Pathways to Peace in Ukraine, and beyond III

Since my publication of Pathways to Peace in Ukraine II, the circumstances on the ground have changed and I've spent a considerable amount of time trying to better understand the facts that led to the war in Ukraine, recent developments and related ideas and concepts and their geopolitical significance to make this the best last shot at trying to come up with a set of pathways to end the war in Ukraine. There's much content here that is critical of the USA, Russian and Ukrainian governments. There is indeed a focus on the USA and the West. If the USSR remained the sole superpower after the end of the Cold War in an inverted parallel universe, it would be appropriate to apply the same focus on it and the Warsaw Pact, should they have chosen to become hegemonic and undertake a divide and conquer strategy of the USA. I also want to emphasise that I really don't particularly care which government manages the territory in Ukraine (though I reserve my inalienable right to perceive matters from the perspective of nationalists of any flag, or any other perspective), or which government manages any territory in any other part of the world - because what really matters is what happens on that territory, not who manages it. Despite these hypotheticals, its quite clear that due to this extortionate geopolitical build-up, and from my understanding of the lived experiences of my relatives in Crimea, life there is better since its annexation by/accession to Russia.  This is a long read, buckle up. 

The method that I'm using is based primarily on an etymological deconstruction of the word Socialism as inspired by Jacques Derrida and John Rawls' philosophy, specifically the concepts of overlapping consensus, boundaries of reasonable disagreement and trying to put oneself in someone else's shoes as the Veil of Ignorance would demand. I may express myself authoritatively, but I don't know all the facts or all the ideas, though I'm trying to generate a consensus for peace while consistently under incredible stress, during wartime and genocide and in possession of the internet at my fingertips. 

Below is a comprehensive though non-exhaustive list of relevant facts, ideas and concepts and interpretations which ground my understanding of this conflict. It could, hopefully, serve as a basis for a good-faith win-win peace agreement. At the very bottom of this page, I detail a single agreement nested with multiple diverging options.

Before WWII

It couldn't start any other way if one is to try to retain composure in these trying times. The formation of the universe, the solar system, and our common origin as humankind as well as the developmental vectors of our planet, and their intersection with existential risks are important grounding points when considering history, historiography and geopolitical matters. Countries, and the entire nation state system is a human construct. Borders are not physical objects, they are metaphysical objects and are closer to property, intellectual property, title, ethics, aesthetics, etc. Even though they are human constructs, and are often unfortunately used as a tool to dominate others, they have basic administrative utility. Some people feel a connection with the village, city, region, country, supranational union or continent of their birth but also can feel this closeness with one or several cultures, religions or ideologies, people who share a passion or a trade, often in varying orders of prioritisation.

Others feel closer to people who share their taste in music, a subculture, as well as gender or sexual identity, typically in urban areas around the world. In shorthand, in essence nationalism/national conservatism and queerness are not so different - they are different modes of preference for human self-identification. This is evidenced by the existence of the concept of queer nationalism. With respect for queer people, and some of my friends who are queer, I do not like nationalism as a concept, particularly ethnic nationalism (for reasons expressed throughout this website), but for most of my life have taken great interest in various countries/nations and cultures around the world and their history, and feel inspired by the ability of places like Australia, Russia and Malaysia to maintain social cohesion in a multicultural society despite great geopolitical turmoil. Countries, nations and flags are all essentially symbolic unifiers which are supposed to represent a uniting basis for a group on a territory, a particular quality or a set of qualities (chosen and/or unchosen) of a group. 

There are also people who self-identify with concepts and ideologies which are internationalist in nature which also includes queer Internationalism, Communism/Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism and associated forms of plutocracy, non-localised religions, the New Age movement, the Green movement and countless others. In simple terms, just like political parties, all of these groups and subcultures are forms of hive minds with their respective leaders sending signals to their respective followers who, for whichever reason are just sick and tired of watching the world suffer and want someone else to fix it for them. At this point its important to highlight the distinction between Internationalism and Globalism. Globalism essentially refers to the transnational structure of predominantly Western but also other international institutions and financial interests which appear to make decisions without the free prior and informed consent of the citizens of any country. These institutions can include and are not limited to the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of International Settlements, the World Health Organisation and many others that have experienced a trust deficit. 

In "Democracies" we tend to express our views on countless topics about the direction of our country, vote, and then hope that our representatives don't sell us out once we've put our faith in them. Its a very flawed process because some of them don't listen to us, others sell us out, and the whole democratic exercise gets treated like shopping for a hamper basket - you have two choices, both of them have some things that you want, and some things that you don't want, so you feel like you have to pick between the lesser of two evils, such are the "realities on the ground" they say. To fix this, governments in countries which see themselves as democracies (or wish to) would gain stronger and more durable mandates if they focused on governing in the interests of the entire spectrum of society, not just the fraction that voted for them, and on the most contentious topics, bring together members from groups which have opposing views and try to reconcile a pathway forward. This is something I learned and practiced at Wholefoods, and later read about in the works of John Rawls. Its also something I have watched Vladimir Putin get iteratively better at doing over the last 20 years (with considerable interruptions), though this is arguably easier to do in an illiberal democracy and a conservative society because the boundaries of reasonable disagreement are considerably narrower. If you're interested in ideas about how to fruitfully reform democracies, please see "Pathways to reform Western Liberal Democracy". The spectrum of opinions on the war in Ukraine is considerably broader than the governmental positions of Russia and Ukraine, because in order to come up with workable pathways, all perspectives and implications have to be seriously considered, but one can also spend an entire lifetime considering them. 

The Legend of Lech, Czech and Rus' and its relevance to Slavic people the disputed histories of which have become one of the root causes of nationalism in Eastern Europe, which has been exploited by external influences for almost as long as the existence of the Slavic people themselves. This is clearly evident in other parts of the world, with disputed histories, contradictory historiographies feeding into the respective national consciousnesses of many countries in relation to distant but even recent historical events.

The foundation of the Kievan Rus and its relationship with neighbouring proto-states, as well as its evolution into Russia and Ukraine.

The Tatar and Mongol invasions of Europe. 

'The Ruin' period during which a nascent Ukrainian identity was being divided and suppressed either by Poland/Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire.

Subsequent competition between Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire in the "European theatre" and the eventual wedging out of the influence of the Ottoman Empire from the territory of modern day Ukraine and South-Eastern Europe.

Pogroms against Jews in Europe, including Eastern Europe and the territories that are now Poland, Ukraine and Russia.

Its hard to say anything truly meaningful about many of these points without an exhaustive comparative historiographical analysis because the historical details relating to the above content can be highly disputed, and the last few years have shown that a considerable amount of important historical detail can be left out of the historical record, or distorted by presenting one historiographic perspective as the only perspective to view history from. 

The American Constitution which was created before Nazism, contains its First Amendment (the principle, purpose and intent of which, especially considering the time it was created in, I consider highly admirable and reasonable in essence) seems to have eventually precluded the United States of America from persecuting Nazism as an ideology after WWII, giving it a case to prevent the explicit inclusion of opposition to Nazism in the founding documents of the United Nations, and also arguably (from its long-view geostrategic perspective) giving it 'carte blache' to advance the causes of nationalists, ultranationalists and other kinds of separatists as well as capitalists and monarchists via the military-industrial complex, neoliberalism and even food aid for the pursuit of its geopoliticial hegemony over the last 35 years. Since its founding Soviet Union did very similar things on the basis of Communism, Marxism, Socialism, class and anti-colonialism.

The Soviet Union also caused a lot of intended and unintended pain and suffering in its early formation but also throughout its existence in its pursuit to build Communism internally and internationally, including the Holodomor, which affected not only Ukraine but my home region of Voronezh and many other parts of Russia as a result of Joseph Stalin's agricultural collectivisation policies.

The Soviet Union is also responsible for one of the fastest ascendancies out of poverty, into industrialisation, literacy and electrification as well as space which is comparable in scale and speed to the rise of the United States of America and the People's Republic of China. 

After WWII:

To my knowledge, the Soviet Union lost 27+ million people to defeat the Nazis, and it wouldn't have been able to do this without American industrial, financial and military assistance. The eventual collaboration of the USA and the USSR in WWII is the single biggest reason, in my view, why Nazi Germany was defeated. If great powers cooperated more and respected the will of smaller or weaker countries on the basis of reason alone, we could have iterative progression towards something resembling a permanent world peace. 

The ascendance of neoliberalism toward the end of the 20th century and beginning of this century, arguably advancing the thesis of "democratic peace theory" (as political representatives across democracies are essentially increasingly controlled by the same financial interests), "the end of history" and moving countries rightward on the political "J-curve" as they get saturated by Western capital, as well as reducing the significance of the role of the voting public in democracies due to state capture, lobbying, political donations and financialisation of political movements, manipulation of public opinion by mega corp and cliques of billionaires. This resulted in Western Liberal Democracies gradually evolving into one hegemonic neoliberal plutocracy which pivoted to try to balkanise Russia.

Harry Truman warned us about the military-industrial complex, in a period when the top individual tax rate in the USA was 94% (1944-45) and top corporate tax rate of 53% (1968-69). It is at this time, shortly after we said "Never again" that the world devolved into the Cold War where the other superpower (USSR) had an effective individual tax rate of 100% with no private sector (outside of black markets). Since then, we've seen several dozen genocides and conflicts unfold, some of which are ongoing the longest of which are the Arab-Israeli conflict and the conflict in Myanmar/Burma both of which are essentially nationalistic in nature. 

Immediately after WWII the US Congress struggled to restrain the ambitions of General Douglas McArthur and the Pentagon, which consolidated its dominion over the Pacific theatre and Australia (at the expense of its sovereignty), resulting in America having a historically unmatched continuous global naval, aerial and surveillance supremacy.

The Cold War was effectively fought over a 9-30% tax difference in the top tax brackets (with exceptional economic growth in the USA), the idea of a completely centrally planned economy (as opposed to a market or a mixed economy), press freedom, personal and political freedoms as well as concepts such as "from each according to his ability to each according to his need", the pursuit of individual economic opportunity and anti-colonialism - Capitalism vs Communism. This is what it looks like from a mixed liberalist and/or constructivist perspective of international relations (with liberalism having an 'Enlightenment - oriented' streak of 'seeking to civilize the uncivilized' and constructivism having an identitarian based set of explanations for the behaviour of states with emphasis on social constructions and concepts such as language, national identity, culture, heritage and history). From a realist perspective of international relations, great power competition would persist irrespective of ideology or culture unless there are mechanisms to constrain it, because great powers will always find an excuse to compete, even by means which they themselves would find unacceptable if used against them. The UN Security Council was supposed to be that mechanism, and it failed almost immediately after its establishment. The realist perspective would say that neither the USSR or the USA really cared about any constructivist or liberalist fluff, or their own ideologies - they just sought to expand their influence on the planet, but I think this would be an uncharitable interpretation. I still have faith in the humanity of our planet's political leaders to do what's best for humankind as a whole, and take the off-ramps that I'm trying to construct. 

The countless proxy wars and regime change efforts on the part of both superpowers during the bipolar world order, the tradition of which successive bipartisan administrations of the USA unfortunately continued after the dissolution of USSR. This includes Ukraine. 

Around and after the dissolution of USSR:

After Boris Yeltsin left the Communist Party, he travelled the US to giving speeches for which he was paid dozens of thousands of dollars per appearance, with who knows who, what about, and how many people present, in 1989 (I am personally astonished to be discovering this only last year, and I'm not sure if much of the world knows about this). Looking back at this now, knowing what has happened since, it creates the impression that this may have been a coup. Mikhail Gorbachev then became the first person to be the President of the State of the World Economy Forum in 1990 (what appears to be the predecessor body to the World Economic Forum), the article which I found this from seems to have since been removed from the internet. The two of them had a challenged relationship, but these two hidden facts do not seem to ever be mentioned in the Russian media (from what I've seen). What kind of conversations did Yeltsin have, what about, and what role did Gorbachev have as the President of the State of the World Economy considering the events that subsequently occurred leading to the dissolution of the USSR and the neoliberalisation of its constituent countries' economies? Facts about this seem to be not well known, or understood. These little-known unknowns may have a bearing on the moral vector in what is expressed below.

The USSR had a series of coups in the years and months before it was due for a referendum to reconstitute itself as a Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics / Union of Sovereign States.

