Over the past few days, the Russia-Ukraine conflict seems to have reached its culmination – not on the battlefield but in the halls of power. On February 28, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy faced verbal flagellation by United States President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance at the White House, which appeared to many staged and scripted.
It all felt like Trump was looking for a pretext to break up with Ukraine. The decision to freeze military aid indeed materialised on March 4 and it was followed by the suspension of intelligence sharing on March 5, which will immediately affect Ukrainian military operations.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy appeared to stand his ground, while European leaders hurried to hold a summit and express their staunch support for him. They pledged to continue military and financial aid to Ukraine.
It is tempting to ascribe the events of the past few days to the whims of Trump. But what we are seeing is a political show aimed at selling the bitter reality of Ukrainian defeat to a Western public, which for many years was fed the narrative that Russia is weak and could be defeated or weakened to the point of irrelevance.
The reality is that the US-led West has exhausted the available resources and willingness to wage what former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson admitted is a “proxy war” against Russia. What hides behind the rhetoric and theatrics is damage control and a blame game, preparing the public for the inevitable.
Staunch Russia hawks, like EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, as well as lobbyists for the military industrial complex, will keep insisting that Russia can still be defeated. But they’ve been selling this narrative and various magical solutions – like the supplies of F16 fighter planes or long-range missile strikes into Russian territory – for three years now and nothing has changed on the ground. Ukraine keeps losing men, territory and infrastructure.
It is inconceivable in the present circumstances that Ukraine could achieve a better deal than the one it rejected in Istanbul – under British and US pressure – in the spring of 2022 or the one it could have attained earlier, under the Minsk agreements. The latter framework, agreed upon in 2015-2016, envisaged that Ukraine would retain sovereignty over the separatist-controlled parts of the Donbas region, which Russia has now formally annexed.
The agreements have served as Kyiv’s benchmark for judging the outcome of the conflict. A former adviser for Zelenskyy’s administration and Ukraine’s main talking head at the start of the war, Oleksiy Arestovych, formulated the Ukrainian view on what would constitute victory over Russia back in March 2022 when he said “getting less than we had before the war means our defeat.”
In other words, the war is not worth fighting if the outcome would be worse than what Ukraine would have had under Minsk. Now with all the terrible losses it endured within the last three years, Ukraine is further away from achieving this goal than it has ever been. This is why the blame game has started.
Trump’s version of it involves accusing Zelenskyy of extreme intransigence and wasting Western aid. He also blames European countries, falsely to an extent, for not sharing the burden of helping Ukraine.
But he is not the only one who is playing this game. European politicians might be saying lofty words about unwavering support for Ukraine, but the caveat is always that the US should stay on board. When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer talked about a European “coalition of the willing” to help Ukraine get a much better deal than Minsk “with, if necessary, boots on the ground and planes in the air”, he conceded that it hinges entirely on “strong US backing”.
Despite strong-worded statements, the EU is unlikely to agree upon the 20-billion-euro ($21.6bn) aid package to Ukraine at their upcoming summit. European Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen has announced an ambitious plan to “re-arm Europe” and help Ukraine in the absence of US support, but Trump-allied Hungary and Slovakia said they would veto any additional help to Kyiv.
Since EU support hinges on getting the US back on board and that is clearly not forthcoming, European leaders can readily point fingers at Trump and blame him for the inevitable debacle in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy, for his part, is striving to demonstrate to the Ukrainian people that he has done his utmost, enduring angry reprimands and outright humiliation, to secure Western support and defend Ukrainian interests.
Last autumn, he presented a maximalist “victory plan” to the Biden administration, knowing all too well it was going to be rejected, because the very idea of Ukraine restoring sovereignty over occupied regions seemed preposterous given the circumstances on the battlefield and because NATO membership was out of question.
What he is doing now is continuing to signal that maximalism from the position of moral superiority, which is entirely deserved given Ukraine’s status as a victim of brutal Russian aggression.
Zelenskyy keeps demanding “security guarantees” from the West, knowing well that it was the Western reluctance to provide them that resulted in pressure not to sign an agreement with Russia in Istanbul and continue to fight for a better outcome.
All of this public posturing of defiance and maximalism is meant for the Ukrainian public. When he does not get what he is demanding, Zelenskyy will be able to declare that Ukraine has been betrayed and there is nothing left to do but strike a deal with Russia.
In private, the Ukrainian president and the rest of the ruling elite have been quite realistic about Ukraine’s prospects. In late January, Ukrainian media reported that the chief of Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR), Kyrylo Budanov, told MPs at a classified parliamentary hearing that Ukraine should launch peace talks by the summer or potentially face “dangerous” consequences for the Ukrainian state. The HUR lukewarmly denied the media reports, which quoted an MP present at the meeting.
All of this jockeying on the verge of the inevitable – in the US, Europe and Ukraine – is a feature of a political culture that prioritises neatly packaged messaging over substance. This political culture has dominated the Western approach to the conflict with Russia since 2014.
The West has brilliantly defeated Moscow (and perhaps to some extent – truth) in the information domain across multiple media platforms serving different audiences. And yet, it is bound to lose in the battlefield to a man who might be brutal and criminal, but who favours substance over form and whose decisions are grounded in reality rather than wishful thinking: Vladimir Putin.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
