The West has betrayed Ukraine

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy gave some of the details of his five-point victory plan yesterday to MPs of the Rada. The main points included (although there is also a secret appendix that contains the details of the weapons systems that he is also asking for):

·   Ukraine needs to be invited to join Nato immediately. “Right now.”

·   European allies should shoot down Russian drones in Ukrainian skies and the lifting of restrictions on the use of Western long-range missiles inside the Russian Federation.

·   A non-nuclear deterrence of Russia by deploying a comprehensive non-nuclear strategic deterrence package on its territory, sufficient to protect Ukrainian territory in the future. In addition, joint weapons production should be accelerated and expanded.

·   Kyiv proposes signing agreements with the EU and the US regarding joint protection and investment in natural resources including the extraction of uranium, titanium, and lithium, and the use of these resources.

·   Security deals designed for the post-war period including a large and experienced military used to strengthen Nato's defensive capabilities and European security.

He will get none of this.

And everyone realises it. The talk has already turned from “victory” to “betrayal.”

“I am back in Ukraine and the mood is pitch black. Ukraine feels betrayed,” said Tymofiy Mylovanov in a tweet, the rector of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), former economics minister and a leading commentator on the war. “The West will have years to repent the betrayal of the courageous Ukrainians, whose only crime was their wish to join the Western democratic order."

Lack of ammo

I have been sceptical of the sincerity of the West’s backing of Ukraine since the start of 2023, when we started reporting on the failure of the EU to invest into the productive capacity of its own arms producers to equip Ukraine. It started with a cover piece we ran in January 2023 saying Ukraine was running out of ammunition. That was followed in June by another piece calling out the EU for not signing the long-term contracts that are needed for Europe’s privately owned arms companies to scale up production to match Russia, which was already on a full war footing. That was after the first Ramstein meeting where the Allies decided to significantly scale up their military support for Ukraine.

This failure was demonstrated by the EU’s promise in the second half of 2023 to provide Ukraine with one million 155mm artillery shells by March. When the deadline came less than 200,000 were delivered. Russia has been firing between five to ten shells at the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) for every one they can fire back.

We even had a reporter at the battle for Bakhmut in March who reported that Ukrainian artillery teams were rationing shells and choosing to fire at the most strategically important targets, as they didn’t have enough ammunition to support AFU units under attack in less important locations.

More recently things have become much worse after Russia introduced the FAB glide bombs, very large Soviet-era gravity bombs with wings strapped on their back to make them aimable. The biggest are 1,400kg and Ukraine is defenceless against them as they obliterate anything they hit. Russia has been firing up to 800 of these flying bombs a week. The only effective counter would be F-16 to shoot down the SU-34s fighter bombers that launch them, but Ukraine has nine F-16s and Russia has a fleet of around 350 planes.

At every step the West has provided Ukraine with some, but not enough materiel to make sure it doesn’t lose the war, but not enough so it can actually win.

Things got even worse in 2024 when first the US ran out of money for Ukraine in January and simply stopped supplying it. Over the next four months Ukraine’s skies were open and Russia launched a barrage in January to deplete the air defence ammunition and another barrage in March when it was all gone, which destroyed 90% of Ukraine’s power generation capacity. The winter this year will be very hard for Ukraine and 400,000 fresh refugees have already fled according to the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU).

Victory rhetoric

While the word victory is often bandied about by Ukraine’s supporters, it has been perfectly obvious for well over a year that no one has any intention of ensuring a Ukrainian victory. It is pure rhetoric to comfort the West and shield it from the ugly truth that Ukrainians are being slaughtered on a daily basis thanks to its inaction and half-hearted support.

The reality has been that the US plan was always to “put Ukraine in the best possible position for when the eventual negotiations begin.” In its more sober moments, the White House has said this repeatedly. But this point was left behind long ago.

The best place to stop would have been in April 2022 with the Istanbul peace deal, but that was scuppered by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson who promised the West would back Ukraine if it continued to fight. Zelenskiy had initialled all the points of the Istanbul deal but backed out at the last minute after talking to Johnson. The West has reneged on this promise as it never supplied Ukraine with enough to allow it to turn the tide.

It’s increasingly difficult not to see this conflict as a cynical move by the US to use Ukraine as a proxy to denigrate Russia’s military capacity at the expense of Ukraine. As Senator Lindsey Graham has said, “This is the cheapest war we have ever fought.” And it has not cost a single US life.

There was another opportunity to end the war this August when Ukraine was inching towards a ceasefire deal with Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin is winning, but he has had enough as Russia’s economy is cooling and set to slow sharply next year. Putin has done enough to be able to sell the current status quo to his people as a victory. But that was derailed by the Kursk incursion, a AFU initiative that is now also starting to lose ground according to the most recent battlefield reports.

