Zelensky refuses to accept NATO’s narrative that a Ukrainian missile strayed into Poland—or that he hasn’t been set up to lose.

(Originally published Nov. 17 in “What in the World“) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must today realize, more than perhaps at any point in the nine months since Russia invaded his nation, that his Western allies have set him up to lose.

Despite valiant resistance and heartening battlefield victories, he is in a war his own top military ally says he cannot win. Zelensky is thus a hero facing a Hobson’s choice. On one hand, he can accept a negotiated settlement in which he yields a sizeable

portion of Ukrainian territory to permanent Russian control—including the separatist provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, as well as Zaporizhzhia province and Kherson province east of the Dnipro river, thereby giving Russia a land bridge to the strategically vital Crimea and its only warm-water port, Sevastopol.

Alternatively, he can maintain his refusal to cede an inch of land and condemn his country to a long and costly war of attrition. The U.S. and NATO will funnel Ukraine military aid for “as long as it takes” but are unwilling to provide Zelensky sufficient firepower to actually win. In this scenario, therefore, Zelensky can only hope to outlast the Russian military’s seemingly ebbing ability to fight or Moscow’s political will to neutralize Ukraine—whether or not that depends on the continued rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Either way, the top general for Ukraine’s biggest military ally, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley, says the odds of Ukraine beating Russia are “close to zero.”

The predicament in Poland underscores the dilemma. Washington and NATO have concluded that an explosion at a village grain plant inside the Polish border was likely the result of an errant missile—not a Russian one, but rather a Soviet-era, air-defense missile fired by Ukraine against the latest Russian barrage. Whether or not this is true, it sidesteps a trickier conversation about whether Russia has accidentally or intentionally attacked Poland and whether NATO must honor its treaty obligations to defend Poland by going to war against Russia, and thus come to Ukraine’s direct aid by default.

Zelensky, however, isn’t buying it. He says he’s convinced the explosion wasn’t caused by a Ukrainian missile. This keeps his allies in the hot seat, since Zelensky is implying that they may be lying to avoid living up to their treaty obligations. They can either demonstrate to him that his armed forces goofed, or accuse them of deliberately lobbing an S-300 missile into Poland as a “false flag” operation to provoke NATO involvement.

The problem for Zelensky is that, from the perspective of NATO and the U.S., either of the terrible, no-good choices he faces is preferable to them entering the war to help him or give Ukraine the muscle to defeat Russia. A negotiated settlement that brings about peace in Ukraine ends the wider risk of war. Keeping Russia bogged down in Ukraine similarly reduces the risk of a wider war.

Entering the war directly, on the other hand, increases the risk of Russian attacks Eastern Europe and nuclear confrontation. Likewise, because Putin apparently sees the war in Ukraine as an existential battle for Russia’s survival, any sign of imminent defeat there risks him escalating the war, either by direct attack against NATO or deploying nuclear weapons. Giving Ukraine weapons that enable it achieve a decisive victory against Russia’s invading forces thus increases the West’s risks. Even riskier? Russian defeat. The West is thus much more content, as Putin himself has joked, “fighting to the last Ukrainian.”

But this raises questions as to whether the joke was on Putin all along, and whether Zelensky just wasn’t in on it. Long before the invasion, this newsletter explored the question of whether Washington’s strategy wasn’t to call Putin’s bluff over Ukraine and force him to invade a country even he knew would be a quagmire.

In a nutshell, Putin was worried about the inexorable creep of NATO membership, including new rocket bases in Poland and moves to admit Ukraine to the alliance. Seeing the West’s failed pandemic response and its parlous domestic politics as an opportunity to gain advantage, he manufactured his own Cuban Missile Crisis. Scholars like Timothy Naftali in Foreign Affairs point to that event to suggest that Putin is determined not to repeat the mistake his counterpart did: Khrushchev backed down in Cuba when faced with what looked like an imminent U.S. invasion of Cuba, agreeing to withdraw missiles there, and was subsequently deposed.

But it may be that Putin understands he is in a modern-day replay of the Cuban Missile Crisis, only with the roles reversed—Putin as Kennedy and Biden as Khrushchev. In this version, Russia the U.S. positioned missiles in Cuba Poland and the U.S. Russia responded by amassing forces for a retaliatory invasion of Cuba Ukraine with a high risk of nuclear confrontation.

But unlike Khrushchev, who offered conditions for removing the missiles, Biden didn’t blink. U.S. President John F. Kennedy called his response “one hell of a gamble” because Khrushchev essentially bought his bluff. This time around, though, Khrushchev Biden called Kennedy’s Putin’s bluff, refusing to offer concessions in the face of imminent U.S. Russian invasion of Cuba Ukraine. On the contrary, the Biden Administration amplified Russia’s every move, prompting some analysts to worry that Washington was trying to provoke Moscow into invading rather than discourage it. With no letters from Khrushchev Biden offering concessions (i.e. promise not to invade Cuba Ukraine and we’ll pull the missiles and leave Cuba Ukraine alone), Putin was backed into having to make good on his threat to invade, knowing all along it condemned him to a war his forces couldn’t lose, but ultimately cannot win.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight and newly declassified recordings and documents, we know today that the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn’t as dramatic a triumph for Amercian poker skills as the Kennedy Administration portrayed it. Khrushchev’s overtures, for example, appear to have been partly the result of back-channel diplomacy between Robert Kennedy and a Russian go-between. Kennedy was eager to suggest concessions to avoid an invasion and nuclear confrontation, even throwing into the bargain a secret promise to withdraw nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange.

So who knows what back-channel overtures Putin may have already made to Washington or what back-channel concessions Washington may have in turn proposed to Moscow. But Zelensky must surely now realize that, like Cuba and Turkey before, he and Ukraine are only pawns. And pawns are expendable.