KYIV— The mood here is largely upbeat, as I discovered after two days in Kyiv to attend the twentieth anniversary convening of the Yalta Economic Summit (YES). The conference, founded by Ukrainian businessman Victor Pinchuk (a member of the Atlantic Council’s International Advisory Board), brings together the country’s political elite with prominent European and US leaders, foreign policy thinkers, and journalists.
The YES conference convened thirty-eight days after the start of Ukraine’s daring thrust into Russia’s Kursk Oblast. On a previous trip to Kyiv in late August, all my Ukrainian interlocutors were encouraged by Ukraine’s rapid gains in Kursk but concerned that perhaps their troops would advance too far and fall into a Russian trap. Since then, Ukraine has made additional advances and fortified their gains south of the Seim River. According to Ukraine’s State Agency for Fisheries, this prompted Moscow to poison the river, which would be yet another war crime committed by the Kremlin in its aggression against Ukraine. (Environmental groups should be up in arms about this, along with Russian damage to the environment at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and elsewhere.)
As I was heading to Kyiv a week ago, Moscow launched a counterattack in Kursk. Russian troops advanced several miles on day one and picked up smaller gains in the following days. But by the end of the week, Ukrainian reserves, apparently anticipating the Russian move, broke though Russian lines in two places, captured scores of Russian troops, and are now threatening the Russian rear. The great enthusiasm among Russian war bloggers, who were predicting that Russian troops would certainly meet President Vladimir Putin’s deadline of October 1 to clear Ukrainian forces from Russia, quickly turned to gloom. Those same developments lifted spirits in Kyiv, even as the city endured Moscow’s ongoing major bombing campaign.
But good news rarely arrives unaccompanied. Ukraine’s ingenuity against great odds, which surprises both its enemies in Moscow and its supporters in the West, has become a pattern of this war. But so too has the unsteadiness of those supporters in sustaining Ukraine’s defense. This unsteadiness featured prominently last week as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy arrived in Kyiv for a September 12 meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy hoped the envoys would deliver the message that the United States and the United Kingdom were lifting their ill-considered prohibition on Ukraine’s use of their medium-range missiles—Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, for the United States and Storm Shadow for the United Kingdom—against targets in Russia. This problem is essentially a US one. The Biden administration has slow-walked the delivery of increasingly sophisticated weapons to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began, as it has been deterred by Putin’s constant nuclear bluster. Since Storm Shadow missiles have US components, the White House can veto their transfer or use anywhere in the world.
Despite this pattern, Ukraine’s hopes for the visit were high because there were news reports that Blinken had told US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul that permission would be granted. But when Blinken met with Zelenskyy, it became clear that there was no such permission. These missiles could still not be used to protect Ukrainian civilians from the massive Russian glide bombs or to facilitate Ukraine’s incursion into Russia. This left a sour taste in Zelenskyy’s mouth, and he did not hide that during his address at the YES conference. He noted that when he has asked for new weapons systems or for permission to use them inside Russia, he hears the tiresome refrain that “we are working on it.” But there were also hopes that US President Joe Biden’s meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on September 13 would resolve this issue satisfactorily—or at least result in permission for Ukraine to use the British missiles against military and strategic targets in Russia. According to news reports, this did not occur, although rumors persist that such permission is coming. If not, Zelenskyy will focus on this when he sees Biden in New York next week on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly.
A second cloud visible in Kyiv concerns the upcoming US presidential election. Many of the Western participants in the YES conference hold the opinion that a win by former US President Donald Trump would lead to US pressure on Kyiv to accept the surrender terms for peace outlined publicly by vice presidential nominee JD Vance. While many Ukrainians share this view, others, including some highly placed officials, are fed up with the timid policy of the Biden administration and speculate that Trump might ultimately, once he confronts Putin’s bad faith, prove to be a stronger partner. They recall that he did not hesitate to launch Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase after dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed US red lines and used chemical weapons against civilians—a strike that astonished Moscow. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s remarks at YES reinforced this view, in part because his own plan for peace is an eminently sensible one, which, unlike Vance’s, does not meekly sacrifice vital US interests.
At the end of the day, the mood in Ukraine, just like the ultimate outcome of the war, will depend on military developments; and here too there is more good news. Some of the criticism of Ukraine’s strike on Kursk—including by Biden administration officials giving background quotes to the media—was that it was removing vital Ukrainian forces from efforts to stop Moscow’s slow advance toward the strategic town of Pokrovsk in Donbas. Even four weeks into the Kursk operation, they pointed out that Russian troops were not being moved from the Pokrovsk front to Kursk. That changed last week. Moscow started reinforcing Kursk with forces not only from the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, but also, according to people I spoke to at the conference, some from Pokrovsk. In a perhaps related development, Russian advances toward Pokrovsk, even small ones, have stopped over the past several days. It is too early to say that Russian troops’ forward movement is no longer a threat, but not too early to see the advantages of the Kursk operation also taking shape in Donbas.
Ukraine still faces a very difficult future: a winter with significant energy shortages because of massive Kremlin bombings targeting energy infrastructure, a Russia newly armed with Iranian ballistic missiles while the White House continues to dawdle, and the possibility of sharply diminishing US aid if naïfs in one wing of the Republican Party wind up in charge of national security policy. But the Ukrainians hang on grittily knowing, as the YES conference made clear, that the alternative to victory is their subjugation to a Kremlin headed by an indicted war criminal.
John E. Herbst is senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and served for thirty-one years as a foreign service officer in the US Department of State, retiring at the rank of career minister. He was US ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006.
Further reading
Tue, Sep 17, 2024
Putin is becoming entangled in his own discredited red lines
UkraineAlert By Peter Dickinson
Putin is attempting to impose a new red line over the use of Western long-range missiles inside Russia, but Ukraine has already been using these weapons in occupied regions claimed by Russia for more than a year, writes Peter Dickinson.
Tue, Sep 17, 2024
Biden shouldn’t ‘throw away his shot’ at a foreign policy legacy. It starts with Ukraine.
Inflection Points By Frederick Kempe
Biden’s excessive caution on aiding Ukraine could squander his best chance at leaving behind a positive foreign policy legacy.
Mon, Sep 16, 2024
How Ukraine’s Kursk incursion echoes the Gettysburg campaign
New Atlanticist By Gregg Curley
Viewing the Kursk incursion through the lens of the climactic campaign of the US Civil War offers a relevant framework for interpreting Ukraine’s motivations, possible outcomes, and long-term strategic objectives.
Image: Kramatorsk, Ukraine.- In these photos, members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are deployed in the border area of Kramatorsk on September 12, 2024. Russia said its forces are advancing in eastern Ukraine, where Kiev reported deadly bombings and urged its Western allies to authorize it to launch more attacks on Russian territory. Moscow has intensified its bombings in Ukraine in recent weeks, as it tries to stop the Ukrainian offensive launched on August 6 in the Russian region of Kursk. Handout / Latin America News Agency.