By Caitlin Johnstone, Substack, 4/21/26

Former senior Biden advisor Amos Hochstein said during an interview on Sunday that the Biden administration had been preparing to bomb Iran if they had won re-election in 2024.

Hochstein was asked by Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, “In July 2024 Secretary Blinken claimed Iran was one or two weeks away from having enough fissile material breakout capacity to eventually make a weapon if Iran had decided to do so. There were indirect negotiations that the Biden administration did, but it went nowhere. So when President Trump argues that he did what no other president would, is it just simply that the bill was coming due and it fell on his watch?”

“I do think there’s a certain element to that, and that’s why I was supportive of President Trump joining in in June to take the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term,” Hochstein replied. “We thought that the spring, summer of 2025 was probably, we may have to be there in the same place. And we did, we did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like to look into it, because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.”

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Hochstein, for the record, is an Israel-born IDF veteran who reportedly played a major role in the Biden administration encouraging Israel’s horrific bombardment of Lebanon in September 2024. And his narrative that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities “may have had to happen” under a theoretical second Biden term is false.

In March of last year, US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khomeini [sic] has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” contradicting both the claims of President Trump and of Antony Blinken the year before.

But even if you accept that Iran was a nuclear risk, there was nothing stopping the Biden administration from simply restarting the nuclear deal that the Obama administration secured with Tehran in 2015. The JCPOA was working fine while it was in place; anyone who says otherwise is a lying warmonger. Trump and his handlers torched the JCPOA in 2018 because it was the primary obstacle preventing them from getting to war with Iran, and the Biden administration refused to reverse this move because they wanted war too.

Democratic partisans have been pointing to Trump's war for weeks to chide Hasan Piker and anyone else they blame (read: everyone but themselves) for losing in 2024. But it turns out the Biden admin was planning to attack Iran if they won a 2nd term. https://t.co/UE9C6EiQN3

— Branko Marcetic (@BMarchetich) April 20, 2026

The Democrats were beating the drums of war for Iran well ahead of the 2024 election. Here’s an excerpt from the official 2024 Democratic Party platform explicitly attacking Trump for not going to war with Iran in his first term:

“All of this stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency. In 2018, when Iranian-backed militias repeatedly attacked the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq Trump’s only response was to close our diplomatic facility. In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team. In September 2019, when Iranian-backed groups threatened global energy markets by attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies. In January 2020, when Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops in western Iraq, Trump mocked the resulting Traumatic Brain Injuries suffered by dozens of American servicemembers as mere ‘headaches’ — and again, took no action.”

Kamala Harris, who controversially replaced the dementia-addled Biden as the Democratic candidate late in the race, labeled Iran the number one enemy of the United States. In their 2024 debate, Harris repeatedly slammed Trump for being too soft on America’s enemies and announced that she “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”

I’ve seen a lot of people trying to argue that Trump’s depravity in Iran proves everyone should support Democrats, but it’s clear the Democratic Party is just the more polite-looking face on the same evil power structure.

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The war with Iran was always planned. Analysts like Brian Berletic and Richard Medhurst have been laying out solid arguments that this American war is more about attacking the economic and energy interests of Russia and China in a last-ditch effort to retain planetary hegemony than it is about assisting Israel. This places the United States on a dangerous trajectory toward increasingly hostile escalations between nuclear-armed powers.

These moves were planned years in advance, and would have been rolled out regardless of what impotent meat puppet happened to be wheeled into office in January 2025.

You don’t get to vote out an empire. Whether or not the US will continue working to dominate the planet will never be on the ballot. We will continue seeing reckless US wars of immense human consequence until the empire falls, or until the American people bring the revolutionary change to their country that the world so desperately needs.

By Andrew Osborn and Dmitry Antonov, Reuters, 4/16/26

MOSCOW, April 16 (Reuters) – The Kremlin took the unusual step of ​publicly acknowledging sharp criticism of the authorities from a celebrity blogger on Thursday, saying work was under ‌way to address a slew of problems identified by social media influencer Viktoria Bonya.

Bonya, who is well known inside Russia for her appearances on reality TV shows and other programmes, has a huge social media following, and a video appeal she made to President Vladimir Putin this week was ​watched more than 20 million times and liked over 1 million times on Instagram.

In her video appeal, Bonya – who ​lives outside Russia – said she supported Putin, but said that officials were not telling him the ⁠truth about the country’s real problems, that the Russian people were suffering, and that they were being squeezed so hard ​by corrupt officials that they might one day erupt.

