KHARKIV REGION/KYIV, Ukraine, Jan 20 (Reuters) – As Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president dawns, Ukrainian soldiers and civilians see a hard road ahead in their war with Russia, and many have come to hope for a ceasefire without expelling Russian forces.

With Russian President Vladimir Putin already putting up unnecessary obstacles to starting talks aimed at ending the Ukraine war, Kyiv is now showing that it too is in no hurry to head to the negotiating table. Ukrainian officials are currently making the case that peace discussions should be postponed until after their country has regained the tactical upper hand in the conflict. However, there is a problem in delaying negotiations until Kyiv enjoys superiority — namely, that it may simply never happen.

The Ukrainian commander in chief General Syrksi seems to have given up. Recent remarks of his suggest that he no longer sees a way to win the war. He is now simply waiting for the politicians to concede.

Westerners are fond of citing a statement falsely attributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin that “Ukraine is not even a state.” This quote is marshaled in order to support the equally false and truly absurd claim that Putin’s decision to undertake his ‘special military operation’ and invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was intended to conquer all of Ukraine in an effort to conquer all of the former Soviet states and Russian Imperial territories before moving into Europe. In actuality, the West has treated Ukraine as a less than sovereign, independent state and as a tool – a sacrificial lamb — for the attainment of maximum U.S./Western hegemony in Eurasia by way of NATO expansion. Now, as the fateful and potentially fatal war for Ukraine – the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War – approaches its end game, the statement attributed to Putin may become a simple, if sad, statement of fact. And the wiping of the Ukrainian state off the map of eastern Europe, western Eurasia, and the world is more likely to come as a result of Western actions as it is of Russian forces’ drive westward.

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