A Victory Strategy For Ukraine
What is Victory? The Four Key Goals
OK, I started this piece expecting to write a whole victory strategy and got through the “victory” part and it was getting too long. Next week, in part II, I will go through how the victory goals can be achieved militarily/diplomatically.
Hello All,
One word that needs to be used far more often when it comes to Ukraine is the word “victory”. It has been a word too often forgotten in the last year, particularly since Trump became president. Since then we have heard far more about Russian strength, Russian advances, Ukrainian suffering, etc. This shift has happened to such a degree that it has been numbing and sadly entered the unconscious thinking of too many people. At the start of 2025, for instance, the focus in the White House was all on a possible Ukrainian collapse. In March, Trump publicly exclaimed that there was a strong possibility that Ukraine “may not survive” the war, even with US military aid.
Yet, even as the original prognostications turned out to be laughably inaccurate (the US has stopped all aid, and Ukraine fights on), the same general idea has come out of the White House. One of the arguments that Trump regularly gives for Ukraine having to cede land to Russia is that the war is trending in such a way that Russia will get that land regardless.
The end product of that shift has been devastating in terms of the negotiations and arguably the war at large.
