2024-10-17 15:21:00
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday that his plan to win his country’s fight against the Russian invasion could bring peace next year, but it includes a step that some key Western allies have refused to consider until so far: invite Ukraine to join NATO before the end of the war. .
“If we start moving now towards this victory plan, it may be possible to end the war within the next year,” Zelensky told his country’s parliament.
The president has tried to gain support for the plan from his Western partners, who have not yet publicly supported him.
The first of the five points of the plan presented in a speech to the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, is perhaps the most ambitious and the one most likely to make its Western allies hesitate: allowing Ukraine to join NATO while the fighting continues. Zelensky said that granting Ukraine membership would be a “testament to the determination” of its allies to support Ukraine. However, that may be too ambitious.
NATO’s collective security guarantee, Article 5 of the Military Alliance Treaty, is the pillar on which its credibility rests.
It is a political commitment on the part of all member states to come to the aid of any member whose sovereignty or territory may be attacked. NATO makes its decisions by consensus and many allies – including the United States and Germany – have rejected Ukraine’s entry as the fighting continues because they fear being drawn into a wider war with Russia.
At the Washington summit in July, NATO’s 32 members declared that Ukraine was on an “irreversible” path towards joining the Western military alliance.
Any decision on the bid to start membership negotiations is unlikely to be made before the next summit, which will take place in the Netherlands in June. Ukrainian troops are having difficulty resisting Russian military forces, especially in the eastern Donetsk region, where they are gradually withdrawing.
While Russian progress has been slow, their steady gains are accumulating and Ukraine feels an urgent need for more large-scale Western aid. But there are signs that Western support may be waning, reduced by attention on wars in the Middle East and domestic political issues.
Next month’s US elections could mark a dramatic shift in Ukraine’s fortunes, as Washington has been the largest provider of military aid. Zelensky publicly acknowledged for the first time that in private conversations with Ukraine his Western partners increasingly talk about “negotiations” with Russia and use the word “justice” much less frequently when talking about war. He also highlighted the importance of the fight in Ukraine by reiterating his recent claims that North Korea is sending military personnel to help in the Russian war effort, as well as providing munitions, and that Iran and China are also helping Moscow.
According to officials, Zelensky’s “victory plan” contains confidential parts that he did not mention in Parliament. Other aspects of the plan include continuing attacks against targets on Russian soil, such as the incursion into the Kursk border region that began in August, and drone strikes against Russian infrastructure moving deeper into the neighboring country.
Ukraine, he said, also needs more air defense systems and access to broader intelligence information from its allies. Zelensky noted that Ukraine is rich in natural resources such as critical metals “worth trillions of US dollars,” such as uranium, titanium, lithium and graphite, among others.
Such Ukrainian assets, as well as the country’s agricultural production, are among Russia’s main targets in the war, he said, but could be shared with allies in the postwar period. Even in the postwar period, he noted, experienced Ukrainian troops would be an asset to NATO’s efforts to keep Russia at bay.
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