Zelensky spent the day shuttling between Downing Street and Brussels begging for unity while Trump mocked him for not reading a peace plan that barely exists. Behind the stagecraft, Washington has written a strategy that pushes the war bill onto Europe and steps back. The fighting will end on Russian terms. The question is whether Europe will admit it in time.
Ukraine’s front line is breaking, Europe is talking itself into wars it cannot fight, and Brussels is trying to turn Russian reserves into a permanent war chest. This long read ties the military endgame to the legal and financial tricks around frozen assets, drawing on earlier Telegraph Online (telegraph.com) investigations
Ukraine is being boxed in by three forces at once: a corruption scandal that reaches into Zelensky’s old circle, a peace plan drafted between Washington and Moscow, and a frontline that is creeping the wrong way. Trump’s deadline does not solve any of this. It exposes the fact that Kyiv’s choices are now about managing different forms of defeat, not choosing victory.
The twenty eight point peace plan now on the table does not end the Ukraine war on Western terms. It writes into law what the battlefield has already decided. Ukraine is pushed out of NATO, loses more land, and becomes a neutral buffer, while Europe discovers it was collateral in a project that overreached from the start.
Europe was told it had to cut Russian energy and arm for democracy. In reality it has swapped predictable pipeline gas for volatile imports, pushed energy intensive industry toward the exits and tied its public finances to an open ended rearmament cycle largely designed elsewhere. This piece follows the gas, the factories and the defence budgets to show who really pays for the last phase of US hegemony.