>>21921578Volodymyr Zelensky lost this war when he failed to realize that the only people who screwed him over worse than the ones in Moscow were the ones in NATO. He could have easily brokered a peace deal with Russia after they left Kyiv with their tails between their legs and left this clusterfuck looking like Churchill with abs. Putin would have gladly taken even a meager concession at that point just to save face after Russia’s biggest imperial flop since the Afghan trap, but Zelensky chose to press his luck in the Donbas instead.
By doing so, he didn’t just abandon Ukraine’s best hope for a favorable outcome in this war, he abandoned the moral high ground to play Putin in someone else’s neighborhood. The people of the Donbas have repeatedly made it violently clear that they have absolutely no interest in being part of the post-Maidan neonazi experiment. Regardless of Russia’s manipulations, what Ukraine did to those people for years is no different than what Putin has done to Ukraine for months.
