YURI SCHERBAK: THE ENDLESS END OF WAR...

THE ENDLESS END OF WAR

By YURI SCHERBAK

1.

My God, have I really lived to see this moment?

The moment of if not a full and just end to the war, then at least a temporary truce? Could it be that Ukrainian mothers, wives, and sisters will finally breathe a sigh of relief, as the former “brothers” (and now Cains, executioners and traitors) stop tearing Ukraine apart, draining its lifeblood, killing its children, destroying our homes, and sowing national sorrow?

Will Donald Trump’s boastful promises to stop the war and bring peace to our land finally come true?

Today, without exaggeration, millions of Ukrainians, if only for a short while, live in the hope of an end to the three-year nightmare. Yet this fragile time of expectation is extremely dangerous, for if the loud peacekeeping promises of the U.S. president fail, it could bring even greater suffering to a weary and demoralized people and lead to ultimate disappointment, despair, and disillusionment, which is a direct path to defeat.

When, how, and with which outcome will this bloody war end? And is the White House, with its current optimistic rhetoric, truly capable of putting an end to Putin’s criminal aggression?

2.

For three months now, the new master of the White House has been shocking the world with loud statements, threats, and promises, including those to stop the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Millions, if not billions of humans listen with a mix of anxiety and hope to the unrestrained and contradictory stream of boasting, intimidation, self-aggrandizement, and the overturning of all American virtues, destroying the hard-won achievements of Trump’s predecessors, from President Wilson to Ronald Reagan. Through Trump’s efforts, and with the help of his sycophantic team (there’s a good Ukrainian folk term for them: “ass-lickers”), the United States, once standing on the shining heights of the world as a beacon of freedom, justice, and democracy, has rapidly slid into the Moscow-Tehran swamp of BRICS, siding with Putin, transforming itself into a mad elephant performing a clumsy somersault before a stunned world audience. This revolutionary-counterrevolutionary coup is demolishing the previous architecture of international security, nullifying established concepts of the aggressor and his victim, paving the way for the disappearance of the U.S. from the global stage, a worldwide economic crisis, and a Third World War.

And yet, people need hope. The masses cling to faith in a miracle, in the impossible trick of the illusionist from the White House, like spectators at a magic show on America’s Got Talent.

We want peace so desperately. However…

In these three months, Trump’s peace efforts have failed in Israel, where an agreement between Hamas and the IDF collapsed, and brutal fighting resumed in Gaza.

The situation on the Russian-Ukrainian front is no better.

The treacherous Russian dictator has taken the traditional path of Moscow diplomacy, donning the mask of a peacemaker over his botoxed Mongoloid face and responding to the proposal to cease fire along the entire front with a small Jesuitic “YES” and a large “BUT.” Of course! After all, Stalin, too, was a great peacemaker: just remember the Berlin blockade and the Korean War.

It was precisely after Trump’s phone calls with Putin that Russia intensified its frenzied attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilians,  just over the past week having launched more than 1,580 guided aerial bombs, nearly 1,100 attack drones, and 15 different missiles (Korrespondent, 23.03.2025). As Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry diplomatically put it (so as not to anger the Washington dinosaurs), “the terror that Russians systematically and deliberately commit against civilians contradicts Russia’s claims of peace aspirations and UNDERMINES U.S. PEACE EFFORTS” (Mirror Weekly, 23.03.2025).

3.

In these three months of the U.S. PEACE EFFORTS under the leadership of the 47th president we have gained clarity and shed many illusions. From rosy hopes, we have traveled the bitter road of discovering Trump’s many hidden secrets—his cynicism, narcissism, pathological love of money and flattery. We have come to accept not only the version of his recruitment by the USSR’s KGB as agent “Krasnov”—which no longer seems so implausible—but also the increasingly convincing revelations of Putin’s fascist philosopher Dugin, who dedicated a new book to Trump, Donald Trump’s Revolution: The Order of Great Powers: “U.S. leader Donald Trump is ideologically and politically closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin than to his Western allies… Putin and Trump share a vision for replacing liberal globalism.” (CNN, Smotrim.Ru, 19.03.2025).

The loudest praise for both the Kremlin’s bloody murderer and Washington’s Narcissus has come from New York real estate mogul and billionaire Steve Witkoff, America’s most prominent “useful idiot” and Trump’s closest buddy. A man utterly ignorant of politics, morality, and history, he solemnly declared that “TWO GREAT LEADERS have united for the sake of peace (!).” Having endured an eight-hour humiliation in Moscow while waiting for a meeting with the Supreme Murderer, Witkoff has returned not with peace but with a portrait of Trump gifted by Putin, along with a fairy tale about how the Russian president prayed for Donald’s health after an assassination attempt on him. Witkoff has gone so far as to blame Ukraine for “fueling World War III,” defending the occupiers’ “referendums” on occupied territories that had always belonged to Ukraine!

This disgusting rhetoric was too much even for Washington’s most seasoned cynics. If someone believes that Witkoff, a descendant of the manufacturer of ladies’ coats from Bronx, was more successful in solving the Israeli issues, they are mistaken. Haaretz, the oldest Tel Aviv newspaper, has written with irritation that “Witkoff is not a diplomat. He does not speak like a diplomat, he is not interested in diplomatic manners and diplomatic protocol. He is a businessman who wants to achieve results quickly and move forward quite aggressively.” What came of this effort was characterized by a well-known Israeli analyst, who said that Witkoff's “deals” in both the Middle East and Ukraine were but GARBAGE.

