Marilynn Stark October 6 – December 11, 2022
To graduate to the balancing arm of realism versus idealism in the question of the future of re-establishing order in the European theater may appeal to the thinker on matters of war if it means ending a horrific war. However, to thus graduate amounts only to coming up out of some mishmash that hovers in the minds of some who are justifiably overwhelmed to a certain extent, longing so greatly for a return to peace. Yet, for the sake of clarification does the sheer differentiation between the idealistic and the realistic serve some purpose in the considerations of how to find a way to peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Think of it: To map out such a dichotomy as realism versus idealism as a way to proceed to humanity’s peace negotiations may in the end cloud over the selfsame driving need for humanity that such a route to peace could seemingly allow especially if realism should ever obliterate heroism.
I would rather submit that realism versus moral values, the values for goodness and lawful order, including certain laws of war, are what shore up humanity; and further, such values would set up lines for a meaningful discussion towards a lasting peaceful accord. Once realism is seen through the eyes of moral righteousness, ideals can be realized in the practical realm as the abstract of the ideal now subtends the real. In other words, idealism can indeed underlie realism while at the same time being included in the real. Proof of this is exactly the substance of what the Founding Fathers were seeking in the nascent America — that a viable democracy based upon the agreed upon though somewhat abstract principles of freedom and equality could work. That very marriage of the abstract to the ideal as to the question of the viability and the longevity of the republic, its own workability, is why this nation of America is called an experiment.
Why would realism versus moral values, or realism versus righteousness, set up lines towards a fruitful discourse towards peace for Ukraine? There is no idealism that just naturally springs unto the humane in the ways of barbarism. In truth, if we attempt to measure the ways of a barbarian’s warring crimes to hurt and to destroy all that mankind has built within the context of the given nation of Ukraine, then we are being real even if the task is momentously steep to do so. Indeed, there is further danger at hand: this context of one nation being warred upon will also expand so as to include the nation-building of the collective whole of so many nations who co-exist and interact with one another. Therefore, to destroy one nation means to possibly hurt several others since nations live in exchange with other nations economically and through the leverages of venture and trade and the sharing of common cultural values.
Astonishingly, the root of the war in Ukraine is to be found most unfortunately in the atrocious warring acts of Russia. These warring acts most notably were not even deemed to be warring acts by the actors, the Russians, and that is why it is astonishing to hear that such destruction is not a war — it is instead a special military operation. This sounds ridiculous. Even so, these are the measures of words with which Russia’s adversaries must contend; in fact, this is Putin’s way of saying that the Ukrainians are to be obliterated as if there is only one say, one side, one victor: Russia, implying that Putin is setting out to be an archimperialist.
These are words of some upstart that live in the clouds while the sane among us must counter by striving stridently for clarity’s counterpart just to make sense out of the adversary’s standpoints; and in the face of this now doubled burden of inane words being cast upon the war scenes being foisted upon everyone, the Russians laugh to have put us to such strife. They full well know what they are doing and how they are saying it to us from a very obtuse angle.
Indeed, using a seemingly euphemistic vanguard, Russia committed atrocious, unprovoked acts of war on Ukraine. Period. This should set the tone for a realization on the part of any peace-seekers who wish to recover some world order according to such peace. However, such a realization of a peace that would buttress the now squandered world order is not friendly to easy harmony at all. This breach of the world peace sets the ideal apart from the order that naturally emanates from peace; unfortunately, the ideal is so far out of the true picture that only by asserting corrective measures against such Neanderthalic interests as the Russians’ can we think and thus act clearly as a unified West. Yet, to state ideals and then work from them would seem to all to be the more attractive route somehow; but is there not a decided strategy of those who issue forth categorically mixed concepts regarding their atrocious behavior? In fact — in simple fact — the most fundamental categorical mix the Russians use is to be described as crossing the line of truth by issuing lies instead of truth, of truthful facts. Firstly, to invade Ukraine to conquer Ukraine and declare simultaneously a non-war leaves the mind now facing slaughter ablank, does it not? Thus, as they wage war, they say they do not wage war. This was early on the overarching launch of their first abstract word–missile, their first word-attack; in actuality, it so confused the talking points that the other side, we the righteous ones of the free world living in the West, seemed to be thus stripped of dreaming of true words held within the hold of a meaningful parley if we mentally clamored for peace. Peace is indeed negotiated in part with words, but these words may only arrive when they are potentiated by actions — actions such as a blank withdrawal of troops.
