All wars have simple strategic storylines. In the U.S. Civil War, there was the Union’s Anaconda Plan to strangle the Confederacy and later the March to the Sea to slice what was left in two. In World War II, U.S. strategy centered on “Europe first (PDF),” as well as the principle of unconditional surrender by Germany and Japan. During the Vietnam War, the United States’ guiding mantra was “search and destroy.” In Iraq, the phrase was “clear, hold, build.”
In some cases—such as World War II—strategic shorthand paved the way to victory. In others, such as Vietnam, it immortalized epic blunders. But in every case, these strategic bumper stickers served a purpose. They told audiences—both domestic and foreign—what the basic tenets of the game plan were for winning the war, especially as it dragged on. And it’s precisely this kind of easy-to-communicate plan that Ukraine has been missing for the past year. Two and a half years into the war, Kyiv desperately needs its own tagline. It now has the chance to get one.
During the first year of the war, Ukraine was a straightforward protagonist. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was an unlikely hero, but once Russia attacked, he became a war leader straight out of central casting. His famous reply when the United States offered to evacuate him from Kyiv—“I need ammunition, not a ride”—could not have been better crafted for the moment if a Hollywood scriptwriter had written it.
But as important as the messaging, Ukraine also had a clear—if simple—theory for how it would win the war. First, it stopped the Russian offensive in Kyiv. Next it broke Russian forces around Kharkiv and retook Kherson. Finally, as Western-made arms poured into the country, a final counteroffensive in the spring of 2023 would at the very least push Russia back closer to its borders, if not finish the war entirely.
Such holdups, some of which continue today, meant that Ukraine risked becoming mired in a sort of strategic quicksand. To get more military aid, it needed to prove that it had a chance of winning by demonstrating significant battlefield results—but it needed to do so without violating strict limitations on the use of U.S. and other Western weaponry. At the same time, significant battlefield victories, especially against a Russian military that was learning and rearming, required ever more substantial injections of Western military aid and ever more audacious tactics. Ukraine was caught in a vicious chicken-and-egg dilemma that was leading nowhere good.
More subtly, but no less important, there were domestic consequences for not having a strategic narrative, particularly in terms of public morale. When I was in Ukraine in August, I could see exhaustion in everyone’s faces, from officials in the government to think tank researchers to people on the street. Perhaps this is why more Ukrainians have become open to a negotiated end to the war, albeit not on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s terms. While practically every one of the dozens of Ukrainians whom I interviewed—at different levels of seniority, both inside and outside of government—recognized the need for victory and the existential stakes at hand, few were able to articulate just how Ukraine would come out victorious. And particularly for the younger and more junior interlocutors, that was a source of both frustration and resentment.
Two and a half years into the war, Kyiv desperately needs its own tagline. It now has the chance to get one.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, the latter step never materialized, not least because months of Western hesitation to deliver critical weapons such as tanks and aircraft gave Russia the time it needed to complete extensive fortifications along the front. When the 2023 counteroffensive petered out, Kyiv lost more than troops and equipment. It also lost a compelling argument for how it intends to win.
The lack of a convincing narrative was more than a public relations challenge for Kyiv; it also jeopardized future Western military aid. Western observers increasingly saw Ukraine as locked in a protracted war of attrition against a bigger and more powerful Russia—which also happened to be the Kremlin’s new storyline for the war, after its first storyline (Kyiv’s quick collapse and the installation of a Russian satrap) had been exposed as delusional. This was a war that Ukraine likely could not win, the West now believed. That narrative, in turn, fed a growing skepticism in Washington and other Western capitals about whether military aid to Ukraine was still a good investment. At best, Ukraine could point to the idea that Western weapons and ammunition prevented the loss of even more land—hardly a glowing sales pitch for securing further aid.
Arguably, the accusation that the Russia-Ukraine war was stalemated was never entirely accurate. While much of the Western media attention focused on the stagnant front lines, Ukraine notched a series of less headline-grabbing but arguably equally important achievements, including pushing Russia’s once vaunted Black Sea fleet out of its Crimean ports and the western Black Sea—a significant feat for a country without a navy. Moreover, the lack of Ukrainian military progress was at least partially due to monthslong holdups in U.S. and European aid deliveries, as well as strict red lines limiting the use of any Western weapon to attack airfields, bases, and other military assets on Russian territory.
In this respect, the Kursk counteroffensive arrived not a moment too soon. For the first time, Ukrainian forces pushed into Russia, seizing more than 1,200 square kilometers (about 460 square miles) of territory—somewhat more land than Russia seized in Ukraine in all of 2024—and capturing several hundred Russian prisoners in the process.
