Has the moment of Ukraine's surrender arrived?
In cities at war, when it is feared that the enemy army is about to arrive, bombs are preemptively attached to bridges and roads to be detonated when the assault is imminent. It is a desperate attempt to stop the onslaught and maintain control of the city. The strategy rarely works: when an army makes this decision, it's because the situation is critical and the loss of territory is practically inevitable.
I think of these bridges about to explode when I listen again to the address to the nation by Volodymyr Zelensky, the wartime president, This was done on Friday in response to Donald Trump's peace plan.Zelensky's words, a dramatic, grave, and surprising message to the Ukrainian people, seem like the first public capitulation by the Kyiv government, an attempt to prepare itself for what already appears inevitable: that the end of the war will be decided by Trump and his friend Vladimir Putin, and that Zelensky—and his European allies—has no other option. Is Zelensky preparing the Ukrainians for the final surrender? It seemed so when he said: "[We must decide whether to accept] the 28 difficult points [of the agreement proposed by Trump] or an extremely harsh winter, the harshest, with even more risks." It seemed even more so when he warned his compatriots who find themselves "in one of the most difficult moments in their history."
Zelensky, dressed in dark clothing against a very gray background, has posed a major, existential, desperate dilemma: "We must face a very difficult choice: lose our dignity or risk losing a key partner."Kyiv has one week to respond to Trump, the timeframe granted by the White House. But reality is setting in, and rather than facing "a historic decision," the Ukrainians find themselves in an ambush, restricted in their movements, cornered, and with only one viable option: abandoning their dignity and succumbing to Washington's will. Losing the alliance with the United States sounds like science fiction from a strategic point of view: basically because Kyiv currently has no real alternatives for protection beyond the White House, and Europe has demonstrated that, despite providing the most military and economic support to Ukrainian troops, it lacks the political clout to hold the reins. Strange as it may sound, without Trump's favor, Ukraine's future would be downright catastrophic, decisively more vulnerable to Putin, who knows that the momentum of the war has been working in his soldiers' favor for months.
There is another military practice that armies use when they fear a city is about to fall to the enemy: digging trenches kilometers away to establish a new defensive line of contact and protect the next settlement.
The main argument that Ukrainians use to justify their refusal to cede territories The argument is that if this happens, Putin will use these territories to launch a new invasion of all of Ukraine in the future. In Trump's plan, which accepts the cession of at least all of Donbas and Crimea to Russia, point 7 states: "Ukraine agrees to include in its Constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision preventing the future accession of Ukraine." A hard blow for Kyiv. Zelensky will try until the very end to obtain some concession to secure the country's future.
For Ukrainians, both civilians and politicians, future security guarantees are as much of a concern, if not more so, than the cession of territory. If the war, as it seems today, ends soon and does so by adapting to the directives of Trump and Putin, Ukraine will have to start digging trenches. Europe, too, is in some way capitulating to this pact and, like Zelensky, has no alternative. The trenches that Europe must dig should not only face Moscow. They should also face Washington. Zelensky's speech has further underscored Europe's geopolitical vulnerability.
