Popular Ukrainian video blogger “Pasha Bumchik” surprised his followers with a new video which shows him illegally crossing the Romanian border in the Karpaty mountains. He decided to undertake this audacious move after receiving a draft notice.

There was a soundtrack of choice in the video – the Ukrainian band Skriabin singing: “We’ve been duped, we’ve been cheated like suckers”. Identified as Pavlo Dvulychansky by the Myrotvorets site linked to Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), “Pasha Bumchik” has over 430,000 followers on Instagram as well as large audiences on Youtube and Tiktok. It is safe to presume that he understands the current sentiments of his young Ukrainian audience well.

To what extent the other famous Ukrainian entertainer and the country’s current president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is sensing the mood in society and among Ukraine’s allies is a big question. But there are signs that he might be drifting towards Skriabin’s diagnosis of the situation Ukraine finds itself in.

This is a conclusion one could draw from what we know about Zelenskiy’s “victory plan” which he brought to Washington in order to present to the outgoing US president Joe Biden. The plan hasn’t been formally disclosed to the public, but according to multiple leaks in the Western media, it may include security guarantees to Ukraine equivalent to Nato membership, a clear path to EU membership as well as permission to strike deep inside Russian territory and guaranteed supplies of modern Western weapons for as long as the war will last.

Zelenskiy claims that with the help of his plan, Ukrainian victory can be achieved very soon – even by the end of this year. If it sounds surreally delusional to you, it is for a good reason. Weakened and badly stretched (partly as a result of the controversial intrusion into Russia’s Kursk region), the Ukrainian army is retreating in Donetsk region while a myriad of deceptively minor Russian advances are gradually converting into strategic success.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is entering the winter with a largely destroyed energy infrastructure which may render high-rise buildings dependent on central heating – the dominant type of housing in the former USSR – entirely uninhabitable.

There is no way Putin will suddenly admit his defeat, even if all of Zelenskiy’s demands are magically accepted.

But that’s the whole point. With the possible exception of deep strikes inside Russian territory (even as this request has been rejected by Biden for now), none of these demands could be conceivably taken on board by the US and its allies – and they are not meant to. This is not a plan, but an ultimatum.

In an interview on the eve of his trip to the US, New Yorker’s Josh Yaffa was quizzing Zelenskiy about his Plan B in case his “victory plan” is rejected. Zelenskiy said it was “a horrible thought” and that it would “end up with a very long war – an impossible, exhausting situation that would kill a tremendous number of people”.

The key word here is “impossible”. Why would Ukraine continue to be engaged in this hopeless war if it feels abandoned by the allies?

Zelenskiy’s off-ramp

The country’s former prosecutor-general Yury Lutsenko outlined what might be Zelenskiy’s real Plan B. One of the leading figures of the 2014 Maidan Revolution, Lutsenko is Zelenskiy’s opponent, criticising him from “patriotic”, that is jingoistic, positions.

In a Facebook post later circulated by Ukrainian media, he alleged that upon receiving a flat no from Biden, Zelenskiy could loudly announce that Ukraine had been betrayed by its allies and enter peace negotiations with the Russians.

The Kremlin, Lutsenko maintains, will slap on him conditions along the lines of the failed Istanbul deal, which Ukraine seriously pondered but eventually rejected in the spring of 2022. A number of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian sources (including, lately, former US State Under-Secretary Victoria Nuland) suggested that it happened because Western governments were unhappy with the deal which envisaged Ukraine’s neutral status and a very modest-sized army, among other things. They also presumed that some Ukrainian territory would remain under Russian control, but a much smaller chunk compared to what Russian controls now and which it is very unlikely to give away.

Zelenskiy, Lutsenko speculates, will agree to a ceasefire and put it to a referendum. He will simultaneously get himself re-elected in his new re-incarnation as “the president of peace”.

Maybe there is a real, detailed and well-calculated plan of asymmetric warfare, the only way Ukraine can counter the Russian war machine, that has been presented and is now being analysed by Western allies, while the “victory plan” serves as a distraction. Maybe that secret plan will be put in motion after Zelenskiy meets Biden on Thursday, September 26 – with catastrophic consequences for Putin’s war machine.

But if there is none, then perhaps Lutsenko is forecasting Zelenskiy’s trajectory correctly. Blaming the West for inciting Ukraine to fight a war with a much stronger enemy and then – quite expectedly – failing to offer a full range of support for fear of WWIII, is a politically sound strategy of selling what every Ukrainian will deem as a humiliating defeat.