The US private sector substantially invested in the People's Republic of China after the restoration of its relations with China - which is also when it committed to a one-country-two-systems approach, and the CIA also helped fund "Solidarity" and many other Eastern European independence movements (and allegedly the Neo-Nazi Banderists even during the USSR), as well as Poland's economic ascendance. The Soviet people willfully dismantled the Soviet Union from within, in good faith and what in many of their perspectives was for world peace and the greater good of all of humankind, with Yeltsin and others effectively staging a Liberal-Federalist coup, which prevented the reforming of the Soviet Union into the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics, in part leading to dozens of wars on former Soviet territory, and a stupid amount of suffering. This indeed is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

Despite Jeffrey Sachs insisting that the former Soviet Union should receive the same assistance as Poland the former Soviet states got virtually no assistance at the point of their foundation. This, combined with the importation of neoliberalism (creation of a billionaire class and the effective deletion of the entire political and legal system) created the conditions for institutionalised robbery and untold suffering for over a decade which resulted in Ukraine being biggest loser in this circumstance, suffering from artificially created scarcity, while the newly enshrined neoliberal economic system rewarded the oligarchs and criminal elements (in a country where in its first set of elections as an independent state the contest was between Ukrainian nationalists, pro-Russian parties, Liberal-democratic parties, anti-Communists, Communists and Social Democrats). Its noteworthy that Belarus throughout this entire period retained the same President Lukashenko and is famed in the region for having an economy which still most closely resembles that of the one it had during the Soviet period, and it has also avoided the economic extremes that other countries in the region did not. Later on down the track, these economic conditions in Russia and Ukraine in turn led to disputes over gas transit, costs and credits, leading to flow-on effects of trade disputes as Ukraine was denied the opportunity to be a part of both the European and Russian trade zones. This in turn inflamed the cultural, historical and linguistic tensions between the Ukrainian nationalists, pro-Russians, Communists/Socialists and anti-Communist Liberal Democrats.

The economy of Ukraine was divided with the East predominantly exporting to Russia (mainly heavy industry), and the West predominantly exporting to Europe (mainly agriculture). The linguistic divide also falls along these lines with the West being more Polish influenced, with a greater proportion of people speaking Ukrainian and the East being more Russian influenced with a greater proportion speaking Russian, with Jewish and Tartar groups maintaining a presence across the region (just as they do in Russia). The same divisions exist in relation to sentiments relating to the USSR with more people seeing it as a 'bad' period in Western Ukraine, with people in the East of the country seeing it as either a 'good' period or an inseparable part of Ukrainian history. This is reflected in the presence of statues and symbols across the country, and has an effect on the development of Ukrainian identity. Reviewing the history of Ukraine's Presidential and Parliamentary elections reveals a peculiar picture of a developing neoliberal-ultranationalist and an increasingly anti-Russian alliance in the West, where the Ukrainian language was becoming more popular and moving Eastward, and in the East where the Ukrainian language was not gaining as much popularity. 

The consistent Western support for the policies which made Russian a second-tier language in Ukraine, as well as policies which reduced Eastern Ukraine's trade potential with Russia as well as the "Revolution of Dignity" / coup against Viktor Yanukovich in 2014 is symptomatic of the traditional Western policy of "Divide and Conquer", weaponising internal divisions and a nascent and divided Ukrainian national identity, presumably as a means to bait Russia and catalyse regime change there. Internal policies that reflect this include "Derussification", "Decommunisation" and "Lustration". The parallels to these developments and similar developments to the removal of statues of Confederate leaders in the US or colonial leaders in Australia and reflect the international challenges of dealing with histories and personal legacies involving figures that different peoples within the same country find divisive. On this note, my personal view relating to contentious figures and symbols everywhere is - if there is a statue, change the plaque, or add another one, rather than destroying the heritage, as contentious as it may be, within reason. 

At the same time, since 2013 there has been increasing prevalence of explicitly Nazi symbolism and ideology in Ukraine which I find deeply disturbing, though in my visit to Crimea in 2015 I did get a Korlovrat as a political souvenir - knowing that its connotations are more closely linked with Slavic paganism than with Nazism. Nazism is an exterminationist ideology which sought the permanent destruction of entire groups (Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Queer people, disabled people as well as Communists and Socialists) and believed in a racial hierarchy in which a set of (preodminantly Aryan) ethnicities were "the ubermensch", while the previously mentioned groups were "the untermensch". Communist states around the world also committed genocides, ethnic cleansing and utilised other inhumane measures in pursuit of their ideology, but those measures were not an end in themselves. Capitalist states have also created conditions of systemic subjugation and suffering, and have used inhumane means in the pursuit of profit and other objectives around the world in some cases leading to tremendous upheaval as well. The reason why Communism and Capitalism are distinct from Nazism, is because the intent and purpose of Communism or Capitalism as ideologies is not the destruction of entire kinds of people, though some Communists may advocate for the destruction of a class and the class system while some Capitalists are content with creating the conditions for and the existence of extreme inequality and economic subjugation of lower and middle classes and entire countries through rent, usury as well as militaristic and financialised systems of control and power relations. 

The course of history since WWII has shown that regardless of the overarching ideological paradigm or the structure of the world order at any particular point in time, genocides, mass killings and other kinds of inhumanity continue to occur. Unrestrained great power competition inflames these dynamics, especially in questions relating to sovereignty, sovereign equality of states, territoriality and the responsibility to protect. This was evident very soon after the creation of the United Nations, with the commencement of the Korean War, the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Burmese Civil War. 

It is noteworthy that the Clinton administration was prepared to finance Boris Yeltsin's 1996 campaign in which he was concerned that the Communist Party of Russia would win while it was also the second largest party in Ukraine at the time (a direct form of political interference in Russia's elections, during the election, which was unfortunately requested by Yeltsin himself). This is noteworthy because as the USSR was dissolving Jeffrey Sachs appears to never have received a response in relation the rationale behind not providing Ukraine or Russia with an economic/currency stabilisation fund as both Russia and Ukraine set themselves on a path of "shock therapy" to become market-capitalist economies, while Poland largely avoided the problems both Ukraine and Russia faced precisely because it did have a currency stabilisation fund. It is also highly noteworthy that over the last 40 year window, the US restored its relationship with China and heavily invested in it and developed its relationship with Vietnam (both officially Communist countries) while maintaining its trade embargo on Cuba since the 60's and a sanctions regime against North Korea (also both officially Communist countries). 

This shows that after the dissolution of USSR, US foreign policy wasn't exclusively based on whether a country is Communist or not (as it doesn't seem to have actually cared about whether a country is or isn't a dictatorship or a kingdom, or is Communist or Socialist for that matter), but likely on securing its hegemony for the coming century. This is why the bluntness and transparency of President Donald Trump is indeed refreshing as he's not coaxing the geopolitical ambitions of his administration with overtures about democracy as previous administrations have done. It is also noteworthy that simultaneously (in the 90's) nationalist, ethnic nationalist and ultranationalist movements became hyperactive, and many separatist conflicts broke out across the former USSR (serving as an excellent basis for the execution of "Divide and Conquer"), with even some nationalists such as the then Chechen leader Dzhokar Dudayev becoming Islamist instead.

The people of Ukraine were (and still are) some of the worst off in Europe, and when Russia and Ukraine had a series of gas disputes (at the time when their economies were struggling but in ascendancy) Poland's economy was growing with substantial US and EU support. It was also around this period that Obama and NATO were re-assuring Russia that NATO's placement of a missile defense system in Poland was officially for the purposes of deterring potential Iranian missile attacks and not directed against Russia, after Russia's expression of interest in joining NATO was flatly declined, Russia's suggestion of creating a mutipolar world order was met with contempt, Russia's attempts to protect Abkhazians and South Ossetians were immediately presented as "aggression", even though in the Russian media they were described as responses to a destabilising situation which included attacks against peacekeepers and the civilian population.

When Viktor Yanukovich was elected, he wanted to ensure that Ukraine could be a part of both the Russian and the European customs unions and it appears that he was told "you can't have it both ways". Pick a side. Its fascinating, but as I'm writing this - it appears that Australia is being put into exactly the same position as Ukraine was, during our election, by two of the world's superpowers. Yanukovich, eventually picked Russia, presumably because most of Ukraine's industrial capacity (in Eastern Ukraine) was predominantly exporting to Russia and because it was his home constituency, which resulted in a Western-backed coup. If Ukraine did not have to pick sides, none of this senseless loss of life would have happened. For an astute observer, the series of decisions made by successive Ukrainian governments after the Revolution of Dignity / coup against Yanukovich resulted in divisive policies that alienated its Russian-speaking population, leading to a gradual escalation of separatism into civil unrest, a civil war and now a war between states - not just Russia and Ukraine, but essentially most of the West and Russia. It feels like the coincidence of all these events (while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were raging on) were a part of a Brzezinsky-style intergenerational plan to finish Russia off while seeking to obtain control over its nascent democracy via venture and vulture capital and the "free market" through dependence and an alternate form of subjugation. As this appeared to fail, the US and NATO pivoted from the Middle-East to pursue regime change in Russia via the increasing separatism and civil strife in Ukraine with overtures about it being a dictatorship or not being a "Liberal Democracy". While its true the political system in Russia seems more "authoritarian" than in many Western countries, its also important to note how many people vote for Vladimir Putin, and in particular how many of the diaspora vote for him, and while I didn't vote for him last spring, I understand why people did - they remember what's been happening over the last decade. Another peculiar point is that throughout all this time, there have been no declarations of war made, Western media has retained a consistent presence in Russia, often asking President Putin questions (and the local media on one occasion even seeking his justification about whether he believes if he is a war criminal, to which he gave a detailed response). At the same time, to my knowledge Russian media have been banned from most Western countries for a considerable period of time, and I don't remember a "Western" leader ever being asked by a journalist if they are a war criminal and hearing a response.

We should also remember that we are in a climate crisis, Russia is one of the largest fossil fuel emitters as is the USA, and the latter has, under successive Democratic administrations, pivoted its economic engine towards renewable energy. We should also remember that the USA is $37tn in debt, and needs to secure critical minerals and trade routes to run its economy. Lastly, we should also remember that while it promotes itself as a free market liberal democracy the American financial system is controlled by a small number of companies (Black Rock, Vanguard Corporation and State Street Corporation - who also part-own each other, who also along with other financial organisations carry a considerable amount of debt) and, along with other sources, finance the US sovereign debt that funds the functions of government, the interest on which is a significant sovereign risk for the United States of America. These are also the same companies that, along with the taxpayer, fund and profit from America's wars, allies and client states, and are interconnected with many producers that much of the world depends on for many basic goods. And despite this, the USA still doesn't move to tax its own billionaires properly, something that a few of them have complained about.

Welcome to Great Power politics. Yanukovich was forced to choose. He made the wrong choice in the eyes of the West, and the West helped destroy him through a well orchestrated Revolution of Dignity which also had substantial numbers of demonstrators with legitimate grievances, as well as nationalists and and anti-Russian ultranationalists. There were also counter demonstrations where legitimate grievances were expressed as well, some of whom initially sought autonomy and then secession from Ukraine. The separatists in the Donbass became emboldened because they saw their language and cultural rights as inviolable and so did many Russian speakers in other parts of Ukraine.

Imagine the oldest brother (NATO) putting a bigger brother (Russia) and a smaller brother (Ukraine) on an island, intentionally not giving them of food while the two tried to get their shelter built. When they're both very hungry the little brother takes fruit that the bigger brother found. The bigger brother eventually punches the little brother because he is also hungry and stressed. The little brother gets angry and starts crying. The older brother is watching this unfold the whole time, because he wants to prove to the bigger brother that he's the boss. The older brother then pulls up to the island and offers the little brother a basket of fruit, but only if the little brother tells the bigger brother and everyone else that the bigger brother is bad. The little brother then turns around to the the bigger brother and says "look what the older brother offered me, so don't punch me again, and I need you to share your fruit with me." The bigger brother agrees. The older brother then pretends to be the bigger brother's girlfriend (USA) and messages the little brother about how they recently broke up and how bad the bigger brother is and how she actually always liked the older brother. The little brother gets angry and decides to start messaging everyone how bad the bigger brother is, saying whatever is necessary to ensure that nobody likes the bigger brother. Eventually the bigger brother and the little brother start fighting and again the older brother steps in to mediate (but isn't actually interested in resolving the conflict). Eventually after the bigger brother feels betrayed or baited by everyone he knocks out the little brother and the older brother threatens the bigger brother with a knock out. The bigger brother and the little brother used to have an alliance (USSR) against the older brother (NATO), but the little brother still remembers the days when he had an alliance with the older brother (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) and now that the world has understood that story, the older brother doesn't look so good anymore. This is essentially a simplified beginning to the end summary of the war in Ukraine in the 20-21st centuries. It is a story of a seemingly contrived plan to design a brother-war for the purposes of strategically defeating, dividing and conquering Russia or at the very least catalysing regime change there as has been a great power's standard script, or at least this is how it seems to me. 

When I visited Crimea in 2015, my relatives there told me that Crimea has been fiscally underserviced for the last decade but also that they didn't care much for who held the political authority over the region because they've been ignored by Ukraine and they didn't have much faith in Russia's ability to turn the situation around in their favor. Since then it appears that they now feel more looked after than they were before, and feel valued by Russia.

