This is the End, My Only Friend...
Zelensky Makes the Mistake of Going Toe-to-Toe with Trump. What's Next?
Today, on the cusp of signing the mineral deal which would allegedly start Russia and Ukraine down the road to peace, a flare up in the Oval Office led President Trump to announce that Ukraine was not serious about peace and should return when they were. And rightfully so considering Zelensky called Vance a b-tch.1 Shortly thereafter, Zelensky stormed out of the White House. This won’t come as a shock to most who have been paying attention, as Zelensky has become increasingly antagonistic towards Trump over the last two months. One thing is for certain: dark days are ahead for Ukraine.
The Press Conference
It was clear from the start of the press conference that there was some tension in the room. Very quickly, Trump’s optimistic comments that a deal was being made which would help to get the peace process going were met with sharp interjections from Zelensky. Zelensky pulled out a folder of photos of Ukrainian POWs, flashing them in front of the cameras, noting “here is a pastor, look they even do these to pastors.” This is rich coming from a man who has brutalized pastors in his own country: long jail sentences, forced exiles, house arrest, targeted conscriptions of priests in excess of sixty years old, pulling them from hospital beds to bring them to jail, the list goes on.
I want to pause here because what happened today was easily explained by anyone who has watched Zelensky’s actions and the way his regime has fought this war. Zelensky has sought to frame the war in an overly simplistic Star Wars-esque battle of good and evil - because frankly Americans eat up these simple narratives and often lack the intellectual depth and attention span to look into the facts.2 From the start, Western leaders were highly skeptical of giving Ukraine weapons. Zelensky framed it as a clear cut struggle of good v. evil so that, if Western leaders denied him weapons, he could just go over their heads, appealing directly to the media and people about how their leaders were preventing good from conquering evil by not giving them weapons - basically moral blackmail. This is why he dresses the way he does and presents himself and the conflict the way he does. This carries into the Ukrainian military and intelligence apparatus presentation of itself and the way it fights the war: the Kursk offensive was a propaganda campaign; the Dnieper River crossings at Krynky, a pointless operation which even ABC News had to admit that “the aim of this operation remains unclear.” All that matters is that he can say “see, we can fight, we just need more money and weapons!”
Zelensky went to the White House hoping that he could gaslight Trump into giving him the security guarantees he wants - NATO membership. He thought that if he showed unverifiable photos of desheveled prisoners, Trump and Vance would feel pressured to give an assurance in front of the media - and it backfired. Big time.
Trump tried to steer the conversation back into a positive direction, Zelensky would not relent with his demands. Vance, not willing to be gaslit, stated that he found it disrespectful for Zelensky to come to the Oval Office and try to negotiate before the American people. And he’s right, this was a tactic clearly meant to gaslight the Administration and Vance wasn’t taking it. Zelensky tried to sit there, in front of the very country which has sent him three-hundred billion dollars and say that they have been fighting Russia all alone. Trump clapped back, saying they’d have been defeated in three days if it weren’t or the US, and that his attitude would need to change if he wanted to stop the killing, and that right now they’re losing thousands of men a week.
This is an incredible statement, as Zelensky made no attempt to correct Trump. Considering how tight lipped Zelensky has been on casualty figures, and that he hasn’t corrected the American administration when Trump says “hundreds of thousands dead, over a million combined,” or “thousands dead a week,” not simply casuaulties, which includes wounded, but dead, says that the casualty numbers are likely far closer to the ones the RAF have been releasing, than those which the AFU has released.
The mineral deal was not signed. There is still a chance Zelensky could sign before leaving the country, but it’s clear that the incident has left some bad blood between the two parties.
Mineral Deal and Peace Negotiations
Trump has made one thing clear: no mineral deal, no American aid. This puts Ukraine in a bind. In spite of all of Europe’s rosy rhetoric, they are wholly, wildly incapable of supplying Ukraine on their own (for defense, much less for offense). Newsweek reported in 2023 that NATO would run out of ammunition within days of launching a war with Russia. The best of NATO, France, would last about ten days. The situation hasn’t really improved since then, as Atlanticist industrial capacity has been utterly decimated over the preceding generation, and plans to ramp up production will take years. Without America, Ukraine’s prospects are totally hopeless.
The question one may want to ask is why is Trump so insistent on this mineral deal, is he so callous that he just wants to secure minerals?
Nyet comrade, this is not it. Instead, Trump is hoping to gain leverage. For leverage over Ukraine, he wants to secure rare earth minerals - which likewise benefits America; for leverage over Russia, he is floating the lifting of sanctions and economic cooperation deals. Thus, by not signing a peace deal, Ukraine loses the protection guaranteed of a land which contains American strategic assets; if Russia fails to sign a peace deal, they lose the chance to normalize their economic situation.
