Snakes: Why Ukraine and the EU Don't Want Peace, and Why America Should Just Walk Away

Zelensky, Brussels, and the Globalists Want Endless War—Not Peace

Donald Trump has staked much of his political brand on being the consummate dealmaker. He is not a theorist, nor a philosopher-king, nor a bureaucrat buried in details. His appeal rests in his posture as the man who cuts through nonsense, breaks impasses, and brings adversaries to the table. In the past, Trump’s instincts on foreign affairs have proven unconventional but effective: cooling tensions with North Korea, brokering normalization between Israel and Arab states, restraining NATO adventurism, and articulating—against Washington orthodoxy—that endless wars in the Middle East were bleeding America dry. He relishes the image of the peacemaker, a strongman who negotiates with other strongmen, and he has claimed to have “solved” or de-escalated multiple wars.

But the ongoing war in Ukraine is not a normal conflict. It is not Iraq or Afghanistan, where American forces could draw down once political costs outweighed gains. It is not Israel and the Arab states, where transactional deals could bring stability because the combatants wanted respite. It is not North Korea, where containment and face-saving gestures sufficed to stall the nuclear question. Ukraine is something different: it is a grinding, existential war that the key players—the Ukrainian government under Volodymyr Zelensky, and the European Union as Ukraine’s political sponsor—have no intention of ending. Their political survival depends on perpetual war. Trump’s latest peace crusade for Ukraine is therefore doomed to fail. Worse than that, it risks being weaponized against him, allowing the EU and Ukraine to present him as naïve or compromised.

The reality, however uncomfortable, is that Ukraine and the EU do not want peace, cannot accept peace, and would see any genuine peace deal as a betrayal of their own narratives. Zelensky is a war-time president, increasingly ruling as a dictator. The EU has staked its legitimacy on the idea that Russia represents an existential external threat. Peace would shatter both Zelensky’s grip on power and the EU’s carefully crafted illusion. Meanwhile, Russia is winning—not necessarily in terms of flashy territorial gains, but in the slow, deliberate destruction of Ukraine’s military capacity. Under such conditions, Russia has no incentive to compromise.

Trump is right to want peace. He is right to want to extract the United States from Europe’s war. He is right to want to pivot toward cooperation with Russia in countering China. But he is wrong to believe that Ukraine or the EU are sincere partners in any peace process. His best course is not to shuttle between Kyiv, Brussels, and Moscow seeking a deal that cannot exist, but to expose the bad faith of the other parties. He must demonstrate that Ukraine and the EU are prolonging the conflict for their own cynical purposes—and then withdraw American support altogether.

Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency has been recast by the war. Once a comedian promising reform, he has become the indispensable “Churchill of Kyiv,” elevated in Western imagination to mythic status. But this transformation has come at the cost of democracy in Ukraine. Elections have been suspended indefinitely. Opposition parties have been banned. Media outlets have been consolidated under state control. Zelensky’s government rules under martial law, and his legitimacy is inseparable from the ongoing war effort.

For Zelensky, peace is not simply a policy choice. It is political suicide. The Ukrainian nationalist right—particularly the far-right paramilitary and neo-Nazi factions integrated into Ukraine’s security apparatus—view any compromise with Russia as treason. These groups were powerful enough to play a decisive role in the 2014 Maidan upheaval, and they have not disappeared. Zelensky knows that signing a genuine peace with Russia would risk his position, perhaps even his life. His alliance with these forces is not optional. It is existential.

The Western press prefers to dismiss or minimize the influence of Ukraine’s far-right, but their presence is undeniable. Units like the Azov Battalion have been not only tolerated but celebrated, despite their open embrace of neo-Nazi symbology. Their integration into the Ukrainian armed forces was not a marginal event; it was a central feature of Ukraine’s military mobilization. These groups act as enforcers of political orthodoxy in wartime Ukraine. Zelensky cannot cross them. And they will not accept peace.

Thus, when Trump imagines Zelensky negotiating in good faith for an end to the war, he is imagining a different Ukraine, one that does not exist. The Ukraine that exists today is a state locked into war not only by geopolitical realities, but by its own internal political architecture. The guns cannot fall silent, because silence would mean reckoning—with corruption, with authoritarianism, with neo-Nazi allies, with broken promises—that Zelensky’s government cannot survive.

If Zelensky’s survival depends on war, so too does the EU’s fragile legitimacy. From the start, Europe’s leaders have pitched the war in Ukraine not as a local conflict, but as an existential struggle for the continent. The slogan has been consistent: “If we do not stop Russia in Ukraine, they will march on Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, even London.” The Russian army, we are told, seeks the conquest of all Europe.

This narrative is absurd. Russia has shown neither the logistical capacity nor the political intent to launch a march on the British Channel. Its military strategy has been narrowly focused on Ukraine, a country it views—rightly or wrongly—as a historic and strategic buffer. The Kremlin has not prepared the economic, military, or political apparatus for continent-wide conquest. Yet for the EU, this exaggerated fear of Russian expansionism serves a purpose: it justifies the immense costs of war.

