Needless to say, what is the consequence of such an approach. In short, the war must be fought to the last Ukrainian - and as much territory as possible will ultimately go to Russia.
How did it all start this time? The US, which has the best intelligence on developments on the battlefield, knows that the collapse of the front is imminent and that it is best for Ukraine to urgently begin to negotiate peace.
Donald Trump has come up with a new plan. Although his 28-point plan was categorically unacceptable to the Russians, according to John Mearsheimer, it was nevertheless described by our media, political and cultural establishment as a manifestation of the American President's pro-Russian approach.
Trump has presented the most realistic plan to date
It was the most realistic peace plan so far that could at least be discussed, and negotiations could begin. However, as there was a small glimmer of hope that the war might end other than on the battlefield, European leaders formed a united front and blocked the plan. In other words, they brought their own "peace plan" with the same conditions as those imposed on a country that had lost the war, i.e. de facto surrender conditions (reparations, abandonment of part of the conquered territory).
Meanwhile, Trump has this time pulled out the heaviest calibre of US foreign policy by involving the Ukrainian anti-corruption authorities in order to nudge Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky towards a realistic understanding of the situation. The special police and prosecutor's offices, which are under American control, grabbed Zelensky's closest people (Mindich and, subsequently, Yermak) by the scruff of the neck. This de facto blew Zelensky's cover and made any political future impossible for him.
Shortly afterwards, the name of the former army general-in-chief, Valery Zaluzhny, who had been dismissed by Zelensky a year and a half earlier because Zaluzhny had a realistic view of the development of the fighting, which was a cardinal mistake that was not forgiven at the time, either in the Ukrainian political leadership or in the West.
For example, Zaluzhnyi was sceptical about the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023, because he knew that Ukraine would lose the best part of its army there, which would make it impossible to defend itself in the long term, and its fall in such a decimated form would be complete, or would become only a matter of time. He had a similar view of the defence of Avdiivka and Bakhmut.
Ukraine is stolen from Western propagandists
If you doubted the success of the offensive at the time, which involved going headlong into the wall, you were a Putin propagandist.
And if you did so with Ukraine in mind?
That's beside the point, Western propagandists don't give a damn about Ukraine. The bottom line is that the Russians are inflicting casualties, not that tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are needlessly killed in the process.
After all, the "Discord papers" affair with the leaked documents showed that even in the US they knew that the counter-offensive would be unsuccessful and would end in disaster rather than in the retaking of Crimea, as the disoriented, disinformation, de facto anti-Ukrainian channels proclaimed at the time (in our country it is the mainstream media and politicians standing on the "right side of history").
America is not interested in prolonging the war
We are seeing something similar today, but with the difference that the US is no longer interested in the continuation of the war. Intelligence reports say that the Ukrainian army is breaking at all key points of the front, and therefore efforts to end the war by diplomatic methods need to be kick-started.
Zelensky himself was to try to revive American interest in peace negotiations, and he traveled to Turkey with this intention. He publicly stated that Ukraine's priority was to do everything possible to end the war.
However, any attempt at realistic peace terms inevitably runs up against a bind from Zelensky, who is now accountable not to Ukraine, but to the Bandera clans around him, which have become a key political actor in Ukraine, thanks in part to long-standing US support.
They have played a determining role in almost every fatal decision made by Ukraine since 2014 - and together they have led to a colossal tragedy.
Fascists behind Zelensky's back
They continue to play their role today. Zelensky must not make peace with Russia and cede some territory to it, even if it were the only hope of saving Ukraine. If he did, he would be liquidated by his own people.
Such are the consequences of long-term support for fascists. The Ukrainian people and their interests are an afterthought, indeed not even an afterthought. Who knows whether the interest of Ukraine is still taken seriously by anyone in power.
The Americans have no problem supporting Muslim terrorists (Syria and the like) as long as they help them overthrow the regime in the country they set out to take over. Even in the Middle East, where in 2001 they decided to start a series of devastating and long-running wars going nowhere precisely because of the threat of Muslim terrorism.
It cannot surprise us, then, if in Ukraine they have supported this nationalist element in particular and politicians with a hateful and uncompromising attitude towards Russia. Unlike the majority of the Ukrainian people, they shared a common interest with the American hawks - to weaken Russia even at the cost of a major war and the destruction of Ukraine.
As it happens with such foolish "strategies", the plan eventually backfired on its authors. Today, the US president expects concessions from Zelensky, which he must not make precisely because of the extremists around him.
Any hope for peace must be nipped in the bud
When any hope for peace appears anywhere, the European counter-offensive immediately comes.
The model works like this: in the beginning, Ukraine was supposed to fight to a victorious end, even though it was a phantasmagoria. This narrative of a victorious Ukraine has also fed the loyalties of the West.
It was not allowed to surrender any parts of territory. When it started losing them and losing, it was suddenly willing to hand over some of them. But it was too late, for the Russians had in the meantime advanced. Even then, however, she was not willing to make a realistic peace. In the meantime, the US had lost patience with Ukraine, and a battered and devastated Ukraine, dependent on Western funding, would soon lose donations from the indebted Europeans as well.
Needless to say, with every day of extra war, not only are Russia's borders closing in on us (and threatening to close even faster once the front is broken), but the likelihood that the future of the rest of Ukraine will be in Russia's economic and political radius is increasing dramatically.
This has been the attitude of the ruthless anti-Ukrainian radicals who call themselves "supporters of Ukraine" all along.
And anyone who has been considerate of Ukraine and preached realism has been branded a Putin troll and a pro-Russian fascist.
Domestic media
In this context, it is interesting to observe how our domestic media establishment operates as well. When the American peace proposal appeared, which, although not entirely realistic in terms of the picture of the development of the war, at least someone finally understood where the Russian position lay, immediately afterwards a number of articles dusting off the old "narratives" appeared.
Just a few examples from the domestic disinformation of local trolls: the US peace plan is terrifying and Russia is about to attack Europe. I was particularly frightened by an article by Lubomir Smatana, a Czech journalist based in Slovakia, in Denník N. After the surrender of Ukraine, a chaotic apocalypse will supposedly come, as Ukrainian soldiers will start fleeing their occupied homeland, shoot their way across our borders and, with severe psychological problems, threaten us here in some way.
The author prefers not to take his pamphlet to its point, which, however, his text inevitably leads to: rather than this, let us support the continuation of the conflict at home, where the battle-scarred radicals in question (whom he has actually made himself) will die needlessly in a losing war. As long as they fall there, we need not fear them. Strange that this sort of thing will spring up immediately when Trump brings up a new attempt at peace negotiations. And of course, Palo Habera will still come to the rescue...
Whose time is running out?
Let us recall that the US President, in his first speech after winning the election, declared, "I will not start wars, I will stop wars."
The unanswered question now on the table is whether Trump will still have time to achieve peace in Ukraine on a fourth attempt.