To play the word game back then again at the monsters at hand in a logically rarefied sense may at once oddly amuse whilst at the same time teach the truth of the methodology that simply makes peace talks that much further out of reach: that is to say, ‘how can we make peace with Russia if Russia says there is no war.’ To be more polite, no war has ever been declared per se; rather, it has only been inflicted in the guise of some simple military operation. This lack of candor, this prevaricative pretext by Putin, actually constitutes the fundamental mode of the mixture of categorical essence which any peace negotiators must face. Being thus bereft of categorical truth, the Russians have tried to pin the opposition to their warring behavior unto the willingness for that opposition, Ukraine, to offer an ideal slant or framework that must be replete with surrender to their demands; all the while they tacitly assert such a condescending mindset upon the Ukrainians and the world, they also lob missiles into schools, hospitals, homes, and threaten nuclear weaponry upon the place, committing war crime after war crime while hiding behind a transparent veil of propaganda to create a face to meet the faces that they meet. That is not enough: since they cannot muster a steady victory on the war field they have created, they savor heralding the coming cruelty of winter with the destruction of energy infrastructures — the military field does not even exist — or should it be called the war field? We don’t know yet?
Only those words will the Russians hear at any table even before the table is set whereby such words must be derived from their attitude of supremacy not yet really proven on the non-war field where they make unheard of war nowadays. If they have us at all, they have us by the unprecedented onslaught of intended genocide after decades of a reasonably peaceful order in the world at least in the arena of the superpowers. Woefully, of course as such offers of land might arrive at the negotiating table, it would be to those Neanderthals as if some drops of purity had now precipitated from the clouds they, the barbarians, had created with their strange concepts intimated as truths through a processing that must be described in the least as twisting. For they with propagandic words would confuse everyone out of the reality of what atrocities they would commit regularly as a matter of war policy — in the meantime, they are literally driving a nation’s structure to the dirt with armaments. The deepest dove in any heart would want to believe in realism. That symbol of the white dove of the purest of heart and the love of peace would want to play into the real even if that which is real has been riven apart by words that do not tell the truth, letting the ideal de facto go by the wayside. This frolic with realism would thus be expected to lend a working order to the disorder that is the mayhem Russia has conceived of and is imparting to the sovereign nation of Ukraine and thus unto the whole, entire world. How about starving the world for grain as a topic of conversation at the kitchen table of a day? This is not a superpower, Russia; this is an endgame of a superpower if we are to be real about the tragedy we now witness. Think of world hunger as well as the hunger of Ukrainians, and let the mind soar ever upward to the haven of an overarching idealism that can be brought into the real realm of world power of the modern day as opposed to a realm that is to be derived from the imperialistic bend of an ancient empire that no longer exists except in a history book — Russia.
We of the West face atrocities of war on the part of a reactionary leader, Putin, with his own dream-ridden ideals that are driven by a mad despotism, a despotism he derives from a continuous history of some sort that is itself contentious. In strict reality, can we reassert a perspective in our own thinking that we can indeed seek to now call back and also preserve a world order? We should preserve a world order where that reality is for us essentially continued freedom. Moreover, is this a freedom that is to be juxtaposed to an autocratic state that does not believe in freedom as we do? In such a stance, the only common ground between the two sides is peace.
An answer comes to mind forthwith when we witness the energetic heroism of the Ukrainian people, civilians and soldiers alike, who have arisen to the occasion of war from their love of freedom in the purest and most raw sense. As General Petraeus said, this is a war for their independence the Ukrainians are fighting. Forsooth, this display of ardor for democracy found in the minds and hearts of our Ukrainian brothers and sisters constitutes proof that we of the free world can and will preserve our ideals and ideas according to how we think and not one day according to how some dictator will tell us to think based on lies, deceit and robbery. We keep our categories straight through honor and honesty as best we can. In contrast, a communist dictator as a matter of course would wish to take from us our freedom to self-actuate as individuals so as to subjugate the common person in our midst into a communistic mold of living, being molded essentially into the power and say of the state that would live under autocratic rule. Essentially, such people become subjects while they are so objectified by some masterminding dictator. The likes of Putin, the great dictator, practice an anti-self reductionism of the individual. The dictator would reduce the individual to a mere ghost of the happiness that is to be found in the sense of self that is so innately provided by a leverage found within the self. It is this nature of the individual self that freedom taps. Freedom taps the true worth of the individual. Freedom taps the true worth of the individual out of the sense of equality that inherently exists in each and every individual and is shared from one person to another by comparative measure; and furthermore, freedom is so declared to live among the people of a free world, or a free nation of the world. Thus does freedom lend itself to the very life and destiny of each and every citizen who has faith in the democratic way. Through this faith in the democratic ideal is the very power of the freedom of the individual matched into the practical realm. It is for the individual through the pursuit of happiness in the practical realm where one would choose actions by a sense free will. Such free will mirrors an inner freedom as it does so arise into action out of that inner freedom, and that sense of free will subtends the aegis of a Creator. Such a Creator is named as name might be through different faiths and theological precepts that may vary as they will vary.
