Ukraine is now fighting against four dictatorships

And, 95 Ukrainian prisoners of war, including Azov fighters, return home after two years in captivity.

Hello and welcome to your weekly briefing on Ukraine. 

Let’s begin with some good news for a change: 95 Ukrainian prisoners of war returned home after a swap, including 34 Azov fighters who defended Mariupol, and a human rights activist turned soldier Maksym Butkevych. 

Photos published President Zelensky on Telegram.

They spent more than two years in hell that is Russian captivity. 

Yet when a reporter approached Butkevych right after their arrival, saying that her entire Facebook feed was raving about his return (mine too), he seemed like the kindest, most gentle person in the world. 

He immediately put his rights defender's hat on: “My friend and I came from a colony where more than 40 convicted Ukrainian prisoners of war are being kept, convicted on fabricated charges,” Butkevych said, adding that they were the first ones to leave from that penal colony in Russia-occupied Luhansk.  

You’d think Zelensky’s “victory plan” was the top political news of the week, but the President also made headlines flaunting the possibility of Ukraine developing nuclear weapons.  

"Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, which will serve as protection, or it must be part of some kind of alliance. Apart from NATO, we do not know of such an effective alliance,” Zelensky said he told Donald Trump when they met in the US. 

He walked it back the next day, saying that he was only invoking the failures of the Budapest Memorandum – a 1994 deal in which Ukraine agreed to give up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the U.S., and the U.K. 

The Memorandum proved useless, as all deals with Russia eventually do. 

“This means that the Budapest Memorandum is not a good protection for us, it is not a real umbrella. Therefore, we have no alternative but NATO. That is our signal. But we are not developing nuclear weapons,” Zelensky said. 

After months of speculation about North Korea’s involvement in Russia’s war, there is now mounting evidence that it’s happening, including a video of North Korean soldiers getting equipped at a Russian base. 

South Korea said on Oct. 18 that as many as 12,000 soldiers from North Korea are being deployed to fight on Russia’s side. (This is on top of the ballistic missiles and artillery shells that the pariah supplied earlier.) Ukraine’s Military Intelligence chief said the troops will be deployed by Nov. 1. 

This effectively means that Ukraine is now fighting against four states, three of which are nuclear powers: Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. I feel as though this simple fact doesn’t get enough attention, so read it again.

Almost from the very beginning, this war was about attrition. It boiled down to whose allies could outproduce the other side. It’s now increasingly obvious which side is winning, isn’t it? 

One could argue it’s because dictatorships are better at fighting criminal wars: they don’t care about their people, they don’t care about proper procedures or international norms, they can devote ludicrous amounts of money to weapons production, and send off hundreds of thousands of their citizens to die. One can also argue that from the very beginning, the West misunderstood this war, misread Russia’s global aims, and downplayed Ukraine’s capabilities. The reality is probably a mix of those.

Zelensky’s now-public “victory plan” wraps up this briefing. I’ll recap: the plan’s five points include an immediate invitation to NATO, increased military aid with no restrictions, a “non-nuclear deterrence package” on Ukraine’s territory, a deal between Ukraine and its allies about the joint use of Ukraine’s natural resources, and Ukrainian soldiers replacing NATO military contingents in Europe after the war. 

Read my detailed deep dive here: Zelensky finally unveils his victory plan.

Let me know if there are any particular topics you’d like me to unpack in upcoming essays.

I’ll be back next week,

Cheers, and Glory to Ukraine,

— Yours Ukrainian