When I visited my home town of Voronezh last (in 2015) I went to have my passport renewed at the relevant local office. There was a very long queue of Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers which I skipped because I am a Russian citizen. It felt strange because their fate shouldn't be different to mine just because where I was born or where I now live, but that was the reality on the ground (what a disgusting phrase, might I add). I've never felt unsafe in Russia in the several times I returned there, but I also never sought to pursue anything there beyond tourism, seeing family and friends. It has seen unprecedented improvement in many fields since my immigration to Australia in 2003, and I feel pride in my home town, its legacy and achievements. It punches well above its weight in many metrics and has a lot of history. 

Petro Poroshenko's government, after the "Revolution of Dignity" / American-supported coup of Viktor Yanukovich, sought to 'redeem'  Stepan Bandera - a Nazi/Neo Nazi - to serve as the main basis for Ukraine's vision for their national identity. This is one of the worst possible people to pick as a person to put on a statue (and I personally hate the idea of putting people on statues, or venerating them - if you need something to feel like you're ascending to - make it an idea or an ideal and represent it with art, symbols or architecture, the world has had enough cults of personality). This also commenced a process of "Desovietisation" of Ukraine with the intent of removing Soviet statues, symbols and monuments which was also a divisive set of decisions that alienated people who do not have a negative view of the Soviet period.

Volodymyr Zelensky's show (and also name of his political party) "Servant of the People" is a remarkable work of art, excellently portraying the many unfortunate and often hidden realities of the dynamics within governments around the world. In the academic disciple of Philosophy, people often make distinctions between the literary works of writers such as the "early Wittgenstein" and the "late Wittgenstein". This is because people have a tendency to build on ideas, strike and/or develop on ideas that they had in the past that they either think were more or less accurate. I really like the early Zelensky, many ideas I've had I've subsequently found to be similar to his, but I do not like the late Zelensky very much, however to ensure that Ukraine's future is not a militaristic rump state, he will need to unwind the ultranationalism and militarism that has gripped the country over the last 3 decades. 

His stated vision for Ukraine before he was elected, and various views, which characteristic of many Western politicians somehow often end up becoming the exact opposite to what they intended towards the end of their terms. I think this happened because Zelensky didn't fully realise what he's signed up for, and was exploited for the long-game neoliberal plutocratic agendas of Black Rock, Vanguard and State Street Corporations that were exercised through the US government and NATO. 

The propaganda war in the internet included some remarkable examples of dehumanisation, particularly of Russians, while the rhetoric of Russian leadership has consistently drawn distinctions between Western and Ukrainian people, and their leaderships, not seeking to dehumanise them, and showing exceptional restraint towards the common Western citizen, despite the West collectively pitting all of its financial power against Russia.

In his announcement of the "Special Military Operation" Putin did challenge Ukraine's sovereignty as a nation-state, and has since acknowledged that there will still be a Ukrainian state in some form after this conflict is over. The reality for all "countries" or "nation-states" in my view, is that they are metaphysical objects which exist primarily for administrative purposes - just like "title deeds" for land, numbers and common objects to which we give names like tables or computers. They are essentially immaterial (but this truth isn't a common sense one) - copper exists, as does plastic, and those materials can be arranged into computers or phones, wood can be arranged into tables and chairs just as people and land are arranged into nations and nation-states, or how sounds and symbols are arranged into language, how meaning and feelings are arranged into ethics, aesthetics and morality.  

Revelations of non-human intelligence, recovered craft and biologics, as well as their reliability and implications for concepts of "occupation", "the right to resist", "territorial integrity", "sovereign equality of states" and "self-determination" create a very, very long but fascinating philosophical rabbit hole (when considered in conjunction with the set of nested conflicts that is the war in Ukraine, and its relationship to other conflicts). At the end of this rabbit hole, my conclusion, is that questions of self-determination should be dealt with early, through established diplomatic or supra-national means prioritising levels of autonomy starting with devolution of power, progressing to autonomy and ending with independence on the condition that the independent territory should be within a supranational union of which its neighbours are also a part. It solves the unity question, the nationalism/national identity question and the security question. Its a better solution to implement consistently and it avoids the never ending peacockery and to-and-fro's about who was where first, who started it, who is more powerful, who is the richest or has the best media reach, and it focuses the necessary local conversations about conflicts of language and identity onto the locals themselves and their ability to articulate reason to one another in the pursuit of perpetual peace and stability.

Many commentators often criticise America's and the West's recent foreign policy as destructive (with which I largely agree), but to understand its intentions, challenges and geopolitical cleverness, including in Ukraine, it's worthwhile taking certain facts and "the long view/long game" into consideration (this is the sort of thinking I imagine one would encounter within the deep-state apparatus of every great power and its top leadership):

The above points are critically important when trying to understand the origins of the war in Ukraine, and the long-view strategy of the West (and other great powers and imperial entities). Despite decolonisation, it has used economic neo-colonialism to secure its interests and/or utilise divide and conquer strategies providing new captured markets for the military-industrial complex and neoliberal institutions creating a transcontinental government "of capital, by capital and for capital" regardless of which colour of political representative is in power or what the people think (because the representatives will still have to negotiate with capital, and if capital doesn't agree it can just fund one of the other parties in the next election, or fly somewhere else and blame the joblessness/lower incomes/higher inflation on the incumbent). Neoliberalism has ensured that the private sector can drip-feed the public with enough bread and circuses to keep them from thinking too much about politics, especially geopolitics and the influence the private sector has on the public sector. In pathways to reform Western Liberal Democracy I make some suggestions on how to restore it (newsflash - if it ever existed as designed, it is currently on life support with neoliberalism at the switch).

The long-view strategy that transcends governments, bureaucracies and political parties is exemplified by the opium wars and their effect of subjugating China to European colonial powers, the support of both sides by both superpowers during the Chinese Civil war and the Iran-Iraq war, regime change efforts which supported right-wing or nationalist leaders (frequently monarchies and capitalist military dictatorships) by the West (and equally left-wing and revolutionary by the USSR), utilisation of the private sector and the global financial system to dictate terms and sanctions against those who refused to accept new agreements and aggressive fast-paced changes in the "realities on the ground" (which in many cases led to the formation of armed resistance and terrorist groups irrespective of ideology), consistent efforts to out-manouver any and every force which seeks to remind people of the existence of the "long-view" and historical injustice. 

The USSR did not 'collapse', it dissolved itself over several years after initial attempts at reform via glasnost and perestroika, like with degrees of foreign influence, via what seems were forms of seeding of ideological confusion within Boris Yeltsin and the upper echelon's of the Soviet leadership about what "Liberalism" is, for what its leaders at the time (in many ways correctly) saw as the greater good for all of human kind (if it had ended great power competition, as opposed to being the next phase of what seems to me to be a long-view attempt to destroy Russia, they would have been vindicated, but it is also clear that they didn't really know better). Unfortunately, this was exploited by the 'West' to finish Russia off, probably to ensure geopolitical dominance, timing it with cataclysmic climate change, for added dramatic effect in true Hollywood-style politics and possibly with the intention of creating yet another captured market, presumably to also reduce Russia's carbon emissions and use its mineral wealth to pay off the creditors of US sovereign debt.

It seems that Boris Yeltsin was confused by Liberalism, because this word means different things in different places. In Australia our "Liberal" party is actually conservative, but they advocate for the rule of law, family values, separation of powers and independence of the Reserve Bank, the Judiciary and due process. The essence of Conservatism is to preserve tradition and (in the West) colonial historical memory - it has a place, and always will. Conservatism is supposed to defend the establishment and allow the right kind of reform when it is necessary, whether it is in relation to slavery (which conservatives like William Wilberforce championed), environmental conservation (a movement which conservatives like Theodore Roosevelt started), a ban on automatic weapons in Australia by John Howard, same sex marriage rights (advanced by Malcom Turnbull in Australia) and any other good principles (like sustainable immigration) that conservatives are willing to lose elections for (which I find deeply admirable). The secret is though, at least for anyone who's ever worked in the public service or understands the nature of our highly advanced and developed society is that people are not equal, because they are not treated equally if they have billions for lawfare or to threaten the government. The same people have power to determine election outcomes, just like in America and in many other places around the world. In America Liberalism has come to mean "which market can we capture 'Liberate' next". In the Russia of the 90's and maybe even today 'Liberalism' means acceptance of 'Western' political values and a synthesis of neoliberalism (taking Western money and giving up sovereignty and control over your own industry), expanding of political and press freedoms, deregulation of industry, rule of law, separation of powers and everything else that is supposed to come with that. For people like Boris Yeltsin, it also created a challenge as, while he was advocating for Liberalist nationalism, many minorities in Russia sought to understand why they can't also seek autonomy and independence from Russia if Russia can do so from the USSR. Its not a Christmas hamper though, you don't have to give up the control of your country to Black Rock, State Street and Vanguard corporations to advance human rights and press freedoms, the rule of law and separation of powers. Democracy and human rights are distinct concepts - they are not the same thing. Throughout history, centres of human development have been shifting, and it has indeed been directed politically in a direction we today call "leftward" because of the French revolution, but there are many developments beforehand that led to this. It hasn't always been the case that the "West" or even the "European" societies were the most "progressive", but in the last two centuries, that is broadly true to my understanding. Paradoxically now it is the conventionally "left" leaning parties and "progressive" movements which had become pro war, with the conservatives in some countries advocating for universal childcare, nationalisation and opposing war. 

For most of my life I've been reading international news multiple times a day (many would say too much, and some would consider me obsessed), and taking much of the above into consideration, its scary how well-trained the media has been in helping narrate the developments in the lead-up to and during this war (and other wars). Much of Western legacy media's coverage of Russia and Ukraine before 2013 can be summed up as "the Soviet Union collapsed and we beat them. Ukraine corrupt and bad. Russia corrupt and bad. Putin extends olive branch. Putin also bad. West good. Listen to West and West only." After 2013 the narrative changed to "Ukraine good, now democracy. Russia not democracy. Russia bad. No one votes for Putin. Never listen to Putin. It's all Russian propaganda. Don't listen to anything that comes out of Russia." This alone should show you that since 1991 Russia has been on the "defensive", but I think its political leadership only realised this just before it chose Putin to rule Russia. Its also fascinating how heavily much of Western legacy media's coverage relies on the language barrier and the fact that people don't speak Russian and won't know the difference between what is said and what is reported, though it is hard to understand the 'realities on the ground' when no matter what happens its always the other side that's guilty. If there's three pieces of evidence, in my view, that cement my perspective together its the above, Zelensky's opposition to Petro Poroshenko's anti-Russian reforms in 2014, and the differential treatment of Poland, Ukraine and Russia after the dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact (also noting that Molotov sought to unite the Warsaw Pact and NATO after the Korean War, and was denied - I cried when I read about this for the first time recently), along with the retention of NATO. Its also noteworthy that linguistic supressionism is globalised - its not just a feature of Eastern European politics (or between Russia and Ukraine). In my view, it is Nazistic to seek to eradicate languages (as it is to eradicate ethnicities and groups of people), and I say that believing that English is the inevitable lingua franca of the world. The uninterrupted consistency of the portrayal of the Soviet Union, then the 'market capitalist' Russia and Russians through countless Western-made movies and computer games is also concerning considering the geopolitical developments over the last 40 years. Literally everything has been weaponsed for this to get people to think 'Russia bad' or 'Russians bad' or 'Russians love dictatorship'. Let me tell you what Russians love - they love competent and informed leadership, because its extremely rare, even in Russia.

Vladimir Putin will be remembered as one of Russia's most competent leaders since Peter the Great (who founded my home town of Voronezh, to build the Black Sea fleet), and I demand that there be no statues built for him or any other ever leader ever again because the world needs to get over the whole personality cult phase. Build monuments to symbolise events and ideas, not people. He may not have fulfilled all of his promises, he's also made many mistakes, I've watched him closely my whole life, but he delivers in the end even if he's late, and that is what matters to me even if I didn't vote for him for the last decade, even if I'm a 'Progressive' and he is a 'Conservative' (as is half of Europe and the Western world). He had a rough start, getting plunged straight into a war after getting elected, and as a pacifist I feel no obligation to condemn him or the many other leaders for their decisions or policies, but I do feel an obligation to highlight what could have been done differently to avoid the current situation. In the case of Vladimir Putin and Russia - considering that much of the West's audience is English speaking, having people like Sergei Lavrov or other high-officials communicate Russia's official perspective in English, in lieu of Russian media presence in the West, is critically important. I'm not sure if this would have avoided Russia being placed into this position, which is also why I've written about Pathways for Great Power Competition, because if anything will prevent these sorts of circumstances from arising, you'll find it there.  

