A Weird End For A Weird War

The war in Ukraine will go down as one of the stranger conflicts in American history, mostly because it has been a phony war. That is, the American government spent most of the war pretending to not be part of the war, while supplying the Ukrainians with hundreds of billions in war material. With a new administration bringing realism back to foreign policy, the end of the war promises to be strange as well. While the end is known, the path remains a mystery.

The story over the last few weeks has been the squeeze the administration has put on Zelensky to get him to agree to peace talks and agree to sign over the country's natural resources as compensation for the hundreds of billions in aid. The process has revealed to the administration that Zelensky is an unreliable partner in a peace deal, so his future is now limited. You cannot make a deal with a guy that no one trusts, so whatever peace comes to Ukraine will not include Zelensky.

You see this with the peace talks coming this week between officials from the Trump administration and a Ukrainian delegation. Saudi Arabia is hosting the talks, and one man has been told not to attend. That man is Zelensky. Not only was he excluded from the meeting, but he was also barred from traveling with the delegation. Zelensky had planned to just hang around Saudi Arabia during the talks. Clearly, these meetings are about life after Zelensky.

The main point of the meeting is to find out if there is any support in Ukrainian politics for a peace deal. Getting rid of Zelensky is not a great challenge. Finding a replacement is not a great challenge. The issue is finding a new leader who can sign a peace deal without the country collapsing into turmoil. The Trump administration needs to find someone that can act as an interim leader, get the political factions to accept a peace deal and then hold elections.

If elections were held today, the most likely winner would be the former commander of the Ukrainian army, Valery Zaluzhny. While he has the respect of the army and the respect of the public, he is tightly tied with the ultranationalists. There are a lot of pictures of Zaluzhny posing next to iconography reminiscent of a certain period in German history, because he is extremely fond of that time. That means he is probably not a reliable option as a peaceful leader of Ukraine.

Another option is Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch who got rich in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He first got rich in the candy business, which earned him the nickname of the "Chocolate King." He also owned media companies, natural resources firms and manufacturing concerns. He has lost a lot of his power over the last five years as Zelensky consolidated his own power in Kiev. Poroshenko is also an outlandishly corrupt figure with ties to the ultranationalists.

Another option is Yulia Tymoshenko, who made some headlines in the West when she briefly became the face of the "Orange Revolution." She is the leader of the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) political party and strongly anti-Russian, but she has been a critic of the war and Zelensky’s handling of it. She is an oligarch as well, having got rich in the energy business. This earned her the nickname "The Gas Princess", which may be one of the better nicknamed in politics.

Within Ukrainian media, the betting favorite at the moment is Tymoshenko for the simple reason that she does not have the ultranationalist baggage. She has her own party outside the Zelensky machine, and she seems willing to strike a deal. It may also be easier for a woman to sell peace to the public. There are millions of wives and mothers of men who have been killed or maimed in the war. That might be enough to overcome opposition from the ultranationalists.

A major challenge to finding a replacement for Zelensky is Europe. The scheming ladies of Brussels view Zelensky as an essential part of their scheme to turn the EU into a replacement for NATO. This is why they are offering him unconditional support for his efforts to scuttle any peace deal with Russia. Then you have individual leaders like Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, who are trying hard to make Zelensky seem like the most honest man in Europe.

Further complicating matters is the condition of the Ukraine army. They are now being routed in the Kursk region. Thousands of their best soldiers are now trapped in a cauldron with no chance of escape. Thousands of others have surrendered and thousands more have died fleeing toward the border. An army low on morale, hearing that its main benefactor wants a peace deal, is not going to respond well to news that its best units have been routed.

Since everything about this proxy war has been strange, it is fitting that its last acts will be strange as well. Normally in a long war of attrition, the side with the upper hand is willing to press on with the war, while the other side wants peace. In this case, the winning side wants a deal, while the losing side demands to fight on, even as its main benefactor demands peace. It will be another reminder that this part of the world produces nothing but misery for everyone around it.