Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky will be powerless to resist if US President-elect Donald Trump decides he wants Kiev to stop fighting and pursue peace with Russia, a source close to Zelensky’s office has told Ukraine’s Strana news outlet.

Trump promised throughout his campaign to bring a speedy end to the conflict, and after the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s election, pundits in the US have begun to speculate as to how Trump will achieve this goal once he takes office in January.

Much depends on who takes up senior roles in Trump’s administration, Strana reported on Thursday, noting that “there are many in the Republican Party who support war to the bitter end, and even in a harsher form than under [President Joe] Biden.”

Should Trump fail to purge pro-war Republicans and Democrat holdovers from the US State Department, the outlet noted, “almost nothing will change except for minor details.” The appointment of a hawkish figure like former CIA Director Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State would signal that Trump intends to follow this course, it added.

However, if Trump staffs the State Department with loyalists and approves a plan to ‘freeze’ the conflict while denying Ukraine NATO membership, and if Russian President Vladimir Putin accepts this plan, then “the likelihood that Zelensky will refuse is close to zero,” a source close to Zelensky’s office told Strana.

Ukraine “is not in a position to refuse its main partner, without whose support it will be almost impossible to continue the war,” the source said.

“Moreover, the mood in society is also growing in favor of a speedy end to the war, and even nationalists have recently begun to say that a ceasefire along the front line is far from the worst option for Ukraine in the current circumstances,” the source continued. “Of course, Zelensky will try to get the best terms for a ceasefire. There will be intense bargaining, but he is unlikely to object in principle.”

Zelensky insists that Ukraine will keep fighting until it restores its 1991 borders, a task that would involve the recapture of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, Zaporozhye, and Crimea from Russia. Senior Pentagon officials have admitted since last year that this feat would be next to impossible.

Russia maintains that it is open to any negotiations starting with an acknowledgement of “territorial reality” – that the above-mentioned regions will never return to Ukrainian control. The Kremlin has also insisted that all the goals of its military operation – securing Ukraine’s neutral status, protecting the rights of ethnic Russians within its borders, and ending the influence of neo-Nazis and ultranationalists in Kiev – will be achieved.

https://www.rt.com/russia/607311-zelensky-trump-forced-peace/

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Ukraine's deep manpower shortage has overshadowed the steady flow of Western arms deliveries. Against the backdrop of Russia’s steady advance, Kiev regime military personnel have been surrendering and deserting in droves, while over a million men of military age are estimated to be on the run across Ukraine.

Almost a fifth of Ukraine’s soldiers have gone AWOL from their positions, The Economist cited a source in the general staff as saying.

An overwhelming collapse in morale on the front line amid Russia’s steady advance is driving mass desertion, a senior Ukrainian military commander has claimed.

Despite more Western weapons in the pipeline for Ukraine, these is a “breakdown of trust between society, the army and the political leadership” in Kiev, according to the outlet. It added that Ukraine has been struggling to replace vast battlefield losses with conscription, “barely hitting two-thirds of its target.”

 Ukraine's losses exceeded 26,000 soldiers in the past month in the Kursk direction! - Putin#BRICS2024 pic.twitter.com/gm2u3ZlGde

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) October 24, 2024

Rampant draft dodging and desertion forced the Volodymyr Zelensky regime to adopt a new draconian mobilization law this year, while also lowering the recruitment age from 27 to 25.

Ukrainian refugees show zero enthusiasm to join Zelensky's Ukrainian Legion

The widely advertised Ukrainian Legion has yet to begin recruitment in Poland, despite Warsaw signaling its readiness to train Ukrainian volunteers residing abroad since August 1, according to the Polish… pic.twitter.com/wpFAe1SZVs

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 9, 2024

Ukrainians are increasingly resisting being sent into the meat grinder of a proxy conflict. Earlier, in October, Ukrainian media reported that since the beginning of 2022, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office has registered some 60,000 criminal cases of unauthorized abandonment of a unit and about 30,000 cases of desertion.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20241108/nearly-fifth-of-ukraines-soldiers-awol-amid-collapse-in-morale-1120817552.html

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

“It’s hard to do cartoons without a plan…”

         Gus Leonisky

President-elect Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky spoke by telephone on Wednesday, with Zelensky describing the conversation as “excellent” and saying the two sides “agreed to maintain close dialogue and advance our cooperation.” Behind the scenes, caution bordering on panic appears to be setting in.