Having said all these positive words about Putin, there are also many things I don't like about him. Firstly, he is a conservative - I live in a country which is comparatively much more progressive, and have for many years disliked the perspectives of some of my compatriots towards queer people, however I've been there myself and we have conservatives in Australia too, and as I became more "progressive" over the years, I forced myself to entertain their perspectives and ideas so that I wouldn't feel untethered from them or my culture, which as all Eastern European cultures today is quite conservative. I also couldn't believe that this has continued to escalate, and as a pacifist I just can't shout glory to Russia or Ukraine or Israel or Palestine, because I don't want to glorify wars or nationalism, but I also want to be able to visit and maybe live in Russia one day. Having said that, I'm reasonably familiar with much of the military equipment of which there is public knowledge because I was nationalistic when I was at school and have paid intermittent, and at times consistent attention to geopolitical developments so I can try to understand what is going on in the world. Lastly, I'm reasonably confident there are skeletons in his closet, as there are for every elected official, especially of large countries. To do this, I have to try to see through all of that with each of them because over time you lose track of what is war propaganda and what isn't, but either way it affects you.

The Cold War, and the current geopolitical interplay appears to essentially be a continuation of "the Great Game". Since the congress of Vienna, very little has changed (geopolitically speaking) except for the speed of response, rate of change, vectors of influence and capability of countries to cause change and damage. These measures are mostly a function of the level of advancement of our technology, living standards and education in industrialised countries (the same ones who were the victors in WWII and had the industrial base). They always make sure you don't know the best stuff though - you're only ever supposed to use education for employment and nothing else!

The rationale for the collective West's often destructive foreign policy appears to be a form of securing natural resources and trade routes for future economic growth as well as containment of inflation and other emerging powers. During its unipolar moment, the USA found itself in a simultaneously advantageous and precarious position. With planetary military coverage, it found itself filling power vacuums all over the world. It also found itself heavily criticised whether it interferes in the internal affairs of any country, doesn't interfere, or withdraws from a particular interference (the definition of "can never win"). It also sought to promote democracy globally, but this process was unfortunately corrupted early on with the profit and control motives seemingly taking precedence over the development of institutions and civil society in the countries it sought to democratise, resulting in what seems from the outset a series of predominantly opportunistic wars. It also continued to practice ideological intolerance towards some communist and socialist countries as well as dictatorships, despite supporting other communist and socialist countries and dictatorships when it was suitable. In short, filling the power vacuums left by the Soviet Union created a scramble which appears to have overloaded America/NATO/the West's capacity to simultaneously address all of the issues that were developing throughout the world. This brought them to a philosophical crisis, but at least they 'earned' a lot of money! Don't get me wrong, I want America to win in some cases, but never at the expense of others - and I hope that it will serve a critical role in ensuring geopolitical stability, but you're deluded if you think that America has exercised its power responsibly. I did find fascinating how the cancel culture in "progressive" spaces seems to have also translated into the ability to censor the entirety of Russia. I advocate for freedom of speech, but I do also self-censor to varying degrees. I think its necessary for the maintenance of cohesion sometimes, but also its quite hard to determine what the "boundaries of reasonable disagreement" should be, and its also reasonable that they ought to be different in different places. 

I imagine every major state has contingency measures to ensure its ability to exercise different kinds of leverage against potential adversaries. NATO expansion and indirectly encouraging separatism in Ukraine was one of the West's means of exercising leverage against Russia. Encouraging the development of the Taiwanese independence movement over the last several decades is a means of exercising leverage against China. Other great powers exercise leverage in other similar and different ways. For example, China and Russia control most of the world's critical minerals and refining infrastructure, giving them the ability to essentially 'turn off' the entire Western economy and supply chains. Its an indication of remarkable restraint that they haven't done this yet considering the West's sanction-politics but it is also an indication of the perilous state of the world economy, and that along with the use of nuclear weapons against people is not a power that anyone should possess. There also need to be forms of "competition" if we must live with this concept, which are forms of inverted leverage. Wouldn't it be nice if countries would compete on how many people they've helped, rather than harmed? 

You can rile against greater integration of world governance, or world government all you want, and for as long as you do you will be at risk of having everything you've ever loved lost because a some old men can't agree on a trade and will then "impose costs and consequences" on each other's countries - which means your people, and your life and livelihood. There are also many other different kinds of leverage that they use against each other to "impose costs". All kinds of leverage and hostility end up hurting the people more than the political or financial elites. Did anyone sanction the US or NATO in any of their conflicts? No - and that was the essence of the unipolar world order and the interplay between "international law" (which over the last few years just seems to mean "all people are equal") and "rules-based order" (which over the last few years just seems to mean "the West is superior") wherein the latter the rules are set and enforced by the profit motive, but this also occurred in previous bipolar and multipolar scenarios. Utilisation of these measures is an indication of diplomatic failure, usually due to stronger counterparties deciding that the weaker party is in no position to expect equal terms, then the weaker party seeking other forms of influence and leverage, and the stronger party subsequently retaliating with impunity as a form of punishment. This process can evolve into armed conflict and is bound by concepts like "rational choice theory", "nash equilibrium", "realpolitik" and "escalation dominance". 

Linguistic and cultural divisions appear to have been exploited by the West to weaponize them against Russia in the quest for geopolitical supremacy over an emerging Russia, China and the Global South over a multi-decade long project. However to expect that this doesn't get exploited by other great powers is also naive. The resurgence of developing economies has many challenges but any pursuit of hegemonic supremacy will be increasingly untenable. The global public overwhelmingly wishes to see a steady state that is based on mutual respect and balances economic, social, political and intellectual progress without militarism or death of people or ecosystems. 

Ukraine is caught in a geopolitical crossfire, as is Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo and so many other countries. This isn't a novel 21st century development, and considering the fact that this is occurring despite the end of the "Cold War", it gives credibility to the thesis that "the Great Game" never ended, its just that there are now also many new domains in which its being played. If you want to understand the logic of "the Great Game", play a few thousand hours of Civilisation 6: Beyond the Sword, Civilisation: Beyond Earth, Monopoly, X4 Foundations, Stellaris: Apocalypse and you'll understand.

Most people around the world don't understand this, and don't understand the geopolitical basis on which their representatives often make decisions, in some cases even at the lowest jurisdictional levels. People want to enjoy life in peace without having to worry about these questions, hoping that someone else is going to take care of and sort them out. And this is where we're at, I've been unemployed for several years, just watching them all, learning about everything they do, taking care of it and sorting out the difficult questions while weathering all the psychological warfare, watching a genocide unfold, watching people die and be tortured, watching the positions of politicians change in response to public sentiment and the positions of the public change as new information comes to light. Much of politics recently seems to be designed to force you to react in stupid ways, institutional power doesn't seem like it when people understand what institutional power is doing, but my best defense is when the global public who pays taxes to kill my compatriots understands what's happening, and why its happening and advances its own understanding beyond my own. 

Parts of Russia and Ukraine, particularly among the older generations, still seem to think that the Communists did little wrong to advance their agenda, which serves as another point for historiographical tension in the region (newsflash - the Communists were a very destructive force, before and and even in WWII the Soviet Union committed war crimes which get glossed over just because it defeated the exterminationist ideology of Nazism). Both Russia and Ukraine have ultranationalists and Nazis and had them since 1955 at the earliest, the CIA had allegedly also been supporting them since then. There were Ukrainians and Russians fighting on the side of the Nazis because the Nazis occupied parts of Ukraine and Russia for a considerable period of time. Ideas don't die, like nature they spread or get beaten by better ideas and can remain frozen for a long time. Their legacy can be seen in Ukraine in the Azov Battalion which has now been disturbingly incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces, and in Russia through the Russian Marches (the first time I watched Russian ultranationalists destroy the shops of Kyrgyz, Tajik, Kazakh and Uzbek people, just because of who they are, I was bawling my eyes out because I couldn't believe that something like this could even happen in my motherland) and through people like Yevgeniy Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin who fought for Russia while openly brandishing swastika tattoos, and not even the Kolovrat (so there's no justification in Slavic paganism about the nature of the ideology which they decided to permanently brand themselves with). 

Had the West privileged the philosophy of John Rawls, or anyone else who had sought to enshrine an approach of mutually assured cooperation and prosperity during its unipolar moment, and advance good intentions for the world in the formation of its foreign policy objectives over competition, profit and commerce-led unipolar dominance after the dissolution of the USSR - we could all be living in a utopia. I am trying to provide Western and other leaders with the conceptual tools to utilise their economic, technological and logistical might for a series of objectives which enable them to atone for the past, advance their interests, as well as the common good of humankind while protecting the right to dissent and opt-out and protect all the freedoms that have been attained to date.

What John Rawls has done is essentially provide a framework for how Christ would understand metaphysics, ethics and geopolitics. There are several other philosophers who have done similar things. John Rawls believed that a just and fair society can only be either a property owning democracy or practice democratic socialism. Towards the end of his life he became increasingly socialist. The West tried being a property owning democracy and it has failed miserably, turning it into a neoliberal plutocracy - we're seeing the effects now. It can now either reform itself back into the property owning democracy that should have been that parts of it would rather wish it was (with any inequality being only justified if its to the benefit of the least advantaged) or move towards democratic socialism and any of the other systems that have been designed by people who have advanced his work (arguably much better ones - such as Elizabeth Anderson's "Democratic Equality"). Maybe Joe Biden knew this all along or maybe he just understood it recently - it is indeed a mechanism that John Rawls conceived to correct the course of the West in case it ever went wrong. I make no apologies for using this mechanism.  

We are now on the cusp of an out of control arms and technological race because the benefactors of neoliberalism who gamed the system over the last several decades (and aren't as entitled to what they have as much as they think they are) are afraid of the judgment of history and hope the international public won't notice. I hope that the US Congress and Presidency will finally and perpetually take control of the economy and direct the dollars on what to do, based on the will of the people, and not the other way around, and without the astrophysical degrees of political adversarialism that we've seen on display on every other issue except for hating Russia, China and others. 

The levels of inequity and inequality on our planet are unprecedented since the French Revolution (within both the wealthy and the poor regions of the world, and between the wealthiest and the poorest regions of the world, the former of which are service-dominated economies, the latter of which tend to be exploited for raw materials and goods and agriculture dominated economies). It is also inevitable that in the 21st century the technological development that we've seen will result in small states becoming more and more powerful. This is mostly a good thing, because they now finally have a voice that they've never had before. If you are a leader of a small country, or even an individual in one, express yourself. If you make a strong argument, or a good point, you will be heard and your voice will be amplified. The bad thing about this is that if they've gone nuts and are violating human rights, it may become harder to stop them unless their neighbours are united or a reformed United Nations gets some teeth and a process which facilitates determining just causes for UN Security Council interventions. I've had a crack at designing what that process looks like at the bottom of "Pathways for Great Power Competition". 

Great power competition over the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza as well as other places is holding us all hostage, because while select boomers gamed the system to earn a lot of money across the world via neoliberalism, they've neglected that all of it could be lost to a ramping-up series of hunger-games which will include them as few will be left unaffected by the cataclysmic effects of climate change, including in the developed world. My charitable interpretation is that they forget that we're on the same planet too often. 

The war in Ukraine is the worst nightmare we never asked for, with a human, material and environmental toll that is unprecedented in Europe since WWII. I grew up with the view that Ukraine and Russia are brotherly countries, and they still are. I have many Ukrainian relatives, some of whom have moved to Russia for better job opportunities and because they felt hostility directed at them in Ukraine, even in the early 90's, and some of them live in Ukraine. I know for a fact that this is an experience shared by many peoples across the world due to conflicts within their countries and between countries. I never felt the need to mention to anyone that my heritage is in part Ukrainian (a grandmother), until I started trying to understand this war better as it started escalating. In my thesis year at university I wrote about border disputes. I had many challenges with my topic, and even considered changing my focus to understand the war in Ukraine, but persisted with my focus on Thailand and Cambodia (because I'd just come back from the latter after an internship relating to the Cambodian genocide). Now a part of me regrets not changing my topic, because in the subsequent years I stopped paying attention to the escalating separatist conflict in Ukraine as I focused on pursuing a career in the Victorian Public Service and looking after my grandparents. My mother and I brought them to Australia because we were concerned that the conflict may develop into a wider war, which it has. I always felt that it would somehow sort itself out. Its worth noting that many people won't understand what the conflict in Ukraine is about. Russians and Ukrainians are, in my view, almost identical, but the difference is emphasised when you interact with each other because of nationalism in the same way as people don't understand the historical conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, Australia and New Zealand and many other places. When you zoom in - the differences are emphasised, when you zoom out they are diminished. The same applies to many places - but people feel offended if you say this.

