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34 I Cover story bne July 2024
the fall of Avdiivka on February 17 and a six-month hiatus in US fiscal and military support, Moscow has been unable to deliver a coup de grace that its superior man- and firepower should afford it. The “cargo 200”, as soldiers’ coffins are known, continue to stream back home in large numbers from
the blood-soaked wheatfields of the Donbas.
The West has also made it clear that now supplies have resumed, it will never give Kyiv the most powerful weapons its needs to defeat Russia; Germany has ruled out the transfer
of Taurus long-range missiles and the US is reportedly deliberately dragging its heels in training pilots to fly the desperately needed F-16 fighter jets. Permission is also being withheld to use Western weapons to strike targets inside Russia proper. This policy is unlikely to change.
Other frustrations niggle Zelenskiy.
It has also been made abundantly clear to Bankova that Ukraine will not be invited to join Nato and that even its EU accession is at least a decade away. Moreover, after Polish imports of Ukrainian grain collapsed the local market last April, restrictions and duties have been reintroduced on Ukrainian agricultural exports to the EU, cutting heavily into Ukraine’s only source of foreign exchange earnings at a time when it is desperate for money.
Dozens of foreign policy experts on Wednesday, 3 July called on Nato members to avoid advancing towards Ukrainian membership at the summit, according to a letter sent to the Whitehouse, seen by Politico. “The closer Nato comes to promising that Ukraine will join the alliance once the war ends, the greater the incentive for Russia to keep fighting the war,” reads the letter. “The challenges Russia poses can be managed without bringing Ukraine into Nato.”
“US doesn't see Ukraine in Nato today,” Zelenskiy said in a recent interview. "It is so-called 'one step forward, two steps back' policy. I do not think that this is the policy of world leaders."
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The sword of Damocles that hangs over the conflict is the increasingly likely return of Donald Trump as president in November; he has promised to “end the war on my first day in office.”
Two key Trump advisers presented a plan to end the war in June that boiled down to telling Zelenskiy to negotiate or else the White House would cut
off all support, and telling Putin to negotiate or the US would arm Ukraine to the teeth.
Analysts say this is an asymmetrical dilemma, as to cut Ukraine off would almost certainly lead to Ukraine’s rapid collapse and probably a change in government, whereas to increase arms supplies to Ukraine would see Putin respond in kind with a general mobilisation and it could even bring China into the conflict as Russia’s defeat is as big a problem for Beijing as Ukraine’s defeat is for Europe.
Nato is also likely to be weakened under Trump as his team is suggesting a two-tier Nato system where the US will withhold the Article 5 support for
aid will fall from around $38bn this year to only $19bn in 2027, giving Ukraine a two-year window to resolve the conflict before it goes bust.
Still, starting talks will be extremely difficult, as Ukrainian legislation, sponsored by Zelenskiy, explicitly prohibits negotiations with Russia, and Zelenskiy signed a decree prohibiting any direct talks between himself with Putin personally. The Russians have also ruled out Zelenskiy as a counterparty,
as they claim he has no legitimacy since his five-year term in office expired on May 20, and that actually the speaker of parliament Ruslan Stefanchuk is now the legitimate head of state.
Talk of talks
Hard as it seems, the talk of possible talks is growing louder. Zelenskiy
has come closest to admitting that talks need to start in an interview last weekend with the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he said that the war “can’t go on for years.” Zelenskiy said there can't be direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia but floated the idea for the first time that there could be indirect
“The sword of Damocles that hangs over
the conflict is the increasingly likely return of Donald Trump as president in November; he has promised to “end the war on my first day in office”
an attacked country if they haven’t met the spending 2% of GDP on defence requirement, which defangs to some extent the threat to increase Nato support for Ukraine.
And Ukraine is going to run out of money soon. There is already a $5bn hole in Ukraine’s budget funding plans for this year that is forcing some cuts and tax hikes, and analysts widely believe that the most recent US and EU multi- billion dollar support packages could the last. The Rada budget committee is also forecasting that essential Western
negotiations through a third party similar to the Istanbul talks and the negotiations to thrash out the tripartite Black Sea Grain Initiative in the first year of the war.
In particular, he said, Kyiv is preparing "three detailed plans" in the fields of energy, food security and prisoner exchange that will be ready “by the end of the year” and will be presented to partners and also Russia. These
are parts of Zelenskiy’s own 10-point peace plan that he presented to the G20 summit in November 2022 that was