Elements of Ukraine’s deep state have come out of the woodwork to warn about the unpleasant potential consequences for the regime of Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election.

Former president and oligarch Petro Poroshenko, implicated in the alleged pay-to-play corruption scandal involving President Biden’s son, and boasting about how the 2015 Donbass peace Minsk Agreements inked during his tenure were an anti-Russian ruse, led the charge among officials putting a brave face on things.

“I insist on red lines, which exist not only in Ukraine, but the entire free world,” Poroshenko wrote in a late-night social media post Wednesday, outlining five demands he said the Ukrainian government must stick to under Trump, including “no compromises” on sovereignty, territorial concessions, restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, sanctions, or NATO membership (basically a complete repudiation of the Russia-Ukraine draft peace deal negotiated in Istanbul before being sabotaged by NATO in the spring of 2022).

Poroshenko’s gung ho posturing stands in sharp contrast with what Ukrainian officials are saying privately.

“At this stage we are talking about survival, not victory,” an unnamed former senior member of the Zelensky cabinet told a UK outlet. “What is important today is not fighting forever for lost territory. It’s making sure that Russia is no longer a military threat to us. That can only be done diplomatically, not militarily,” the official said.

Another source warned Ukraine’s Strana.ua newspaper Zelensky would be basically forced to accept a Trump plan to freeze the conflict if it comes down to that.

“If Trump and the State Department approve a plan to stop the war along the front line with a moratorium on Ukraine’s entry into NATO and Putin agrees to this, the likelihood of Zelensky refusing is almost zero. The country is in no position right now to refuse its main partner, without whose support it will be almost impossible to continue the war,” the source said.

Former Zelensky foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba put it another way, telling media on Thursday that “there will be many super-irritating steps ahead from Trump which will make us reach for Corvalol [a remedy with a sedative effect] and think that this is the end, that this is all over.”

Pessimism Largely Matched in NATO

Ukrainian officials’ jittery reaction to Trump’s victory has been largely matched by Kiev’s sponsors, with Russia hawk former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen suggesting the alliance should play to Trump’s ego and “his desire to be a winner” to push a get-tough approach in Ukraine. “I don’t think he would like to be depicted [as] a loser and if you force the Ukrainians to the negotiating table, you have a very, very weak hand when you start these negotiations,” Rasmussen said.

Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Stavridis warned in an op-ed that Trump could simply tell Washington’s European allies that Ukraine is “your problem, handle it.”

Foreign Policy magazine reported, citing NATO and Western security sources, that there is almost universal agreement “that Ukraine is slowly losing the war and that this winter will be critical.” Bloomberg, meanwhile, warned that if Trump cut off US military support “without applying" unspecified "levers that made Russia stop fighting, Ukraine would face the possibility of defeat,” with “its US-supplied tanks, launchers and air defenses” set to “run out of ammunition in a matter of months.”

Europe has already set about preparing for a hardline Trump approach, with Responsible Statecraft reporting that Brussels is “‘Trump proofing’ Ukraine war aid,” giving Kiev enough money to “prolong a losing war while saddling the suffering country with enormous debt.”

In a series of social media posts a day after his conversation with Trump, Zelensky wrote bluntly “we need sufficient weapons, not support in negotiations,” and that Russia must be “pushed” toward “a just peace.”

“Ukraine is grateful for all the support from our partners and we are open to any constructive ideas to achieve a just peace for our country, but it is Ukraine that must decide what should and should not be on the agenda to end this war,” Zelensky wrote, calling on the West to ramp up the pilfering of frozen Russian assets, and urging Europe to “unite to protect the common interests of our peoples."

It remains to be seen whether Kiev and NATO officials’ concerns are justified. In 2016, Trump’s election victory gave rise to hopes that the political outsider would help end the Ukrainian crisis (then confined to the Donbass), particularly amid allegations that Poroshenko’s government had interfered in the US election to assist Trump’s opponent – Hillary Clinton. Surrounding himself with neoconservative advisors, including Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, Trump broadly continued the Obama administration’s approach to Ukraine, even breaking with Obama-era policy by agreeing to deliver lethal weapons to Kiev.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20241107/ukrainian-deep-state-urged-to-take-sedative-to-ward-off-trump-induced-panic-1120810151.html

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

“It’s hard to do cartoons without a pun…”

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