What do you do when you are losing a war against Russia? In particular, if that war could have been avoided or stopped very quickly and on advantageous terms, but instead you – listening to very false friends – decided to fight on until your country was devastated. And you are also realizing that you have been gambling with your own future as well. That is the key question in Vladimir Zelensky’s life now, whether he can admit it to himself or not.

In such a grim scenario, there are three basic options. Number one, the sane option: you can face reality and start negotiations to end the war, knowing that you will have to largely accept the terms of your opponent (because remember, you are losing, and also Russian President Vladimir Putin has just reiterated in an interview with the primetime ‘60 Minutes’ program that Moscow will only accept an “outcome in its favor” and based “on the realities” that over two years of fighting have produced).

Or option two, the manic one: you can choose reality denial and keep fighting as if you could still win, thereby damaging your country even more and making sure that, in the end, it will still lose but on even worse terms.

Or, finally, option three, the delusional one: you can do what most weak characters do most of the time and try to square the circle by pretending there is a way to have it both ways, that is, to stave off defeat while somehow magically ending the war, or at least slowing it down.

While options two and three both require a hefty degree of self-deception, option three is the craziest because its realization presupposes that your opponent goes along with your wishes in plain contradiction of his own interests and aims. Just as if your side – and not his – were winning the war.

Judging by their recent public statements, Zelensky and his team are currently stuck between the manic and the delusional. But they are not alone: According to a recent Financial Times article on page one, heavily relying on anonymous Ukrainian sources, Kiev and Moscow have entered “preliminary discussions about halting strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure.” The timing of the article was intriguing because it clearly reflected Ukrainian wishful thinking and speculation much more than reality. As one of the diplomats involved put it, “there’s very early talks about potentially restarting something.” It is odd to find something so inchoate that needs so much hedging on page one. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov has already made it clear that the Financial Times story was false, reiterating Russia’s conditions for entering negotiations and commenting pointedly that “nowadays there are a lot of bogus stories that have nothing to do with........

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