In short, we must in our collective conscience safeguard humanity. We must safeguard humanity so that safety and good provisions in the standard of living can be assured on into posterity for Ukraine and all of Europe. This continued freedom and nothing short of such safety and good provisions would be the most succinct answer to what we have witnessed in this war put upon Ukraine by Russia. What Russia wants to take from the West sets up what the West must work to preserve if not gain back. Using energy as a weapon, Russia imagines a sort of victory for its own ribbon ceremony; yet Europe can lessen Russia’s power to use energy as a weapon in the long run simply by developing alternate provisions that are in keeping with the change in the times, those times in the coming post Russo-Ukraine war era.
Then again, if Russia falls apart due to mutiny and a scattered military mind on the battlefield that is proving to be no match for the righteous — the Ukrainians and America and NATO as a collective provider of munitions and mentoring for Ukraine — then will Russia even have a pair of scissors sharp enough to cut the ribbon, let alone the ribbon alongside some victory ceremony in the first place? Indeed, the best tool for Russia would rather be sound knees upon which to beg for peace with Ukraine since she, Russia, had ever re-enlivened the question of nuclear arms yet to be ominously put to sordid use. We did not need a second cold war.
Further, an unhappy Putin not only denigrated the world order when he resorted to using nuclear threats while massacring wantonly in Ukraine, but he also came onto the world stage in some cloud of heroic verbiage whilst simultaneously attempting genocide of the Ukrainians. Putin is pretending. He is pretending to be extending the awesome Russian warring power that had once defeated the Nazis of Germany to also defeat what he poetically terms the Nazis now in Ukraine. He plays upon the prideful heritage of the Russian people, calling them into a mind of heroic venture in Ukraine under his command. Putin unleashed this blitzkrieg upon Ukraine, blindly threatening all of Europe for its long-enduring peace, even in the face of the historical, life-preserving feat of the knowing Gorbachev. Gorbachev was a leader whose steps were cautious as he set up any bargaining event at the Geneva table with Reagan. The idea at that time was to undo nuclear threats. It was Gorbachev who had performed the feat of a neutralizing standoff successfully with the partnership of the United States and President Reagan after the height of the Cold War. Indeed, Gorbachev was real. Putin is not real. He is greedy and full of himself.
Tsk-tsk that Putin would throw away his own nation’s greatness even if he would imagine restructuring it by a process of reassembling what he first regards as a loss instead of a gain — the gain being world peace and its newly established accord for a continuing world peace. Moreover, this had been a world peace that had been forged in the Nuclear Day itself, in the very face of the power of the nuclear missile being slated as possibly detonated by two superpowers one upon the other. One would imagine that instead of a set of independent nations breaking away from the purported motherland of Russia, then the USSR, one could have seen a vast radiation reach. Nuclear fallout would have devastated those very same people who rose up to seek democratically principled freedom as republics now free of Soviet dominance and direct belonging. How could watching the MAD counterpart to that selfsame bedlam of nuclear fallout also being suffered upon America appease anyone? Both sides suffering nuclear fallout, the USSR and the USA, would have been a reprehensibly disastrous assault on all of humanity itself; sadly, for ages to come would it have been ever so if not for the sanity of the leaders who together talked down the nuclear event. Was it not the reasoning of the MAD Doctrine that had ultimately appeased the rational mind of the Russian psyche, leader or not?
