Zelenskyy’s Victory Plan Hinges on Harris Winning the Presidency

The Ukrainian president hopes he can rely on future U.S. President Kamala Harris’ support. But what happens if a certain unpredictable Donald Trump, whom Volodymyr Zelenskyy was also due to meet on Friday, wins the Nov. 5 election? Zelenskyy must face up to the fact that continuing U.S. support for Ukraine has become a campaign issue. In five weeks’ time, the prevailing mood in the suburbs of America’s swing states will prove crucial in determining Ukraine’s fate.

Zelenskyy arrived at the White House Thursday sporting a solemn demeanor and high expectations. The Ukrainian president also brought his carefully drafted victory plan.

Is it a plan for peace or victory? In the short term, many Ukrainians would settle for a plan simply to get them through the coming winter. Yet Zelenskyy is entirely right to ask for an idea of the West’s longer-term strategy by 2025 at the latest, with a view to reducing the war’s duration and offering some hope to his long-suffering nation. Western governments, particularly those in Washington, Berlin and Paris, have all too often been preoccupied with domestic affairs and crises of their own making.

Zelenskyy wants to leverage a policy of strategic strength to compel Russia toward peace by helping the leadership in Moscow recognize that the costs of continuing the war will exceed what it stands to gain in terms of the lasting damage inflicted on Russia and its people.

Can the West find the means to further this strategic end? The U.S. administration’s announcement on Thursday that more than 50 countries allied to Ukraine will gather in Germany in October could be a constructive step in that direction. U.S. President Joe Biden will host this high-level meeting.

Putin’s Global Propaganda Coup

The problem is that Biden is an outgoing president, and the summit is set to coincide with his last days in office. In a matter of days after the meeting in Germany ends, it will be apparent whether the policies agreed there stand any chance of seeing the light of day. They could all so easily come to naught if Donald Trump is elected president on Nov. 5.

Meanwhile, Trump, the pugnacious campaigner, has been turning Ukrainian President Zelenskyy into a whipping boy. He railed in front of cheering supporters in North Carolina that the U.S., “continue[s] to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal.”

Moreover, Vladimir Putin can raise a glass to his successful global propaganda coup, for the tenor of Trump’s campaign-trail outbursts in the American swing states echoes the isolationist rhetoric of the far-right Alternative for Germany and left-wing populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance parties during the recent regional parliamentary elections in the German states of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg. Why should we give money to Ukraine? Don’t we have enough problems here in our own country? As long as Putin keeps up his military pressure on Ukraine, and the political waves of anti-Kyiv sentiment simultaneously continue to roll through the European Union and United States, Russia will achieve its objective.

Nonetheless, Trump did agree to a brief meeting with Zelenskyy at Trump Tower in New York on Friday. In doing so, he acceded to holding their first face-to-face meeting in two years — something Zelenskyy had been lobbying for during his U.S. visit, despite their recent evident differences of opinion.

JD Vance: An Extremely Far Cry from Kennedy

At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, gave a master class in how to give the complete cold shoulder to the president of a country enduring a Russian invasion, on both political and personal levels. Despite the fact that he was physically staying in the same hotel, Vance chose to skip a round of meetings between the Ukrainian president, U.S. senators and the NATO Secretary General because he did not believe he “would learn anything new” from Zelenskyy. Similarly in June of this year, there was talk of the disgust felt in NATO circles when elected members of the AfD and BSW walked out during an address Zelenskyy gave to the German federal parliament.

When can anyone recall leading U.S. politicians ever having retreated so far from their commitment to liberal democracy? In 1961, John F. Kennedy pledged that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Citizens of West German federal states have benefited from this underlying assumption for decades. But does the assurance still stand?

We cannot expect the elderly Biden to produce such a defining Kennedy moment. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, might be tested in this regard. After her meeting with the Ukrainian president in Washington on Thursday, she set out her stance clearly when she said: “I will continue to stand with Ukraine … And I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war. To be safe, secure and prosperous, the United States must continue to fulfill our long-standing role of global leadership.”

If there’s one thing both parties understand, it’s that Harris can only help Zelenskyy realize his victory plan if she herself prevails in the presidential election on Nov. 5. And the bitter, but incontrovertible, truth the Ukrainian president must swallow is that his country’s fate will inevitably be decided by the prevailing mood in the suburbs of America’s swing states in five weeks’ time.