Zelensky bets on new US payoff: long-range strikes into Russia

According to president Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s offensive in Russia’s Kursk region – which has forced the Kremlin, for the first time, to fight Ukrainian troops on Russian soil  — is part of a larger plan to bring peace. “The main point … is forcing Russia to end the war,” Zelensky said this week.

Zelensky did not provide any details of his plan, beyond saying that he will soon present it to President Biden and both presidential candidates. Yet his top priority is no secret. By showing that he can bring the fight across the border, Zelensky hopes that his chief sponsor in Washington will authorize the use of US weapons for long-range strikes far deeper into Russian territory.

Zelensky’s strategy is understandable: when it comes to dealing with Russia, Biden has repeatedly rewarded his Ukrainian counterpart for choosing bellicosity over diplomacy. Biden’s commitment to using Ukraine to weaken Moscow has led him to repeatedly ignore his own self-defined “red lines” for avoiding direct US-Russia confrontation. After seeing Biden send weapons that he had previously ruled out and grant Ukraine the permission to use them on Russian territory, Zelensky is making the logical gambit that humiliating Vladimir Putin in Kursk will convince Biden to let US missiles hit Russian territory far from the newly expanded front line.

“There should be no restrictions on the range of weapons for Ukraine, while terrorists have no such restrictions,” Zelenskyy said this week.

As part of his lobbying effort, top Ukrainian officials are headed to Washington with a wish list in hand. Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, and Andriy Yermak, a senior adviser to Zelensky, will present US officials with a series of targets that they hope to strike with US weapons. While the White House claims that it is not weighing the proposal, a Democratic lawmaker “said the administration was considering Kyiv’s request,” Politico reports.

Whether or not Biden ultimately offers his approval, the very fact that such a request is being made underscores the dangers of Kyiv’s decision to subordinate itself to Washington’s proxy war aims.

Rather than implement the Minsk Accords or accept the April 2022 peace deal in Istanbul that offered Ukraine nearly identical terms, Zelensky has adopted a strategy of sacrificing his people in exchange for a drip-feed of NATO weaponry and looser restrictions on using it. Having encouraged Zelensky to walk away from peace talks, Biden must now decide whether to “reward” his proxy by authorizing long-range strikes that could very well trigger a devastating Russian retaliation, including against NATO allies. And because US personnel play a vital intelligence, targeting, and operational role in Ukraine’s use of American weapons against Russia, he also must weigh whether to escalate his involvement in the proxy war to an unprecedented level.

Compounding the risks of Zelensky’s “peace” strategy, another pillar is targeting the Russian nuclear power plant in Kursk. In muted diplomatic parlance, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi confirmed this week “that there has been activity near here” and that he had been shown remnants of Ukrainian drones. By targeting the Kursk plant as it has in Russia-occupied Zaporizhzhia, Zelensky is presumably hoping that capturing a nuclear plant would grant him additional leverage – provided a nuclear disaster does not come first.

Zelensky is all the more desperate for Biden’s approval because his bet, to date, is not paying off. While Ukraine hoped that Russia would divert its forces from the east to defend its own territory, “any weakening of the Russian momentum caused by any redeployment is not discernible,” an Austrian military official who monitors the Ukrainian battlefield notes. As a result, Russia has had an easier time closing in on the strategic Donbas city of Pokrovsk. And has been an established pattern throughout the war, Russia has responded to Ukraine’s Kursk offensive with one of its most devastating strikes to date, including on Ukraine’s energy grid.

By contrast, to invade Kursk, it was Ukraine that had to divert a substantial number of forces from its eastern front. Moreover, according to the Wall Street Journal, “a substantial number of the troops came from a reserve force Ukraine had been building with Western encouragement for operations later this year and in 2025.” Therefore, by going all in on Kursk, Ukraine has not only weakened its defenses in the current fight, but also left itself shorthanded for the upcoming winter months.

Zelensky’s deliberate troop diversion in the Donbas suggests that he may be giving up hope of holding on to any part of the region. If that is the case, the reasons long predate the invasion and current military reality. The Minsk peace agreement, which Zelensky pledged to implement but ultimately abandoned, was predicated on granting limited autonomy to, and respecting the cultural rights of, millions of ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the Donbas who rebelled after the 2014 Maidan coup that overthrew the president they overwhelmingly supported, Viktor Yanukovych. The Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who drove the 2014 coup rejected the Minsk pact for precisely this reason: it would reintegrate Ukrainians whom they did not want to live with.

In an insider book on Zelensky’s presidency, Simon Shuster, a Time Magazine reporter with years of experience covering post-Maidan Ukraine and access to the Ukrainian leader and his top aides, inadvertently explained the ultra-nationalists’ hostility to Minsk. Under the peace pact, “Ukraine would be burdened with a region devastated by war and influenced by Russian propaganda,” Shuster wrote. “Its residents—some 3.5 million of them—would support a strong pro-Russian bloc inside the Ukrainian parliament, and they would hinder any of Kyiv’s attempts to integrate with the West.” Even worse, “they might even field a candidate strong enough to take power across the country, just as they had done with Viktor Yanukovych during the elections in 2010.”

In other words, from the ultra-nationalist point of view, Minsk threatened Ukraine with the threat of democracy – and the ethnic Russian Ukrainians that would be allowed to participate in it. This explained the paradox of ultra-nationalists opposing the return of their own territory under Minsk’s terms. To protect their own power, and future prospects of joining NATO, Ukraine’s far-right was willing to give up the millions of fellow citizens who stood in the way, rather than re-integrate them with autonomous rights.

Having repeatedly bowed to Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and Beltway neocons, Zelensky appears to be gambling that his hostility to peace will yield a new reward from Washington in the form of long-range strikes into Russia. Based on how the war has progressed, the Ukrainian president is making a reliable bet – as always, at his country’s expense.