A Victory Plan That Never Had a Chance
Good Times Bad Times, the geopolitical analysis channel, delivers a blunt assessment of Volodymyr Zelensky's "victory plan" -- and the verdict is not kind. The piece, drawing on Tim Willasey-Wilsey's analysis from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), argues that Ukraine's diplomatic strategy has failed not because its goals are wrong, but because it fundamentally misreads the political environment in which those goals must be achieved. The distinction matters. A plan that would work in a just world is not the same as a plan that works in this one.
The analysis arrives at a moment when the battlefield picture offers little comfort to Kyiv's supporters. Russian forces continue their grinding advance across the Donbas, pressing toward Pokrovsk, encircling Kurakhove on three sides, and slowly compressing Ukrainian positions in the Kharkiv region. The Kursk incursion, once a bold Ukrainian counterpunch, is steadily shrinking. Reports of North Korean soldiers preparing for combat in the area -- cited by both Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence -- add an unsettling new dimension to the conflict's internationalization.
The Five Points and Their Reception
Zelensky's plan, presented to the Verkhovna Rada on October 16, contains five public points and three classified ones. The open points amount to a sweeping set of demands: a formal NATO invitation, expanded military aid including the right to strike targets inside Russia, deployment of NATO deterrence systems on Ukrainian soil, Western investment in Ukraine's mineral wealth, and the replacement of American troops in Europe with Ukrainian forces after the war ends.
Any of these, taken individually, would represent a significant escalation of Western commitment. Taken together, they constitute what the analysis describes as a fundamental misreading of allied willingness.
The fact is that the victory plan is a political failure for President Zelensky.
The critique is not that implementation would fail to produce results. On the contrary, the analysis concedes that full implementation could push Russia out of Ukraine entirely. The problem is that "full implementation" was never on offer. For two years, Western capitals have responded to Ukrainian requests for planes, munitions, missiles, and tanks with what the analysis characterizes as "laziness, procrastination, and almost reluctance." Presenting demands several levels higher than those that have already gone unmet was, in this reading, not bold diplomacy but strategic malpractice.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The Case Against the Plan
The sharpest criticism centers on what the plan lacks rather than what it contains. Zelensky's proposal asks the West to do a great deal for Ukraine but offers relatively little in return. The analysis argues that Ukraine should have led with its own contribution -- concrete offers tailored to individual allies' domestic political needs -- rather than a generalized list of demands.
This criticism is not exclusively external. Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleksiy Honcharenko, of the European Solidarity party, voiced a similar concern from within Ukraine's own political establishment.
According to the plan, it seems that someone has to do everything for us.
The analysis proposes several alternatives that Zelensky's team could have pursued. Lowering the conscription age, however politically painful, would signal to a reluctant West that Ukraine is willing to make maximal domestic sacrifices. Individualizing diplomatic approaches to each ally -- offering reconstruction contracts to some, drone technology access to others, mineral rights to those willing to invest -- would give Western politicians something to bring home to their electorates. Instead, the Zelensky administration reportedly backed the Kamala Harris campaign, a move characterized as potentially catastrophic given the tightening polls favoring Donald Trump.
The Counterpoint Worth Considering
There is, however, a meaningful counterargument that the analysis raises but does not fully engage with. Defenders of the plan argue that opening with ambitious demands creates negotiating room -- that the high bid is the starting position, not the final ask. In diplomatic practice, this is standard. No country opens negotiations by asking for exactly what it expects to receive.
The analysis dismisses this reasoning by arguing that when demands are set too high, negotiations never begin at all. Instead of productive back-and-forth, the result is eye-rolling from potential partners. Whether that assessment is correct depends heavily on one's reading of Western capitals' tolerance for Ukrainian assertiveness -- a question on which reasonable analysts disagree.
There is also a structural problem with the analysis's own prescriptions. The suggestion that Ukraine should lower its conscription age and offer mineral extraction rights in wartime amounts to asking a country fighting for survival to make painful concessions to allies who are, at most, experiencing fiscal discomfort. The asymmetry in sacrifice is real, even if the political logic for demanding Ukrainian concessions is sound. Critics of the "Ukraine must offer more" school of thought would argue that framing defensive military aid as something that requires additional Ukrainian inducements already concedes a morally untenable position.
The Troop Replacement Miscalculation
One of the analysis's most incisive points concerns Point Five of the victory plan: the proposal to replace American troops in Europe with Ukrainian forces. The argument is that this proposal reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what American military presence in Europe actually does.
American soldiers stationed in Germany or Poland are not simply bodies filling garrison slots. They function as a tripwire -- an attack on them is an attack on the full economic and industrial might of the United States. Replacing them with Ukrainian troops, however battle-hardened, would actually lower the security guarantee for host nations like Poland and Germany. The proposal, intended as a generous offer, could be perceived by its intended beneficiaries as a threat to their own security architecture.
This is the kind of miscalculation that compounds. It suggests to European capitals that Kyiv does not fully grasp what drives their security calculations, which in turn erodes confidence in Ukrainian strategic judgment more broadly.
The Attention Economy of War
Perhaps the most consequential argument in the piece concerns opportunity cost. Ukraine's struggle for media attention and the focused engagement of world leaders is itself a scarce resource. Major diplomatic campaigns can be mounted only periodically, and a failed campaign does not simply fail -- it actively damages future attempts.
There is a cost of presenting an ineffective plan. Ukraine is struggling for media attention and the attention of world leaders. Such campaigns can be presented once in a while, and Kyiv has lost this attempt.
The analysis warns that the plan's failure may cement a perception that Ukraine lacks creative strategic thinking, defaulting instead to repeated escalation of the same unfulfilled demands. This perception, whether fair or not, feeds directly into the growing chorus calling for negotiations -- negotiations that, given the current battlefield dynamics, would likely occur from a position of Ukrainian weakness.
Bottom Line
The analysis stops short of declaring Ukraine's cause lost. It notes, with a gambler's pragmatism, that the future remains unpredictable -- internal Russian instability, South Korean intervention via proxy, or a change in American policy could all reshape the conflict in ways no one currently anticipates. But the core argument is sobering and difficult to dismiss: Ukraine's diplomatic strategy has treated allied support as something that can be demanded rather than something that must be earned through creative, individualized engagement. Whether or not one agrees that Ukraine bears responsibility for "selling" its own defense to reluctant partners, the political reality is that it must. The victory plan, whatever its merits in a world of willing allies, was not designed for the world Ukraine actually inhabits.