Zelensky is rolling the dice on the battlefield with one eye on the US election

Analysis by Nick Paton Walsh, CNN

(CNN) — The past few weeks in the Ukraine war have felt like, to borrow an adage often attributed to Lenin, that decades have happened in them. It is perhaps the fastest moment of change in the conflict since it began, and heralds Kyiv throwing everything it has down on the table to try and bring palpable results before the US election alters its fate, maybe irrevocably.

Since the surprise invasion of Russia’s Kursk region in early August, Ukraine’s risk tolerance has rocketed. Its top brass unveiled Tuesday it had taken 100 Russian settlements, as reports emerged of its forces trying to break into Belgorod region too.

The shock incursion is now turning into a longer-term project, although Kyiv insists it is a buffer zone it seeks, and not a revenge occupation. It is remarkable how powerless the Kremlin appears to be to halt Ukraine’s progress, now three weeks in, despite having diverted 30,000 troops in that direction, according to a Ukrainian assessment given during President Volodymyr Zelensky’s annual news conference Tuesday. But this bold move has company.

The past months have seen Ukraine targeting Russia’s deepest infrastructure at will. Airfields. Oil refineries. Ammunition hubs. All daily. A Ukrainian drone attack last Wednesday seemed to get close to Murmansk, the northern naval hub on the Arctic circle, where much of Moscow’s nuclear submarine force is based, according to a local Russian official.

This Wednesday, flights were reportedly interrupted in Kazan, a city east of Moscow halfway to the Urals, after another apparent drone threat. The reach of Kyiv’s drones is a complication unimaginable to Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022 when he was told his war of choice would see his forces in Kyiv in a matter of days. Billowing smoke is not uncommon in Russia’s western and southern regions now. At some point, Moscow’s increased vulnerability, and the vast damage itself, will pierce the sanitary cordon of what state media allows to be said.

Zelensky also let slip that another new capability has had an impact: the newly arrived NATO F-16 fighter jets, which he opaquely said had intercepted Russian missiles this week. This step change in Kyiv’s abilities to project air power will only grow in the months ahead and stymie Russia’s singular, long-term advantage – control of the skies and the ability to bomb at will. Moscow has responded to attacks on its territory and infrastructure with the only way it has known – in strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, hotels, and civilian targets, in horrifying waves night after night. Bu the numbers of dead have been relatively small and those of interceptions large, Kyiv has insisted.

And while Zelensky appears to be throwing all he can into the fight, Putin seems stuck peddling a familiar tune. The Kremlin is casting the Kursk debacle as if it were a natural disaster, some analysts have noted. The billowing smoke is something local officials must extinguish but Putin seems able to mostly ignore. Moscow talks of foreign mercenaries assisting Kyiv while its missiles target Western journalists in a Donetsk hotel.

It may be clumsy and ignorant as a response, but Russia’s wider aim remains unchanged and in reach. Tens of thousands of Russian troops are bearing down on the Ukrainian military hub of Pokrovsk, as they have been since Moscow captured the last small-ish town in the east, Avdiivka, in February. The goal, the tactics, the geography, the pace – always the same. Yet it is usually successful.

This is the wider gamble Zelensky appears comfortable with. The fall of Pokrovsk may be weeks away, by current assessments of the pace of Russian advance and speed of Ukrainian collapse in both positions and morale. It may, at best, submit to another slow, horrific winterlong grind before it falls. But the fall appears likely.

After Pokrovsk, there is truly nothing to defend – no major town or position – until the city of Dnipro itself, on the other side of the vast Zaporizhzhia region, about a two-hour drive away. Unless the Kursk gambit causes Russia to stretch so thin that its Donetsk operations stall, Kyiv will need to wildly fortify the rear behind Pokrovsk, or risk a pacy Russian advance across open ground that could truly alter the future shape of Ukraine.

Zelensky is, it seems, happy to accept that risk and has calculated that the damage he can do to Putin’s prestige – by taking out oil infrastructure and military targets deep inside the Motherland and annexing part of his borders – is a necessary and an urgent war aim, regardless of how oblivious Putin and his public seem to be to this embarrassment.

It gives Ukraine a “win,” at least, which may fix two of Kyiv’s urgent problems: the will of NATO allies to provide arms to a losing campaign, and the willingness of Ukrainian men to fight in a losing war. He has assessed that the loss of Pokrovsk may be inevitable, and a sacrifice Ukraine can make in the pursuit of wider damage to the Kremlin’s borders.

The heavy intwining with US politics was also evident when Zelensky said Tuesday he would in September present his ‘secret’ plan for victory – likely intense drone strikes, perhaps also using US-supplied longer-range weapons – to President Joe Biden, and candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. He is daring them to refuse him this chance, and trying to make being a Russia hawk part of the November election calculus. It may backfire, but more likely lead to some silent acquiescence, and Kyiv inflicting what damage it can as Moscow adapts again.

Yet an unfamiliar new paradigm is emerging, one which Zelensky addressed directly too. The threat of Russian escalation is almost absent in the conversation. It is as if the limit of their conventional powers has been exposed by the humiliation of Kursk, along with the emptiness of their nuclear rhetoric. The latter cannot be entirely ignored, if the Kremlin feels an existential threat so grave it is willing to risk the overwhelming conventional NATO response it will likely face from nuclear escalation. But Putin’s powers appear very diminished.

Zelensky has divined Ukraine’s moment is now, and that after November there is a 50% chance Trump will impose an unpleasant peace, or that NATO cohesion will slowly erode, or that he will struggle to fill his own trenches with willing Ukrainian soldiers. And in the weeks ahead, he is willing to leave huge swaths of territory vulnerable, as well as cross every one of Russia’s red lines – once hallowed yet now shifting daily – in the pursuit of a point at which Moscow breaks and decides to yield. He must hope the pressure is being felt as acutely by Putin.

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