If Ukraine accepts the loss of territory currently controlled by Russia (more will be lost before negotiations begin in earnest) as well as neutral status and demilitarisation, then the questions Ukrainians will be asking their government will be as follows: What was this enormous sacrifice for if we could have had a much better deal with Russia in Istanbul, not to mention Minsk agreements (which were ditched by Zelenskiy prior to the start of Russia’s full-out invasion)?

The simple answer that could potentially ensure Zelenskiy’s political survival in post-war years goes along the lines of Skriabin’s song – “we’ve been duped, we’ve been cheated like suckers” – by the West. If he decides to go in that direction, then we are likely to hear about the circumstances of Ukraine rejecting the Istanbul deal from the horse’s mouth. Various sources, including a senior Ukrainian negotiator, suggested it was British prime minister Boris Johnson derailing the agreement with tacit support from Washington.

It will be even more interesting to hear about the circumstances of Zelenskiy's sudden transformation from a dove into an uncompromising Russia hawk which coincided with President Joe Biden entering the White House in January 2021. This is when Ukraine crossed several of Putin’s red lines simultaneously by clamping down on his Ukrainian ally Viktor Medvedchuk and his TV channels, launching loud campaigns to join Nato and to derail the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.

In a matter of two months, Russia began building up troops at the Ukrainian border, but a year of dangerous brinkmanship passed before Putin pulled the trigger, launching the full-out invasion. What happened during that year, what promises and guarantees Zelenskiy was receiving in exchange for making it clear to Moscow that Ukraine was not going to implement the Minsk agreements (top Western and Ukrainian officials later confirmed they were never going to be implemented), will also be important to hear.

Back to values

A huge and expensive effort has been made over years to push the narrative that Putin’s brutal and criminal invasion was inevitable, but of course it wasn’t. It was a result of irresponsible brinkmanship spurred by delusions and outright lies.

Trying to weaken or marginalise a nuclear superpower by constantly challenging it to a conflict has always been a dumb idea. For the US West-led West, the algorithm of a proxy conflict with Russia would always be the same. You push the red lines until you abut in the real threat of nuclear war and then of course you back off, because you are not suicidal – unlike, perhaps, a dictator in the Kremlin who proved he could do the unthinkable on a number of occasions, what with the invasion of Ukraine or the poisoning of Aleksey Navalny.

Of course the smartest strategy is to avoid that conflict altogether, because once you back off at the last moment you are a loser. Common in the West, a cynical argument in favour of Russo-Ukrainian war goes along the lines that it is weakening Russia. But the reality is that the Russian economy is booming thanks to increased war spending, the army is getting stronger and infinitely more experienced in large-scale modern warfare that any Nato army can dream of, while the conflict has been used by Putin to cleanse the domestic political field of any semblance of real opposition. He has squeezed out of the country not just almost every opposition activist, but the entire civil society as well as independent journalists and experts.

Stronger than ever, Putin’s regime has ensured its long-term survival as long as the West continues to nurture the conflict. There is nothing as stable as a rogue regime under US sanctions – just look at Cuba, North Korea and Iran. And on the contrary – from Russia’s own experience in 1991 – the perceived absence of a tangible threat from the West, a detente and closer ties is indeed what could potentially end the regime.

Choices made by Ukraine were manufactured by a factory of delusions about the omnipotence of the West and about the weakness of Russian state and society – the image of colossus with the feet of clay was repeatedly invoked by politicians and media prior to the failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023. Whether those who build this metaphorical factory themselves delusional or they were simply profiteering from the conflict is the question that will be asked for decades to come. It could be both, of course – there is no contradiction.

The same narrative factory was churning out megatonnes of xenophobia, weaponising what anthropologists call schismogenesis – a process in which societies build their identity on the basis of the opposition to their next door neighbours and former kin. The West made catastrophic compromises on its own values by supporting an ethnonationalist project backed by securocratic mafias, not unlike the ones that rule today’s Russia, for geopolitical – aka expansionist – ends.

The time when one could unabashedly dream about Ukraine’s victory, the collapse of Putin’s regime and Russian reparations have long gone. What is needed now is to try and preserve what’s left of independent and democratic Ukraine without causing further population flight, the loss of critical infrastructure and the state capture by far right militants. It is time to step back, reconsider the failed strategy of marginalising instead of genuinely integrating Russia over the last 30 years and start building a new one – based on universal values rather than geopolitical manipulations.