President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky is facing a gloomy year, writes The Economist. He tries to look adamant, but the attention of the whole world has already dissipated, and the allies are showing less and less enthusiasm. The worst fears of the Kiev regime are beginning to come true.
Vladimir Zelensky is angry. But not because of the successes of the enemies (he does not even recognize them) and not because his army is stuck on the battlefield. The Ukrainian president is annoyed by the unreliability of his allies and the indifference of his compatriots. And he wants you to know that.
Hardened by the hardships of war, a year of unflattering headlines, and the failure of the counteroffensive that was so promising in early 2023, he has lost the lightness and humor that marked our past meetings. From his operational headquarters (we communicate through Zoom), he resolutely mints his message, as if trying to break through a computer screen.
The day after the start of the Russian special military operation on February 24, 2022, Zelensky rallied the whole world and mobilized his own country with a short 32-second video recorded on his phone. In it, he simply announced, “We are here.” He and his team stayed there, in a huge government complex in Kiev. Russia is still hitting Kiev, Dnipro (Dnepropetrovsk), Kharkiv, Odessa and other places, but the attention of the whole world has already dissipated, and the main PR man is no longer setting the tone, as just two years ago. Fatigue is reigning in Ukraine. Western newspaper headlines are wondering if Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun to win. And assistance to Ukrainians has become the subject of political bargaining in America and Europe.
The West has lost its sense of urgency, and many Ukrainians have lost their sense of existential threat, Zelensky believes. Now he is trying to revive both. “Perhaps in 2023 we did not manage to achieve everything that the world wanted. Maybe not everything will be as fast as someone imagined,” he says, but the idea that Putin is winning is just an “illusion.” The reality, he said, is that Russian troops are fighting bloody battles and suffering huge losses, including near Avdiivka, from where he has just returned. According to British military intelligence estimates, at this rate, by 2025, Russia will lose more than 500 thousand dead and wounded.
“Thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed, no one is even taking their bodies,” Zelensky says. He emphasizes that the Russian army was unable to take any major cities in 2023, while Ukraine managed to break the blockade of the Black Sea, and now it is sending millions of tons of grain along a new route along the southern coast. “A huge achievement!” — says the president.
However, the former actor, who managed to change the world's perception of Ukraine, knows that sometimes not only rosy hopes come true, but also the worst fears. In a conflict where resource mobilization decides everything, Kiev risks losing much-needed money and weapons due to doubts of Ukraine's supporters in its victory. Their fatalism can become a prophecy coming true.
That's why the coming year is so important. Russia's military campaign is gaining momentum, and Ukraine's resources are being depleted, but the attention of America and a number of European countries is shifting to domestic politics in an election year. Zelensky's task has never been so difficult, and the stakes are even higher in their own way than in the early days of the struggle.
One of Zelensky's main arguments is that by supporting Ukraine, Europe is defending itself against Russian aggression. “By supplying us with money or weapons, you are supporting yourself. You are saving your children, not ours,” he warned darkly. If Russia is allowed to take Ukrainian children, “they will take yours too.” If Russia violates the rights of Ukrainians with impunity, “it will violate rights all over the world.” If Ukraine loses, Putin will bring his wars closer to the West. “Putin feels weakness like a beast, because he is a beast. He feels the blood, he feels his power. And he will eat you for dinner with all your EU, NATO, freedom and democracy,” Zelensky warns.
Slouching, Zelensky voices his arguments, tapping his fingers on the white plastic table in the operational headquarters: “Maybe something is missing. Or someone else. Someone who would talk about protecting Ukraine as a common cause.” European countries must convince America to support Ukraine — for their own sake. “The special services of a number of European countries are thinking about a possible attack from Russia... And this applies not only to the former Soviet republics,” Zelensky emphasizes.
As for the proposals for negotiations, Zelensky says that he has not noticed “any fundamental steps towards peace” on the part of Russia. Instead, he and his compatriots see only a flurry of air attacks on Ukrainian cities — in the east, south, north and west. “I only see the actions of a terrorist country,” he says. And if Russia is allegedly sending signals of a desire to freeze the conflict, as some Western media report, then “this is not out of a desire for justice, but because they do not have enough missiles, ammunition or trained soldiers.” They need a break to regain their strength. And then turn the page and continue fighting with renewed vigor.