Europe is in crisis. The migrant influx has strained public services and provoked populist backlash. Energy prices have soared. Fertility rates continue to collapse. Trust in EU institutions is waning. Populist movements are gaining momentum across the continent. Against this backdrop, the Ukraine war provides the EU with a unifying narrative, an external enemy against whom internal divisions can be suppressed. So long as the Russian threat is inflated, Brussels can postpone its confrontation with populism and domestic dysfunction.

Peace would break this illusion. Peace would force Europe to confront its own failures, its own crises, its own citizens demanding accountability. That is why EU elites are not interested in peace. They need the war. It is their political lifeline.

Against this backdrop, Russia’s position is paradoxically the most straightforward. Russia is winning the war—not in the sense of dramatic blitzkrieg advances, but in the slow destruction of Ukraine’s military capacity. Russia’s objective is not merely to seize territory, but to grind down Ukraine’s armed forces until they are incapable of functioning as a meaningful military threat.

The signs are clear. Ukraine is conscripting men up to age 60. Reports of press gangs dragging men from the streets into uniform abound. Defensive lines are reported to be undermanned, with gaps emerging as casualties mount. The Ukrainian army, once sustained by Western training and matériel, now finds itself hollowed out, increasingly reliant on raw recruits and dwindling reserves.

Russia, meanwhile, has mobilized its economy for long-term war. Its industrial capacity is now oriented toward sustained production of artillery, drones, and missiles. Its manpower reserves remain deeper than Ukraine’s. Its population, though not unscathed, is not suffering the same demographic collapse as Ukraine’s war-aged males.

For Russia, there is no incentive to accept a ceasefire of the Minsk variety, in which Ukraine would be given time to rearm and regroup under Western sponsorship. Moscow learned that lesson. It will not repeat it. Russia can afford to continue on its present trajectory, eroding Ukraine’s capacity until eventual collapse. Diplomacy offers Russia little that military victory cannot achieve.

And from the American perspective, the question of who governs the Donbas or other eastern portions of Ukraine is simply not a core national interest. Whether those territories fall under Kyiv’s authority or Moscow’s orbit does not change the safety, prosperity, or freedom of Americans. These are issues of local ethnic, linguistic, and historical dispute—profound to Ukrainians and Russians, but peripheral to U.S. strategic priorities. The insistence that America must decide the fate of the Donbas is a dangerous illusion, one that risks drawing the United States into endless war over land that has no bearing on our security.

This is the reality Trump must grasp. His instincts push him toward peacemaking. He believes his personal charisma and outsider status allow him to break deadlocks. But in Ukraine, there is no deal to be made, because the other parties are not seeking one.

Zelensky cannot make peace without risking overthrow by the far-right forces he has empowered. The EU cannot make peace without collapsing its own narrative of existential Russian threat. And Russia does not need peace on Western terms, because it is achieving its objectives through war.

Trump’s well-intentioned crusade for peace risks becoming a fool’s errand. Worse, it could be exploited against him: Kyiv and Brussels could posture as the reasonable ones, rejecting Trump’s overtures as naïve or dangerous, while continuing to prolong the war.

What Trump should do is not chase after peace, but reveal the insincerity of the supposed peace camp. He should expose Zelensky’s reliance on neo-Nazi allies, his suppression of democracy, his dependence on endless war. He should expose the EU’s fearmongering, its cynical inflation of the Russian threat to mask domestic failures. He should point out that Russia is winning on the battlefield, and that calls for ceasefire are little more than stalling tactics to buy Ukraine more time.

Then, he should walk away. No weapons, no intelligence, no aid. America must not subsidize Europe’s illusions or Ukraine’s authoritarian drift. Trump should tell the Europeans: if you believe Russia is coming for the Channel, then defend yourselves. Build your own armies, pay your own costs, bear your own burdens. America will not underwrite your fantasies.

Finally, Trump should reopen dialogue with Moscow—not out of naïve trust, but out of cold realism. The United States and Russia share one overriding interest: the containment of China. Beijing is the true rising power, the true long-term threat to American primacy. A U.S.-Russia rapprochement would be a geopolitical masterstroke, one that Europe’s war fever currently prevents.

Trump’s peace crusade in Ukraine is a noble impulse but a misguided one. It is a fool’s errand, because Ukraine and the EU do not want peace and cannot accept it. Zelensky’s dictatorship depends on war. The EU’s legitimacy depends on war. Russia is winning the war and does not need peace.

The best course for Trump is not to mediate, but to expose. Expose Zelensky’s alliance with neo-Nazi factions. Expose the EU’s fearmongering. Expose the reality of Russia’s battlefield advantage. Then leave. Leave Europe to its illusions, and leave Ukraine to its fate. Withdraw American aid, intelligence, and weapons. Pivot instead to Moscow, exploring shared interests and building a framework for cooperation against China.

Only then will Trump truly serve American interests—not by playing peacemaker in a war that cannot end, but by extricating America from Europe’s folly and positioning the United States for the real struggle of the 21st century.