Commentary: Zelenskyy sees NATO invite as ‘the only way’ for Ukraine to survive Russia’s invasion. His friends don’t agree

BIRMINGHAM, England: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used an address to the country’s parliament last week to unveil his “victory plan” for the first time in public.
The five components of the plan include an immediate invitation for Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an upscaling of Western arms deliveries and the lifting of any restrictions on their use against targets inside Russia, the deployment by NATO of strategic deterrence capabilities in Ukraine, Western investment into Ukraine’s economy, and Ukrainian contribution to European security in the future when the war has ended.
The first three Ukrainian demands are the most critical from a military perspective. Yet, from a political perspective, they are complete non-starters as the diplomatic wrangling over the past month clearly demonstrates.
Even the sole endorsement of the plan to date, by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, is only a qualified one: During his visit to Kyiv on Oct 19, Mr Barrot reportedly expressed the hope “to make progress on President Zelenskyy’s victory plan and rally the greatest number possible of countries around it”.
Elsewhere, support was even more lukewarm.
Mr Zelenskyy’s speech in parliament followed earlier pitches of his victory plan to leaders in the United States at the end of September and across Europe in early October.
In Washington, Mr Zelenskyy secured further support worth US$8 billion in military aid. In Europe, only Germany committed another €1.4 billion (US$1.5 billion) in military support, to be jointly delivered with Belgium, Denmark and Norway. Meetings in London, Paris and Rome produced no tangible new pledges.
Moreover, a highly anticipated gathering on Oct 12 of the heads of state and government of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group of 57 Western countries, also known as the Ramstein group, was scrapped after US President Joe Biden cancelled his trip to Germany to monitor Hurricane Milton. The meeting will now take place in a virtual setting in November.
Mr Biden’s rescheduled visit to Germany eventually took place on Oct 18. Mr Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were later joined by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron. Individually and collectively, they all underlined the importance of supporting Ukraine – but no new substantial pledges of additional aid were forthcoming.
On the contrary, before his departure from Germany, Mr Biden reiterated that that there was no consensus among Western allies to provide Ukraine with the long-range weapons and permission to use them for strikes deep into Russian territory that have long been requested by Ukraine and are a core element of Mr Zelenskyy’s victory plan.
Mr Zelenskyy, who was originally set to present his victory plan at the Ramstein meeting, was not invited to the gathering of the US, German, French and British leaders, but he had an opportunity to address EU heads of state and government and NATO defence ministers at their respective meetings in Brussels on Oct 17. Neither meeting produced outcomes that signal anywhere near what would be required to achieve the step-change necessary in Western support to change the odds in the war in Ukraine’s favour.
The EU’s difficulties and limitations in maintaining a united front are obvious in the Council conclusions that point out that “military support will be provided in full respect of the security and defence policy of certain Member States and taking into account the security and defence interests of all Member States.”
These certain member states – Hungary and Slovakia – are also opposed to Ukraine’s NATO membership, but so are the US and Germany.
Ukraine applied for NATO membership in September 2022. Mr Zelenskyy believes that an official invitation to NATO is “the only way” for Ukraine to survive the Russian invasion.
But this key demand by Ukraine remains well beyond what members of the alliance can deliver. The new NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, repeatedly side-stepped questions in this regard at his concluding press conference on Oct 18, noting that Ukraine’s membership “is something we are ongoingly debating, of course, also amongst ourselves.”
In the same way that the EU is procrastinating on finalising further assistance measures for Ukraine under its European Peace Facility and on an updated mandate of the EU’s military assistance mission to Ukraine, NATO is still working on establishing a security assistance and training facility for Ukraine as a dedicated command which is “to become fully operational in the coming months”, according to Mr Rutte.
The issue with these commitments by Kyiv’s western allies, reiterated also by the first-ever meeting of defence ministers of the G7 group of advanced democratic economies, is not that they are not sincere or that they will not eventually materialise, but rather whether they will reach Ukraine in time.
On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces have lost about half of their initial gains from their incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. On the frontlines in the Donbas, Russian forces continue to make steady gains, especially in the Donetsk region where they are closing in on the strategic logistics hub of Pokrovsk. In the northeastern Kharkiv region, Russian pressure has also increased, forcing the evacuation of Kupiansk, a city some 100km east of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
Russian forces have also continued their attacks on Ukraine’s critical national infrastructure and stepped up their strikes against Odesa, Ukraine’s most important Black Sea port in the far southeast of the country, and on Mykolaiv, an important inland logistics hub on the river Bug.
Russian air superiority – partly due to lack of Ukrainian air defences and partly due to the abundance of drones and missiles that Russia can deploy against Ukraine – is a critical factor explaining these setbacks. It also underscores the Russian capacity to produce military equipment at scale and to source critical supplies from allies like Iran and North Korea.
The evident Ukraine fatigue in the West, which partly accounts for the slow pace of making additional commitments or delivering on existing ones, uncertainty over the outcome of the US elections on Nov 5, and the problems that Germany, France and the UK face domestically, all point to the fact that, their rhetoric notwithstanding, Mr Zelenskyy’s key partners may already be beyond their peak in supporting him.
The problem for Ukraine and the West is that there is little evidence that Russia and its allies are as well.
Stefan Wolff is Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham and Head of the Department of Political Science and International Studies.