While the counteroffensive came as a surprise to many—including officials in the U.S. Defense Department—the push into Kursk makes perfect sense. Ukraine, after all, needed to do something big. It needed to show that while the Russian military may be vast, it is still uneven and, in places, brittle. Ukraine also proved that, despite Western and particularly U.S. hand-wringing about the threats of nuclear escalation that have characterized the Kremlin’s messaging on the war from the start, Putin is not as trigger-happy with his nuclear arsenal as the messaging implies, for a host of reasons. So these threats should not be a reason for the United States to place strict limits on Ukraine’s conventional military operations.
What Ukraine needed, in other words, was to do something splashy and show—once again—that it can win.
At the same time, Ukraine needed to give its own population some good news after years of destruction and bloodshed. As one Ukrainian interlocutor told me, Ukrainians have not felt as much optimism since the country’s lightning offensive to recapture the areas east of Kharkiv in late 2022. The Kursk offensive offers Ukrainians what they needed—a strategic reset.
But while the Kursk offensive is a first step, Ukraine will need to offer more if it wants to maintain the momentum that it now enjoys. Perhaps most importantly, it needs to find a new strategic storyline. Ukrainian leaders need to convince both their constituencies at home and backers abroad that they have a plan to win the war. Indeed, Zelenskyy has promised to present such a plan to U.S. President Joe Biden and his two potential successors this month.
Inferring from Ukraine’s actions, the country’s new, if still unstated, strategic tagline seems to have three relatively well-defined parts: survive, strike, and seize. The first—survive—focuses on withstanding Russia’s punishing assaults against Ukrainian energy infrastructure and halting Russia’s slowly advancing offensive in the Donbas. The second—strike—seems to revolve around hitting military and industrial targets deeper inside Russia, not only in order to wear down Russian military capabilities, but also to increase the economic and political costs of the war for the Putin regime.
The third and final part—seize—is where Kursk fits in. This action emphasizes capturing Russian territory along the border, presumably both as a buffer to protect Ukrainian territory from Russian aggression and as a potential bargaining chip further down the road.
Ultimately, all three elements are necessary but likely not sufficient in constructing a new theory of victory for Ukraine. While the survive, strike, and seize elements of Kyiv’s nascent strategy will undoubtedly ramp up the pressure on Moscow, they probably will not, by themselves, allow Ukraine to retake its lost territory. Indeed, Russia has continued to advance in eastern Ukraine, despite the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk. Nor will future strikes and seizures dramatically ramp up domestic pressure on Putin to the point where he will end the conflict. Most Ukrainian analysts whom I interviewed admitted that most Russians—particularly those who actually have influence in Putin’s autocracy—simply don’t care enough about Kursk to force Putin to abandon his war aims.
Thus, the question that remains is what the next and final element of Ukraine’s theory of victory might be, if it exists at all. Essentially, Ukraine has two basic choices—supplant or settle.
In the former, it can hope that the increasing pressure on the Putin regime will ultimately cause it to collapse under its own weight. As Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ill-fated coup attempt demonstrated last summer, all authoritarian regimes—including Russia’s—appear stable until the moment they are not. But while this theory is plausible, betting on Putin’s collapse is by no means assured, and even so, it is not necessarily guaranteed that whoever comes next would end the war.
At the end of the day, it’s up to Ukraine to choose whether the tagline for its war is survive-strike-seize-supplant or survive-strike-seize-settle. Or perhaps it is something else entirely.
Alternatively, Ukraine can push to settle the conflict. By increasing the pain to the Putin regime through the Kursk offensive and continued deep strikes against Russian infrastructure, Ukraine can pressure Putin to change his cost-benefit calculus—and back off from his maximalist demands. Kyiv could then trade captured Russian territory for Russian-captured Ukrainian territory.
In some ways, this approach seems to be the more straightforward one. Ukraine has already inflicted significant costs on Russia and can almost certainly ramp that up, especially if the West lifts restrictions on the use of its weaponry and other red lines. With Kursk, Ukraine has also already demonstrated that it can take Russian territory. The question is whether it can take enough territory—and just as importantly, hold it—to achieve sufficient leverage to reclaim all of Russia-occupied Ukraine.
At the end of the day, it’s up to Ukraine to choose whether the tagline for its war is survive-strike-seize-supplant or survive-strike-seize-settle. Or perhaps it is something else entirely. Ukrainians, after all, are the ones bearing the brunt of this war. And then, it will be incumbent on Ukraine’s supporters in the United States and around the world to give it the resources and policy room to make that storyline a reality.
And the good news is that the basic hook for the plotline—a modern-day David fights off Goliath in a battle between liberal democracies and a coalescing bloc of revanchist autocracies—remains as compelling as ever.
But with U.S. elections on the horizon and growing challenges around the world competing for scarce attention and resources, Ukraine’s leadership owes its partners and allies—as well as its own public—its theory of how it will win. If not for the West’s sake, then certainly for the sake of the Ukrainians themselves.
– Raphael S. Cohen is director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program at RAND Project Air – Force.