“You know what the risk is?” she said. “That people will stop being afraid ​and they’re being squeezed into a coiled spring and that one day that coiled spring will shoot out.”

KREMLIN SAYS WORK IS BEING DONE

Among other things, she spoke out against a sweeping crackdown on the internet, social media and messenger apps, accused the authorities of being too slow to respond ​to floods in Dagestan, and said they had mishandled the outbreak this year of a cattle disease in Siberia that led ​to an unpopular culling.

“The people are afraid of you,” she told Putin. “There is a big wall between the people and you,” she said, ‌blaming regional ⁠governors, government officials and lawmakers for not telling Putin the truth about what was going on.

Instagram, like Facebook, is banned in Russia but Russians are able to watch it using virtual private networks.

When asked about Bonya’s public appeal, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Of course, we’ve seen it. It’s quite popular.”

“It touches on many topics, on each of which, as you can see – as ​you have seen – work is ​actually being done,” he said.

“But, ⁠to be fair, a great deal of work is being done on them, a large number of people are involved, and none of this has been overlooked,” he added.

BLOGGER SAYS SHE ​IS ACTING FOR RUSSIANS

The idea of Putin as “a good Tsar” misinformed by nefarious officials is ​not a new ⁠one, and Kremlin critics suggested that Bonya’s appeal may have been coordinated with the authorities to let people feel that their problems are being aired and dealt with ahead of parliamentary elections later this year.

Her strongly worded outburst also came as some senior Kremlin ⁠officials and ​business-oriented former officials and bankers had, according to a source, lobbied Putin about their ​discontent over mobile internet shutdowns and a move to block the Telegram messaging platform.

Bonya said the initiative to publicly appeal to Putin was solely her own ​and that she was acting on behalf of the Russian people.

***

‘The People Are Afraid of You’: In Rare Appeals, Celebrities Ask Putin to Address Russians’ Suffering

Moscow Times, 4/16/26

Russian influencers and public figures have issued a series of rare appeals to President Vladimir Putin, saying many Russians are afraid to speak up about problems they face and criticizing what they called “an intention to bring us back to the U.S.S.R.” 

The appeals began when blogger and influencer Viktoria Bonya called on Putin to address mounting social and economic pressures that have dominated national headlines in recent weeks.

“The people are afraid of you, artists are afraid, governors are afraid,” she said, adding that she was not.

“There is a huge wall between you and us ordinary people, and I want to break through that wall,” she said in the 18-minute video, which has garnered 24.1 million views and over 1 million likes in the past two days.

“We consider you an excellent politician, but there is a lot you don’t know,” said Bonya, who is best known for appearing on the popular reality TV show Dom-2 (“House-2”) and lives outside Russia.

She listed issues “that no governor would tell” Putin about, including devastating flooding in Dagestan, oil pollution along the Black Sea coast, the culling of livestock in Siberia and internet shutdowns, as well as rising prices and tax burdens on small businesses.

“People are screaming out loud right now. They’ve been stripped of their last resources and they continue to lose more. Businesses are dying,” she said. “People are googling how to leave Russia. It’s one of the most popular search queries right now.”

As the video went viral, some viewers speculated that she could be aligning herself with the Russian opposition or was even acting on the instruction of foreign intelligence.

“I’m not some opposition figure. I never have been and I don’t plan to be. I’m just a person with a heart,” Bonya said in response to interview requests from exiled media. She later said she had not been paid to record the appeal.

Other critics questioned whether the appeals to Putin were actually a PR campaign aimed at portraying him as a “strong president” unaware of problems on the ground or a more nuanced signal from competing factions seeking to ease restrictions in Russia.

Public criticism of Putin or government policies can lead to prosecution and blacklisting by the authorities for both celebrities and ordinary citizens.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday said Bonya had brought up “very significant issues,” but that authorities were already working to address them. 

“We have seen the video. It is quite popular and has received a large number of views,” Peskov said, adding that “none of these [problems] have been left without attention.” 

Also on Wednesday, popular blogger Aiza (also known as Aiza-Liluna Ai or Aiza Dolmatova) posted an eight-minute video in which she sharply criticized corruption among lawmakers as well as rising taxes and utility tariffs.

In the since-deleted clip, Aiza suggested that Putin is likely “not actually aware” of what is happening and only receives information from specially prepared briefings.

The next day, she said she had “simply wanted to support people” and later deleted the video because of the media attention and “threats” she received.