To Putin, what is this very vein of thinking now? Has he really thrown away such rational thinking that had settled the first Cold War? After all, Russia ended up allowing grain to leave the Black Sea finally, helping to avert a world level hunger war. Is his aim really to take back what the world together had gained in the subsequent post-Cold War nuclear non-proliferation arena for all of mankind? In his now most contrary way, is Putin some kind of a hidden ghost of the ancient past of the steppes forsooth coming to light in the modern day of mankind? Is it now for us to watch a global field in Putin’s mind’s eye where supremacy of might and power will regain its purported predestined course of imperialism? Will this be indeed at the expense of some frail regard for the clear atmosphere in which the next generations of the human species will be permitted to grow — that is, free of nuclear fallout with its imposed sickness and destructive genetic effects on the living being? These are the questions that stir the hearts of the onlookers as well as of the leading thinkers and leaders themselves as we watch the horrors of war strike the Ukrainians. This is all because of Putin. Logically, if the Russian army is as inept as it appears to be in Ukraine, does that surprise fact lend purport to the use of even nuclear tactical weapons by Putin as a recourse in what could develop in his warring perspective? Something has to happen somehow that will avert such a turn of events; nor do we want the cowardly among those who influence the thinking politick at large to take over and perform a handout to Putin. We must act with perspicacious insights as we do, as we are doing with great diligence, having learned from the past; and we must act with a circumspect prescience to preserve our peace and predestined separateness from such a cruel despot. For we have recently seen Putin now rise into action as a powerful warring criminal. Putin unmistakably reverses the nature of his binding, atrocious misdeeds with such as his descriptive words that untie the very knots he in reality actually does create by those misdeeds, or so he thinks. This is a contest in beliefs: Can we of the righteous mold outdo the beliefs Putin tries to create behind some fluffy words? Oh, listen to these propagandic words of Putin that are prettily precarious and oh so benign; do they sound even valiantly disposed towards the good of the downtrodden? Are those downtrodden indeed under the rule of some quixotic Nazis in Ukraine that don’t quite make the news except as Putin would report them. Let us ask this question: can our keel of sound thinking in our own words that are — in contrast to Putin’s lies — backed by a reality context work ultimately to save us from like destruction? Can our words carry the weight and the power of the autocrat Putin to inculcate a belief system in the human mind through sheer repetition backed as it is by military power? Can our words actually transcend the power of the double-speak the Russians use as they spread misery and militant mayhem whilst calling it liberation; indeed, whilst they commit genocidal level war whilst calling it a mere special military operation?
One might expect as much: The words of the West would properly address the horrors of war in Ukraine, and then these words would also be spoken in a court of international law one day so as to mete out justice for all of humanity. Indeed, those horrors of war the Ukrainians so bravely countenance that we have seen and might still see for some time to come need an intervention that only the guidance of careful words can implement. It is these words, our words, that will guide our actions and plans in a forum now more unified than when Putin struck towards Kiev on that memorable day in February 2022. We of the free world have gathered together in opposition to the dark arrogance and atrocities of Putin, rendering support to Ukraine’s effort to fight for their continuing freedom. NATO and the great America have rallied to save the day.
Just why would any militant fascist create a pile of detritus with advanced artillery on a battlefield and then think that he can put some icing on it as if it were a piece of cake only because he can lie and deceive after having robbed his own state for his entire rulership years? This is the bank of untruths we must countenance as we as peacemakers must face Putin. We must wield words sufficient to stand up to the war atrocities effected upon Ukraine by Vladimir Putin. These words may be words of truth derived from a moral mind that had guided its own perfection ideal. These words may be offered by such as any whose nation had become like contenders even if accessorily in the war who provided arms and mentorship to Ukraine in its hour of need. Then, if Russia may settle for peace if and only if she would retain some of the land she would have taken from Ukraine through the vector of war, so it might be expected. This is simply untenable in the face of any military victory by the mighty Ukrainian armed forces. It is untenable since given a victory to the side of Ukraine militarily, the only corrective measure available to ensure a long-lasting status of sovereign peace for Ukraine would be the full restoration of all of Ukraine’s land to its righteous owner, its own side — to Ukraine. Ukraine cannot “invade” itself due to its honor. Nor can Ukraine be accused by Russia of self-immolation so as to with empty words, with gaming lies, frame Ukraine as a bad actor. Yet this propaganda game has been posed by Russia already, and it demonstrates that Russia actually does know right from wrong. In war, then, the attacks must be on military groups and military supplies, not upon civilians; and this is so by international law. Russia knows this. In summary, then, the hard goal is for Ukraine to win the war militarily even if Russia has declared Ukraine defeated at the start by the label of the famous ‘special military operation’ used as license to bully Ukraine. The soft goal is to win the war of words at a table for negotiating peace. The Russians may not be able to swallow their pride and face this, and we people must render them compassion and hope for a new day, a better day. However, Ukrainians are working diligently to gather direct evidence of the massive war crimes Russia has committed against the Ukrainian people. It does not seem that Russia will have any way to go around this block of evidence that waits in the wings of the world stage now afire with the scourge of Russia’s unjust war on Ukraine.
