Zelenskyy’s War Without an Endgame

American  Thinker 

Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s latest vow is not a strategy—it’s theater, the kind that ends with the curtain falling on Ukrainian sovereignty.

On the eve of the Trump–Putin summit in Alaska, Zelenskyy again rejected any settlement requiring the formal cession of territory.

Not Crimea. Not the Donbas. Not a single acre seized in 2014—or since 2022.

Zelenskyy insists Ukraine must be at the table and will not trade land for peace. Fine. 

But diplomacy is not magic—it is leverage, and after more than three years of war, Kyiv has none sufficient to force Moscow to surrender what it holds. Pretending otherwise is delusion.

Zelenskyy speaks like a man convinced he is winning—and as if Moscow were the one suing for peace. It is fantasy. Ukraine is not winning—nowhere close.

His demand for every inch of territory he cannot retake on the battlefield is proof enough.

Simply put, Ukraine is fighting bravely but losing—slowly, inexorably, irreversibly. Drag this war out, as some insist, and it will end with the fall of Kyiv—sooner than they dare admit.

Zelenskyy vows he will not cede territory, yet for approaching four years he has done precisely that—trading land and soldiers, acre by acre, village by village, unit by unit, for time. Time to pull America and Europe deeper into a war that serves no one’s strategic interests. Time to chase a NATO invitation and an EU flag that will not arrive in time to save him.

Russia is waging a war of attrition—true to its doctrine for generations. Trump and Putin meet because both see the battlefield for what it is: a slow-motion grind on Moscow’s terms, not Kyiv’s. Trump sees an opening for peace; Putin sees a path to victory.

That path has been paved in part by Russia’s ability to sidestep Western sanctions, using a web of BRICS partners to keep its war machine supplied and funded.

China funnels dual-use electronics and buys Russian oil by the tanker. India refines and resells that crude, blunting Western embargoes.

Iran ships drones, ammunition, and operates a shadow fleet carrying Russian petroleum to China, India, and beyond—sometimes through intermediaries as far as South Africa. Under the BRICS umbrella, South Africa lends diplomatic cover. Even NATO’s Turkey acts as a sanctions safety valve, importing Russian energy and serving as a transshipment hub.

For years, Europe’s own energy purchases bankrolled the Kremlin before belated LNG shifts began to bite.

Far from starving Russia’s war machine, the world has been feeding it.

On Ukraine’s side, the 2023 counteroffensive is a fading memory—and where it succeeded, it was a pyrrhic victory.

The front is now marked by small, costly advances—quickly erased by larger Russian gains.

This is the attrition curve: manpower dwindles, shells run short, lines thin.

Losses compound in reverse—slowly at first, then all at once.

One month the map looks stable; weeks later the line buckles, reserves vanish, logistics are exposed—and there is no depth left to trade for time.

When the breaking point comes, Moscow will not nibble at the edges. Expect full-frontal assaults, followed by pincer movements and deep envelopments—to encircle and annihilate brigades, not merely push them back. Fronts don’t “bend” at that moment—they collapse.

Yet Zelenskyy’s fatal political error is negotiating for total victory as if it were already won. It isn’t. You don’t demand unconditional surrender when you lack the power to enforce it—and the wider the gap between rhetoric and reality, the sooner Ukraine risks the very outcome it claims to prevent: the loss of its statehood, on Russian terms.

That delusion persists in Washington, kept alive by voices from the Biden-Blinken school of foreign policy romanticism—still peddling the fairy tale: one more tranche, one more package, one more spring.

In reality, it buys Ukraine’s destruction—its soldiers bled out, its cities dark, its economy gutted, its people scattered. A strategy that assumes time favors Kyiv is, in practice, a strategy that runs out the clock on Ukrainian sovereignty—whether or not its architects intend it.

And the romanticism—the framing of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as a 21st-century morality play—obscures the deeper rot in Western policy.

It began with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, when Ukraine surrendered the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for vague “security assurances” from the U.S., U.K., and Russia—not treaty guarantees, but paper promises.

John Mearsheimer and other realists warned that NATO’s eastward flirtations would eventually collide with Russian red lines and be seen in Moscow as an existential threat.

That warning became reality in 2008, when the Bucharest Summit declared Ukraine “will become a member” of NATO yet offered no Membership Action Plan—dangling the prize without the means to claim it.

Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden all reinforced those mixed signals, holding out false hope while doing nothing to make it real.

We disarmed Ukraine, baited Russia, and never built the deterrence to back our words.

Only President Trump broke that pattern—refusing to make entangling promises Washington had neither the will nor the means to keep.

Which brings us to Alaska. This may be the last real chance to trade maximalist fantasy for achievable peace—and that requires compromise.

Putin is not returning to the 1991 borders. Zelenskyy is not retaking Crimea by communiqué. Pretending otherwise isn’t diplomacy—it’s denial, and a fool’s errand.

And here’s the hard truth for Americans: the only force on earth capable of pushing Russia back to its pre-2014 lines is the United States military—Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.

Doing so would mean a major U.S.-NATO war with Russia, fought on the European continent for years.

Donald Trump—who has the sense to avoid such folly—will never commit to that catastrophic proposition.

A future Democrat president might stumble into it—or rush headlong—without hesitation.

If realism ever penetrates Kyiv’s thinking, there are options short of surrender: a cease-fire with a buffer zone, a frozen conflict, verifiable limits on deployments, phased sanctions relief conditioned on compliance, and yes—allowing the Donbas to decide its fate in an internationally supervised plebiscite.

Kyiv resists such measures because many in these regions, who never backed Zelenskyy to begin with, would likely vote to cast their lot with Moscow.

The West’s policy elites are content to stall until what they hope will be a more pliant American president takes office in 2029. Ukraine will not last that long. It will fall slowly—until it falls all at once.

Wars usually end in one of two ways: decisive victory or negotiated settlement. Ukraine has no path to the first, and rejecting the second risks drifting into something worse—a collapse without terms, on Russia’s timetable.

The Alaska summit is a step toward negotiation—and a warning. Ukraine must move toward a settlement grounded in realistic, attainable goals, not a war plan marching steadily toward the end of its sovereignty.

Trilateral talks will fail if Ukraine or Russia remains recalcitrant.

Whether Kyiv has a seat at the table or not, the clock is running out.