“I’m very scared,” she said. “I didn’t say anything bad or anything that isn’t already in the media.”

Even pro-Kremlin actor Ivan Okhlobystin, who once described the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a “holy war,” joined in the appeals to the Kremlin leader, calling the clampdown on the internet and foreign social media platforms “a huge mistake.”

“If they want to bring us back to the U.S.S.R., then a time machine would need to be built first. Without that, it simply won’t work,” he said.

“The very idea of restricting access to information for our science and culture is beyond comprehension,” he added. “Nothing can truly be ‘restricted’ these days — we live in the 21st century — and this lack of understanding will only further damage reputations.”

Putin’s approval rating has fallen to its lowest level (67.8%) since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine amid the internet shutdowns, messaging app restrictions and price increases, the state polling agency VtSIOM said. 

The public’s dissatisfaction with tightening internet restrictions has prompted some officials to warn of “political and economic risks” from the measures, Bloomberg reported this week. 

Political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky said Bonya’s appeal fits the classic “Good tsar, bad boyars” narrative, in which problems are blamed on lower-level officials rather than the leader.

“To the all-powerful grandfather, generous and kind-hearted, who has simply become slightly lost in technological modernity — from a sweet granddaughter who still loves him and empathizes with him,” he said.

Political scientist and former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov said the appeals reflect “tectonic shifts” in Russian society.

“Many people in the opposition …are reacting to all this with mockery,” he said. “That is completely unfair, because [Bonya] is bringing a fundamentally new audience into the opposition camp that wasn’t there before.”

Nor did he believe the claims that the appeals were orchestrated by the Kremlin.

“She will bring with her people who previously had no interest in politics. Their dissatisfaction is also growing — there are problems with the internet, prices in stores are rising, the war is getting on their nerves, everything in general is exhausting them and the state is, so to speak, intruding into their private lives,” he said.

“Bonya is, in a way, a marker that this is a trend — people feel that they are not alone, that there are prominent figures who express emotions similar to their own,” he said.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 4/13/26

Orban’s “democratic ouster” is expected to remove Hungary’s procedural opposition to the EU’s planned €90 billion loan to Ukraine that’ll be financed by members raising common debt. RT published a detailed article about this plan here last December, which was a compromise for financing this loan after the bloc failed to reach a consensus to either outright confiscate some of Russia’s frozen assets for giving to Ukraine or use at least some of them as collateral for a loan to it. Readers can learn more here and here.

If everything goes according to plan, and Bloomberg reported that the bloc plans to move swiftly after Hungary held everything up for several months already, then this move risks funding a forever war. Hopes of a military breakthrough along the front or a diplomatic breakthrough in US-mediated talks have yet to materialize, so the pace of Russia’s on-the-ground advance remains glacial, thus meaning that it could take years to achieve Russia’s reported minimum goal of obtaining control over all of Donbass.

Funding two-thirds of the Ukrainian budget for the next two years per the EU’s goal would likely lead to another two-year round being agreed in order to encourage the US to continue its military aid. Ever since last summer, the US no longer donates arms to Ukraine but instead sells them to NATO, which then transfers them there. Even if Trump suspends these sales, so long as the Ukrainian budget is financed and nothing major changes, then it might hold out long enough for him to change his mind again.

To be sure, Ukraine cannot fight forever since even Zelensky’s new Chief of Staff Kirill Budanov recently admitted that it faces “a huge, huge problem” after new Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov revealed that over 2 million Ukrainians are dodging the draft, which seriously complicates operations at the front. There’s also always the chance that Putin will turn the special operation into a formal war in which he’d no longer care about civilian casualties in an attempt to decisively end the conflict on Russia’s terms.

There are two competing schools of thought about why he hasn’t yet done so. One speculates that he doesn’t want to inadvertently risk an escalation with the US that could easily spiral into World War III, while the other is that he still truly considers Russians and Ukrainians to be one people like he explained at length in summer 2021’s magnum opus, ergo his reluctance to see their civilians suffer. At any rate, the forever war scenario assumes that Putin won’t do this, which can’t be taken for granted.

Nevertheless, the EU operates under the assumption that he won’t do so, which explains why it plans to move swiftly to approve Ukraine’s €90 billion loan and still buys arms from the US for transfer to that country. This not only perpetuates the risk that tensions spiral out of control but also perpetuates the EU’s energy insecurity amidst the ongoing crisis caused by the Third Gulf War since an end to the conflict could hypothetically result in the resumption of Russian energy exports to the EU to its citizens’ benefit.