Furthermore, one point is a most powerful point that must be recognized for its immeasurable weightiness in any consideration of the nature of the beast at hand as Ukraine contends for its sovereignty on the battlefield. Putin is a long-standing leader across two decades and two years now. Putin is currently leading an entire nation, his own Russia, with a pack of lies. He deceives his people and believes that such leadership will give him license and further his license across greater time to conduct this genocidal war against Ukraine. Given the size of Russia’s military, this blaring fact of Vladimir Putin’s bogus leadership adds immeasurably to the burden of all of the nations of the world; in fact, this bogus nature of Putin’s leadership constitutes a threat to his ultimate accountability for his war crimes in Ukraine. He thinks he may never be held accountable for those war crimes since his homing psyche validates his identity as a leader with a standing that is incontestable as he looks down on the less powerful as irrelevant to his actions. The measure of potential discord and also existing discord that is thus being created by Putin’s mindset of being immune to blame for his war crimes cannot be underestimated. It has taken Ukraine’s skillful defeats of Russia on the battlefield to start to undo the typical mindset of us of the West and free world who have regarded Putin as somehow invincible, or as in a class all his own. This now more shallow regard for Putin has been reflected in the media. The typical opinion of Putin as superior and totally, unquestionably formidable as a military commander was issued forth prolifically and across the board by commentators at the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war. People are still recounting this unexpected victory by Ukraine in the founding battle of Russia’s most recent invasion. Ukraine’s victory in the battle for Kiev should have been unheard of in the minds of so many onlookers familiar with the great Putin. Yet, as truth would tell, at the outset of this military conflict Russia’s proposed attack on Kiev would have been a quick and easy surgery, but Russia instead could not be true to its planned brief special military operation. Instead it failed. The world watched in disbelief as a 40-mile-long convoy was reduced to a traffic jam and utterly humiliated into defeat. It seemed that nobody believed in Ukraine and in Zelensky and everyone believed in Russia and in Putin. However, Putin should have been invincible.
Indeed, there was no deceit in the fact of the matter of that battle for Kiev. Putin could not bluff his defeat away and make a pretense, for he had been in fact sorely defeated. He did not take Kiev and have his soldiers don their ceremonial uniforms that were on hand for the occasion of a gala victory parade through the beloved city of Kiev. Putin is being slowly taken apart since then, and thus he is ferocious and practicing illegal acts of war on the Ukrainian populace. Notwithstanding, Putin’s characteristic gross acts of deceiving his nation as a matter of course for decades now drives the contenders of the free world who are vying to defeat Putin and forge peace and sovereignty upon Ukraine’s soil to the point where only a mindset for idealism can be the sure guide to peace-making.
One exhortation must be declared: when in the face of losing freedom no matter the country in quest thereof, the people gravitate to values that are derived from an abstract and idealistic mindset for the venture at hand. Thus was the USSR ever dismantled, and maybe Vladimir Putin will learn this lesson of how democracies are born once he lays down his sword.
We know not how else to think and how else to regard the question of settlement as we pray for Ukraine’s peace unto sovereignty except as we must proliferate our thoughts unto the highest platform that is the primordial place where peace is born. Putin’s lies to his people cannot lead him to have taken a single square mile of land from Ukraine. As Ukraine carries on militarily, so must we not join deception’s quarter and fool ourselves by recommending to Zelensky that he should appease Putin with a false settlement that would lead to ultimate peace. It will not. In the face of Ukraine’s possible military victory comes just that: the truthful and factually correct defeat of Putin. We ourselves of the free-thinking free world cannot have a war to fight whether by proxy and then categorically sidle the very definition of war over into some other quarter, into something else, into something it is not. War is not a poem, nor is it a bargaining posture wherein victory must not rule in the face of the absoluteness in power of nuclear technology. This dishonor to the nature and purpose of war is anti-spiritual; in fact, it would be a great fallacy of steeply dangerous implications for posterity as well as for the contemporaneous world stage. War’s truest power is to settle conflicts and issues that badger peoples and nations. If mankind were to squander the meaning of the deaths that occur in war by committing a default as to the true meaning of a military victory categorically, then massive unrest could result in the mind politick that could spawn more wars and quickly so.
