Imperialism planned to use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia, engineering a proxy war by which it might advance one crucial step towards the balkanization of Russia – a vast territory just waiting to be looted by monopoly capital.

But things have not gone according to plan. Rather than breaking up Russia, the war which the west initiated has broken up Ukraine. Instead of uniting the ‘collective west’, it has divided it. And now is the time for mutual recrimination, finger-pointing and the hunt for scapegoats.

As a barometer registering the shifting fortunes of war, there is none better placed than the west-backed stooge Volodymyr Zelensky. Not so long ago, this former actor-turned president was cutting a dash as the poster boy for democracy, European values and the American way. He wowed the United Nations, hob-nobbed with heads of state, received ovations galore, and easily persuaded governments across Europe to part with ever more cash and weaponry.

But as the sanctions campaign against Russia boomeranged, doing more economic harm to the west than to its intended object, and the real cost of the war in blood and pelf began to dawn, Zelensky rattled the begging bowl more insistently, warning that failure to come up with the requisite cash and weapons would prejudice the chances of the famous ‘spring counteroffensive’, which was supposed to change the tide of the war.

But the ignominious collapse of the counteroffensive has finally forced an agonising reappraisal onto the administration of Joe Biden in Washington.

Whilst the neocons like Victoria Nuland might still be urging a fight to the last drop of Ukrainian blood, it seems probable that President Biden and his secretary of state Antony Blinken are now bent on washing their hands of the war, urging Zelensky to quit the heroics and start talking to Russian president Vladimir Putin, with a view to sidelining the war into a so-called ‘frozen conflict’.

Of course, all these calculations take no account of the reality that in the real world it is Russia and not the USA that is in a position to call the shots, and nothing is on offer that could tempt the Russians to stop their mission halfway.

All the same, the moves indicate that some shred of reality is starting to penetrate the hazy minds of US officials and ruling elites. Not so President Zelensky, however. He is like an actor who, half way through the script, realises he is in the wrong play. Oblivious to all the chatter about frozen conflicts, he is clinging desperately to the dogged refrain that all Russian forces must be withdrawn and Vladimir Putin must stand trial – and only then would Ukraine consent to talks!

Perhaps the Kiev junta and its president might have a clearer idea of the reality of the situation if Zelensky spent more time at home and less time hanging around the UN and western capitals. His latest visits to the UN and Washington were very different from his earlier forays, however.

The much-trailed joint Biden/Zelensky announcement in Washington about the transfer to Ukraine of the ATACMS missile system, billed as evidence of Washington’s long-term commitment to the war, never happened.

Catastrophic slip of the ‘plucky Ukraine’ mask in Canada’s parliament

And then, to cap it all, Zelensky went to Canada – a trip to the heartland of his most loyal fanbase that was supposed to shore up his faltering image and restore his wounded pride after the UN general assembly turned a cold shoulder and the US Congress refused to give him an audience. But instead of restoring his flagging icon status, Zelensky found himself pulled into the centre of the most disastrous public relations fail of the war.

Given that the west has been running its proxy war more like a Hollywood movie (complete with compliant actor in the main role) than a military operation, the scriptwriters and producers under Nato’s direction have been careful to airbrush out all uncomfortable facts regarding the true context and content of Ukraine’s supposedly heroic ‘brave resistance’ against inexplicable and evil ‘Russian aggression’.

Just as BBC journalists have been careful to edit out and avoid mention of symbols and regalia that clearly indicate the fascist ideology and direct Nazi connections with which today’s Ukrainian armed forces and polity are saturated, so Ukrainian film editors were assiduous in filling in the empty seats that greeted Zelensky’s address to the UN general assembly in New York.

Presentation and packaging have been the key to the whole of the west’s war, which has been based on the idea that, as invincible masters of the universe, the Russian economy will fall over at their say-so and the people of the world will believe whatever they tell then to.

In just such a vein, the editors of the UN footage were clearly hoping to fool the credulous and inattentive into believing that President Zelensky remains as popular as ever. Except that rather too many of those who saw that footage spotted a continuity slip-up that placed our ‘Churchillian’ speaker in the audience for his own speech.

But the indifference and even hostility that met our hero in New York and Washington would certainly not be repeated in Canada. Prime minister Justin Trudeau was keen to show that his personal love for Zelensky, his administration’s enthusiasm for the war and their collective keenness to fight to the last Ukrainian remain undimmed.

Equally unshaken it seems is Canada’s willingness to scrape the national coffers in the imperialist cause. While Poland shouts ‘no more’ from the rooftops and the USA itself starts to mumble about the limits of its ability to keep stumping up the $25 billion that is needed every quarter to keep the Ukrainian army and state afloat, Trudeau was announcing $650m in new military assistance.

In a jubilant session of the Canadian House of Commons, Trudeau hugged and praised his Ukrainian counterpart, and went so far as to honour him with the presence of a 98-year-old veteran of an earlier ‘anti-Russian’ war. Two standing ovations and a Zelensky fist-pump showed that the Ukrainian president was as buoyed up by this tribute as were Canada’s parliamentarians – not one of whom made the slightest protest.

When the inevitable storm blew up on social media, however, a flurry of innocent apologies for ‘confusion’, ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘unwitting ignorance’ were issued in quick succession. The speaker of the house was persuaded to take the fall for having ‘failed to do the necessary checks’ and ‘misled the house’ and the media ran with the story that it was all an innocent mistake and we should certainly not make too much of it given that further reporting or investigation would only help the cause of ‘Russian disinformation’ in confirming the presence of nazis in Ukraine.

After all, how could hundreds of well-paid well-educated representatives of the people be expected to understand that if you were fighting against the ‘Russians’ in WW2, you were fighting with Nazi Germany?

How could the country that gave shelter to thousands of such criminal scum (at the urgent request of the British government, be it noted, and saving them from the Soviet gallows that were their just deserts) have any clue about the ideology this ‘Ukrainian-Canadian community’ might bring with them? How could they possibly know that those who arrived on Canada’s shores fresh from the killing fields, drenched in the blood of massacred innocents, had been perpetuating, celebrating and whitewashing their sins as ‘traditions’ for the last 80 years and waiting for their chance to continue in the same vein?

Perhaps Trudeau could have sought enlightenment from his deputy Chrystia Freeland? Herself descended from just such stock, and a graduate of Canada’s Ukronazi youth camps, Freeland’s former career was as an academic and journalist engaged in the rewriting of Ukraine’s history to whitewash the crimes of Bandera-ite fascists and attribute all their massacres to the Soviet defenders of the people.

While all this has been blowing up, Zelensky himself has been noticeably silent. After all, what can he say? ‘Nazis? Us? Surely not!’ Moreover, while whatever he said would stink of hypocrisy and inevitably lead to further discussion of an uncomfortable topic, even the most mealy-mouthed of fake apologies would bring down the very real opprobrium of the very powerful Ukrainian fascists who surround him in Kiev.

This heavily armed goon army has been groomed for decades to act in Nato’s service by just such propaganda as Freeland and her family have been pushing – that the wrong side won in WW2 and that they, the upholders of Hitler’s legacy, are on a mission from God to cleanse the world of Russian and other Untermensch. And it is on these goons that poor old Vlod depends for the continuation of his political and physical existence.

Zelensky is running out of road fast, and his travels outside Ukraine may increasingly be less to do with international diplomacy than about scouting out future rat runs and bolt holes.

Meanwhile, as military defeats multiply and the wheels are falling off the propaganda machine even in the western heartlands, Biden is not going to find it easy to disentangle his own political fortunes and that of his party from the catastrophic failure of his proxy war.