Pirmin_Styrnol🇺🇦🇪🇺🇩🇪

So many people seem genuinely astonished by this local ceasefire in Oleshky, where Russian occupation and the fighting have driven the city into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe. Turns out, all it takes is an order from the Kremlin, and Russians and Ukrainians stop shooting at each other. They can calmly and civilly arrange the evacuation of innocent civilians facing starvation, even allow Ukrainian and American journalists to be present on the ground, and so on. Well, duh. There is not, and never has been, a single adequate, rational, even remotely sane reason to wage a war aimed at destroying Ukraine. This is the stupidest, most brainless, absurd, pointless, contrived, and deceitful war in human history. The Kremlin wanted to give Donald Trump a little gift ahead of the elections, so the Kremlin gave an order to put the bloodbath on hold for a few dozen hours. All it would take is a single order from the Kremlin, and not only would a local ceasefire become possible, but the entire war would end. Just like that. Instantly. And 95% of Russians wouldn't give a single damn. They would happily accept absolutely anything as yet another "great victory of Russian arms," provided that's how state television explained it to them. And with a snap of the fingers, all those insane fairy tales about "NATO expansion," "Nazi Satanists," the "multipolar world," "historical Russian lands," and all the rest of that bullshit would simply vanish into thin air. The problem is that, in this insane, upside-down looking-glass world, absolutely everything is being done to encourage a megalomaniacal maniac, driven mad by impunity and boredom, to never, ever, under any circumstances stop the war, but to keep it going indefinitely. Instead, he is constantly appeased and rewarded for it.

And now I’m going to tell you f̶r̶o̶m̶ w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ t̶h̶e̶ a̶t̶t̶a̶c̶k̶ o̶n̶ B̶e̶l̶a̶r̶u̶s̶ w̶a̶s̶ b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ p̶r̶e̶p̶a̶r̶e̶d̶ what’s actually going to happen instead of all this hysterical white noise desperately trying to drown out the inevitable: The Orange Man is going to lose the elections with a deafening crash, and spend the rest of his time in office, along with his entire administration, desperately fending off a third impeachment, countless investigations, and criminal prosecutions for all his wild antics. And all this pompous posturing will finally come to an end. As for Putin, he can play Stalin all he wants, fantasize endlessly about carving up the world into three spheres of influence at some imaginary new “Yalta,” and unleash as many hordes of bots on social media as he likes. But when, at the end of the fifth year of your glorious blitzkrieg against Ukraine, you’re still banging your head against Mala Tokmachka, suffering your second defeat at Lyman, while Ukraine is bombing Moscow and St. Petersburg, and when you’re 1.5% of the global economy, all these fantasies can only impress a handful of useful idiots from Elon Musk’s freak show. And the man sitting next to him at this imaginary Yalta is, to put it mildly, no Roosevelt. He’s a semi-coherent, half-con artist from trashy reality TV who has failed spectacularly in Iran and has no idea how to get away with that. As for the Chinese emperor, it’s not even clear why he would want to take part in this lunatic circus in the first place, let alone share power with these people.