On 24 February 2022, with about 100,000 troops, Russia launched its “Special Military Operation” - not a "full scale invasion." Citing a UN principle, the “Responsibility to Protect,” Russia directly intervened in the 8-year Donbass civil war only after Minsk I and II and all prospects for diplomacy had failed.

On June 2024, after two plus years of fighting, Putin outlined Russian conditions for a broad, permanent sustainable peace: No temporary ceasefire, no EU "peacekeepers," no NATO in #ukraine - recognition of Crimea plus Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts as permanent Russia territory.

As long as the US, UK and EU do not address Putin’s terms or security concerns, #Russia will continue advancing beyond the four annexed oblasts cited above, and toward the historical “Russian cities” of Odessa, Kharkov, Nikolaev and Dnipro.

If an accord isn’t reached soon, we're likely to witness the slow-motion collapse of NATO's gambit to hand a “strategic defeat to Russia” - using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. According to Kyiv TV channel 1-1, one million Ukrainian soldiers are KIA, MIA, POWs or are wounded, permanently disabled.

War fever has gripped Starmer, Macron and the Brussels cabal, spread by political elites who have sunk to an infantile level, claiming Russia is planning to invade the Continent. “Never again” to war in Europe has morphed into, “If we don’t stop Russia in Ukraine, they’re coming for us…”

With no regard for Ukraine's horrific losses, "superhawks" in the US, UK and EU - whose aim is to weaken Russia - are urging Zelensky to keep fighting. The West, however, is misjudging the degree to which Putin, the Kremlin and the Russian street will go to drive Neo-Nazis from Kyiv and NATO from the Russian borderlands.

Contrary to the US neocons and the bellicose EU cabal, the goal of Russia's SMO was never advancing "imperial dreams" but to stop NATO-armed Ukraine and Neo-Nazi thugs from targeting, killing Donbass Russians.

(Between the 2014 US-engineered coup in Kyiv and the Russian intervention on 24 February 2022, about 14,000 civilians in the Donbass had lost their lives.)

Desperate, Zelensky is trying to drag the US and NATO into a larger war. In a hurry to stop the fighting, Trump wants a ceasefire – has set a 20 April deadline that Russia - without details or conditions – without a dialogue to resolve the root causes of the conflict – will not accept.

There’s no talk at this time of a future Trump Putin summit. And no new threats or sanctions on Russia - or weapons deliveries to Ukraine - will change the facts on the ground. Russia is winning; NATO and Ukraine are losing. Absent a long term, permanent security accord, Russia will end the conflict on the battlefield.