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Washington has long confused motion with momentum and, most fatally, allies with assets. The latest casualty of this confusion is the half-alive, half-strangled attempt to end the Ukraine war before it devours yet another year of blood and treasure. Donald Trump’s 28-point peace plan, hatched en route to Miami, revised in Geneva, advanced in Moscow, and finally everywhere courtesy of the world’s most industrious leakers, was conceived as a pragmatic off-ramp. Not surrender, not capitulation—merely the grown-up recognition that wars end either with treaties or with funerals.
Instead, the plan died the way most diplomatic ideas do: suffocated by the very people who claim to cherish it. Ukraine rejected any paragraph not beginning with “Russia retreats” and ending with “unconditional victory.” Europe rejected anything that might require them to stop emoting and start contributing. And the usual Beltway war chorus, those heroic paladins who consider military service an entry-level job for someone else’s son, condemned the plan as insufficiently punitive toward Moscow. For a proposal meant to bring peace, it certainly brought out the knives.
Inside the administration, two factions immediately collided. On one side stood J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, and the handful of officials who have privately conceded what everyone outside cable news already knows: Ukraine is losing ground. A country hemorrhaging men and morale cannot fight to the last PowerPoint slide. Peace is not ideal; it is necessary.
“For a proposal meant to bring peace, it certainly brought out the knives.”
Opposing them was the Crusader Caucus, embodied by Marco Rubio and the “Russia Must Pay MSRP” crowd. Their view is elegantly simple: The war must continue until Russia “feels consequences.” That the first nineteen rounds of sanctions have succeeded only in raising European heating bills and enriching middlemen in Mumbai is considered irrelevant. The twentieth round will break the Kremlin. Naturally. Right after Esperanto becomes the lingua franca of NATO. Trump, characteristically, oscillated between the two camps—part peacemaker, part weather vane. One moment he is determined to end the war; the next he is persuaded by Rubio, Zelensky, or the pastry chef at Mar-a-Lago that peace must wait until after soufflé.
The original plan, while imperfect, at least resembled something adults might negotiate over. Then came the revisions. Kiev removed anything inconvenient, Europe added everything irrelevant, and the hawks deleted anything Russia might accept. The end product was a document so confused it could only have been drafted by a committee, or a modern humanities department where clarity is hate speech.
Kiev’s preferred version demanded Russian withdrawals, NATO-adjacent guarantees, and the demilitarization of Russian forces in Russian-held territory. Moscow was expected to smile politely while handing over the Donbas, Crimea, and, if the mood struck, the moon. A plan designed to begin a conversation wound up ensuring none could occur.
While diplomats quibbled over syntax, the war moved on. Pokrovsk fell. Hulyaipole wobbled. Ukrainian forces executed what press officers charmingly call “tactical repositioning,” though the troops would call it “retreat.” The only people convinced Ukraine is winning are commentators who haven’t checked a map since 2022 and Zelensky, obliged to promise victory even as the next mobilization order lands.
The tragedy here is not moral ambiguity; it is mathematical certainty. Ukraine cannot win the war it insists on continuing. Russia, swagger notwithstanding, cannot sustain forever a conflict that consumes men faster than Moscow can manufacture euphemisms.
Europe responded to the U.S. peace effort with its usual mix of passive aggression and irrelevance. Estonia’s Katja Kallas insisted talks will work only “when Russia needs to negotiate,” which—judging by recent maps—may occur sometime after the sun burns out. Brussels specializes in a two-step foreign policy: Issue outraged statements; wait for America to do the heavy lifting. The E.U., having skipped defense spending for a generation, now complains that America is insufficiently deferential while paying for everything from ammunition to Ukrainian payroll taxes. Washington wants peace. Brussels wants moral clarity, preferably at American expense.
Into this operetta strides Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, newly anointed diplomat, and longtime courtier, widely considered the second-most-powerful man in Ukraine, with fingers in every pie from domestic politics to military planning to foreign policy. His message was simple: Ukraine would concede nothing, not an inch, not a pebble, because the constitution forbade it. Stirring stuff—Churchillian, if Churchill had lacked a navy, an air force, and the faintest prospect of winning.
And then came Operation Midas, the corruption blockbuster so lurid it could have been pitched as The Wolf of Wall Street: Trench Warfare Edition. Investigators from NABU, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an agency forever discovering scandals only after everyone else has read about them, uncovered a kickback extravaganza at Energoatom, the state-owned nuclear power operator and perennial magnet for “creative accounting.” This wasn’t petty graft. It was a full-service embezzlement scheme allegedly run by close associates of the president himself, with anti-corruption officials accusing members of Zelensky’s inner circle of siphoning off a cool $100 million.
The operation required offshore Laundromats, shell companies, and a secret Kiev office decorated like a Bond villain’s midlife crisis. Tens of millions vanished on paper, presumably reappearing in real estate, luxury cars, and whatever else one buys when one’s moral compass resembles a roulette wheel and keeps landing on “double zero.”
At the golden center sat Timur Mindich, Zelensky’s old comedy partner, part-time media fixer, and proud owner of the gold toilet that gave the operation its name. Mindich fled to Israel just hours before the raids, a reliable sign one’s schedule has developed an urgent conflict with the rule of law. His ties to Ihor Kolomoisky—the billionaire patron who helped launch Zelensky’s political career before fleeing Ukraine in 2018 as prosecutors closed in and resurfacing in Israel, where many a Ukrainian oligarch seems to find spiritual and legal refuge—only added seasoning to the soup. When the subpoenas start flying, Ukraine’s oligarchs head not to the trenches but to Tel Aviv, the diaspora of the well-connected.
The findings landed like a missile strike inside Kiev’s chain of command. Ministers resigned. Donors clutched their wallets. Western backers stepped away.
And then, inevitably, Yermak resigned—officially to “help the president focus,” unofficially because Operation Midas had drifted far too close to his own political waterline. He fled to Israel, where he holds citizenship, staying two steps ahead of the investigators closing in.
Washington greeted his departure not with celebration but with that special sigh reserved for malfunctioning smoke alarms that finally fall silent.
When NABU subsequently raided Yermak’s office, coming on the heels of his rejection of the U.S. peace plan, nobody believed it was merely about Energoatom. This felt like something else entirely: a disciplinary telegram from Washington, written not in ink but in subpoenas.
Kiev heard the message plainly: Negotiate, or the next resignation will not be voluntary. But the deeper problem was already visible.
Three men at the apex of Ukrainian power, all accused of graft, all vanishing into the same country of convenient refuge. Call it coincidence, call it choreography, call it what you like, but don’t call it democratic idealism.
Because wars fought by exhausted conscripts are rarely about the slogans printed on the posters. They are about the men who own the posters. And Ukraine’s demographic future, already bleeding out in trenches from Pokrovsk to Kherson, is being spent like small change by oligarchs who will never hear a shot fired but will happily count the proceeds.
Forget the stirring speeches about freedom and the impassioned pleas about territorial integrity. The true struggle is not between East and West, or democracy and autocracy, or NATO and the Kremlin. It is between a dying nation and the parasites feeding on its corpse.
