attention to the fact that monopolization of the defense industry and imperfect legislation leads to problems with weapons production in Ukraine.
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I think I am not far wrong claiming that Zelenskyy’s plan to preform a complete reset in the Ukrainian Army may well be linked to America’s new war strategy for Ukraine, meaning that the new American strategy is likely to require a new Ukrainian Commander-in-chief.
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