Zelinsky sent the Ukrainian Army, including the Nazi Azov battalion, to Eastern Ukraine to subjugate the rebel Donbas republics and to murder the Russian "cockroach" defenders. In response, Putin sent the Russian army to The Ukraine, not evidently, to pursue a lightning war of conquest, but to engage in a slow grinding down of the Ukrainian army, and the gradual occupation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizkia and Kherson. In the process, many of Ukraine's Nazi warriors must have died, while many more, more than 2500 according to this Russian source, have become prisoners of war following the surrender of the Nazis holed up in the Azovstal bastion.
How much further Russia will advance, and for how long Russia intends to hold the territory it has conquered, remains to be seen. It is likely, however, that Russia will hold indefinitely all occupied territory East of the Dneiper River, territory, that is, which Russia won, previously, in the Russo-Polish war that ended with the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667. Under the terms of that treaty -- signed more than one hundred years before the founding of the United States of America -- Russia gained title to all of what is now the Ukraine on the right bank of the river.
In addition, however, Russia will likely cross the river and occupy the rest of Ukraine's Black Sea coast, including the city of Odessa, which was founded in 1794 as a Russian naval fortress on territory annexed from Turkey in 1792.
Meantime, Zelinsky has agreed to what is atantamount to a merger of Ukraine -- that part of it which the government in Kyiv still controls -- with Poland. Under the terms of this remarkable agreement, Polish citizens will be free both to stand for election to the Ukrainian Parliament, and to serve as judges in Ukrainian courts.
Thus, entirely through his own actions, Zelinksy has effectively abolished The Ukraine: the East and likely also the South going to Russia, the West going to Poland. In this way, Poland regains the lands, including the Polish City of Lvov, annexed to The Ukraine by Stalin following World War II. At the same time, Ukrainians will presumably be free to migrate into Poland. For Ukrainian Jews, this freedom is of immense significance, since it allows them to restore the a Jewish population to what, before the Nazi genocide, had long been the home of the majority of Europe's Jews.
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