The EU’s unstated goal is to perpetuate the conflict till at least 2029 in the hope that the Democrats will regain control of the White House and resume the US’ Biden-era Ukrainian policy. Even though Europeans will economically suffer till then, not to mention more Russians and Ukrainians dying, the bloc is willing to pay these costs in pursuit of its ideologically driven goal of inflicting a strategic defeat upon Russia. Ultimately, however, the conflict might end up strategically defeating the EU instead.

TASS, 4/15/26

MOSCOW, April 15. /TASS/. The pace of Russian macroeconomic indicators is below expectations and forecasts so far, President Vladimir Putin said at the meeting on economic issues.

The unemployment rate remains record low at the same time and totals 2,1%, the head of state noted.

TASS collects the key statements of the head of state.

Condition of the Russian economy

The dynamics of Russian macroeconomic indicators is below expectations and forecasts for the time being. “Below expectations not merely of experts and analysts, but also the forecasts of the government and the Central Bank of Russia,” the president said.

Statistical data for two months shows the decline of economic dynamics. The national GDP lost 1.8% in January – February. “I regret saying that the economic dynamics is going down for two months in a row. The GDP contracted by 1.8% on the whole in January – February.

Balanced budget and support measures

The authorities should keep the course of public finance stability and budget balance, including in the environment of dramatic fluctuations in international markets, and the government prepared appropriate measures.

The financial bloc should focus on preparing specific measures to stimulate economic growth. “I consider necessary to focus continuously in our work on preparations of specific measures for stimulation of growth, on development of appropriate solutions to overcome generally expectable trends that are emerging recently,” the head of state noted.

Proposals should be worked out on extra measures “aimed at resumption of growth of the national economy, support of business initiatives and improvement of the employment structure favoring industries with more efficient jobs, where high added value is generated,” Putin added.

Unemployment rate

The unemployment rate in Russia remains record low and stands at 2.1%. “It evidences in particular that our labor market is changing. Flexible platform-based types of employment are evolving,” the head of state said.

“These and other tasks are recognized in the plan of structural changes in the Russian economy. The government prepared it last year and started its implementation,” Putin added.

***

Russia’s economy up, Ukraine’s down in IMF growth forecast

By Lucy Lery Moffat, Kiev Independent, 4/15/26

WASHINGTON — The International Monetary Fund slashed Ukraine’s growth forecasts but raised Russia’s on April 14, as Kyiv exits a winter of heavy bombing and Moscow rides an unexpected windfall from the war in Iran.

Russia is set to grow 1.1% in 2026, the IMF said in its flagship report on the global economy released on April 14, up from a 0.8% estimate in January.

Ukraine will have to make do with 2% for 2026, says the fund, down from a 4.5% forecast in October — and on the lower end of the fund’s February range of 1.8–2.5%.  

Ukraine is emerging from the toughest winter of the full-scale invasion yet, after Russia launched thousands of drones and missiles at Ukraine’s power and heating infrastructure as temperatures regularly plummeted to minus 20 degrees Celsius.

Moscow wiped out 9 gigawatts of Ukraine’s generation capacity — at times leaving Ukraine with just half of what it needed, causing blackouts and interruptions to heating supplies for millions of people.

Russia, which was staring down the barrel of a budgetary crisis in January, has had a sharp reversal in fortunes since U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran began on Feb. 28. The blockage in the Strait of Hormuz has made Russian barrels more attractive — and expensive.

The fund said that Moscow would carry the momentum of higher energy prices through to 2027, where it is also forecast to grow 1.1% — up 0.1% from the fund’s forecast earlier this year.

Ukraine has stepped up long-range drone attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure in recent months, in a bid to dampen Russia’s chances to line its war chest.

Roughly 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity was reportedly halted amid Ukrainian drone strikes, pipeline damage, and tanker seizures.

Speaking at a press conference in Washington D.C., Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, chief economist at the IMF, said that the shock today is comparable in size to the oil price shock in 1974, and that under a best-case scenario — a short conflict — energy prices would rise by 19%.

The impact is already feeding through to Ukraine. Ukraine’s top central banker, Andriy Pyshnyy, said that higher oil prices caused by the war in Iran could raise inflation rates by 1.5 to 2.8 percentage points in an interview with Reuters on April 13.

While inflation had been on a downward track from a peak of 15.9% in May last year, prices have risen for two consecutive months — hitting 7.9% in March 2026, according to the National Bank of Ukraine’s latest numbers.

