For Ukraine, winter is here, and with it hard choices that must be made

After a brutal 3½-year grind, the war in Ukraine has arrived at a delicate moment.

On the battlefield, the Russians continue to advance, though at a pace that would take them over 114 years, at a cost of 44 million additional casualties, to conquer the entire country.

Vladimir Putin would celebrate victory in the same place where he has sent so many of his countrymen — the graveyard.

We may safely doubt whether the Russian economy will hold out that long. An irritated President Donald Trump has tightened the sanctions squeeze, and whoever succeeds Trump is likely to turn the screws even tighter on Putin’s economic vulnerabilities.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Russians are winning — and winning, as Vince Lombardi once observed, is the only thing that counts.

If the Russians are weak, the Ukrainians are weaker. Both countries are running out of military-age males to feed into the insatiable maw of the war — but the Ukrainians, who have fewer, will run out first.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, up to now a symbol of indomitable resistance, finds his government sinking into a bog of scandal and corruption, involving kickbacks from an energy company to his business partners and political allies.

In the fallout from the scandal, Zelensky’s chief of staff and two ministers in his government have been forced to resign.

Whether or not Zelensky himself is implicated — and no proof exists of that — people will believe the worst. His judgment, which bears on every aspect of the war, has been shown to rate somewhere between terrible and appalling.

Corruption has always been endemic in Ukraine. Hunter Biden’s warm and profitable friendship with Burisma, another Ukrainian energy company, can serve as an illustration of how money and power stick to one another in that culture.

Following the Russian invasion, however, the Biden administration and the Europeans simply looked the other way.

They cast Zelensky as David and Putin as Goliath, and poured billions into the war effort, with few questions asked.

We can be sure that Trump will ask a great many questions now.

The Ukrainians confront a political scandal that has tainted and weakened the government, a bloody invasion they have little chance of defeating, and massive pressure from their paymasters, the Americans, to come to terms with Putin.

In response, Zelensky and his European admirers remain stuck in defiance mode.

“Russia must lose the war,” Zelensky said back in August 2024, when he unveiled a “victory plan” that hinged on admission to NATO — a complete nonstarter.

There will be “no territorial concessions” to Russia as part of peace negotiations, he reiterated in October of this year.

That has been Zelensky’s message since the war began. It is sincere and praiseworthy, and initially, it won him the foreign support his country needed to defend itself.

But Ukraine in 2025 isn’t Britain during the Blitz.

Zelensky isn’t Winston Churchill.

Defiance isn’t a strategy.

At a time when he is running out of options — or, as Trump has diplomatically put it, “He has no cards” — the Ukrainian president has shown himself unwilling to descend to mere strategic maneuvering.

He’s a performer, an excellent communicator, a commanding personality — and he has wrung every advantage that he could from those personal traits.

At this difficult moment, something new is needed.

Enter President Trump’s infamous 28-point peace plan.

Released Nov. 21, the plan is far from a stylistic masterpiece. It ranges from the cosmic to the microscopic, settling boundaries and relations between nations while drifting into calls for “infrastructure development” in Ukraine.

This confusion of scales is typical of Trump administration documents.

The plan was negotiated between the United States and Russia, and it very much reads that way.

Crimea and other conquered Ukrainian territories are ceded to Russia. The Ukrainian military is limited to 600,000 personnel. For some reason, Ukraine is told to hold elections “in 100 days.”

Trump’s plan has its share of imperfections. But as an opening gambit to the serious mud-wrestling of the negotiating process, it was adequate enough.

This is where the Ukrainians suffer from a fatal shortage of strategic thinking. Zelensky’s response to the plan should have been, “Yes, but —” followed by plausible proposals that would turn Trump’s attention back to the intransigent Russians.

But Zelensky has never learned how to deal with Trump. In a sense, the two men are irreconcilably similar. Both have succeeded by relying on will and instinct, and they anger and frustrate each other as mirror images that can’t touch on the same plane.

There is, of course, a large difference. Zelensky desperately needs Trump’s favor, whereas Trump would love a Big Beautiful Peace that allows him to be done with Ukraine.

In the end, the Ukrainian response to the 28-point plan fell back on rhetoric rather than reality.

Zelensky refused any compromise that smacked of defeat. Yet he has warned that conditions for his people this winter will be so dire that defeat is a possibility.