We should note that the Russian economy has borne the sanctions remarkably well - the most aggressive sanctions regime in history. Seeing how America and her allies have crushed others with sanctions, they spent the last decade and a half restructuring their economy to be as sanctions-proof as possible. They’ve managed to maintain a well-balanced budget without flooding the economy with money and causing inflation to run out of control.3 They’ve not had to institute a call up of the draft, choosing instead to offer handsome bonuses for volunteers - bonuses amounting to one to five years the average salary of a Russian civilian depending on where they live, and putting Russian military pay on par with American military pay + combat pay. That they’ve managed to balance their budget while fighting a high-intensity industrial conflict, increasing military expenditures up to nearly 7.5% of GDP, while under sanctions, without going bankrupt or facing popular revolt, is admittedly impressive. How long they can pull this off is another question. One has to wonder at what point the financial burden catches up with them. Also, Russia has a tight labor market with an unemployment rate just over one percent. How long they can pull people from their workforce to go to the front remains to be seen. But, I digress.
By signing this mineral deal, Ukraine is put into a position to hold virtually all the land it still occupies, minus a few transfers between the two parties. They will obtain security guarantees, continued military aid, beneficial trade and financial assistance. What if they refuse to sign?
Ukraine - On the Homefront
The internal situation in Ukraine is not great, to put it lightly. Politically, socially, economically, and militarily, Ukraine is in a state oscillating between apathy and despair. There is very little freedom of the press in Ukraine. The overwhelming majority of the media is controlled by the state or directed by American NGOs. On the one hand, this means that the excesses of the regime are not spoken of in the media, and the frontline situation is described in as rosey a manner possible. The downside is that, at this point, no one but the more rabid nationalists believes what the media says. People instead get their news via Telegram and similar platforms.
Ukraine has had to resort to press-ganging civilians into military service. A quick internet search will reveal dozens of videos of men in camouflage with masks pulling up in vans, doing the ol’ snatch-and-grab on young men walking around the city. The government has targeted ethnic and religious minorities for service, not merely ethnic Russians or members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, but also ethnic Romanians, Hungarians, and Carpatho-Russians. But one cannot find this surprising considering the desperate military situation. We should, perhaps, wonder why they didn’t launch a much larger draft to begin with.
The Morale Crisis
The military situation is, to again put it mildly, strained. Morale across the AFU has plummeted, and desertions have risen from a trickle, to a stream, and now a raging river. And this is not isolated to the Territorial Defense Brigades, but Western trained units - typically known for their higher level of training and motivation. Take, for example, the 155th Mechanized Brigade. The 155th spent nine months training in France (see photo below) and was equipped with Leopard II tanks, French Caesar howitzers (155mm) and other modern equipment, totalling nine-hundred billion dollars. What was meant to be a 5,700 strong unit left France with 1,924 men. It was deployed to Pokrovsk, a key logistics hub and the last major obstacle to the Russian conquest of the Donbass. Yurii Butusov reported that "Before the brigade fired the first shot, 1,700 servicemen deserted."
The brigade simply dissolved.4
I mention the 155th because this was supposed to be a flagship unit, one in which money was dumped by the barrel-load, and which received some of the best training the West has to offer. Certainly this isn’t happening in every brigade, otherwise the Russian’s could skip to Kiev. But we know for certain that desertion across the AFU has reached a critical level; desertion rates are so high that the Verkhovna Rada was forced to decriminalize first-time desertions! Soldiers cite both the horrible conditions at the front, and the open ended contract in which, once one is in the army, there is no end to the contract so long as the war continues. And things have only gotten worse since these reports came out. Now that American aid has been suspended for nearly a month, with no resumption of aid in sight, with the dream of reclaiming their lost territories and “winning” the war gone, what little morale was holding out has now collapsed.
Situation at the Front
Russia has been in an offensive posture for more than a year. Unlike the Ukrainian Summer Offensive (or even the Kursk Offensive) Russia has not sought to force a breakthrough and drive deep into the enemy territory since the initial invasion. They understood this would be a war of attrition and planned appropriately. In attritional warfare, such operations are largely a waste of manpower and resources. Instead, Russia has let her overwhelming advantage in artillery do the work. Artillery accounts for roughly 80% of casualties on the modern battlefield, thus, having an 8:1 to 14:1 advantage in artillery, Russia need not waste manpower needlessly. They have largely adopted the storm trooper tactics of the Germans late in the First World War.
These Storm-Z detachments were born out of what remained of PMC Wagner, training specialized units in every parent unit. These small units, combined with attack and reconnaissance drones, will find and exploit weak spots in the enemy line. Often they will rush in a small group of armored vehicles and dismount to gain a foothold. In other circumstances, they’ll use dirtbikes to quickly insert a small, heavily-armed team of shock troops within a tree/trenchline. From there they can move up more men. There are no “meat-wave attacks” as the media has repeatedly stated. A “meat-wave” indicates something like we see in the opening scene of Enemy at the Gates, where a mass of human bodies (hundreds or more) bumrush a position in a suicidal charge in hopes that the enemy runs out of ammo. There is zero footage of this ever happening in Ukraine (and we have thousands, tens of thousands of hours of combat footage).
