How Does Ukraine Define Victory?

As the Ukrainian army rolled swiftly over Russian forces this past week, liberating thousands of square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in the country’s northeastern region of Kharkiv, over four hundred high-profile Ukrainian and international politicians and businesspeople gathered in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, to discuss the war, potential outcomes and the West’s support for Ukraine.

The gathering in question was the 17th annual Yalta European Strategy conference—or YES—organized by Ukrainian philanthropist Victor Pinchuk and his Pinchuk foundation. The event took place in complete secrecy in an underground venue especially chosen to serve as a shelter in case of a missile attack.

Precautions were understandable. To bring all these people into a country not only conducting an active counteroffensive in the East, but also regularly experiencing air raids in multiple regions, was a complicated matter of logistics and high-level security.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave an in-person speech to open the gathering, which drew to Ukraine a handful of prominent international participants, including the Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki; the President of Latvia, Egils Levits; various US and UK politicians, business leaders like Turkish drone maker Haluk Bayraktar and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Fareed Zakaria, of CNN, was on hand to moderate, and Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenskyy, took part on a panel with Yale University historian Timothy Snyder. All parties braved the uncertainty of war to make the trek to Ukraine.

But in Kyiv the streets are calm and quiet, restaurants and shops are open and, while there is a certain solemnity in the air, it is almost possible to forget that a brutal war rages further to the east and south. Uniformed military personnel, ubiquitous patriotic blue and yellow signs and slogans, and rusty burned and battle-damaged Russian military machinery on display next to St. Michael’s Cathedral in the city’s center serve as a reminder of the ongoing war.

Panel discussions took place before an electronic backdrop of screens displaying a couple dozen Ukrainian regions. Live feeds from Kharkiv, Luhansk, Dnipro, Poltava, Lviv and other regions showed blue skies with birds occasionally flying across the monitors. Periodically, some regions’ feeds went black, displaying a red ‘air raid’ warning, showing in real time how often Russian forces attack Ukrainian territory.

At one point, almost a dozen regions displayed such warnings, including Kyiv, and sirens erupted. The summit, safe in its fortified basement, never stopped. Ukrainians, after 200 days of war, have become so accustomed to the sirens that most ignore them and continue about their daily lives.

With news of Ukrainian soldiers’s successes pushing Russian forces out of the Kharkiv region—subsequently freeing the key cities of Balakliya and Izyum—talks centered around Ukraine’s definition of victory and whether the West will provide enough unity and support to help the embattled country defeat Russia. Would Ukraine get Crimea back? Could it survive as a nation long-term while the current Kremlin regime holds power?

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, fresh from the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany, said Ukraine had three objectives for victory: for the country to return to its internationally recognized borders as defined in 1991, including the Crimean peninsula and entire Donbas region; for Russia to pay reparations for its violent invasion, and for those who committed atrocities to face a war crimes tribunal.

Ultimately, it is the Ukrainian people and their government who must decide what terms they will accept from Russia, said Jake Sullivan, United States National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden. Connecting to the conference remotely, Sullivan said “it should be up to the democratically elected president—president Zelenskyy—who answers to the people of Ukraine, to define the objectives of their military effort.” He added that the job of the United States, the NATO allies and a wide coalition of countries around the world is to try to put Ukraine in the best position to achieve those objectives.

“As we speak,” Sullivan said, “the nations of Europe are emerging from the conference that took place yesterday in Ramstein, Germany, at the ministers of defense and chief of defense level, where they renewed a commitment from multiple European countries to continue to provide military equipment of various forms, including budgets to go above and beyond what’s been already committed.” Sullivan noted that he has every confidence this support will continue.

“Rumors that there is disunity in the west are greatly exaggerated,” Sullivan said. “And what Putin is hoping for—what he was hoping from the very beginning—is that this western resolve will crack. This will not happen.”

Those from the west who are quick to suggest that Ukraine and Russia negotiate an end to the war in order to return the world to its pre-war state will need to accept that business as usual is no longer possible and some serious changes must take place.

“Russia destroyed Bucha, Irpin, Mariupiol, Volnovaha, Kharkiv, and many other places,” Reznikov said, stressing the need for a trial similar to those held in Nuremberg, Germany, following WWII in which representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany were tried. “It would be best if such a trial takes place in Kharkiv or Mariupol,” he said.

It’s hard to estimate the death toll and the civilian loss of life Mariupol has suffered as it remains occupied by Russian forces, but it’s clear that the city has been destroyed. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city with about 1.5 million people, has been attacked by Russian forces every day with artillery and missiles and is being systematically destroyed: infrastructure, cultural centers, universities, colleges, schools, hospitals, large residential areas on the outskirts as well as in the historic downtown Kharkiv—all have been targeted by Russia.

Although the latest counteroffensive liberated more than 40 settlements in the Kharkiv region, according to the head of the Kharkiv Administration, the city is close enough to the Russian border to present an easy target for Russian forces and their long range ordinance. The scale of destruction is unimaginable to those who haven’t witnessed the war zone.

To give conference guests from western Europe and the US a glimpse of what the war looks like, they were driven to the sites of devastation and torture discovered following Russia’s temporary occupation of the Kyiv region; to towns such as Bucha and Irpin, where populations were exposed to brutal treatment at the hands of the occupying Russian soldiers, and where mass graves of civilians have been discovered.

Radosław Sikorski, a Polish member of the European Parliament, said during a YES panel that Putin’s initial goal was to completely destroy Ukraine as a state. “Ukraine was going to be wiped out as a separate nation with the large-scale eradication of elites,” he said.

“This is a war for survival not only of Ukraine, but also of the free world,” said Taras Berezovets, a former TV host and political analyst turned military press-officer. “If Putin had to win this war it would show an example to other tyrannies, like Iran, North Korea, China. It would effectively give China the impression they can start their own small victorious war over Taiwan or anywhere else. Winning the war here, for the west, means stopping future wars for Ukraine and for yourself.”

Berezovets believes there is definite unity among the NATO members to help Ukraine beat Russia. “If Ukraine loses this war it means the war would come to the door of NATO states: the Baltic states, Poland, Slovakia—Russia is not going to stop,” he said.

According to Berezovets, the military estimates that the war could continue for another 12 to 18 months. “Russians still have enough resources,” he explained. “Of course there is a scenario where Putin would be removed or something happens to him.”

While the Ukrainian military continues to receive weapons from allies and is much better equipped now compared to the beginning of the invasion when they wielded little more than old Soviet Kalashnikovs, Berezovets says more is needed. “We lack armored personnel vehicles, BTR, BMP, we lack military aviation helicopters and fighters, we lack anti-aircraft systems, we need more artillery and of course we need cruise missiles, artillery and shells.”

From the very beginning, Ukrainians challenged the common narrative that Russia was unstoppable and would take over Kyiv in a few days. However, even before international support arrived and western resolve to provide weapons to Ukraine was not as strong, the nation of 40 million decisively fought for its survival against the Russian aggression.

But there is a fear that Putin may cross more red lines and, perhaps, resort to using nuclear weapons, or other weapons prohibited by international conventions, such as biological or chemical weapons. Those fears have not sapped Ukrainian resolve, however.

“Our mission is survival,” Zelensky said, addressing the YES audience. “This is our major counter offensive. We cannot talk about where we can go—there is no way out, this is our home. We are staying here alive, whatever it takes. Our weapon is our faith. Our sense of readiness, our sense of victory, is why we will win.”