After a Victory Day event in Melbourne last year (on the 9th of May) which screened a film about WWII I met a proudly Russian guy who was born Kiev. I was telling him how stupid I thought the development of escalations in the war in Ukraine was, and that Russians and Ukrainians are very similar - he agreed with the latter point. I then said that I thought the same about the Polish, and he also agreed, more reluctantly. When I said I think the same of the French and the Germans as I've had the opportunity to meet many throughout my life, he was baffled as if I'd said something sacrilegious (which I often do when exploring any type of questions) - this, to my mind barely registers on the spectrum of things which are controversial.  

The details and principles in different cases of inter-state and intra-state conflicts are indeed important and in some cases may even be intertwined. In many cases they're overwhelmingly conflicts over philosophical questions and/or attempts to exert power by one party over another. One key topic I will explore elsewhere but will comment on here is on integration vs assimilation. As someone who experienced the influence of assimilation (in its passive and active forms), and has subsequently retained my mother tongue and a reasonable comprehension of my motherland's culture I think all countries should fully abandon assimilationist practices because they can, and often do, generate resentment, especially if one isn't curious about the motivations different groups may have, particularly the group which is seeking another group's assimilation. Politics is inspired by philosophy and the pursuit of something better - everywhere and always, but politicians have an incentive to race away to first place for material and geopolitical reasons, which often if not always leads them to to neglect the essence of the art that they practice. In a globalised world, this process has only accelerated.

Its important to consider that separatism is quite widespread around the world, and there are several matters of principle relating to international law and its relationship to great power politics and geopolitics that need to be understood because solutions to one conflict may have effects on other conflicts because of ideas relating to 'precedent'. The kind separatism in the Donbass region and Crimea is quite widespread in the former Soviet Union (and indeed the whole world) and stems from the basis on which a people consider themselves as a 'nation' and are enabled to form a 'state', have autonomy or degrees of self-rule because there's something the central government is doing that they don't like. During the period of decolonisation as well as the dissolution of the USSR in the 20th century many people found themselves on the 'other side' of their family (as in many other places on Earth), friends and others who share their language, culture, heritage, ethnicity or who they otherwise feel closer to. A sense of history and historical injustice can but does not necessarily ground these feelings which are often promoted and/or suppressed by a country's education system, particularly the historical narrative that kids are taught to parrot (and especially if the history curriculum does not include historiography). Crimea and the Donbass region had several internationally unrecognised referenda on autonomy and independence since 1991, and this is a major factor that has led to the escalation of this conflict. The formation of East Timor, the autonomy of Chechnya and the end of the troubles in Northern Ireland are examples of how these conflicts can be ended peacefully, as is the initial phase of the dissolution of the USSR, but each of them had adverse and unintended consequences. Examples of violent separatism include the American revolution, the partition of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and an ongoing example is the war in Burma (which as the Arab-Israeli conflict has been going since 1948). My charitable interpretation is that in each of these cases, the people trying to solve a problem did not intend to create a new one. 

Any solutions to the war in Ukraine should also, eventually, include solutions for paying off America's sovereign debt without adversely impacting the living conditions of Americans and other people living in the West, and can't license another resource-opportunistic conflict in any way. This is exceptionally hard to do in a country where the same corporate interests fund both major parties and candidates, which also in turn wedge out competition like the Green Party, the Libertarian Party and third-party candidates. Many of the same corporate interests fund America's sovereign debt, and its the same corporate interests which profit from captured markets and wars. Its also the same corporate interests which promoted so much "democratisation" overseas, which could be good, if only money had no place in corrupting mandates in democracies. But its the opposite that is true. Democracy in much of the West today means representatives doing what big business and corporate state capture wants them to do. If they don't, or if you say the word "tax" the system pivots its entire financial might to make sure those people are unelectable and unseat whoever is in power who says it at the next election, or put in power whoever is most willing to generate profit for big business and billionaires rather than serving the people, the national or the global public interest. This is what needs to be fixed, with an international closure of all tax loopholes and havens, and the whole world can then peacefully move towards greater stability and openness without war. 

If you're an average citizen in the West, and you want to help change things in some small way, change your super/pension/investment fund to one which is more aligned with your values. Read broadly and vote, and don't vote for the two major parties. The people who ultimately manage these funds are some of the people who our elected representatives end up negotiating with when determining finance for projects, as far as I understand. I've moved my super/pension to Australian Ethical Super to ensure that my investments are working ethically, and towards ethical ends. The reader should consider whether any particular provider aligns with their values and risk appetite (I'm not a financial advisor/do not have a license or receive any compensation for any content on my publications). I do, however, think that consolidated sovereign wealth funds are a better model, especially if people can have a say on where their pension is being invested, down to the local level and there are functional multilateral avenues for their representatives to ensure international financial stability. Other ways include trying to become more politically informed and joining a political party that aligns with your views, but not being a hostage to its policies or political direction and maintaining free and critical thinking. 

Some of the war propaganda in the war in Ukraine has sown a lot of confusion, including for me. This includes the transgender war reporter on the Ukrainian side who for some time created the impression that Ukrainian people (and the mainly Western countries that support Ukraine) generally consider transgender identity to be valid, when Russians do not. The reality is that the rates of recognition of queer people of Eastern Europe is lower in comparison to northern or Western Europe, and the difference in this rate between Russia and Ukraine is insignificant. This division is also present within much of the West and indeed the whole world in relation to queer people (generally between urban and rural areas). It is peculiar however, because this created the impression that there is a cultural element to this war, or an ideological one based on "Liberalism" and advancing minority rights in Russia while Ukraine already has those rights, when in fact they're very much the same, as is Poland. Queer and transgender people have existed for longer than the word that describes them - like the Hijra people of South Asia. Much of the current attitudes toward queer people is a legacy of the British Empire's "Buggery Act" and "Sodomy Laws" which infused with Victorian evangelism and powered by steam engines was exported to its former colonies around the world, in some cases even influencing scriptural interpretations to align with these laws. One Muslim scholar who writes about restoring the early Ummah principles of pluralism and ethics in the aftermath of the colonisation of the Muslim world is Abdullahi An Naim - his works are a very worthwhile read. On the contentions around the topic of queer rights themselves - it has clearly been a divisive topic in the West and around the world over the last few decades, and all I have to say about it is this. Queer/LGBTI rights are human rights, and in my view they don't have that much to do with Liberalism. Its easier to say that those rights exist than to specify what those rights are exactly, because they do indeed conflict with traditionalist and Victorian era value systems the latter of which most of the current traditionalist worldviews stem from. Specifically, they conflict with the principle that parents have the right to prevent their children from learning about sex and gender as well as homosexuality, transgenderism, gender fluidity and the extent to which gender and/or sexuality are innate or learned, socially constructed or 'natural'. Also, as in every community there are disagreements on policy questions, and this includes the queer community. The advent of modern science and medicine also opens uncomfortable questions about the realities of surgical and substance based body alteration - whether its hormone replacement therapy or the use of steroids or anything else, and has many parallels with cybernetic, genetic or device-based enhancements such as wearing watches, glasses or depending on pacemakers or your phone for navigation as well as food additives, performance enhancing drugs in sport, taking nootropics before school and university tests or drinking energy drinks, and where these trends are taking humankind. This is something I will delve into deeper in other publications.

I encountered this video on "Heavenly Jerusalem" - a state that some people seem to wish to found on the territory of the Odessa, Mykolaiv, Kherson and Zaporizhya regions. I haven't fully explored the rabbit hole that is any potential relationship this may have with the war in Gaza, but the interviewee at one point says that this state will have a 12 person council of which one member is designated to be Benjamin Netanyahu. There's more on this in this Youtube channel. If this is indeed a legitimate plan that was made, any materialisation should be determined by the will of the people of said regions through a referendum and not through imposition of any kind. There are currently two polities for the Jewish people in the world - Israel and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Russia. Following the pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, I understand the desire for a 'right to return' to those lands, whether through conventional immigration or the formation of a new state. Having said this, the explicitly neoliberal and at times extremely disturbing expressions in the above mentioned channel give rise to many concerns in relation to whatever plans and intentions there may already be, and how they could have been affected by the war in Ukraine or vice versa. Before anyone jumps to yell that this is a Jewish or an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, I would encourage you to consider that the charitable interpretation would it would first be anti-Semitic to hold all Jewish people as suspect, accountable and in prejudice for the plans or decisions of some Jews and secondly that Naftali Bennet attempted to help the early negotiations, and Benjamin Netanyahu considered it as well. Many online spaces describe this as "Russian propaganda", which it could be, but it also could be some Ukrainians who sought to end the war in Ukraine and invited Israeli leaders to help. Without any incontrovertible evidence - the motive isn't clear, and Hamas' terrorist attack on October the 7th considerably complicated trying to understand this situation or come up with any solutions for anything. Zelensky did say at one point that he wanted Ukraine to become a big Israel and another interpretation could be that Hamas came across this content and either authenticated it, sought to use it for the purpose of drawing Israel into a protracted conflict or were not even aware of it and chose to do carry out the massacre on the 7th of October anyway after considerable planning (the right for the Palestinian people to have a state without Hamas notwithstanding).

Blaming all Jewish people for the actions of a government is far from reasonable, especially as there are many non and anti Zionist Jews. It would be the same as holding a prejudice against all Germans due to the actions of the Nazis or holding all Americans responsible for the war in Iraq, however I do believe it is important to express your principled opposition to these conflicts, and even when paying attention for a considerable period of time, it isn't easy to understand what is going on when all the evidence is contested. I have always respected the Jewish people, because from a very young age I knew that their fate under the Nazi regime was the same as that of the Slavs, gay and transgender people, disabled people, gypsies and many others. I also personally think its now outdated for any German person (or people from collaborating countries) to still feel the institutionalised guilt about what the Nazis did. If I had to guess where the real Nazis are today, I suspect they would have been behind the planning of the October 7th attack, and Israel's genocidal response to it as well as those who sought to drag Ukraine into NATO and financialise the conflict. If you don't believe that exterminating and subjugating or forcibly assimilating groups of people, cultures and languages is a good thing, wish that it didn't happen and don't believe in a racial hierarchy then you are not a Nazi or a Neo Nazi, but the minimum standards of decency in the 21st century should be lifted and unless you don't feel informed or courageous enough to express a considered opinion, you should take the time to express your anger within reason. There are many more conflicts in the world that we hear little about, and some of them, like the war in Sudan are even more complex.

Throughout my life in Russia and Australia and in my travels I've always maintained the curiosity and respect for people of all kinds of background and heritage, while retaining the right to be critical of them - its the best disposition to have if you are trying to learn about the world I think. Irrespective of whether "Heavenly Jerusalem" is an untrue conspiracy or not, I believe that considering the history of their treatment in Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe, and their connection to the lands in those places, Jewish people eventually deserve a pathway to return to the places they find sacred to them, as does everyone else. Any considerations of statehood must have a mandate that the people of the regions in question wilfully, without coercion and under circumstances of free prior and informed consent give rise to, and it should be self-evident that there needs to be a proper Israel-Palestine and broader Middle East peace process worked out for these conversations to be borderline reasonable. This group is the closest to articulating my current thoughts on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

You could say something like 'Vlad, you're enabling a Jewish supremacy in Ukraine now', and I would respond twofold: 

If there was no Nakba or October 7th attack or genocide in Gaza, and if the relations between Jewish and Arab people were amicable, would you consider that there was a historical injustice that needed to be corrected in Ukraine with concern to Jewish people? I would and it couldn't be reconciled now because of the conflict there. The Jewish people of Russia and Ukraine were treated with the same disdain as other immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers were treated with in the West and in other places around the world at different points in history. In the last few decades this is unfortunately because of the West's opportunistic wars. If you don't like mass immigration, then get more politically informed and prevent it by preventing your government from causing or facilitating mass destruction in the places from which people are fleeing. Reverse the course of history, and create reasons for them to not wish to leave, or even better, create reasons for them to return to their mother country by helping make it better rather than complaining about the fact that they're coming to your lands after your governments chose to destroy theirs. In the case of mass immigration to the US however, it appears that the Democrats and Republicans were playing political games, and the Democrats let in many dangerous people, because the Republicans didn't want to agree to pass an immigration bill which had things they disagreed with. It does also seem that the current Trump administration is not being as judicious about due process as it should be when deporting them. But in any case, especially as there are Jewish people in Ukraine already I can't see a reason as to why, if done properly and not like during the Nakba, they shouldn't eventually be able to doorknock and communicate with the Ukrainian and Russian governments, maybe in years time, to test the public opinion for creating a 'state', rather than imposing a top-down neoliberal solution.

The below proposals for a peace in Ukraine, apart from China's and Putin's latest one are to varying degrees "maximalist" - they express the legalistic position of a government without seeking to understand the rationale of the other side, as you would expect from a 'government' position. 

