Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny said in an interview last week that his forces seem to be stuck in a stalemate, and that he does not expect to see any significant breakthroughs in the near future. 

“There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” he told The Economist. He continued, “The biggest risk of an attritional trench war is that it can drag on for years and wear down the Ukrainian state.”

Igor Zhovkva, the deputy head of President Vladimir Zelensky’s office, took issue with Zaluzhny’s comments and said, “the last thing I would do is comment for the press… about what is happening at the front [and] what could happen at the front.”

Zhovka said Zaluzhny’s comment “eases the work of the aggressor” and stirs “panic” among allies.  

Zelensky admitted that people are, no doubt, tired, but “this is not a stalemate, I emphasize this once again,” according to The New York Times.

TRENDPOST: It is worth noting that Zelensky gave an extensive interview to Time magazine last month that was written by the same author who penned his “Person of the Year” tribute (Simon Shuster).

The recent article said Zelensky is still firm in his belief that Ukraine can defeat Russia, which is worrying some of his close advisers. One person close to Zelensky told the magazine that Zelensky is “delusional.” (See “ZELENSKY’S APPROVAL IN UKRAINE IS SLIPPING, POLL FINDS” 31 Oct 2023.)

“We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that,” the adviser said. Shuster wrote that Zelensky’s belief is bordering on self-delusion, “verging on the messianic.” 

Axios noted that Zaluzhny’s comments were a clear break from the official line out of Kyiv that Ukrainian forces are gaining. 

Zaluzhny said the fact is Ukraine can see everything Russian forces are doing, and Russians can see everything Ukrainians are doing.

“In order for us to break this deadlock, we need something new—like the gunpowder, which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each other,” he said.

The conflict will reach the two-year mark in February, and Russian forces last week launched their largest drone campaign in weeks that took aim at Ukrainian infrastructure before the winter months. There were no reported casualties. The New York Times reported that Russia has used about 650 Iranian-made Shahed drones in the past two months. 

In August, Zaluzhny, told U.S. officials who offered advice on how to conduct the counteroffensive that they don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to fighting a military power like Russia, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“You don’t understand the nature of this conflict,” Zaluzhny told these officials. “This is not counterinsurgency. This is Kursk.”

He was referring to WWII’s full-scale Battle of Kursk between the Soviet Union and Germany.  

TRENDPOST: One current senior U.S. official and one former senior U.S. official told NBC News on Saturday that Washington and Brussels have started to talk to their Ukrainian partners about negotiating for a peaceful settlement. 

A stalemate plays into Russia’s hands because it has a much larger army than Ukraine. One of the sources told NBC, “Manpower is at the top of the [Biden] administration’s concerns right now.”

The U.S. and its allies can provide Ukraine with weaponry, the source said, “but if they don’t have competent forces to use them it doesn’t do a lot of good.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin told a conference last month that Russia is not interested in seizing new territory in Ukraine and wants the conflict to come to a swift end.

Russia currently controls about 20 percent of what was considered Ukraine prior to the 2022 invasion, which includes two Donbass republics and the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, according to RT, the Russian news outlet. (See “PUTIN SAYS RUSSIA IS NOT INTERESTED IN MORE LAND, WANTS TO NEGOTIATE” 10 Oct 2023, “PUTIN BLAMES U.S. FOR UKRAINE COUP IN 2014,” 1 Nov 2022 and “VICTORIA ‘FUCK THE EU’ NULAND WHO SPEARHEADED OVERTHROW OF DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE IN 2014, STILL IN POWER” 22 Feb 2022.)

TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal, which has been completely banned by the mainstream media whores, said from the start of the war that there was no chance that Ukraine could defeat Russia, and Kyiv would do well to negotiate immediately, vow neutrality, cede land to Russia, and move on. But instead, failed generals sold the war on cable news, and Putin was depicted as the second coming of Hitler.

We also noted that Ukraine was not going to become a member of NATO, because it would mean nuclear exchanges. By fighting Russia, Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of young men and at least $151.2 billion in infrastructure as of September 2023. 

Col. Douglas MacGregor (ret.), who has been one of the sober voices about the Ukrainian conflict, coined a phrase that is worth repeating: Negotiate you fools. 

TREND FORECAST: As we have detailed over the past year and a half, Ukraine has lost the war. However, we have also forecast that Kyiv will do all it can to keep the fight going and in doing so will launch an attack on a nuclear power plant and blame Russia, launch a major devastating false flag attack and blame Russia and/or launch a major strike on Moscow or other major Russian targets.