After briefly presenting his Victory Plan at the seat of Ukraine’s national sovereignty, the Verkhovna Rada, Volodymyr Zelensky has continued his tour to try to win the support of the people and institutions that really matter – his foreign partners. In Brussels, the Ukrainian president sought to curry favour with one of his main suppliers, the current support of the Ukrainian state, the European Union, whose Parliament once again welcomed him as a hero. “The last time you were here,” wrote Roberta Metsola, “I promised you our unwavering support on your country’s path to EU membership. Today I am proud to welcome you to the House of European Democracy as the leader of a candidate country for EU membership.” “Ukraine is Europe,” she said, deliberately confusing the continent with the political bloc. However, with EU entry long understood as a decision that has been made and that it is simply a matter of time, Zelensky’s speech did not focus on the benefits of the Union or the enormous benefit that will be obtained by admitting Ukraine into the European family, but on the continuation of his campaign to formalize the Victory Plan as a possible way out of the war. Kiev is acting in the same way that in the last decade it has managed to institutionalize the nationalist discourse, previously only characteristic of a part of the country, as the only possible national discourse. Ukraine is working to achieve the same objective and to make its plan – in reality a wish list that its allies must help it to fulfill and not a roadmap to achieve them – appear as a path to a just peace.

“We are ready to put the Victory Plan on the table for European leaders and we count on them to support it,” Zelensky wrote yesterday in a long thread in which he details the meaning of his proposal much more in depth than he did the day before before the deputies of his country. “Ukraine is ready for real diplomacy. But to achieve it, it must be strong,” added the Ukrainian president, who, continuing with euphemisms such as a just peace, which must be just for the population under his control and not for those who looked to Russia for protection against Ukrainian aggression, seems to understand true diplomacy as that in which he is able to dictate the terms and does not have to negotiate with the other party.

Here, too, there is a clear continuity with the precedents of this war. During the years of the Donbass war, Ukraine always prioritized the Normandy Format, in which it negotiated only with Russia and not with Donetsk and Luhansk, at that time the side that Kiev was facing militarily. In the spring of 2022, Kiev repeated the modus operandi of delaying negotiations as long as it was able to obtain concessions – such as the Russian withdrawal from northern Ukraine – until, having managed to gain time for its allies to send sufficient war material, it withdrew from negotiations in which concessions were demanded of it. Since then, Kiev has made it clear that it will only negotiate in a position of strength and without considering unacceptable concessions. The precedent of the peace agreements that were supposed to end the Donbass conflict is useful to understand what kind of conditions Ukraine is not willing to accept.

Ukraine’s well-known refusal to implement the Minsk roadmap, which did not require territorial concessions or the renunciation of membership in political or military blocs in order to regain territory, may indicate Ukraine’s low tolerance for true diplomacy, where negotiations are necessary and all parties are aware that they will have to make concessions. This is precisely what Ukraine is trying to avoid by means of the current plan, which requires its partners to take the war to Russia, an act that can only be understood as an escalation, in the name of peace.

Kiev’s discursive game in the coming months will thus be based on information about the preparations for the next peace summit and calls to end the war, mixed with demands for a greater and faster delivery of weapons in order to be able to intensify the bombings against Russian territory or strategic places such as Crimea, whose population the Ukrainian president has not addressed at any time during his presentation of the Victory Plan. Projection exercises such as the statement that Ukrainian soldiers “need more strength because Putin is preparing his reinforcements to continue the war, not to end it” will occur more often as Zelensky is preparing his reinforcements to continue the war, not to end it.

“Putin simply has to see that his geopolitical calculations are not working,” added Zelensky, whose geopolitical calculations are even further from reality than those of the Russian president. While it is currently a pipe dream to expect Ukraine to abandon the four regions that Russia has recognized as its own (Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson) as well as Crimea, which has been Russian since 2014, it is much less feasible for Ukraine to achieve its goals: territorial integrity according to its 1991 borders, NATO membership and a non-nuclear deterrent package, i.e. Western missiles on its territory.

Apparently satisfied with Zelensky’s Victory Plan, the still EU chief diplomat insisted yesterday that the war “is existential” and called on member states to continue supporting Ukraine, for whom winning peace and war “have to go hand in hand.” That is exactly the reaction Ukraine hopes to get from its partners, although, to the chagrin of Zelensky and [Andriy] Yermak, it is being lacking even despite the subtext of the proposal. Ukraine demands a lot from its allies, but also wants to show that it offers them important compensations. Kiev demands an immediate invitation to NATO accession that “would not only symbolize NATO, but also show the inevitability of Ukraine’s European integration and the irreversible path to democracy in the country.” “The invitation will strengthen our diplomatic position and will be one of the main arguments for stopping the war,” Zelensky said yesterday, presenting the invitation – not even the entry itself – to the Alliance as the element that will magically turn the war around in the same way that the Leopard tanks were going to break through the Zaporozhye front.

The Ukrainian president included a thinly veiled nuclear threat, saying that “either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons or Ukraine will be in NATO. NATO countries are not at war today. All people are alive in NATO countries. And that is why we chose NATO over nuclear weapons.” Ukraine ratified the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in the 1990s, but has not forgotten this nuclear aspiration. This is not the first time that Zelensky has used the nuclear issue as a threat, an argument he already put forward in 2021 and which was one of the reasons for the rise of political tensions.

Aware of the cost of maintaining the Ukrainian state and armed forces for its partners, with a certain tone of desperation as the situation worsens on the front and Russia does not give in economically or militarily as Kiev would wish, and fearful that war fatigue will take its toll on the former comedian’s most important audience, Western leaders, Kiev has seen the need to offer something in return. Peace through force does not refer only to the current war, but Ukraine intends to extend it into the future, thereby consolidating itself as a necessary external border where the West cannot afford not to have a significant presence that will bring them benefits. In exchange for support, Zelensky presents Ukraine as practically a NATO military base, the Western springboard against Russia that Moscow has denounced in the last decade that the country was becoming. The path had already begun, but the Russian invasion has accelerated it, although not as much as Zelensky would like.

“Ukraine has critical resources worth trillions of dollars, and Russia wants to seize them. These include titanium, uranium, lithium, graphite, manganese and others. These resources must not fall into the hands of Russia or its allies,” the Ukrainian president said, adding that “Ukraine proposes a special agreement with key partners – the EU, the US and our mutual global partners – to protect Ukraine’s critical resources, make joint investments and direct the relevant economic potential towards our shared growth.” One does not need to read between the lines to see in the proposal a practically colonial relationship in which Ukraine presents itself as a supplier of soldiers to “free up US forces to do more in their priority regions, especially in the Indo-Pacific” and raw materials to profit from.

“It is realistic to maintain positions on the front inside Ukrainian territory and at the same time bring the war back to Russia, so that the Russians can feel what war is and start to hate Putin for it,” Zelensky said, even though Ukraine’s setbacks contradict his appeal for peace through war, two aspects as compatible as the colonial relationship that his approaches present with the discourse of the national liberation war or the references to democracy with the cancellation of elections or a purely aesthetic use of Parliament.

Imposing the plan (translation)