• Zelensky's peace formula

• Dmitry Medvedev's view on dividing Ukraine

• Putin's ceasefire terms and proposal to temporarily place Ukraine under the administration of the United Nations, which is the best proposal I've heard from him so far considering that it has produced reasonable stability in Cambodia, and is actually one of the ideas which I've detailed at the bottom of this page

• China's peace proposal

• The failed March 2022 peace negotiations (where Boris Johnson, having since congratulated the Azov Battalion, encouraged Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian and subsequently acknowledging that he had scuppered the negotiations)

• The Switzerland peace summit outcome
  
  
  

Below are my considerations on questions relating to the framing of the war in Ukraine:

Is Ukraine a sovereign independent country?

On paper and in principle - yes, but in practice as with most "Western Liberal Democracies", due to neoliberalism finances and corporate lobbyists currently have more de-facto power than voters do - in Ukraine's case this is the IMF and therefore ultimately the United States. Donald Trump has also effectively put a 'caveat' on Ukraine, to use property developer terms and whichever financial interests are really behind this is really hard to tell, but we know they involve Black Rock and the UK. I'm reasonably confident at this point that Prime Ministers and Presidents, apart from the non-Western "authoritarian" one's like Putin and Xi are a part of a front for a web of financial and other interests.  

The EU often advances policy that sets precedents on regulating the private sector and big tech but its representatives answer to the same financial interests as do the representatives of Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand and possibly many other countries, or at least that how it seems from prolonged and systemic observations. The bureaucracy and government therefore act as a de-facto extension of corporate interests which are the prime-movers across these political systems. I'm less familiar with how this web of interests operates in Russia and China as their presidents seem to have considerably larger degrees of freedom to operate, and without digging deeper I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. 

Ukraine's sovereign status can be questioned on the same grounds as the status of all of the aforementioned countries, and there are strong arguments which undermine the legitimacy of many if not all countries that exist today. It can also be questioned on the same basis as Russia's - that Yeltsin appears to have staged an anti-Soviet coup, which is why it seems some fear the recreation of the USSR (because it arguably may still legally exist and be more legitimate than all of the former Soviet states as the USSR's dissolution wasn't done constitutionally but thought the Belovezha accords).

Was Ukraine's territorial integrity violated?

Ukraine's territorial integrity was certainly violated by Russia from the moment it securitised the Crimean peninsula.  

There is a conflict of principles between "territorial integrity" and "Responsibility to Protect". The two can become mutually exclusive when a government is committing atrocities against its own population, in the cases of separatism or when there is a cultural or ideological clash (as during the Cold War). Concepts like "just cause", "act of aggression", "humanitarian intervention", "right of conquest", "national identity", "terrorism", "terrorist state", "right to resist", "self determination" and "legitimacy" the definitions of which have been routinely contested since they emerged and clearly to this day, are often used in public discourse. To determine who has "just cause" would require prioritisation of "territorial integrity" over "responsibility to protect" or vice versa. The case of the Rwandan genocide is a worthwhile read when considering this. I once studied just cause theory, and as a pacifist found it interesting to try to understand from an analytical standpoint, but greatly detested the idea of wars being licensed (at all), while also seeing the dire need for justified and non-exploitative humanitarian and security interventions to exercise the responsibility to protect. In "Pathways to Great Power Competition" I detail an alternative process to determine "just causes" for future security interventions without the need to 'take sides' in this nested geopolitical conflict or having to go into the rabbit hole of evaluating the moral righteousness of any conflicting parties after coming up with an unifying definition for each aforementioned concept. 

From the perspective of the Ukrainian government - Ukraine's territorial integrity was violated throughout this process as it would have been less likely for it to occur if vigilantes, mercenaries, other non-state actors and eventually the Russian government did not interfere in Ukrainian separatist regions after the coup against Yanukovich / Revolution of Dignity occurred. From a Russian perspective this was unacceptable because of people that found themselves on the other side of the border quickly lost the status of their language - something which is culturally very important for Russians. At the same time in several European states Russian residents have been denied citizenship and language rights.

Russia's facilitation of a referendum on Crimea's accession to/annexation by Russia (the third referendum that Crimea has had either on declaring its own sovereignty and autonomy within Ukraine, on the status of its autonomy within Ukraine or on its accession to Russia) is also considered by Ukraine as a violation of territorial integrity. My view has consistently been that a just and fair resolution to this conflict should eventually enable an opportunity for a fourth and final referendum on the status of territories, facilitated by international observers from the UN, to settle this question once and for all as well as demonstrate a best-practice example for how the status of a territory should be determined. The questions include but not be limited to; 

Should <<Region>>;

• Be a sovereign independent state

• Be a part of Ukraine (noting its ability to choose its own degrees of autonomy as expressed in solutions 5a and 5b below - an idea I also support as a matter of broader principle, but one which requires testing)

• Be a part of Russia
  
  

This suggestion is clearly insufficient to solve anything.

Other instances of Russian aggression from the Ukrainian standpoint;

Where non-state actors got involved in separatist activity in Ukraine, and catalysed the physical fighting

Where Russia recognised the Donetsk and Lukhansk Peoples Republics as states

Where Russia commenced its Special Military Operation / invasion on the 24th of February 2022, commencing an occupation of territories in the East of Ukraine

Where Russia admitted the Donetsk and Lukhansk People's Republics as well as Zaporozhia/Zaporizhia and Kherson Regions as Federal subjects of Russia

As a quite important aside. If you notice the many slashes ( / ) - and the changes in the region names - this is one of the root causes of the problem. It represents networks of power, the right to forcibly assimilate cultures and with the progressive disclosure on non-human intelligence, biologics and recovered craft something potentially much bigger. Without incontrovertible evidence in relation to this, and the potential distortions and omissions of historical facts, its quite hard to understand the broader implications, but it doesn't stop one from trying.

From the perspective of the Russian government - Russia is exercising its Responsibility to Protect the Russian speaking population of Ukraine, preventing the spread of assimilationism, Nazism and Neo-Nazism as well as the expansion of NATO and Western irregular forces into Ukraine and attempts to change the regime in or break apart the Russian Federation, which is currently its primary existential threat. In this case, the view of the Russian government is that the Revolution of Dignity constitutes a US engineered coup which subsequently advanced assimilationist policies of derussification of the entirety of Ukraine after illegitimately determining a closer economic and security relationship direction the EU and NATO over Russia when the considerable Russian speaking minority in the South-East (among which there are also Ukrainian speaking and Tatar minorities) would not only 'lose out', but have, since 1991 consistently shown their desire not only to retain their Russian-Ukrainian identity via language, but also through referenda and petitions. As a unitary republic, decisions for the whole country are made in the Rada in Kiev - clearly a problem for the separatist regions after the Revolution of Dignity/deposition of Yanukovich. This was the basis of the Russian speaking minority refusing to comply and seeking to declare autonomy, which was denied by the Ukrainian government, and on this basis they eventually declared independence. In the first instance, this occurred in Crimea in 1991 and wasn't recognised. In the second instance it occurred in 2014 in Crimea with the facilitation of Russian soldiers who were already based on the peninsula in Russian bases (not through an invasion - they left their bases without insignia and took control over military assets, but Putin did lie about this at the time, saying that they weren't Russian soldiers), and soon after they decided to accede to Russia / be annexed by Russia (the results of which many Western commentators and politicians contest, without evidence). Few countries recognised the independence of Crimea, the Donetsk and Lukhansk People's Republics and they eventually acceded to / were annexed by Russia.

As an aside, opposition to the suppression of Freedom of Speech in the US on various grounds, which extended into the silencing Republican and other conservative voices and any consideration of legitimacy in the "Russian narrative" gave me some impetus to publish on Freedom of Speech. Last year I was very scared of WWIII breaking out if the Democrats had won, but Donald Trump coming to power has slightly settled those fears. It feels like the US administration has done a 180 degree turn on most things, which gives rise to many concerns about a sense of harmony, unity and stability in the US political system, which I do think is very important. I'm working on a publication on this topic.  

Was Russia's special military operation / February 2022 invasion "full scale"? 

No, it was not. This framing is incorrect in my view because Russia's military force was only sufficiently large to occupy Kyiv/Kiev and the regions that declared independence, until the March 2022 negotiations were undone by Boris Johnson, or the people behind him. 

To occupy all of Ukraine - a country of over 40 million people in February 2022, Russia would have needed a significantly larger force, it does not have such a force or equipment or an economy to sustain such an occupation force. Moreover, any fear in Europe about Russia invading EU or NATO is grossly misplaced because it relies on people not knowing anything about the size of NATO/EU economies and armed forces in comparison to Russia's. There is no comparison. 

Russia's initial objective was clearly to take Kiev and remove the government from power to 'denazify' Ukraine, which later evolved to secure and protect the Russian speaking regions and 'denazify' Ukraine. Currently the objective is expressed through Russia's negotiating position - to secure the Crimea, Kherson, Mariupol, Lukhansk and Donetsk regions in full, not allow Ukraine to join NATO and though unstated, presumably prevent any re-emergence of Nazism there. 

None of this should have ever happened. No one ever needed to die. No one would have ever felt afraid if Ukraine continued to be a neutral state and have the opportunity to be in both trading blocs. I now fear for Australia as it feels its also getting put into the same position between China and the USA, and my view is consistent - Australia should be partners with both, as should Ukraine have been partnered with Russia and the EU. 

Was Russia's special military operation / February 2022 invasion "unprovoked"? 

Russia's special military operation appears to have been provoked by NATO, specifically for the purposes of dividing Russia into several smaller states changing its leadership by fomenting internal unrest or otherwise seeking to control its resources and finances as it was rejected by NATO and the collective West basically ganged up on Russia under Joe Biden, maybe even before, clearly in pursuit of an opportunity to retain hegemony by catalysing regime change or fiscally or directly controlling or even fragmenting Russia into separate countries, and calling for its strategic defeat. This is also the issue with the war in Gaza as the people who seek to erase Israel from existence forget that though undeclared it likely has nuclear weapons too and seeking to balkanise or erase a state from existence is exactly the sort of situation in which the Presidents of Russia and Israel could use those weapons, which is why with great relief I welcome Donald Trump's momentum to build peace, advance proposals for partial demilitarisation of the USA, Russia and China (best news I've heard for a long time) and negotiate a removal of nuclear weapons from both Iran and Israel all the while I'm greatly concerned by some directions of his internal policies. 

If the separatist movements in Ukraine and Russia since the end of the USSR were supported or encouraged by NATO or the USA, and should there be compelling evidence for this as representatives of Russia claim there is, regardless of whether they were Islamist, Nationalist or Ultranationalist, the war in Ukraine could be considered as either the continuation of "the Great Game" or a planned genocide of Slavic people considering catalysis of regime change in Ukraine in the Revolution of Dignity, opposition to Russia's membership of NATO, expansion of NATO almost up to Ukraine, and that Bill Clinton sought to bring Ukraine into NATO while also promising Russia that NATO would not expand, has had governments actively threaten Russia with a strategic defeat and fragmentation, at one point weaponising the entire Western media apparatus for this specific objective while the planet is burning, and while the world would become a utopia if the West and Russia cooperate with one another instead of destroying my and future generations for money, prestige or glory. 

The below pathways to peace are inspired and informed by:

The principle "If you love something, set it free!"

The equal consideration of interests of Russia and Ukraine as well as other great powers, their histories, the current geopolitical climate, and most importantly - people's lives and livelihoods, and to a lesser degree, sadly, the financialisation of these geopolitical conflicts

Reformism 

The faith in our ability as humankind to not repeat the mistakes of the past

The historically disastrous consequences of capitulationist thinking

The dissolution of the USSR

The Peace of Westphalia, Congress of Vienna, Treaty of Versailles, Paris Peace Conference, Tehran Conference, Yalta Conference, Cairo Conference, Potsdam Conference

A commitment to ensuring that no country or bloc of countries will capitulate or dictate the peace terms on the war in Ukraine

A desire to inspire greater reform of the international governance framework 

Principled opposition to neoliberalism, Nazism, Neo-Nazism, xenophobia, ultranationalism, totalitarianism, and dehumanisation

Principled opposition to separatism, especially through violence as a means of advancing self-determination (regardless of jurisdiction)

Nonetheless these ideologies and sentiments exist and have to be considered and dealt with

Principled support for self-determination and devolution of power via peaceful and civil pathways, preserving the unity and integrity of countries and/or the constituent supranational unions that they are parts of

Principled support for the right to dissent and opt-out

Principled support for collective solutions to collective action problems

The fact that, as this is a war, the governments of Ukraine, EU and the US (until Donald Trump) and Russia have through their parliaments and constitutions made pathways to peace seem almost impossible to conceive of for a considerable period of time

Pathways to the Reconstitution of Ukraine into a Ukrainian Confederate Republic or a Ukrainian Federal Republic

The below plan has many holes, and I may edit it in the future, however I urge conflicting parties to see it for its intent - to disentangle the realities on the ground from geopolitical realities, and in the best interests of the people of Russia and Ukraine as well as for creating a pathway for peace not just in Ukraine, but elsewhere. 

1) Immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of all forces to 30km behind the front line on each side (excluding security services for cities, towns and villages). An international peacekeeping force should have a presence in this "demilitarised zone" from countries considered as neutral by both Russia and Ukraine until the below points are complete.

2) Commencement of a negotiation process involving the leaderships of the international community on pathways to global de-escalation, ending this war, the war in Gaza and the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as other conflicts, and beginning the process to iteratively and progressively reform and stabilise the current world order in a maximally democratic and inclusive way. 

This should occur in maximally neutral locations.

3) Commencement of a humanitarian and reconstruction effort facilitating a return of any refugees and asylum seekers who wish to do so. Towns and villages along the border of and/or within disputed regions should be selected as peace and transit zones eventually enabling the settlement of Russians and Ukrainians who seek to reconnect and spread a message of mutual respect, love, forgiveness, peace and encouragement of brotherly relations between Ukrainian and Russian people. Jewish and Tatar presence in these settlements should be encouraged to remind everyone present of their shared and interwoven histories in Ukraine. 

4a) Commitment to the withdrawal of all Russian forces from Kherson, Zaporizhya, Donetsk and Lukhansk regions excluding Crimea following the implementation of points 4-12. 

The Ukrainian parliament is dissolved and Rada and Presidential elections are held after the Ukrainian state is reconstituted. 

Constitutional requirement for Ukraine to be a member of both EU and Russian trading blocs and be neutral. 

Pathways to the restoration of the Ukrainian administration of Kherson, Zaporizhya, Donetsk and Lukhansk, Crimea regions (region per implementation of each point below, or all regions after all points are implemented) following the;

• denazification of Ukraine (removal of all ultranationalist, Azov battalion and other Nazi and Neo-Nazi inspired groups from Ukraine's armed forces and their listing as prohibited groups, Banderist street names and statues and related changes in the public education system)

• demilitarisation of Ukraine to the extent that it can't be used as a springboard to catalyse regime change in Russia

• restoration of the status of the Russian language in Ukraine, and all other minority languages

• restoration of ties between Russia and Ukraine and the European Union

• restoration of ties between Russia and the United States

Ukraine becomes a part of the Union State of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.

The Union State submits an joint application to join the European Union and NATO

4b) Commitment to the withdrawal of all Russian forces from Kherson, Zaporizhya, Donetsk and Lukhansk regions excluding Crimea following the implementation of points 4-12.

The Ukrainian parliament is dissolved and Rada and Presidential elections are held after the Ukrainian state is reconstituted.

Constitutional requirement for Ukraine to be a member of both EU and Russian trading blocs and be neutral.   

Pathways to the restoration of the Ukrainian administration of Kherson, Zaporizhya, Donetsk and Lukhansk, Crimea regions (region per implementation of each point below, or all regions after all points are implemented) following the;

• denazification of Ukraine (removal of all ultranationalist, Azov battalion and other Nazi and Neo-Nazi inspired groups from Ukraine's armed forces and their listing as prohibited groups, Banderist street names and statues and related changes in the public education system)

• demilitarisation of Ukraine to the extent that it can't be used as a springboard to catalyse regime change in Russia

• restoration of the status of the Russian language in Ukraine, and all other minority languages

• restoration of ties between Russia and Ukraine and the European Union

• restoration of ties between Russia and the United States

With the exception of the port of Sevastopol

Ukraine joins NATO

Russia obtains a veto power over the executive decisions of NATO relating to security beyond its territory and within Ukraine.

NATO obtains a veto power over the security decisions of Russia relating to security beyond its territory. 

4c) Commitment to the withdrawal of all Russian forces from Kherson, Zaporizhya, Donetsk and Lukhansk regions excluding Crimea following the implementation of points 4-12.

The Ukrainian parliament is dissolved and Rada and Presidential elections are held after the Ukrainian state is reconstituted. 

Constitutional requirement for Ukraine to be a member of both EU and Russian trading blocs.  

Pathways to the restoration of the Ukrainian administration of Kherson, Zaporizhya, Donetsk and Lukhansk, Crimea regions (region per implementation of each point below, or all regions after all points are implemented) following the;

• denazification of Ukraine (removal of all ultranationalist, Azov battalion and other Nazi and Neo-Nazi inspired groups from Ukraine's armed forces and their listing as prohibited groups, Banderist street names and statues and related changes in the public education system)

• demilitarisation of Ukraine to the extent that it can't be used as a springboard to catalyse regime change in Russia

• restoration of the status of the Russian language in Ukraine, and all other minority languages

• restoration of ties between Russia and Ukraine and the European Union

• restoration of ties between Russia and the United States 

With the exception of the port of Sevastopol

Constitutional geopolitical neutrality, requiring the withdrawal of all non-Ukrainian military equipment, facilities and personnel from Ukraine. 

Constitutional requirement for Ukraine to be a member of both EU and Russian trading blocs and be neutral. 

Ukraine's EU membership should be considered only with the consent of Russia and Belarus via referenda in all three states or through a joint application to EU membership with Russia and Belarus via referenda in all three states.

Abolition of NATO

Reform of the European Union into a European Federation leading to the EU becoming an independent force with its own foreign policy, which can and should be challenged by its dissenting constituent sovereign states, which the UK should have the opportunity to rejoin.

5a) Re-establishment of a second Ukrainian Confederate Republic, with a new constitution the contents over which Poland and Russia both have a veto. 

This should be commenced through a Ukraine-wide constitutional convention (including in territories considered by Ukraine to occupied by Russia and considered by Russia to be Federal subjects of Russia). Prior to this, all existing agreements that the governments of Ukraine entered into since 1991 should be publicly disclosed, listed, publicly scrutinised and re-ratified or annulled by a new Parliament.

Re-ratification of agreements requires the free, prior and informed consent of the Parliaments of both Poland and Russia or their executive representatives. 

All Ukrainian land and other assets owned by non-Ukrainian physical persons, companies or capital is to be nationalised into a consolidated Ukrainian sovereign wealth fund. 

Fund revenue should be distributed along the principle of "greatest difference for the least advantaged" or as a universal basic income payment of equal value to all citizens of Ukraine.  

The people of Ukraine should receive an equal proportion of vote shares of the fund. 

Each region can disengage its collective share from being a part of the national fund and re-engage its collective share into the national fund by region-wide vote of 67%. 

Any subsequent investment in the Ukrainian Sovereign Wealth Fund, or its constituent regional funds (whether private or from other sovereign wealth funds) does not grant the investors any vote-shares or control over the decisions of the fund. 

Each Ukrainian citizen is entitled to an equal proportion of shares within each region. Not voting on a given decision distributes a citizens voting power to all other citizens equally. 

Shares are not sellable or transferrable and are lost when one loses Ukrainian citizenship.

5b) Re-establishment of a second Ukrainian Federal Republic, with a new constitution the contents over which Poland and Russia both have a veto. 

This should be commenced through a Ukraine-wide constitutional convention (including in territories considered by Ukraine to occupied by Russia and considered by Russia to be Federal subjects of Russia). Prior to this, all existing agreements that the governments of Ukraine entered into since 1991 should be publicly disclosed, listed, publicly scrutinised and re-ratified or annulled by a new Parliament. 

Re-ratification of agreements requires the free, prior and informed consent of the Parliaments of both Poland and Russia or their executive representatives. 

All Ukrainian land and assets owned by non-Ukrainian physical persons, companies or capital is to be nationalised by a consolidated Ukrainian sovereign wealth fund. 

Fund revenue should be distributed along the principle of "greatest difference for the least advantaged" or as a universal basic income payment of equal value to all citizens of Ukraine. 

The people of Ukraine should receive an equal proportion of vote shares of the fund. 

Each region can disengage its collective share from being a part of the national fund and re-engage its collective share into the national fund by region-wide vote of 67%. 

Any subsequent investment in the Ukrainian Sovereign Wealth Fund, or its constituent regional funds (whether private or from other sovereign wealth funds) does not grant the investors any vote-shares or control over the decisions of the fund. 

Each Ukrainian citizen is entitled to an equal proportion of shares within each region. 

Not voting on a given decision distributes a citizens voting power to all other citizens equally. 

Shares are not sellable or transferrable and are lost when one loses Ukrainian citizenship.

6a) In the Confederate model each region can choose between 2 levels of autonomy (maximum - where policy only relating to national defense and taxation is determined by the Ukrainian parliament, and partial autonomy where each region can choose which functions of government it fulfills), can hold a referendum to centralise or locally devolve governmental functions every 10 years, and every 10 years can hold a referendum to stay in Ukraine, become independent or accede to a country with adjoining borders. 

Legislative, Judicial, Executive and all other government and public representatives are to be banned from accepting any and all political donations. 

Any gifts must be publicly listed. 

All income received by public officials must be obtained from the public purse. 

The default sentence for bribery or privately funding candidates by corporate, business, industrial interests or any approximates of Political Action Committees should be 10 years for physical persons involved (with parole, or restorative justice pathways) and nationalisation of all corporate assets for non physical persons as well as physical persons involved. 

The lost asset value to foreign capital should be exchanged as Russian carbon debits as in point 11 of this plan. 

6b) In the Federal model where each region can choose between 2 levels of autonomy (maximum - where policy relating only to national defense and taxation is determined by the Ukrainian parliament, and partial autonomy where each region can choose which functions of government it fulfills) and can hold a referendum to centralise or locally devolve governmental functions every 10 years.

Legislative, Judicial, Executive and all other government and public representatives should be banned from accepting any and all political donations. 

Any gifts must be publicly listed. 

All income received by public officials must be obtained from the public purse. 

The default sentence for bribery or privately funding candidates by corporate, business, industrial interests or any approximates of Political Action Committees should be 10 years for physical persons involved (with parole, or restorative justice pathways) and nationalisation of all corporate assets for non physical persons involved. 

The lost asset value to foreign capital should be exchanged as Russian carbon debits as in point 11 of this plan. 

7) Banning of all ultranationalist, Nazi sympathetic and Nazi movements, paramilitary groups and organisations in Europe (which extends from Portugal to the Ural mountains) a commencement of a process towards the establishment of a digital globally accessible historiographical consensus (which can include differing interpretations) on the history of nationalism, ultranationalism and Nazism in Europe as well a greater efforts in public education on political education and on the distinctions between the kinds of nationalism (particularly between ethnic nationalism, state nationalism, ultranationalism and civic nationalism) as well as patriotism and cosmopolitanism. Primary and secondary history education, particularly in relation to WWII should be identical in Europe and around the world and include several different historiographical interpretations available to express different perspectives of all historical events. This is a problem well beyond Europe, but a solution to this conflict and the Arab-Israeli conflict could lead to opportunities for much broader and fruitful, democratic and inclusive social and political changes. Any evidence which is critical to the understanding of WWII and non-human intelligence/non-human biologics/recovered craft which is not yet public should be made public through progressive disclosure. This solution set does not fully consider the likelihoods and possibilities of what is out there.

8) Guaranteed constitutional maximally comprehensive language rights for speakers of all languages present on Ukrainian territory.

9) Replacement of all Stepan Bandera statues in Ukraine (and any other figure who espoused or endorsed Nazism) with an alternate unifying Ukrainian historical figure that all Ukrainians can get as close as possible to consensus on. 

10) Reconstruction of Ukraine to be funded by 'the West' and countries that provided Ukraine with military aid 65% (pro rata per state based on arms supplied to date) and Russia 35% with degrees of consideration given to military and civilian loss of life and damage to civilian infrastructure in relation to the final figure. Reconstruction of energy and other infrastructure must be carbon neutral or negative, consistent with a goal for Ukraine to reach net-zero by 2040 and reconstruction funding and investments should prioritise renewable energy, nuclear power, agriculture, logistics, civil society and civilian infrastructure. 

11) All Ukrainian debt or gifts in relation to the war in Ukraine should be cancelled or converted to carbon debits in relation to a proportion of Ukraine's and Russia's 1990 baseline in accordance with the Paris Agreement, pro rata to current proportion of global carbon emissions (whether by direct emission or exports).

12) Withdrawal of the Russian army from all occupied territories (at point 12 because Boris Johnson prevented a the peace agreement of March 2022). 

13) Names of localities should ideally be in both Ukrainian and Russian (and other minority languages if appropriate), or by regional determination if a single language is selected.

