The kernel of the long-awaited “victory plan” for Ukraine that President Volodymyr Zelensky introduced this fall goes something like this: If you give me what I’ve been asking for — membership in NATO and permission to fire Western missiles deep into Russian territory — I could end the war by next year.lodibet

The demands are not in themselves new. The urgency is in the timing: The American election, and what President Biden does before he leaves office, will have serious consequences for the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Actual membership in NATO is not in the cards for Ukraine until the war is over. The Atlantic alliance has already declared that Ukraine is on an “irreversible” path to membership, but that is as far as it is likely to go for now. Firing NATO missiles deep into Russia, however, is something a growing number of members have signaled they would allow.

Not Mr. Biden, at least not yet. NATO weapons striking inside Russia, he fears, would take Western participation in the war to a new level. It would also cross a red line that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has drawn. Long-range strikes against Russia, Mr. Putin has declared, “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia.”

A growing chorus of NATO members disagree, and have urged the United States to give Ukraine the green light. Russia, they argue, has no compunction about using weapons from China, North Korea or Iran against Ukraine. “Are you telling me that Putin is not using — is not throwing — everything he has at Ukraine?” Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Whatever decision Mr. Biden takes (or avoids taking) in his last weeks in office will create a reality that the next president will have to deal with.

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