4.

Trump’s much-hyped plan to abruptly end the war in Ukraine by April 20, when every Christian of the world will celebrate Easter, has clearly failed. Even if, against Putin’s will, hostilities are temporarily halted, achieving a real and lasting peace will be a difficult and painful process, requiring long and complex negotiations. History offers many vivid lessons in this regard.

Consider the Korean Armistice Agreement of August 1953 reached after Stalin’s death. Negotiations have lasted for two years. South Korea DID NOT sign the agreement, as its then president, Syngman Rhee, was outraged by the lack of prospects for the unification of the Korean state. The United States has ignored the protest of its ally, the South Korean president, and a military understanding has effectively been signed between the United Nations Command (U.S. and allies), the Supreme Command of the Korean People’s Army Kim Il Sung, and the command of the Chinese People's Volunteers regarding the demarcation line with the withdrawal of troops two kilometers from the demarcation zone. This agreement aimed at the “complete cessation of hostilities and all acts of armed forces in Korea until a FINAL PEACE SETTLEMENT is reached.” 72 years have passed since then, and there is still no final peace settlement.

The U.S. war in Vietnam, which lasted 16 years, has proved to be even more complex. Negotiations have lasted for five years having culminated in the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, South Vietnam’s president, called it the U.S. betrayal: “But the United States did not keep its word. Is an American’s word reliable these days? The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom.” (BBC News, 21.04.1975).

Not only has Kissinger’s agreement ensured the collapse of America’s loyal ally but also led to millions of deaths in Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia where the massacre was committed by winning communists.

History teaches us that the United States has betrayed its allies in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and this tragic reality must be taken into account, especially when dealing with Trump and his team.

In its negotiations, Ukraine will face two powerful forces: the furious hostile regime of Putin that dreams of destroying the Ukrainian state and the genocide of Ukrainians, and the unfriendly American side, to say the least (Trump and his family, Witkoff, Musk, Vance, Waltz, Rubio, Hegseth), who look down on the Ukrainian state with contempt seeing it as a bargaining chip in their global plans to conduct joint business with Russia, hoping to get rich and opportunistically detach the Russian Federation from China.

Compared to the global threats of Riyadh-2025, Munich-1938 may seem like a child's sandbox, and the shadow of the former loser (British Prime Minister Chamberlain) has grown to the size of a formidable enemy of Hitler compared to the despicable idiot Witkoff, who crawls on his knees before Putin.

Historical analogies fade in the face of the modern catastrophe that may await Ukraine, Europe, and the world.

5.  

It is clear that under the guise of ceasefire negotiations Russia will make every effort (“cannon-fodder assaults,” devastating missile-drone attacks, sabotage, attempts to perturb our state from within) to achieve Ukraine’s capitulation. A characteristic statement by Putin during the closed part of the meeting with representatives of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs on March 18, 2025, an hour before the conversation with Trump, is indicative: “Russia will not claim Odesa” (!) and “other territories currently belonging to Ukraine” if the West “recognizes Crimea, the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions as part of Russia in the near future.” This was reported by a special correspondent of Kommersant citing participants of a closed meeting with Putin. The Russian leader was NOT TALKING ABOUT BUSINESS but about Ukraine. Putin has stated that his counterpart (Zelensky) had the opportunity from the very beginning to get away with a SMALL AMOUNT OF BLOOD IN EVERY SENSE (!). Russia cannot be STOPPED at all. They (the Ukrainians) are not able to dig in deeper” (RTVI, Novosti, 19.03.2025). And this killer president “with a black heart,” as an American senator called him, just a few minutes after these statements in a conversation with Trump assured that he supported the peaceful idea of a ceasefire! And the Almighty American President of All Times and Peoples believes this bloody fool…

Have there ever been similar situations in world history?

6.

I had hoped to finish my book Ukraine’s Third World War with a story about the cessation of hostilities. About peace on our wounded land. About light at the end of the tunnel.

But it hasn’t happened.

Because today, that tunnel looks more like a gas-filled pipe in Sudzha (Kursk Region) where hundreds of Russian soldiers had suffocated to death. Not light, but darkness of death looms at the end of this tunnel.

And yet, there is still hope.

If not the hope for Trump’s miracle, then in the heroism of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the wisdom of my people who, in the face of mortal danger, will create a government of national unity, remove the self-proclaimed State Ruler Yermak, and elect a new military and political leadership.

***

Amid the snow-capped mountains of Norway and the flashes of the Northern Lights, I often recalled the powerful poem of Taras Shevchenko:

It does not touch me, not a whit,
If I live in Ukraine or no,
If men recall me, or forget,
Lost as I am, in foreign snow,—
Touches me not the slightest whit.

But it does touch me deep if knaves,
Evil rogues lull our Ukraine 
Asleep, and only in the flames 
Let her, all plundered, wake again...
That touches me with deepest pain. (Translated by Vera Rich)

***

I believe that “evil rogues” will not take away the victory over the Russian Horde from us. The blood of the best sons and daughters of Ukraine has not been shed in vain.

I believe in the end of the war on terms acceptable to us. I believe in relentless karma, the plague-like disintegration of Russia and the post-war revival of Ukraine.

I have no other faith.

Karikature: Oleksiy KUSTOVSKI (KUSTO.)