14) Temporary relocation of all UN Offices to Kiev for 5-10 years or until deemed necessary by the UN following the reconstruction of Ukraine and establishment of the necessary facilities, subsequently following a rotation schedule (or by vote, or by an international democratic process) to move UN General Assembly, Security Council and other Offices around the world with suggested locations including La Paz, Baghdad, Lagos, Colombo, Rekjavik, Naypyidaw, Khartoum, Noumea, Harare, Phnom Penh, Johannesburg, Sarajevo, Rio De Janeiro, Dublin, Beirut, Alice Springs.

14a) Permanently move the United Nations to Ukraine, but the above would give more to the world I think.  

15) A process to determine the future framework of European and international security including pathways such as;

Abolition of NATO and removal of all non-European military infrastructure from the European continent or

Admission of all European states including Ukraine and Russia into NATO

Reformation of NATO into a body the functions of which are exercised through the United Nations

Another process as described in Pathways to Great Power Competition

In this latter case, the costs for operating NATO and/or US security infrastructure (which are currently borne predominantly and overwhelmingly by the US taxpayer) should be distributed considerably more evenly among the regions where security services are provided, including outside of the EU.

This should also require a significantly greater role for the people and representatives of local sovereign states in determining the functions, capabilities and deployments of said security services and in the relevant regional unions.

This process should be gradual and align with regional security needs as well as the budgetary constraints of the United States of America

In other words, the can be no circumstances under which Ukraine and Russia are separated by security pacts.

 

My perspective on what the root causes of this conflict are:

• The policy of assimilation and/or forced assimilation via language in Ukraine and the resulting separatism

• Presence of Neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine, though Prigozhin and Utkin's presence in Russia's security apparatus also raises questions about the presence of Neo-Nazi's in Russia

• Neoliberal capitalism, and maybe just capitalism or advesarialism rather than cooperativism which encouraged the West to support ultranationalist and Neo-Nazi groups

• Great power competition and geopolitical disequilibrium due to the rise of Russia and China

• Climate change and access to critical minerals

• The "progressive" / "conservative divide" between (and within) the "West" and the "East" as indicated, in part, by the outcomes of the Yogyakarta conference

Ideas for the political economy of Ukrainian regions which choose maximum autonomy

Ukraine has at various points in history experimented with various radical ideologies across the political spectrum. This tradition evolved during times of turmoil, and was often quickly suppressed (particularly during the period of the Russian revolution). My vision for Ukraine under the above peace plans is that each region which chooses maximum autonomy can advance this tradition and implement it in peacetime across the country.

This would also, in some way, fulfill Volodymyr Zelensky's vision of Ukraine becoming a "Hollywood of Europe", with a political twist. This would involve individual regions voting (either through regional sovereign wealth funds, or via political-democratic institutions) on a particular political economy to guide the regions development for a fixed period and/or with refreshment of mandates. 

Some political economies that could be tried on a regional level or have been tried before, or are listed within the stated vision of past and current Ukrainian political parties include;

Agrarianism

Anarchism

Anarcho-Communism

Anarcho-Capitalism

Planned Socialism

Market Socialism 

Planned Capitalism

Market Capitalism

Decentralisation

Populism

Third Way

Social Democracy

This would enable the devolution of power and political experimentation on a regional level while maintaining a cohesive nation-state structure, giving it a second chance, and ensuring a great degree of consistent international media attention and scrutiny in relation to the political and economic development of Ukraine after a peace agreement is reached. 

It would also facilitate the reduction of xenophobia and development of a healthy, de-neoliberalised, non-plutocratic, pluralistic political culture while giving maximum power to individual citizens without any compulsion in their civic and political life. It would also facilitate immigration of politically interested persons across the ideological spectrum who may wish to help develop any of these visions under peacetime. 

Considerations relating to justice:

I may publish in relation to the administration of justice in relation to the war in Ukraine in greater depth separately in the future, but below are my preliminary thoughts. 

Administration of justice in relation to the war in Ukraine could take two forms:

Form 1:

1) Public self referral of all elected representatives and departmental officials involved in planning (should it be the case that it was indeed planned), funding or carrying out this conflict to the International Court of Justice [on the basis that it is a form of anthropocide - a term I invented as are the ones that follow based on John Rawls' idea that we do not chose where we are born or who we are born as], regardless of whether it is Ukrainocide, Russicide, Arabicide, Semiticide, Hebrewcide, Juvicide, or any other form of mass killing which is done by a capable party with the intention to destroy a group) or by determination of the International Court of Justice, or at the very least the self-referral of one selected representative from each involved state. If it is not the case that the conflict in Ukraine was planned with the intention to divide Ukraine and/or catalyse regime change in Russia, this conflict should be considered a war and a similar process should occur in the International Criminal Court. 

2) Should any involved state refuse to send its representatives to the court itself, its elected representatives and departmental officials should appear in related proceedings via video-link/in absentia in either the ICJ or the ICC.

3) Alternatively, the ICC and the ICJ as well as each domestic court should establish a cross-jurisdictional network of courts to determine the protocols for the commencement of domestic proceedings related to relevant elected and departmental officials with respect to national sovereignty and international law. 

Form 2: 

Should there be a total refusal for any representatives to accept responsibility in front of the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court (as seems likely to be the case), then each elected leader or departmental representative who is involved should at the very least at some point share with the world;

• What they regret most in their reign

• What they feel guilty about

• What they could have done better or differently during their reign and campaigns with hindsight

• What they resent about their counterparty / "enemy" most

• What they genuinely appreciate about their counterparty / "enemy"

• How do they think their counterparty / "enemy" should be punished

• Why do they think their counterparty / "enemy" should be punished

• Did their ever feel empathy for their counterparty / "enemy"

• If they did, did it ever reflect personally on them in their day-to-day life or habits

• Do these feelings differ when considering your counterparty / "enemy's" leadership vs population

• What their vision for the planet is

• What their greatest fears are

• How they wish the circumstances of their military engagement should have turned out differently (before or during)

• What is their view on just causes in war

• What is their view on the acceptable degree of states interfering in the affairs of other states without their consent

• What is their advice to future generations all over the world

• What is their advice to their own polity/society

• What is their advice to their counterparty's/"enemy's" polity/society

• If you could, how would you try to bring about 'world peace'

• What is the greatest threat to humankind of our time

• If they could choose to be born anywhere today, with their knowledge, where would they choose to and why

• If they could change something about the world order, what would it be

• What are they most proud about in their own polity/society

• What would they like to see change in their own polity/society

• How would they like to live out the rest of their life

• How would they like to see their counterparty / "enemy" live out the rest of their life

• If they could pick a single public figure to advance their political legacy, who would it be

The complications in relation to these two forms are many, but its a starting point. 

After a peace process is concluded there should be two monuments erected - one in Ukraine and one in Russia;

One in Independence Square in Kyiv, or by the monument of Vichoyi Slavy.

One in Red Square in Moscow, either directly on top of Lenin's mausoleum, near St Basil's Cathedral or by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. 

The monument in Kyiv should be of a Ukrainian trident in the foreground of a larger Russian double-headed eagle.

The monument in Moscow should be of a Russian double-headed eagle in the foreground of a larger Ukrainian trident. 

Alternatively, another monument symbol should be selected through a democratic process jointly conducted across all of Russia and Ukraine, with the final decision made by a simultaneous referendum in both countries. 

Both monuments should be known as "The Monument of Eternal Unity" (Ukranian: Пам'ятник вічної єдності, Russian: Памятник вечного единства) commemorating the eternal unity of Ukrainian and Russian people, and all of humankind. 

Finally, a peace process could not be complete without a definition of 'the Ukrainian Idea' and 'the Russian Idea'. 

In my view, the Ukrainian Idea is defined by Ukraine's perpetual struggle for independence as an emerging European power which, from the early days of the Kievan Rus and the Zaporizhian Host always stood strong in the face of competition between major powers, whether it was the Mongol Empire, the Tatar Khanate, the Ottoman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, the Swedish Empire, the German Empire, Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Everyone's always wanted a piece of Ukraine, and many in the West and Russia during my childhood saw it as the backwater of Europe (while Russia's famous pejorative is the gas station with nuclear weapons). This was never a part of its essence, because it seems to me now that its fate was possibly predetermined in 1991 by outside forces. The Ukrainian idea also contains the promise of a better future and glory which is found in its tradition of political envisioning and shifting allegiances due to a historically enshrined antipathy to double-crossing, broken promises and betrayal. Lastly, the word "Ukraine" means 'the borderland', which symbolically ties it to Russia in perpetuity as does Kiev - the founding city for both Russia and Ukraine. It can also mean 'the region', which to some is a preferred interpretation. As does much of the world, in its pursuit of a better future Ukraine could unshackle itself from its colonial legacy, and rename itself to something that contains the word "krai" (for Russians meaning 'edge', 'border', and for Ukrainians 'region') such as Slavakrai / Slavakraina or use a nationwide democratic process to determine its new name, or whether it wants to keep its current name but so that all Ukrainians and their Slavic neighbours can feel pride and glory in as it emerges into the future as a country which is inclusive, sovereign and independent from any other country's regional or geopolitical interests while honoring the Polish, Russian, Jewish and Tatar heritage that once contested its territory. 

In my view, the Russian Idea can be defined by its national emblem - the double-headed eagle - it looks left and right, forward and back, it looks East and it looks West. From the days of Kievan Rus - the proto-state which eventually developed into what is now both Russia and Ukraine, multiculturalism was at its heart, and this remains so to this day. From its foundation this political entity has experienced many cycles of inviting the best from the West, rejecting the rest and keeping what it decided to be the best of cultural, scientific, technological and philosophical ideas. Starting with the Slavic people inviting Prince Rurik to establish the Kievan Rus, Cyril and Methodius spreading Cyrilic and Orthodox Christianity, surviving the Tatar and Mongol invasions, and subsequently conquering many of their lands during the Siberian expansion - Russia had both, a history of anti-colonial resistance eventually itself becoming one of the largest and most powerful colonial powers our planet has ever seen, second/third only to the Mongols and the British, which integrated many different peoples under one state. It was the Russian people who drove the dissolution of the USSR under Boris Yeltsin. Today, Russians just want to live in peace. We are sick of war. Multiple times each century it feels like we open our souls up only to feel like a knife is being wedged through us. We don't ask for it, but everyone seems to forget the lessons of history. We don't need or want more land, much of what we have is underdeveloped as it has always been. We make an effort to learn about other people's cultures, because various forces consistently insist on trying to stop anyone from appreciating ours. We want to be friends with Europe and America and everyone else, but we always end up getting fucked over and then have the blame piled onto us somehow. We would like to see an eternal peace, and our state to remain eternally sovereign, but we are extremely cautious if not even afraid of others' intentions because we just tried several years ago, 34 years ago, and we tried under the USSR after the Korean War, and after WWII, and during, and before WWII..  and that experience made us develop some of the most powerful weapons that humankind has ever seen this and last century - to defend our Motherland and our people. We are one of the birthplaces of democracy in Europe, but foreign interference has conditioned us to respect authoritative competent leadership, enabling authoritarianism to flourish. It has also flourished because of how the Russian state developed. Many Russians consider the state 'sacred', as did I when I was younger, but my view is different now. The purpose and functions of the state may be sacred, but the structure of its constituent institutions is not. Authoritarianism is not necessarily a bad thing, because it has guarded many countries including Russia, and when the world stops trying to destroy Russia, Russia will open its heart to the world as it has before, but you need to stop trying to destroy it first. History has shown that Russia knows how to forgive, do you?

When I was little, I used to collect Colorado bugs from potato harvests with my grandparents. I remember asking them what were the bugs were named after. My staunchly communist grandparents, who met at a rocket engine factory they both worked in, and were greatly disappointed in the state of the country in the 90's, said that the bug was from the American state of Colorado. When I asked about America, their attitudes towards it were guarded yet hopeful. The last time I visited them, they were still farming, and they were still guarded but they no longer felt hopeful about a fruitful relationship with America. They felt betrayed. For over 20 years of their lives they were derided by society and my father - their capitalist son, about how the country they helped build for their entire life was worth nothing. We all remember the lawlessness and social disintegration of the 90's - when hooligans were basically forming miniature governments in housing blocs fighting for territory and control, when boys treated girls like property to fight over. We all have family and friends across these stupid borders all over the world but instead people everywhere are dying for control over land, and a nationalistic sense of prestige. If this war ever ends, with international support, Ukraine and Russia could feed the world. The black earth of Ukraine is the same black earth that I used to play with at my grandparents dachas in my home town, its fertility is second to none. Russia could accelerate the decarbonisation of its energy sector, but it could do that if and only if there is a pathway to restoring trust with America, knowing that America or anyone else will never ever attempt to destroy it again. I'm still hopeful that at the end of that pathway is world peace, mutual cooperation and prosperity for all.

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Glory to world peace