Tense Times For Ukraine As Pressure Mounts On The Battlefield And Beyond

Winter is approaching, Russian forces are advancing, and the future of support from Kyiv's most powerful backer is uncertain as the United States heads toward a closely fought presidential election in less than a month.

Ukraine is fighting for its survival and its sovereignty, so any day, week, or month is potentially crucial to the country's fate.

But a confluence of factors makes this a major crunch time: Ukraine is facing pressure on multiple fronts -- not least on the actual front line that cuts across the country from the northeast to the south. Moscow's troops have been pushing forward in the eastern region known as the Donbas, where they took the key city of Vuhledar last week.

With winter on the way, relentless Russian attacks have substantially reduced Ukraine's power generation capacity, raising the specter of an energy crisis.

This week, even the weather halfway across the world seemed to be working against Kyiv: U.S. President Joe Biden called off a trip to Germany as a hurricane bore down on Florida, prompting the cancellation of a top-level October 12 meeting of Western weapons providers -- and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy -- that was supposed to be a powerful show of support.

No new date was set for the Ukraine Defense Contact Group gathering, which was to have been the first ever at the head-of-state level. It would likely have been the last face-to-face meeting between Biden and Zelenskiy before the November 5 U.S. election, whose outcome could have a major impact on the course of the war that has raged since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

With plans for a Contact Group meeting uncertain, Zelenskiy is traveling around Europe presenting his “victory plan” for the war in talks with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, and other countries.

In a U.S. visit last month, he presented the blueprint to Biden as well as to the rival presidential candidates, Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

The response was underwhelming, and Zelenskiy returned home without one of the main things Kyiv seeks: permission to use U.S.-supplied missiles to strike military targets deeper inside Russia.

Election Day

The tight race for the White House adds to the uncertainty over the chances of getting that permission, as well as over U.S. arms supplies and U.S. policy toward Kyiv and the war. A Harris victory is seen as likely to bring continuity, but whether she might move further or faster to support Ukraine is unclear. Trump has repeatedly said he would end the war very quickly, leading to concerns in Ukraine that Kyiv could be pushed to make major concessions.

On the battlefield, meanwhile, Russia's gains have come at a massive cost in the lives of its soldiers and military equipment, and analysts point out that both countries are struggling to get more soldiers to the front.

But aside from a surprise incursion into Russia's Kursk region, Ukraine has made few gains of its own since it recaptured large swaths of territory in the east and south in 2022.

These facts on the ground serve as a reality check for Ukraine and its backers abroad, suggesting that Kyiv's goal of regaining all of its territory from an invader that occupies about one-fifth of the country is out of reach under the current circumstances.

This calculation is contributing to increasing pressure on Zelenskiy to set aside the aim of territorial integrity for the time being and consider seeking an arrangement that would stop the fighting and put security guarantees from the West in place but would leave chunks of the country in Russian hands -- not formally but physically.

Some of the talk about such a shift in objectives has come from prominent figures who have been among Kyiv's most vocal champions.

"Finland fought a brave war against the Soviet Union in '39. They imposed much bigger costs on the Red Army than expected," Jens Stoltenberg, until this month the NATO secretary-general, told the Financial Times. "The war ended with them giving up 10 percent of [their] territory. But they got a secure border."

Czech President Petr Pavel told The New York Times in late September that Ukraine would have to be "realistic" and that the "most probable outcome of the war...will be that a part of Ukrainian territory will be under Russian occupation, temporarily," adding that this temporary situation could last for years.

'Ensuring Ukraine's Security'

The remarks raised hackles in Ukraine, where a majority of citizens oppose making any territorial concessions to Russia. But as the war persists, the number of Ukrainians willing to cede territory for the sake of peace and independence has increased -- from 10 percent or less until May 2023 to 32 percent in May 2024, according to polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS).

That number has remained about the same in more recent polls, Anton Hrushetskiy, executive director of KIIS, told RFE/RL. Ukrainians "are ready to postpone greater certainty on the territorial issue," he said -- but only if they are confident of the country's security.

"The main issue is the format for ensuring Ukraine's security in the future, what it will look like," Hrushetskiy said. "Because if there is no explanation of how Ukraine can defend itself in the future, as a NATO member or in another way, Ukrainians will be against any agreements."

Zelenskiy, clearly aware of the sometimes-competing desires of Ukraine's citizens and its backers abroad, not to mention the continuing Russian onslaught, seems to be seeking to thread the needle -- to move forward, when it comes to the issues of peace talks and territorial control -- on a tightrope whose end is in the shadows.

In an October 1 article under the headline "Ukraine Faces Its Darkest Hour," the Financial Times quoted an unnamed senior Western official as saying, "Land for [NATO] membership is the only game in town, everyone knows it.... Nobody will say it out loud...but it's the only strategy on the table."

Zelenskiy hit back by saying that any "bargaining" about sovereignty or territory was unacceptable. That's in line with the goal he has repeatedly set out and that James Nixey, head of the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House, described to RFE/RL as "the maximalist objective, the all-you-want-for-Christmas" -- the withdrawal of Russian forces from all of Ukraine including Crimea, which they occupied in 2014.

At the same time, however, Zelenskiy is casting the "victory plan" as a blueprint for getting Russia to the table for negotiations.

He and his administration are "not talking about concessions on territory or something like this in their victory plan," Olga Onuch, a professor of Comparative and Ukrainian Politics at the University of Manchester, told RFE/RL. "They're talking about, 'Give us the tools we need to put ourselves in a better situation to reach the point of a negotiation when it will need to happen.'"

Tough Kremlin Talk (Through The Media)

"In truth, what is being discussed in Washington and elsewhere is not what some are calling a 'land for peace' deal, but rather an arrangement in which Ukraine could be given durable security arrangements, including potentially NATO and EU integration, even before regaining full control of its territory," Sam Greene, a professor at the King's Russia Institute, wrote on September 6.

"But more than the truth, what matters is how the story is seen, and this has contributed to a growing Ukrainian anxiety that the West is preparing to abandon it to an increasingly belligerent Russia, despite (or maybe precisely because) of the fact that Russia is becoming even more belligerent," Greene wrote in a blog post.

That comment touches on a question that is sometimes given little attention in discussions outside Ukraine about the possibility of a cease-fire or peace deal: When, if ever, might Moscow be ready for talks on anything short of its own terms -- which, among other things, include recognition of its sovereignty over the five Ukrainian regions it baselessly claims belong to Russia.

An October 3 article in the Russian-language media outlet Poyasnitelnaya Zapiska, which cited what it said were several high-level sources close to President Vladimir Putin and people familiar with "negotiations processes" between Russia and Ukraine, seemed to indicate that the Kremlin wants to present a hard line on Ukraine.

After Ukraine sent troops into the Kursk region, where they remain two months after the cross-border attack, "the Kremlin came to a conclusion: We will destroy the state of Ukraine," the article quoted what it described as an acquaintance of Putin's as saying.

The source added that there are no prospects for peace talks at the moment, it said.

Aleksander Palikot contributed to this report from Kyiv.