Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky knows he has only one sure path to lasting victory over Vladimir Putin’s invasion force — and it doesn’t involve trading land for peace.
“There is no, and should not be, any alternative but to completely get rid of Russian aggression, to liberate the land, to liberate people, because every city, town, and village that remains under occupation means people staying in captivity,” Zelensky told world leaders gathered at the Munich Security Conference this month. “May freedom be the subject of compromise? No. And it’s a rock-solid no.
But Putin appears unfazed by the loss of almost half of his pre-invasion army so long as he can maintain the fiction at home that Russia is the victim of Western aggression. If its very survival is at stake, his “special military operation” is worth the pain. “Ukraine cannot afford battlefield failure; Russia can afford many battlefield casualties and failure as long as Putin believes he can ultimately succeed,” warned former NATO Supreme Commander and retired Army Gen. Wes Clark at the same Atlantic Council event.
“The Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans, we have to prove him wrong in that regard. He's not going to be able to do to them what the Russian empire did to Napoleon's army or the USSR did to the Nazis,” Petraeus said at the Atlantic Council event.
Clark, the former NATO commander who won the 1999 Kosovo War against Slobodan Milosevic without putting a single NATO troop on the ground or suffering a single allied casualty, argues the current U.S. policy, which is to put Ukraine in the strongest position for a negotiated settlement, is likely to result in “a soft failure by both combatants.”
The real center of gravity in the war is Putin’s state of mind, argues Clark. “When he believes he cannot succeed, that's when this war will end,” Clark said.
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