If Washington really wanted to push for peace they could, since Ukraine is running entirely on US support.

But peace is not what Washington has been after since this conflict started in 2008.

It seeks to decouple from Europe, while abolishing Ukraine's status as stabilizing neutral buffer, putting the Russians and the Europeans at daggers drawn.

The Europeans and the Russians fight each other to a bloody pulp, while the US takes care of business in the Pacific, this time with China as the big bad instead of Japan. WW2 with colors reversed - the same situation which landed world hegemony in Uncle Sam's lap.

He may be crazy enough to cut off all funding. But even then I can’t see Ukraine agreeing to this plan as it’s written. — Mikie

Cutting off funding and arms and intelligence would not be crazy.

Ukraine cannot win the war, that is clear. The more it goes on the more Russia will want for its trouble.

That's the dynamic that's created when a peace is not agreed swiftly: both sides have a psychological need to "show something" for the additional bloodshed, but the losing side generally never achieves that, requiring more fighting to try to make up for the losses. Who does make battlefield gains and increases their military leverage is the winning side, who then demand more, making it even harder for the losing side to capitulate.

So a tragic process of chasing ever increasing demands: as things get worse, what could have been negotiated even 6 months ago would be totally acceptable but there's now additional demands that are too hard to swallow ... though again in 6 months again they would be acceptable but there is now still more demands to compensate the additional 6 months of fighting.

The losing side never has more leverage, always less (what it means to be losing), and therefore continued fighting always makes things worse and not better. The exception being the intervention of other forces, a la Rohan coming to save Gondor at the last moment, but that is clearly not going to happen for Ukraine.

Losing a war means you have less, not more, say in the peace settlement.

As for Ukraine accepting, it of course depends on what you mean by "Ukraine". If by Ukraine we're talking about Zelensky ... he seems pretty clear to Ukrainians that they may have no other choice but to accept a deal. The straight up Nazi factions and other organized crime groups are presumably less likely to ever accept such a deal, but even they maybe compelled by the disposition of forces on the ground, preferring to rule over the rest of Ukraine rather than lose more territory.

The strategy of the Russians has been to fight in what is essentially one large cauldron in the South-East of Ukraine, maximizing the distance personnel and supplies need to travel and maximizing the distance with NATO radars and other signal processing. As a corollary, minimizing the distance with their own country and logistics.

The farther Ukrainians need to go to reach the front the more likely their movements can be spotted and analyzed as well as interdicted with standoff munitions. The more fuel, vehicles, and time it takes also, effectively reducing the effective quantity of everything.

However, simply because the war has stayed in the South-East Ukraine for so long does not mean it will invariably stay that way, that is just lazy thinking.

Once Ukraine is attritted enough and cannot arrest Russian advances, then Russia can go basically anywhere: keep pushing up from the south but also re-invade from the North or anywhere along the border.

The basic geographic strategic problem Ukraine has, that compounds greatly their capacity problems, is that there are no choke points. Fighting has been mostly in the South-East because that's where Russia has chosen to fight, not due to any geographic necessity.

Manning what is effectively a 3000 km contact line (counting Belarus) simply takes a lot of soldiers. There's no way around that. You need soldiers manning some interval of the contact-line and borders, as at least a "trip wire" warning system, and then you need a lot of soldiers in reserve to then go and stop offences.

Once Ukraine's army is simply below this large amount of soldiers required, then in order to defend against one offensive Ukraine needs to start deprive other parts of the front of essential man power ... so the Russians can just attack there.

It becomes a simple numbers game that Ukraine can't defend everywhere in addition to this process causes efficiency to rapidly degrade, but the consequence is Russia can make large gains in territory.

For example, the problem of no geological choke point is a problem Ukraine has now, but there is one big exception that is the Dnieper, so Russia may take all of Ukraine East of the Dnieper.

It seeks to decouple from Europe, while abolishing Ukraine's status as stabilizing neutral buffer, putting the Russians and the Europeans at daggers drawn.

The Europeans and the Russians fight each other to a bloody pulp, while the US takes care of business in the Pacific, this time with China as the big bad instead of Japan. WW2 with colors reversed - the same situation which landed world hegemony in Uncle Sam's lap. — Tzeentch

While I agree this was definitely the plan when all this started, I think it's less clear now to what extent the US has the capacity and will to continue this plan.

This focus on Venezuela could be indication of even the neocons abandoning the above global ambitions.