On November 10, the Ukrainian anticorruption authorities revealed that close associates of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy were allegedly involved in a scheme to embezzle $100m from Ukraine’s energy sector.

Zelenskyy’s business partner Tymur Mindich as well as two government ministers have been named so far in the investigation, led by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), an agency backed by Western governments. Ukrainian and Western media have suggested that the president’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, may also be implicated.

The way the investigation is revealing facts and identifying suspects – slowly, theatrically, strategically – smacks of a political campaign aimed at achieving specific political outcomes under the cover of an anticorruption drive.

The scandal has delivered a devastating blow to Zelenskyy’s international reputation and to the Ukrainian cause at large. The Ukrainian president is emerging out of it as a lame duck who will do what he is told by whoever is pulling the strings, which may be the administration of United States President Donald Trump.

One area in which there is already dramatic change is Ukrainian policy on talks with Russia. On November 11, British newspaper The Times ran a story on Deputy Foreign Minister Sergiy Kyslytsya, the man tasked with leading the negotiations, in which he made clear that engagement with Moscow was suspended because it was yielding no result. Just a week later, Zelenskyy announced he wanted to reactivate talks with Russia.

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Then immediately, talk began of an emerging American peace plan that envisages Ukraine succumbing to all the key Russian demands for ending the war, if we are to believe media leaks. Despite a couple of defiant statements by Ukrainian officials, Zelenskyy didn’t reject it outright and promised to cooperate with the US. The corruption scandal has drastically limited his room for defiance.

What makes the prospect of peace more realistic today is that there is now a clear scapegoat for what essentially is Ukraine’s looming defeat – the Ukrainian president himself.

Indeed, the talks spearheaded by Trump earlier this year did not progress primarily because nobody wanted to take responsibility for an outcome that contrasts drastically with the expectations the cheerleaders of this war had built. While a military defeat today may mean salvation for Kyiv, it would be a deadly blow for war-mongering politicians and lobbyists who promoted the idea that Russia, a major nuclear power, could be coerced into accepting Western primacy by force.

That illusion underpinned the entire Western policy with regards to Russia throughout the conflict. It is the main reason why Kyiv resisted accepting an outcome of the war that the West was unable to change.

It has long been clear that Ukraine’s Western allies have hit a wall when it comes to military supplies and funding for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. Nineteen packages of harsh sanctions against Moscow have failed to stop its army, which has grown only stronger and far more technologically advanced than it was at the start of the conflict.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has been struggling with draft dodging and territorial and human losses. It could reportedly run out of Western funding by April. Worse still, close European allies – like Poland and Germany – have indicated they are not ready to keep funding the large numbers of Ukrainian refugees they are hosting.

The appetite for more war with Russia is largely exhausted in Europe, but of course, no one wants to be blamed for reaching a much worse settlement than could have been achieved had this all-out war been avoided altogether.

Being blamed for a Ukraine defeat is not a huge risk for Trump, who has long dismissed this conflict as “Biden’s war”, accusing his predecessor President Joe Biden of starting it.

It is much harder for European leaders and Zelenskyy himself to accept it, given how invested they have been in the promise that Russia could be defeated on the battlefield.

To understand their predicament today, one needs to recall December 2019 when Zelenskyy met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Paris, and the two sides agreed on a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, which ended hostilities and froze the front line over the next 12 months.

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The war could have ended then on terms Kyiv could only dream of today. In particular, Ukraine would have retained its formal sovereignty over the Donbas region, only a part of which would have become a Russian-influenced autonomy. Ukraine would have lost the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia occupied and annexed in 2014.

But with the arrival of Biden to the White House in January 2021, Zelenskyy made a U-turn on the peace process, embarking on a strategy of pressing Russia on all fronts to coerce it into agreeing to better conditions for Kyiv.

He clamped down on Putin’s main political ally in Ukraine and launched a loud campaign for Ukraine’s accession to NATO while his Western allies tried to pressure Germany into stopping work on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a major Russian export energy project. London also challenged Moscow by sending a battleship into the waters off Crimea, which Russia considers its territory. More than a year of dangerous brinkmanship ended with Putin unleashing an all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

This year, Ukraine finally ditched its rightful but entirely unrealistic demands for a full Russian withdrawal and reparations in favour of a comprehensive ceasefire along the current front lines. It did so after having lost swaths of territory, a lot of infrastructure, 14,500 civilians and up to 100,000 military personnel.

A peace agreement on Russia’s terms would be extremely unfair to Ukraine and would indeed be against international law. But the only alternative to it is the country being sucked even deeper into the black hole of devastation and collapsing nationhood.

The reaction to the draft of the peace plan was the expected mix of virtue signalling, performative defiance and jingoism. It reflects the complete absence of a realistic plan that could improve Ukraine’s negotiating position. Conveniently though, the corruption within Zelenskyy’s entourage gives pro-Ukrainian cheerleaders in the West a way out that absolves them from responsibility for the deadly mess they helped create.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.