Over the last year, the Russian operational tempo has steadily increased, like bringing water to a boil. Watching the daily casualty figures over the last year, these went from 500-600 per day, to 800-1,000 a day, to 1,200, to 1,300 per day fairly consistently;5 equipment loses have increased in a similar fashion. Whereas the Russians typically fall back to pre-planned positions if the Ukrainians push with any force, the Ukrainians have been devoted to holding every inch of ground possible when the Russians would advance. But over the last six weeks (and especially over the last two weeks) the Ukrainians just abandon their positions when the Russians attack. This isn’t to say they’re fleeing the battlefield altogether, but that they’re not willing to die for these positions.
Now, to be fair, we have to understand the battlefield. In Donbass, Ukraine spent roughly seven years building defensive positions, lines, and strongpoints along the line of contact - building a defense in depth. For much of the war, the Russians have been bogged down in this defensive zone, very slowly plugging away position by position. There are many parts of the front where they have not broken through this zone, but in southern Donbass, they were able to break out somewhat after Avdiivka. The lower density of defensive positions combined with improved tactics and coordination of forces has allowed them to more easily take ground. But this does not account for the last six weeks or so in which ground seized has increased substantially. Instead, we see Ukrainians simply ceding ground, Russians walking into positions, and the number of casualties per square kilometer taken has dropped notably. This is important because the main sector under attack, Pokrovsk, is the last major logistics hub and line of defense in Donbass. Once it falls, there aren’t really meaningful defensive positions between the Russians and the Dnieper River itself. One would imagine that the Ukrainians need to hold the line now more than ever, but that's not what we're seeing on the ground.
This is really telling about how Ukrainians feel about the war. Again, until now the narrative has been that every inch of Ukraine is sacred, and must not only be defended, but retaken, otherwise there can be no peace. What this tells us is that the Ukrainians know the jig is up. Knowing that the war is over, they just want to make it home. They don’t want to do anything that is going to increase their odds of not going home. We saw this among American soldiers towards the end of World War II. They didn’t want to go out on patrol, or hear about large advances. They knew the Germans were beaten. This also made it a very dangerous time, as soldiers, hearing that peace could be coming “any day now” became complacent and made avoidable mistakes. I fear a similar situation could result within the Ukrainian Army - and equally the Russian Army, though they seem to be taking advantage of their momentum on the battlefield.
Civilians being interviewed in Kiev, Lviv, and Odessa, are very telling and help to confirm what we are seeing at the front. Ukrainian civilians say that they see the war is over, that they have lost; while they don’t know what the future holds, they just want the killing to stop. Now, certainly, the Banderite zealots and those who have become really important (and wealthy) are still willing to fight. They’ll likely fight to the end, and if they don’t like the peace deal, they’ll probably launch a coup - which is the threat that got Zelensky into this position to begin with.
Conclusions
As things stand, US aid to Ukraine is suspended. Elon is cutting StarLink, on which the entire Ukrainian military is dependent, and Trump has not stated he will not convince Elon to keep StarLink running. Meanwhile, Putin knows that time is short and he needs to finish taking Donetsk Oblast and seize as much of Kharkov and Dnipro-Petrovsk as possible - as there are where the majority of rare earth minerals within reach are located, thus, having the best hand he can when negotiations come to pass.
The question is: how much longer can the AFU fight? If Zelensky refuses to come to the table, and refuses to even allow a ceasefire, what happens when they get critically low on ammo? Even if the Russians’ aims are limited, if the AFU routes, Russia would be foolish not to chase them all the way to Kiev. Zelensky has put Ukraine in a very dangerous position. It’s hard to conceive of why someone would put their country in such a position.
Regardless of how the war started, or what we may think certain figures and movements, the soldiers of the Ukrainian Army deserve an honorable peace. The bulk of the Ukrainian army, though poorly trained conscripts, have fought courageously and honorably.6 Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives; those who survive them deserve to go home with their heads held high. I fear Zelensky is taking that from them. One thing is certain, the road to recovery for Ukraine is a long one.
During the main back and forth between Zelensky and Vance, Zelensky calls him Сука, Russian for bit-h. People always revert to their native tongue during moments of intense emotion.
To be clear, this isn’t directed at most Americans… It’s directed towards those of you who are now feverishly reading through my posts in hopes of finding something, anything you can clip and use to attack my wife and I. Yes, this is for you.
This is largely thanks to the head of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, an economic wizard. She is one of Russia’s longest serving ministers and one of the few people who can tell Putin “no” and him listen. Fortune released a good article on Elvira and her work last year.
These are the numers each side is reporting. The actual numbers we will likely not know for several years. Whatever the numbers are, it’s one of the great tragedies of our time.
This doesn’t apply to the many war-criminals in the Drone units and Banderites. They deserve to be shot by firing squad.
https://substack.com/@stevenberger/note/c-79888509