Why the West should embrace Zelensky’s victory plan for Ukraine

If Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán hates something, it must be good.

Orbán, a noted Russophile, has called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s victory plan for victory “more than frightening.” So clearly, Zelensky must have hit a home run.

The West’s tepid response to Zelensky’s plan, which he outlined in a speech before Ukraine’s parliament last week, is also evidence he has touched a raw nerve. One may disagree with the plan’s five components — which include Ukraine joining NATO and the lifting of allies’ bans on the use of long-range weapons against Russia — but the overall thrust of the scheme is perfectly obvious.

Zelensky has reminded the West in no uncertain terms that Ukraine’s victory depends directly on the West and its political will. Simply put, the West will win if it wants to win. And it will lose if it doesn’t want to win. It cannot win if it doesn’t embrace a victory plan — either Zelensky’s or its own.

Zelensky has also reminded the West that victory cannot be bought on the cheap. Ukraine has sacrificed, and continues to sacrifice, thousands of its young men and women. All the West needs to do is drink less wine, beer and coffee and divert some of the resources it devotes to enjoying the good life to helping the efforts of Ukraine’s brutalized and victimized people. That’s not rocket science, just common sense — and, again, political will.

Zelensky’s victory plan is thus a challenge to the West. Small wonder that Western policymakers have responded by ducking. They know what Zelensky knows, but they fear treating the war as something that affects them as much as it affects Ukraine and Russia. No matter that Putin reminds them of the true nature of the war every day. The West prefers to play ostrich.

Are Western policymakers ignorant? Of course not. Their problem is different. They want Ukraine to win, but they don’t want Russia to lose — at least not too much.

But you can’t have it both ways. Either Ukraine and the West win and Russia loses, or Russia wins and Ukraine and the West lose. The Biden administration typifies this self-contradictory approach by providing Ukraine with just enough assistance to stay in the fight, but never enough to deliver a knock-out punch.

Why this skittishness about a Russian defeat? Stopping Putin means stopping genocide, imperialism and war — and the resultant massive geopolitical instability of a Ukrainian defeat. So, what’s the problem?

Two fears underlie Western hemming and hawing. One has already been mentioned: After so many decades of living high on the hog, the West fears tightening its belt and prefers to let Ukraine suffer the consequences of Putin’s aggression.

The other relates to the future of Russia. A Russia with a bloodied nose fits Western desires perfectly. But what if a Ukrainian victory produces the collapse of the Russian regime and, perhaps, even the collapse of the state — what then?

Won’t crazed Russians and non-Russians explode in mass violence that leads to civil war and national liberation struggles that, when the dust settles, result in a multiplicity of new and unstable states? Won’t some of them become havens for terrorists or mad generals with access to nuclear weapons? Isn’t Putin and his bloodthirsty, nuclear saber-rattling regime preferable?

A just-as-likely scenario would involve amicable relations among newly independent states and a greatly weakened, even defanged, Russia. The real problem with this reasoning has to do with causality. For it’s not a Western-inspired defeat that will lead to the Russian Federation’s disintegration. The culprits will be Putin, his brittle regime and his unwinnable war.

In other words, Russia is headed for collapse regardless of what the West does.

And it gets worse for Russia. Putin’s realm will fall apart even if he manages to eke out something resembling victory against Ukraine.

The war has exposed, produced and magnified a whole range of systemic weaknesses that will, sooner or later, destroy Putin’s regime and the Russian state. We don’t know when that collapse will take place. But we can surmise that, the later it happens, the greater the angers and resentments fueling it, and the bloodier it will be.

That’s why Zelensky’s plan is on target. By enabling Ukraine to win sooner rather than later, it’s promoting human rights, geopolitical stability and Russia’s gradual transition toward a post-imperial future.

That’s also why negotiations with Putin haven’t a snowball’s chance in Hell. Putin can’t agree to a cease-fire that accepts Ukraine’s “occupation” of provinces he’s formally annexed or of officially Russian Kursk without losing the tattered legitimacy he still retains. Nor can he agree to anything short of a smashing victory that might persuade Russians that 650,000 dead and wounded were worth the trouble.

Negotiations won’t stop the Russian system’s slow-motion collapse; indeed, by revealing the actual depth of the weakness of the regime and the state, they might accelerate it.

Ironically, Orbán’s opposition to Zelensky’s plan and concomitant support of negotiations is a poison pill for his pal Putin. Hungary’s goulash dictator thinks he’s helping Russia’s president. In fact, Orbán is hastening Putin’s political demise — and his own.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”