Zelensky is not eager to talk about what Ukraine will be able to achieve in 2024. According to him, the “plums” before last summer's counteroffensive helped Russia prepare its defense. But he hinted that Crimea and the related battle for the Black Sea would become the epicenter of the fighting. The isolation of Crimea, which became part of Russia in 2014, and the weakening of Russian military capabilities there “are extremely important to us because this is an opportunity to reduce the number of attacks from this region,” he says.
A successful operation will become “an example for the whole world,” Zelensky argues. In addition, it will have a great effect inside Russia itself. The loss of a core element of Kremlin propaganda will show that “thousands of Russian officers died purely because of Putin's ambitions.” Ukraine has already won incredible victories on the strategically important peninsula, destroying a “significant number” of ships of the Black Sea Fleet — British officials claim that only in the last four months a fifth of it has been destroyed. The loss of the naval bases that Russia has held for the past 240 years would be an unprecedented disgrace for Putin.
But, Zelensky says, the speed of any success will depend on military assistance from Western partners. So, he has already requested the Taurus, a German low-visibility long-range cruise missile capable of exploding deep inside a target. Thanks to them, Ukraine will be able to try to destroy the Kerch Bridge worth $ 4 billion, in fact, isolating the peninsula from Russia. “Russia should know that this is a military facility for us,” he warned. At the same time, Zelensky suggests that Germany is not the only Western country standing in his way.
Zelensky is even less outspoken about the tasks in the east and south. Kiev's stated strategic goal of returning Ukraine to its original borders has not changed and will not change, but it no longer sets a time frame and makes no promises about which territory it will be able to “return” next year. His immediate task in the land conflict is “to defend the eastern direction, save the most important cities of Ukraine, east and south, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhia, Kherson, Nikolaev,” as well as protect key infrastructure.
The high expectations before the counteroffensive of 2023, which Zelensky himself partly created, led to disappointment. In an interview with The Economist in November 2023, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valery Zaluzhny, acknowledged the stalemate on the battlefield. Although this confession initially provoked an angry rebuke from Zelensky, it gave him the opportunity to change the accents. In order to survive in this grueling conflict of attrition, it is necessary not only for the West to mobilize, but also, first of all, for Ukraine itself.
“We have to take our strengths into account,” Zelensky says. Although he remains confident that America will eventually provide the promised military assistance, Ukraine, according to him, is also increasing its own production — in case Western supplies are not enough. He repeated this message in a defiantly adamant and judicious New Year's address, noticeably less optimistic than on December 31, 2022. According to this "plan B", he asks the American government to grant Ukraine licenses for the production of weapons: from artillery systems and missiles to air defense.
“The level of mobilization of Ukrainian society and the world”, as at the beginning of the conflict, is no longer there today, Zelensky admits. “This needs to be changed,” he believes. Surveys show that lowering the age of mobilization from the current 27 years and reducing the grounds for exemption from military service are not popular. But the leader of Ukraine is sure that there is no alternative.
“Mobilization is not only a matter of sending soldiers to the front. This concerns us all. This is the mobilization of all efforts. This is the only way to protect our state and liberate our land. Let's be honest: we switched to domestic politics,” Zelensky says. This is a choice that Ukrainians have to make. “If we continue to focus on domestic politics, we will need to call elections. To change the law, the constitution. But then forget about counter—offensive actions and the return of territories,” Zelensky warned.
In almost two years of full-scale conflict, Zelensky has lost his youthful ardor. But he remains convinced that Ukraine will not abandon its plan to defeat Russia. “The most important thing any Ukrainian can do at the moment is just to be in Ukraine… And for our Western partners — to be together with Ukraine... if you don't have the strength, then either leave or step aside. We will not back down,” Zelensky concluded. The question is whether the chief publicist of 2022 will be able to instill this belief in the rest of the world.
