The Ukrainian junta may be belatedly talking about finding peace "urgently", but that is not credible. The really urgent concern is finding another piece of action to sustain the racket of war in Ukraine.
All of a sudden, it seems, the Kiev regime wants to give peace a chance. This week, the so-called president Vladimir Zelensky was telling the Vatican envoy Cardinal Pietro Parolin that it was urgent to find a peaceful end to the conflict with Russia to spare further loss of life.
"I think that we all understand that we must end the war as soon as possible, of course," Zelensky told the Vatican secretary of state during a meeting in Kiev.
Only a few months ago, Zelensky rebuffed calls from Pope Francis for a diplomatic settlement to the worst war in Europe since the Second World War.
And earlier this month, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was similarly disdained when he visited Kiev to appeal for a negotiated end to the conflict.
Suddenly, though, there is a decided change in tune coming out of Kiev.
The day after Zelensky issued his purported concern for peace, the Kiev regime's foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba flew to China to meet Wang Yi, China's top diplomat.
"The Ukrainian side is willing and ready to conduct dialogue and negotiations with the Russian side," Kuleba announced.
"I am convinced that a just peace in Ukraine is in China's strategic interests, and China's role as a global force for peace is important," he added, by way of ingratiating himself with Beijing.
Earlier this year, China and Brazil jointly proposed a plan for peace negotiations. That proposal was dismissed out of hand by the Kiev regime.
What's going on here is a cynical move by the Kiev regime to extend its survival and corruption racket.
Zelensky and his cronies have gotten obscenely rich from siphoning off the hundreds of billions in military and financial aid that the United States and its European NATO lackeys have showered on Ukraine to fight a futile proxy war against Russia.
After two and a half years of war and more than 500,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers - many of them forcibly conscripted - the writing is on the wall. The NATO proxy war is a historic loss of monstrous dimensions.
Russia has gained the upper hand militarily - as many independent analysts had predicted - and it will not back down until all of its goals are achieved. The NeoNazi regime has to be liquidated, Ukraine is never to join NATO, and all of the Ukrainian forces must fully withdraw from the five territories that are now legally part of the Russian Federation, including Crimea and Donbass.
If the Kiev regime wants to negotiate this capitulation, then Russia's terms are already on the table, as outlined by President Vladimir Putin last month.
After months of delusional promises by the Kiev regime and its NATO sponsors to keep on fighting, the harsh reality of defeat is becoming unavoidable.
Across the NATO nations, the public mood has shifted away from propping up the corrupt cabal in Kiev and the mindless slaughter that it has promoted to prolong the war racket. The Western public is expected by their governments and media to prop up a corrupt regime with endless taxpayer handouts while also subsidizing the rent-free accommodation of millions of Ukrainians who have fled from this repressive regime.
No doubt sensing the mood shift, the German government is reportedly scaling back - by as much as 50 percent - its military aid to Ukraine.
In the United States, where polls show the majority of Americans - like the majority of Europeans - want a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, there is also a serious prospect of a Trump presidency after November's elections.
Trump and his vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance have categorically stated that a new administration will not give Ukraine any further unconditional support. The Kiev regime will be instructed to find a peace deal with Russia that involves accepting Moscow's terms.
The Kiev regime of puppet president Zelensky has to be one of the most loathsome entities in a long while. Born out of a CIA-backed coup in 2014 against an elected president, the regime has brought Europe to the brink of world war. Its callous disregard for Ukrainian and Russian lives is odious. And all for a few dollars more to further enrich portfolios of overseas properties and bank accounts.
Zelensky's days of traveling around the world hustling for more and more taxpayer handouts are over. The scam has become tiresome and threadbare. It's beyond farce.
However, the NATO-NeoNazi scam in Kiev is so convoluted and saturated with Western media lies, that it is difficult to wind down. "But, but, but... we were told that this was all about defending democracy and Western values from Russian aggression." How to come clean from such a scandalous deception of the world?
For a start, Zelensky's term of office as supposed president expired in May after he refused to hold elections. That makes him an illegitimate president with no legal authority. In short, a tinpot dictator. So, who does Russia negotiate with if indeed a peace process is genuine?
A second anomaly is that Zelensky enacted a decree nearly two years ago that forbids negotiations with Russia. If the Kiev regime is genuine about finding an end to the violence through diplomacy, then it needs to rescind its dubious decree. It hasn't done so. Maybe it doesn't even remember the whim.
The history of dealing with the Kiev regime and its NATO masters is rife with bad faith and treachery. No one could possibly believe anything that these parties say, even if they put their signatures on a treaty. The Minsk peace accords back in 2015 were deliberately sabotaged by the NATO powers, the decades-old NATO promises of non-expansion have been a risible joke, the peace formula that was mediated by Turkey in early 2022 - which could have spared 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers - was cynically trashed by Washington and London.
The Ukrainian junta may be belatedly talking about finding peace "urgently", but that is not credible. The really urgent concern is finding another piece of action to sustain the racket of war in Ukraine.
The only solution to end this reckless conflict is for the NATO puppet masters in Washington and Brussels to realize that their sordid geopolitical game is over. Russia's terms for a peaceful resolution are reasonable and just, and have been on the table for a long time.
NATO and its quislings in Kiev are going to have to accept the reality that their war is lost. It was launched in lies and political fraud. It's not going to be easy to unwind the deception that the United States and its NATO vassals have perpetrated on their public and the rest of the world. But that's their problem to resolve, which will come with a devastating political price - eventually.
In the meantime, Russia is not going to entertain a grubby little errand boy who has no authority and whose desperate instinct now is to squirm out of the hell his regime has co-created.