Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky is set to reveal the details of his much-hyped ‘victory plan’ to MPs in Kiev on Wednesday, weeks after presenting it to US President Joe Biden.
The unveiling is expected at an extraordinary session of the Ukrainian parliament. Sergey Leshchenko, an aide to the head of the Ukrainian presidential office, suggested in a social media post on Monday that “obviously, now there is only one reason for such an event, and that is the public presentation of the victory plan.”
Zelensky’s team has used the term ‘victory plan’ to describe a set of requests to Kiev’s Western backers. The details have not yet been made public, but the plan has been outlined in general terms by Ukrainian officials and Western media.
Biden and other senior American officials were reportedly unimpressed with the content of the plan, which Zelensky delivered to the US president in person in late September. Some sources have branded it a “wish list” rather than a course of action.
Mikhail Podoliak, a senior aide to Zelensky, defended the proposal during an interview with the Ukrainian online news channel Freedom on Tuesday. He claimed it was based on “unconditional logic” and calculations of how much damage could be inflicted on Russia if Ukrainian requests are fully granted.
“What this plan says is, ‘Stop looking at what is going on with infantilism,’” he stated. “If we do ten times more than now, use enough resources, we will have a massive upscale of the war in the Russian territory, and social changes in Russia will follow.”
The Ukrainian official claimed Kiev’s proposal would involve up to 25 more Russian regions being affected by the conflict, including the Moscow Region, and would “make Russia look as it should look: helpless, running somewhere screaming in terror.”
Any compromise with Moscow would result in the full collapse of international law and would trigger armed conflicts in previously peaceful parts of the world, Podoliak claimed. He also lashed out at Western nations for failing to make sanctions against Russian bite as much as claimed, and for placing conditions on Ukraine’s use of foreign-supplied weapons.
“We have written rules for waging war,” he complained. “Ukraine wants to conduct war according to them, so let’s not include into those rules some informal limits and restrictions.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that if Western nations grant Kiev permission to use their long-range weapons for strikes deep inside Russia, Moscow will consider such attacks as coming directly from the states that supplied the arms and will respond accordingly.