Tom Nagorski
One year ago, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy got a hero’s welcome in Washington, greeted as a champion of the resistance against Russia and cheered with long bipartisan ovations during his address to Congress.
Ukraine was “alive and kicking,” he told American lawmakers, and President Joe Biden promised the U.S. would support the Ukrainian war effort “for as long as it takes.”
As Zelenskyy arrives in Washington this week, the war looks increasingly like a stalemate, ammunition stocks are running dangerously low, and Ukraine’s top commander has contradicted Zelenskyy publicly on the state of the war. Away from the battlefield, attention has shifted to Israel’s war against Hamas, and American support for the Ukrainian resistance has frayed.
What a difference a year makes.
All of which makes Zelenskyy’s visit this week to the White House and Capitol Hill–intended “to underscore the United States’ unshakeable commitment to supporting the people of Ukraine,” as the White House put it–as urgent as any foreign trip the Ukrainian leader has made since the war began.
Stalemate in the east?
While Zelenskyy aims to project confidence and articulate a path to victory, multiple reports suggest that Russian and Ukrainian forces are deadlocked along frontlines in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian troops have retaken more than half the territory Russia captured in the early days of its invasion, but most of those gains came in the first year of the war. A much-vaunted Ukrainian counteroffensive launched in June has done little to move the needle.
As The Messenger reported last week, recent private meetings between U.S. and Ukrainian officials concluded that key objectives of the Ukrainian counteroffensive had not been met. Those objectives included driving Russian forces from land in the eastern Donbas region and reaching the Sea of Azov to sever the land bridge between the Crimean Peninsula–which Russia annexed and seized from Ukraine in 2014–and the Russian mainland.
Ukraine's battlefield problems risk being aggravated by reported problems with troop mobilization, and the nation’s dire need for artillery shells and other ammunition.
U.S. President Joe Biden shakes hands with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy after a meeting in the East Room of the White House September 21, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Dissent in the ranks?
It hasn’t helped Zelenskyy that reports of political tensions in Ukraine have surfaced repeatedly since his last visit to the U.S.
The recent U.S.-Ukraine meetings raised questions about the fraying relationship between Zelenskyy and several Ukrainian generals, including his top military commander Gen. Valery Zaluzhny.
Multiple reports have described friction between Zelenskyy and Zaluzhny, some of which spilled into public view last month when Zaluzhny gave an interview to The Economist in which he said a Russian-Ukrainian stalemate was the war's likeliest outcome.
“There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough” on the battlefield, Gen. Zaluzhny said, adding that the conflict might settle into a years-long “an attritional trench war.”
Zelenskyy disputed the general’s characterization. “Time has passed, people are tired, regardless of their status, and this is understandable,” the president said. “But this is not a stalemate.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst told The Messenger that tensions between Zaluzhny and Zelenskyy have been evident since the early days of the war and had grown in recent months.
“We're hearing about it again and even more loudly, which is not surprising because we are at the most dangerous moments of the war,” Herbst said. “And the reason why this moment is so dangerous is because of…the unreliability of American support for Ukraine.”
Zelenskyy's (and Biden's) case for more funding
For the Biden Administration and some members of Congress, Ukraine’s latest problems only make the case for further U.S. support (the White House is seeking $61.4 billion in new funding) that much clearer.
In a pair of television interviews Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stressed the urgency of the moment.
“We are running out of funding” for the Ukrainians, Blinken said. “This is a time to really step up because if we don’t, we know what happens. (Russian President Vladimir) Putin will be able to move forward with impunity and we know he won’t stop in Ukraine.”
Also on Sunday, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said the American aid “can change the outcome of this war,” and from the other side of the aisle, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, agreed.
“My own view is that it’s very much in America’s interest to see Ukraine successful and to provide the weapons that Ukraine needs to defend itself,” Romney said. “Anything other than that would be a huge dereliction of our responsibility, I believe, to the world of democracy but also to our own national interest.”
But the Biden Administration and its supporters have run into a pair of hurdles of Capitol Hill–and those are looking increasingly like brick walls.
One is an insistence that aid to Ukraine be linked not only to aid for Israel but also to changes in the administration’s policies on immigration and border security. The other has to do with skepticism over whether Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians really have a path to victory, and how American aid can help them get there.
Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, said Sunday the administration has yet to justify the additional support.
“So what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is. What is $61 billion going to accomplish that $100 billion hasn’t?” Vance said.
That question is perhaps the key one Zelenskyy must answer, and doing so may require a rhetorical balancing act: He will have to project strength and confidence that his country’s war can be won; while also showing how dire the situation is, and that Ukrainians cannot do it alone.
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