The Financial Times Joins Zelensky’s Fantasy War

Stuck between the manic and the delusional, Ukraine’s leadership keeps evading reality and Western publications keep going along

What do you do when you are losing a war against Russia? In particular, if that war could have been avoided or stopped very quickly and on advantageous terms, but instead you – listening to very false friends – decided to fight on until your country was devastated. And you are also realizing that you have been gambling with your own future as well. That is the key question in Volodymyr Zelensky’s life now, whether he can admit it to himself or not.

In such a grim scenario, there are three basic options. Number one, the sane option: you can face reality and start negotiations to end the war, knowing that you will have to largely accept the terms of your opponent (because remember, you are losing, and also Russian President Vladimir Putin has just reiterated in an interview with the primetime ‘60 Minutes’ program that Moscow will only accept an “outcome in its favor” and based “on the realities” that over two years of fighting have produced).