Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is making a last-ditch bid for aid at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) this week to rally enough support to turn the tide of the war or prepare an exit to start ceasefire talks with Russia to end the fighting.

"I think that we are closer to peace than we think," he told US broadcaster ABC News in a tantalising admission that an attempt to negotiate a ceasefire may be on the cards.

He added that Ukraine could push Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the conflict, but only if Kyiv was coming from a "strong position".

But in other remarks Zelenskiy stuck to his hard line, that Russia must be expelled from Ukraine and all its territory returned, ahead of his meeting with US President Joe Biden slated for September 26.

Speaking at spoke at a meeting of the UN Security Council on the war in Ukraine on September 24, the president said that the war cannot be ended by negotiations, and "Russia can only be forced to peace."

"This is exactly what is needed, to force Russia to accept peace," Zelenskiy stressed. The war should not end with a "freeze" or "exchange" due to fatigue from military action, but with compliance with the requirements of the UN Charter, which implies respect for the territorial integrity of Ukraine, he recalled.

Zelenskiy has been dismissive of the recently proposed Sino-Brazilian plan which he called “destructive”. He also rejected an earlier 12-point Chinese peace plan proposed on the first anniversary of the start of the war.

"The China-Brazil proposal is also destructive, it's just a political statement. I told Lula [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva], we conveyed to the Chinese side: 'Let's sit down and talk together. You are not our enemies. We are not your enemies. What makes you suddenly think that you should take Russia's side or be somewhere in the middle? What kind of view is that? In the middle of what? We're not fighting in the middle, we're not fighting on the border, we're fighting on our land. You have to stop the Russians, you have to show that you are strong countries," the head of state said.

Zelenskiy is due to present a “victory” plan to Biden, which could prove to be a pivotal point in the war. Few details of what is in the plan have been released, but it is widely believed it contains a fresh and urgent request for more modern weapons and permission to use Western weapons to strike deep into Russian territory.

The head of the President's Office of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, confirmed that an accelerated invitation to Ukraine to join Nato was also part of the victory plan.

In his interview with ABC News, Zelenskiy said his victory plan was not about negotiating with Russia, but rather it was "a bridge to a diplomatic way out, to stop the war".

Ukraine cannot win the war without Western help and remains 80% dependent on western supplies, Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustam Umerov told journalists in New York.

"We are 80% dependent on our partners. We work with the European Union, Nato, Security Assistance Group Ukraine (SAG-U) (the US European Command), the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany and dozens of other countries in a bilateral format on a daily basis," he said in an interview with Lb.ua.

The West has been reluctant to provide Ukraine with the means to turn the tide of the war and has stuck to its policy of “some, but not enough” when supplying Ukraine with arms. Ukraine’s Nato membership has been a non-starter, as there is little enthusiasm to see Kyiv join despite the promises of its “irreversible path” to eventual membership.

The US has flatly refused to grant Ukraine permission to use its missiles to hit Russian military targets in Russia and during his closed-door meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on September 24, where not even interpreters attended, the German leader repeated a refusal to supply Ukraine with its Taurus cruise missiles and did not grant permission for the use of German arms to hit targets inside Russia. If there were discussions on a possible end to the war, no details of their conversation were released.

The world leaders have gathered for the annual summit and Ukraine is high on the agenda as the situation on the ground becomes increasingly dire. Since the fall of Avdiivka on February 17 Russia has had the initiative and the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s (AFU) defence in Donbas is crumbling as the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) makes steady but slow progress and as bne IntelliNews reported, the situation around the key city of Pokrovsk is looking increasingly bad. The AFR have covered most of the 45-km distance between Avdiivka and Pokrovsk and are poised to take the town, after which there are no defendable positions for the AFU all the way to the Dnipro river that divides the country in two.

To add to Bankova’s (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) headaches is that Russia has destroyed half of Ukraine’s heat and power generating capacity. As bne IntelliNews reported, hundreds of thousands of Ukraine have fled the country since the barrage began in January, as they are afraid of impossible living conditions once the winter snows arrive in a few months.

Two camps

Ukraine’s supporters are now roughly divided into two camps. Amongst its most ardent supporter are countries like Poland, the Baltic States and the UK that are still calling for a Ukrainian victory in the war and which are happy to allow Ukraine to use their weapons to hit Russian targets on its own territory.

