Volodymyr Zelensky said that his government has reached out Donald Trump, inviting him to visit Ukraine in order to impress upon the presidential frontrunner of the need for more American military aid as he hyped the prospects of another counteroffensive, despite last year’s failures to move the line against Russia.
“Yes, we have a plan for a counteroffensive,” President Zelensky assured in an interview with Germany’s Bild tabloid newspaper this week as he continued his pleas for more weapons and money from Western powers, namely for House Republicans in Washington D.C. to bow to the Biden administration’s demands for another $64 billion in American taxpayer dollars for Ukraine, on top of the $113 billion already committed to the conflict.
Referencing the refusal from Berlin to send long-range Taurus missiles, the lengthy wait for American-made F-16 fighter jets promised from multiple NATO countries, and additional U.S. supplied ATACMS short-range missiles, Zelensky raged: “Our partners have certain weapons that we need today to survive. Ukraine needs them to survive and I just don’t understand why we don’t get these weapons.”
Warning of a potential defeat at the hands of Russia if the West does not send such weapons soon, the Ukrainian leader said that Vladimir Putin will “destroy everything” and “kill a lot of people”, claiming that the Russian strongman’s “wish is to take over the whole of Ukraine”.
“Most people will not run away, so he will kill a lot of them. What will it look like? There will be a lot of blood. There will be many victims, and many losses. We are talking about hundreds of thousands,” Zelensky said.
The lobbying efforts for more military support from Zelensky have extended so far that the Ukrainian government has even reached out for talks with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump under the presumption that he is personally preventing House Republicans from backing Biden’s aid package.
“I did not call him myself. We invited him to Ukraine both publicly and privately,” Zelensky told the German paper. “We expressed the wish that Donald Trump would come to Ukraine so that he could see the situation with his own eyes and draw certain conclusions. I am definitely ready to meet with him.”
Zelensky claimed that Trump replied to Kyiv “that he wants to [come to the country for meetings], but he doesn’t know when he can do it.”
Trump has consistently asserted that the 2022 Russian invasion would never have occurred if he were still in the White House and that he will seek to put an end to the conflict “within 24 hours“ if re-elected in November. The former president has not publicly disclosed his plans for accomplishing a peace settlement, however, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — a critic of the war and chief Trump aly in Europe — said that Trump would likely cut off American aid to force Ukraine to the negotiating table.
It is unclear if Zelensky has informed the United States of any of his other NATO backers as to the potential strategy for a second counteroffensive to take back occupied lands from Russia, which currently controls around a fifth of Ukraine’s land.
In one of the myriad of excuses offered up by Zelensky’s government for the failure of last year’s “Spring” counteroffensive — which in reality was delayed until the Summer and did not see Ukraine take back any meaningful amount of territory from Russian hands — Zelensky previously claimed that his plans were leaked to the Kremlin before the attack began. He said in February several fictional plans have been drawn up for the next push to disguise their true intentions from Moscow’s prying eyes.
However, it is also uncertain how Kyiv intends to avoid other practical issues, such as the use of drones by Russia to sniff out sneak attacks as was highlighted by Zelensky’s former top general Valerii Zaluzhny, who admitted last year that the conflict had devolved into a “stalemate” because of the relatively cheap technology preventing both sides from acting without the other being able to see.
Ukraine has further claimed at various points that the previous counteroffensive was stymied by Russia being given too much time to dig in their lines and plant landmines to Kyiv’s troops being slowed down by weeds and thick undergrowth, both of which would likely remain significant impediments to the progress of a new counteroffensive. Yet, Zelensky’s government’s principal strategy for explaining last year’s failure has been to blame its allies, for not sending enough weapons and not sending them quickly enough.
The talk of a new counteroffensive and the dismissal of a potential deal with Moscow from the Ukrainian leader will likely throw doubt on the prospects of the peace summit in Switzerland scheduled for June 15th-16th. Russia has said that it has no intentions of attending — given Zelensky’s demand to return all territory, including Crimea, before talks even begin — and it is so far unclear if representatives of the Communist Chinese government will join the talks as a proxy for Putin.
Ukraine has so far rejected the idea of freezing the conflict lines — given that it would mean officially ceding vast swaths of territory in the Donbas to Moscow — and has argued that any peace agreement or ceasefire would only serve to benefit Russia by affording the Kremlin time to build up arms and more soldiers for another invasion at a later date.
“The world will say: ‘Yes, we managed to freeze the conflict, the missiles are not flying.’ That is only until Russia simply increases the production and stockpiles of military equipment, missiles, drones and analyzes all the mistakes it made at the beginning,” Zelensky said this week.
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