At the End of the War, Zelensky Is Confronted With Reality, by Ted Snider

Zelensky is desperately trying to avoid being cast adrift, but the U.S. and Russia are going to control the peace process and the fate of Ukraine. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:

When the United States, the UK, Poland and their NATO partners pushed Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky off the path of diplomacy and onto the road of war against a much more powerful country, Zelensky kept public morale high with tales of unlimited and unending Western weapons, recovery of the Donbas and Crimea, and eventual NATO membership.

But the tale is over, and it was a fiction. The West’s military support succumbed to disillusion, Crimea and the Donbas will be part of Russia, and there is no hope of NATO membership.

Zelensky, who had once issued a decree that Ukraine would not negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin, now says that he will talk to Putin “if that is the only setup in which we can bring peace to the citizens of Ukraine.”

And it is the only way to bring peace to Ukraine. Once disappointed that fantasies of total victory had settled into a stalemate, Ukraine now faces the reality of the possibility of total collapse. And it Zelensky is going to stop that by talking to Putin, he will have to talk fast. His head of defence intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, has reportedly told a closed meeting of Ukraine’s leadership that “[i]f there are no serious negotiations by the summer, dangerous processes could unfold, threatening Ukraine’s very existence.”

Once insistent that Ukraine would recover all of its lost territories, Zelensky has conceded that “De facto, these territories are now controlled by the Russians. We don’t have the strength to bring them back,” while still insisting that Ukraine “cannot legally acknowledge any occupied territory of Ukraine as Russian.”

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