However, after two and half years of war and €150bn in financial aid, the Ukraine fatigue has been growing steadily. There has been a string of reports that some Western allies are actively looking for an off-ramp, Bloomberg reported on September 17, and hope to bring the war to an end this year, a sentiment also expressed by Zelenskiy in August, when Ukraine was inching towards a ceasefire deal with Russia.

As part of their discussions of strategy for the next year, officials are more seriously gaming out how a negotiated end to the conflict and an off-ramp could take shape, according to people familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity, although the sources said no one is putting pressure on Zelenskiy to start negotiations.

Hungary leads Europe in opposing the war, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban proposed a return to cooperation “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” during his UN speech – a favourite Putin trope that he has used for many years and the core of his would-be overarching foreign policy goal, made impossible now after the invasion of Ukraine. Pre-war, European leaders like Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron would roll this phrase out whenever they wanted to soften Putin up ahead of talks.

Germany has also emerged in recent months as openly calling for an end to the fighting. Berlin is coming under increasing financial pressure and is now the slowest growing country in the G7 as a result of the economic shock and the boomerang effect of the sanctions. Its situation became even worse after the constitutional court decision on the so-called “debt brake” left a €60bn hole in the Bundestag’s budget and Berlin recently announced it would halve its financial support for Ukraine to €4bn this year and only €500mn thereafter.

The doves do not talk about victory anymore but have employed the phrase “a just peace” as the end point for the fighting.

This language has also appeared amongst Ukraine’s top officials. Yermak, who is Zelenskiy chief strategist, also said that Ukraine's victory plan contains a clear vision of the steps that need to be taken to ensure a “fair and lasting peace,” in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

The US has also backed away from talking about “victory.” The conflict in Ukraine is to be settled through talks, the Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said this week. "We are going continue to work to put Ukraine in the best possible position" for peace talks, Austin pledged at a press conference. However, individual senators like ardent Ukraine supporter Lindsey Graham continue to call for a Ukrainian victory in the war.

In his final speech to the UN, Biden reiterated support for Ukraine, but brushed over it lightly, using his elegy to review his own career and foreign policy achievements. He reaffirmed that "Putin's war has failed at its core aim. He set out to destroy Ukraine, but Ukraine is still free", emphasising that the US and its allies would not relent in their support for Ukraine. "My answer is, we will not let up on our support for Ukraine,” he said.

As political analyst and bne IntelliNews columnist Mark Galeotti pointed out in a recent editorial for The Times, what “victory” actually constitutes in this war remains very ill defined, but with most analysts falling somewhere between an absolute defeat of Russia and defeat of Ukraine and very few thinking it is possible for Ukraine to recovery all or even most of its territory. The Crimea is seen as a permanent write-off by nearly all analysts.

November peace makers

Before the Kursk incursion Zelenskiy was actively working towards a second peace summit in November to which Russia would be invited. After the invasion of Kursk, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov took that card off the table and so far Russia says it will not attend any peace summits while the AFU is still on its territory. Nevertheless, Zelenskiy is hinting that the plans are still in place.

"As part of the discussion that took place after the speech, the head of the Presidential Office outlined the prospects for holding the second Peace Summit and preliminary preparatory work, which includes a series of thematic conferences on each of the points of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's Peace Formula," Yermak’s press service said after his speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Speculation that Zelenskiy may call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to act as a mediator are growing and Kyiv has noticeable softened its criticism of New Delhi in the last month. Modi also notably kept his distance from the peace plan recently proposed by fellow BRICS members China and Brazil, which both have sway with Putin.

Zelenskiy condemned Modi’s cordial trip to Moscow in July, where he did a number of key energy and supply deals, but India has emerged as one of the few countries that has remained on the fence and continues to maintain good relegations with everyone from Washington to Moscow.

"This is already the third bilateral meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi this year. We are dynamically developing our relations. And we are working together to strengthen cooperation in various areas," Zelenskiy wrote on his Telegram channel after the meeting.

The two focused on strengthening cooperation at international venues, in particular the UN and the G20, as well as the implementation of the Zelenskiy’s 10-point peace plan and preparations for the Second Peace Summit. "We discussed the existing opportunities in detail," Zelenskiy added.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan remains another possible candidate and has previously mediated a Black Sea Grain Initiative deal that allowed Ukraine to restart seaborn grain shipments in 2023.

Erdogan and Zelenskiy also met in New York to discuss restarting the collapsed grain deal and prospects for Turkish aid in Ukraine recovery plans. Zelenskiy also reportedly discussed his victory plan with the Turkish strongman in what looks like a polling of European leaders to the various scenarios that he is considering.