Imagine being a frontline Ukrainian soldier on February 28th, having survived another nightmarish day of trench warfare with satellite enabled battlefield transparency, kamikaze drones, and what some analysts reckon to be at times an 8 to 1 artillery disadvantage, turning on your phone to check how your president got on when meeting the leader of the country keeping your military afloat. 

Through your Elon Musk provided Starlink access, you log in to your account on the Elon Musk owned X, only to see Elon Musk share a video of your president in a public meltdown, with the very hand that feeds him, in front of the world’s media: “Watch this carefully. Very important.” To make matters even worse, you then scroll down to see that your president has even lost the support of Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the most hawkish figures of the hyper-militaristic neocons. Graham says: “He either needs to resign and send somebody over who we can do business with, or he needs to change.” And to cap it all off, you then note how the Ukrainian Ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, sat in the Oval Office and responded with head in hand despair to this diplomatic train wreck. 

That said, no matter what happened in the meeting between Zelensky, Trump, and Vance, the nation of Ukraine was going to be in a terrible situation. As I have outlined elsewhere, no matter how committed or courageous the fighting men of Ukraine may be, inadequate weapons production and dire manpower issues mean that Ukraine has arguably lost the war already. The Collective West, including the US, does not have the industrial capacity to produce enough of the relevant weaponry for Zelensky’s armed forces to continue the war of attrition against Russia and, even if the required matériel could be produced, Ukraine is running out of men – not to mind men that have been adequately trained to navigate the most technologically sophisticated warfare to ever occur on this planet.