After a brutal 3½-year grind, the war in Ukraine has arrived at a delicate moment.

On the battlefield, the Russians continue to advance, though at a pace that would take them over 114 years, at a cost of 44 million additional casualties, to conquer the entire country.

Vladimir Putin would celebrate victory in the same place where he has sent so many of his countrymen — the graveyard.

We may safely doubt whether the Russian economy will hold out that long. An irritated President Trump has tightened the sanctions squeeze, and whoever succeeds Trump is likely to turn the screws even tighter on Putin’s economic vulnerabilities.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Russians are winning — and winning, as Vince Lombardi once observed, is the only thing that counts.

If the Russians are weak, the Ukrainians are weaker. Both countries are running out of military-age males to feed into the insatiable maw of the war — but the Ukrainians, who have fewer, will run out first.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, up to now a symbol of indomitable resistance, finds his government sinking into a bog of scandal and corruption, involving kickbacks from an energy company to his business partners and political allies.

In the fallout from the scandal, Zelensky’s chief of staff and two ministers in his government have been forced to resign.

Whether or not Zelensky himself is implicated — and no proof exists of that — people will believe the worst. His judgment, which bears on every aspect of the war, has been shown to rate somewhere between terrible and appalling.

Corruption has always been endemic in Ukraine. Hunter Biden’s warm and profitable friendship with Burisma, another Ukrainian energy company, can serve as an illustration of how money and power stick to one another in that culture.

Following the Russian invasion, however, the Biden administration and the Europeans simply looked the other way.

They cast Zelensky as David and Putin as Goliath, and poured billions into the war effort, with few questions asked.

We can be sure that Trump will ask a great many questions now.

The Ukrainians confront a political scandal that has tainted and weakened the government, a bloody invasion they have little chance of defeating, and massive pressure from their paymasters, the Americans, to come to terms with Putin.

In response, Zelensky and his European admirers remain stuck in defiance mode.

“Russia must lose the war,”

© New York Post