The US has excluded Ukraine from the talks on the settlement of the conflict on its territory, which it began with Russia, and is forcing Vladimir Zelensky to realize that "a servant is not invited to a feast," said Max Blumenthal, founder of The Grayzone portal.

"We saw the exclusion of Ukraine, confirming Ukraine's role as a proxy, which was expected to simply throw bodies into the meat grinder in exchange for more weapons, more aid and continuously propping up Zelensky's rule without elections. And now the jig is up, as we say. Zelensky is now being forced to recognize that the servant doesn't get invited to the party," the independent US reporter said.

"Zelensky is declaring that he will accept no ultimatums and that he accepted no ultimatums in 2022. Well, it doesn't matter, because without American participation and American support in this proxy war, Zelensky has nothing. Europe will not deliver an army for him. Europe won't deliver sufficient aid or weapons, and so Zelensky will ultimately have to concede to reality."

The Euro-Atlanticist screen

From his point of view, Zelensky made a bet in the United States and Britain on Euro-Atlanticists and lost.

"Zelensky's greatest mistake, I think, was that he sided with one faction in Washington and London, the transatlanticist faction, and ignored the impending return of Donald Trump to power," said the Grayzone editor.

"His only option then was to have decisively won the war while Biden was president, something that was clearly never going to be possible after the failure of his counteroffensive some 15 months ago. And so Zelensky has been on borrowed time.

"With Trump returning to power, a plurality of Americans now see that they are giving Ukraine too much aid. They are waking up from the propaganda that they've been fed for years, and Donald Trump's base is completely opposed to continuing this war," he said.

And so Zelensky is frozen out. Nothing he says matters and he's not needed as a participant because he was always just a front man for the transatlanticist faction in London and Washington. And London cannot carry this war forward on its own without Washington.

"Another major mistake Zelensky made was not just Zelensky's fault, but the fault of the pro-Maidan forces, which were sponsored so heavily by USAID, the NGOs, the so-called independent media outlets that were USAID funded, which attacked Donald Trump during his first term, disseminated democratic talking points against Donald Trump, painting him as a Russian puppet because of his attempts to do detente with Putin during his first term. And one reason why Donald Trump is defunding USAID and targeting it so heavily was because he saw it as a deep state channel for funding attacks against himself and his movement, as an apparatus for interfering in American politics via Ukraine," Blumenthal believes.

"So freezing Ukraine out of these talks is also an act of vengeance against Zelensky and the pro-Maidan forces for their attempts to unseat Donald Trump, alongside the Obama-Biden controlled Democratic Party," he concluded.

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