In light of the foregoing, in such a case as the defeat militarily of Putin, he can just politely withdraw from Ukraine with not a stitch of land in his grasp from the nation he had so mercilessly devastated in the name of his quasi-historical derivations of imperial pre-destination to own Ukraine and its people. Nor is it the nation of Ukraine itself that Putin wants on some such elevated platform: Look at one of the richest men in the world, and see that his truest desire in this instance of an uncalled-for war against Ukraine is its riches, its pure riches. Ukraine is rich in farmland, in natural resources and in geophysical provisions lent by the Black Sea. Putin wants Ukraine so as to build Russia’s wealth, and he does not want Ukraine so as to quixotically fulfill his history class assignment to impart the modern-day version of the reality of Peter the Great and other Russian czars of ancient lore. Putin majored in economics, not in history. He is only concocting convenient excuses, and the drama of the dissolution of the USSR in his mind may have lost its grip on him long ago as he learned high level leadership. He is a kleptocrat, not a president who righteously cares for his nation of people and their loss of a greater empire. Rather, he is stricken by his love of riches according to his love of materialism and not love of humanity. Otherwise, he would not lead his entire nation with lies and simply rob his own people. In simple terms, great wealth breeds great greed, and that is the most likely extent of the mindset of Putin. The rest of the talk about history is romance. We must listen to the meanderings of an alibi to subjugate the land of Ukraine to a wealthy overlord who may try to imagine going down in history as a great conqueror only incidentally. He may very well covet the wealth of Ukraine more than he knows the actual history that envelops the Ukrainian land and its peoples historically.
Idealism and the values that are born of it: This is how we think in order to reassert our love of the peace that has helped to build our free world. In order to deal effectively with a world leader the likes of Putin, we must see him for who he is and simply not listen to his history recitations when he uses a calculator before he reads or rewrites a chapter in his nation’s history. He doesn’t even know what he is doing. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be doing it. That makes him dangerous. He is a man who assumes the stage and puts on the act of a ruler. If it is to be maintained that Putin is a person who is difficult to read and seems cold, that is because he is a phony who is putting on a face, who is believing in his act before he believes deeply in himself. He seems to be almost inanimate until he comes out of his recesses; unless he is portraying some policy or success or plan that gives him the opportunity to be in charge and convincingly so, he seems remote by choice and that by a concerted mind that has become familiar to the people over the years. He has a false identity since he thieves the wealth of the Russian workers, and since he uses killing as a tool to establish his continuing office. If he were a beneficent ruler, his men would not run from their country when he calls them out for action in war. Instead, they would be at is side and ready to serve. The Russian men are afraid of his lies at least as much as they may be afraid of his war, a war they may not ever see as theirs.
Well, alas, this is the nature of the delusive beast we are witnessing and must countenance to stop, lest he consume more and more on into the years to come. Let us seek a greater, noble stance on the world stage so as to inspire an orderly way to live together. If only Putin would lay down his sword and embrace democracy with no lies leftover and with no double-speak behind his words. One should ask oneself: will this ever happen? The law of probability says no, and so we are left with the task of asserting now a moral keel before Putin wittingly takes apart our idealism as mere folly by calling it imperialism.
Putin does not believe in the sanctity of the individual as we so believe in it, and thus he does not believe in America and the entire Western free world. Yet, we know our ideal is to let the truth itself shine for peoples. It is the truth of the power and the moment of freedom for which we live. Only in the light of that truth of freedom will such peoples become engaged in self-determination through a principled democratic spirit, never to be trampled upon nor warred upon nor told that they hold no heritage of their own as a people. Who is there who can look at a despotic dictator in the aftermath of his atrocious war crimes and give him a reward for such a war? Under what pretensions could such a person offer a false settlement in the name of peace when in actuality such a false settlement would only be a piece of clay for the next war to be suffered upon Ukraine? Military readiness is the substance of peace, yet military outbreak does not have to strike if the deterrence of readiness is alive and at hand. That warrior mindset alone has the power and the moment and the place to render the Ukrainian people their just deserves: yes, they can call a victory a victory and claim their land as their own most completely in the full extent of its surface area as it ever was before it was so wrongly invaded by Russia. To say otherwise is to join a double-think born of Putin’s double-speak. There is no ‘other reality.’