The difficulties do not end there.

In addition to his meeting with US President Joe Biden, the Ukrainian leader also met with Republican politicians who are struggling to contain growing skepticism within their party.

“We are protecting the free world, which should receive the support of the Republicans,” says a Ukrainian government adviser in kyiv.

“It was more difficult when the war started, because it was chaos,” he says. “Now we can be more specific in our requests because we know what our allies have and where they store it.”

But increasingly, allied countries are facing questions like “why should Ukraine continue to receive a blank check?” » and “how does the country plan to win the war?” “.

The Ukrainian president tried to answer these two questions on the international stage. Today, it seems he has done more negotiating than campaigning – precisely to maintain Western aid.

And this during a week in which kyiv fell out with one of its most loyal allies, Poland, in a dispute over Ukrainian grain.

The ban on Ukrainian imports led President Zelensky to indirectly accuse Warsaw of “helping Russia.”

Polish President Andrzej Duda then compared Ukraine to “a drowning person with whom we can drown together.”

Since then, the situation has calmed down.

Even for an experienced warlord, Ukraine’s president is facing diplomatically difficult times.

Upcoming elections in partner countries such as Poland, Slovakia and the United States make the picture murkier. Some candidates prioritize domestic issues over military support for Ukraine.

“The need to balance military aid and voter satisfaction makes things really complicated,” says Serhiy Gerasymchuk of Prism, a Ukrainian foreign policy think tank.

“Ukraine must consider promoting its interests using all possible instruments, while taking into account the situation in partner countries and the European Union. This is a challenge,” says Gerasymchuk.

This is the kind of question that Russian leader Vladimir Putin need not worry about.

This is why kyiv is trying to present this war as a fight not only for its sovereignty, but also for democracy.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

Ukraine handed over Soviet nuclear weapons remaining on its soil to Russia in exchange for the promise that its territorial integrity would be respected and defended by the other signatory countries of the treaty.

Nine years of Russian aggression have made this deal seem like a broken promise.

Kiev is also trying to develop a long-term plan while seeking to better interact with countries like Brazil and South Africa, which have been apathetic in the face of the Russian invasion.

It is a strategy that did not bring immediate results.

“The truth is that we depend on success on the front line,” says the Ukrainian government adviser.

He claims that the media have greatly simplified the Ukrainian counter-offensive.

For him, the media focused too much on the frontline theater, where gains were marginal, and less on the substantial successes of missile strikes in Crimea and attacks on Russian warships.

Ukraine has always declared that it will not let anyone “rush” it into its counter-offensive. As the politics of this war become increasingly tied to combat, this will be tested more than ever.