Zelensky rejected any concessions on Ukrainian territories “stolen” by the Russians. Yet he has no means to dislodge the Russians or to persuade them to withdraw; peace, whether by negotiation or exhaustion, will find Putin perched like a vulture over his conquests.

There is much unfairness in all of this, and if Zelensky’s idea is that Ukraine will fight to the last man, as a sort of Alamo of nations, then the world will watch in awe at the nobility of such an ending.

But that’s a fantasy. According to opinion polls, the majority of Ukrainians are sick of the conflict and want a negotiated peace. They respect Zelensky, but not so much as to follow him in a final charge up the hill — and over the cliff.

Once you eliminate victory on the battlefield, what — other than a painful negotiated peace or a fight to the death and eventual defeat —  is left? The only variable is the dimensions of the calamity. 

For now, Zelensky has chosen not to choose.

In another instance of flawed judgment, he has looked for allies among two groups that lost contact with reality so long ago, they have forgotten what it looks like: Europe’s ruling elites and the Democratic Party in the United States.

Both groups adore the Ukrainian president, which is nice.

Both stagger blindly in a fog of delusions, which gives him a pass on all the difficult decisions he should make.

The Europeans couldn’t care less about Ukraine — but they are terrified of Putin.

If defiance, for Zelensky, is an act of physical courage, for the Europeans it’s the exact opposite. It’s cowardice.

They won’t invite Ukraine into NATO because that would tick off the Russians. They are addicted to Russian oil and natural gas, and continue to give Putin billions — more money, in fact, than they spend on military aid to Ukraine. 

But they are happy to condemn the Trump plan in the most vehement terms, while refusing to stir themselves to any action beyond group hugs at summit meetings.

Zelensky appears unable to grasp what the Europeans are telling him about Putin: “Let’s you and him fight — like, forever.”

As for the Democrats, they care even less for Ukraine. They just hate Trump.

If Trump wants peace and tranquility, the Democrats will find much to admire in the horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Interestingly, their reaction to the peace plan included a lot of references to “appeasement” and “Munich,” proving that Trump, who is usually Hitler, can when convenient become Neville Chamberlain.

The amount of useful support for Ukraine from that quarter will add up to zero.

In the world as it actually is, Ukraine, before it can prosper as an independent nation, must traverse two critical thresholds — one near, one far.

The near threshold is winter. The disasters of war have left the country prostrated. It doesn’t have enough energy to keep warm, enough money to buy more, enough men or weapons to prevent the current stalemate from collapsing into defeat.

The Russians, whose best commander has always been General Winter, are certain to press their offensive. They can smell a breakthrough and are likely to throw everything they have into the breach.

Putin knows this. He has no incentive to talk peace before the spring thaw.

If the Trump people really want a negotiated settlement — as opposed to hoping Ukraine just disappears from the president’s agenda — they will have to give Zelensky the assistance he requires to survive the winter.

Only after Putin has been disappointed in his greediest expectations will peace have a chance.

The far threshold is Putin himself — or more accurately, Putin’s life expectancy.

Any negotiated agreement will be unfavorable to Ukraine. That’s what happens when you lose a war.

The bad news is that Putin will want more. Once sanctions are lifted and Russia has caught its breath, he’ll resume his campaign to push, pressure, and provoke conflict on the Ukrainian border — call it a slow-motion invasion.

The good news is that he won’t live forever.

Ukraine has never represented a threat to Russia, except inside Putin’s head. He has woven a strange mythology to justify aggression — and like many successful men of a certain age, he’s come to believe his own lies.

That won’t apply to his successors.

In the best case, a newly democratic post-Putin Russia will recognize the injustice of the war and the settlement can be renegotiated.

In the worst and much more probable case, a motley crew of Putin wannabes will punch it out in the Kremlin, and Ukraine will be relegated to an afterthought.

It’s hard to say what the expiration date is on the functional life of a tyrant, but Putin is 73 and the average life expectancy for Russian men is 65. Sooner than he thinks, he’ll discover the one condition that great power can’t repress.

Ukraine-Russia relations will be radically reconfigured after that threshold is crossed.

Should an agreement be signed to end the conflict, Putin will take it for granted that his gains will last forever — and Zelensky, if he is wise, will remind himself that forever is no country for old men.