Zelenskiy has been using the victory rhetoric too, previously because he really thought Ukraine could win, but now because he can see Ukraine is going to lose. As bne IntelliNews reported, Ukraine is suffering from a growing lack of men, money and materiel and since the fall of Avdiivka on February 17 the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) have been making steady progress.

From the talk of a stalemate last year when the frontline was not moving, between August and September this year Russia has captured 450% more Ukrainian territory than in all of 2023, according to the military analysts.

As journalist and bne IntelliNews columnist Leonid Ragozin suggested in a recent opinion piece, Zelenskiy has a Plan B: by framing his plan as a “victory plan” Zelenskiy can sell the inevitable refusal of the West to fulfil it as a betrayal and exonerate himself, presumably with the hope of calling the now overdue presidential elections and getting re-elected as well as holding a referendum to get authority to give some territory away in the talks.

The refusal of all the points in the plan was a forgone conclusion, starting with the accelerated Nato membership.

Zelenskiy denies it, but his recent international tour to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and then European capitals, must have included sounding out leaders on their support for ceasefire talks. Europe’s Ukraine fatigue is palpable and the money is drying up. US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said last week there is “no appetite” for providing more funding for Ukraine. Germany said it has run out of money for Ukraine in August, and France announced it has also run out of money for Ukraine this week. On top of that the G7 $50bn loan for Ukraine, approved on June 13 at a G7 summit in Italy, is reportedly close to collapse and a €35bn EU package, part of the same deal, is also bogged down in wrangling. Last month the allies sent Ukraine a mere $10mn when it needs some $3.5bn every month to perpetrate the war.

The strategy with weapons supplies has also shifted in the last few months. European Nato members are now scraping the bottom of their stockpile barrel, while the US is hoarding its vast supplies as it watches the Middle East spin out of control and China ramp up its aggression in the South China Sea. All the missiles and F-16s that have been recently sent to Ukraine have come from Europe. From the recent new $8bn package promised by Biden, the Patriots included in the package are actually credits to order more Patriots from US-makers and not missiles that the US has in its stockpile. Those will take six months to be ready.

Europe has finally begun to invest into its defence industry with a slew of plans announced recently, but that was only after it was goaded into action by the report from former Italian Prime Minister and ex-European Central Bank boss Mario Draghi, which highlighted the chronic underinvestment into the European defence sector over the last three decades as one of the key items that has undermined European competitiveness. And these new plans will take years to implement.

The new plan is to boost Ukraine’s defence sector so it can make weapons and ammo for itself. And indeed, Ukraine has made rapid and impressive progress with developing domestic drone production that is churning out a whole menagerie of lethal drones that have gone a long way to replacing its lack of artillery shells. Ukraine has even developed and tested its own cruise missile, Palyanytsia.

But relying on its own production to defeat Russia is a pipedream. So far it appears that Ukraine has only fired one Palyanytsia and none of the mooted joint venture factories with Western partners are anywhere near operational. The first gunpowder factories will only start appearing next year at the earliest and it will be years before Ukraine’s military industrial complex will be anywhere near capable of supplying the AFU with what it needs. Ukraine doesn’t have that long.

Zelenskiy’s plan has no hope of being approved as it falls on the first fence. Zelenskiy has been pushing from the start for a Nato Membership Action Plan (MAP) mechanism, but made an aggressive push during the Nato summit in July 2023 in Vilnius. He was met with a resounding silence. At this year’s Nato summit he was told not to embarrass everyone by asking again.

Instead, Ukraine was told it is on an “irreversible path” towards membership, but immediately following speech yesterday putting Nato at the heart of his plan, the US Ambassador to Nato Julianne Smith said that Ukraine will not be invited to Nato “in the short-term” and added that on the permission to use Western long-range missiles to hit targets in Russia proper “our policy has not changed.” Something is irreversible if it is moving forward, but currently Ukraine’s Nato bid is stood stock still, making the term meaningless.

What is so disingenuous about the Nato question is that it is the very question that started the war. In December 2021 the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a eight-point list of demands that started with “ironclad legal guarantees” of no-Nato for Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later hinted that the list ended with that demand too, but when Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in January in Istanbul he was told to talk to the hand.

If there was never any intention to allow Ukraine to join Nato, but Blinken blankly refused to discuss it, some have taken this to mean the US provoked the war on purpose. The US Department of Defence had been warning of a Russian invasion “any day” since November 1 the year before, however, this point of view remains contentious.

The West still has no war goals for Ukraine. As the money and weapons dry up, this week it was reported that US Senators are pressuring Zelenskiy to drop the enlistment age from 25 to 18. If the US is not going to provide any more help then the only way to stick to the “don’t lose, but can’t win” is to expend another generation of young Ukrainians at a time when the country already has the worst demographics in the world. As Senator Graham said: “We will fight to the last Ukrainian.”