Fuel inflation in Ukraine accelerated sharply to 23.4% year-on-year, the bank also said on April 10.

Kyiv is facing one less risk this week, after incoming Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar said that he would not continue to block a 90 billion euros ($106 billion) loan from the EU to Ukraine.

The cash will cover two-thirds of Ukraine’s military and civilian needs in 2026–2027.

Ukraine heavily relies on funding from foreign partners to keep the state afloat and fund its military, now in its fifth year of fighting Russia’s full-scale invasion.

In the fund’s last big projections in October 2025, it already labeled future prospects as dim due to uncertainty and rising protectionism.

This year’s meetings were again overshadowed, this time by the war in Iran, leading the IMF to cut its global growth forecast to 3.1%, down from 3.3% in January 2026, but also said that growth could fall to 2.5% under an “adverse” scenario or 1.3% under a “severe” scenario.

“With every day that passes and every day that we have more destruction in energy, we are drifting closer towards the adverse scenario,” Gourinchas said.

By Leonid Ragozin, Al Jazeera, 2/11/26

A victim of Russia’s brutal aggression that’s generating a proper humanitarian catastrophe this winter, Ukraine is also stuck between two kinds of Western populism. One is that of Donald Trump and his European far-right equivalents, who don’t care much about either Ukraine or the rules-based order, only their private interests. The other one is that of the anti-Russian (and anti-Trump) hawks who tend to wrap the cynical interests of the military-industrial complex in phoney liberal rhetoric as they pretend to defend the values they don’t truly adhere to — not in Ukraine anyway.

With the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s most important event for foreign policy and military experts, approaching, its longtime chairman, Wolfgang Ischinger, set the agenda regarding the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, which is shifting into its fifth year this month. As long as Ukraine defends Europe, he told the Tagesspiegel, the Russian threat to Europe isn’t huge, but once the war is over, it will increase enormously.

Even as he rushed to deny that he doesn’t want peace to be achieved any time soon, the message was clear: Ukraine is helping European countries to prepare for war with Russia (no matter how implausible this eventuality is looking now, given it presumes Kremlin rulers are essentially suicidal).

At least this is how the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, Andrii Melnyk, read Ischinger’s stance. The argument that “Ukraine should bleed out just to buy Europe more time for its own defence” was cynical, he told Ischinger on X. Ukrainians urgently need a ceasefire, insisted the ambassador.

Meanwhile, the idea that peace in Ukraine would be premature remains predominant in a few major European capitals, especially London, as well as inside hawkish American think tanks which have invested their reputation in defeating Russia — a goal that appears to be further away than ever before. Two prominent foreign policy scholars, Michael Kimmage and Hanna Notte, put it far more candidly than Ischinger in a Foreign Affairs piece. “Most important, the US and Europe shouldn’t rush any talks to end the conflict,” they wrote.

This sentiment prevailed at the meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council at the end of January, Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto suggested in an interview. Several European foreign ministers, he claimed, openly stated at the meeting that “the European Union is not prepared for peace”. This echoes Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s claim, made a year ago (according to Ukrainian media), that peace in Ukraine was riskier than war.

The rationale behind these arguments is really hard to comprehend. Western powers have been steering Ukraine towards refusing any realistically attainable compromise for many years. The only result this policy has achieved is that realistic conditions for peace have considerably deteriorated compared to what Ukraine would have been getting by default during the talks in Istanbul in 2022 or Minsk in 2015.

The threat of Russia attacking NATO countries is even harder to substantiate in a rational, unemotional conversation. Direct conflict between Russia and the West, which both sides made a point to avoid in the last four years, means nuclear war, which would end human civilisation as we know it. Economically and demographically, Russia is a dwarf compared with the EU alone, not to mention the combined force of the EU, the US and Britain. It can’t win a war against the West without resorting to nuclear weapons.

An all-out conflict with the West is not a part of the mainstream political discourse in Russia or an ideological goal — unlike the USSR, modern Russia has no real ideology. There is no way Russia would attack NATO countries unless it senses a genuinely existential threat — through the blockade of its Baltic ports or Western-assisted missile strikes on Moscow from Ukraine’s territory. It’s indicative enough that for the last four years, Moscow hasn’t been directly responding to what people like former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson openly call the West’s proxy war against Russia.

Wild claims grossly misinterpreting Russia’s motives and intentions are an integral part of jingoistic populism, which has been fuelling this conflict for years. So, it has turned out, was the false promise of defeating the world’s leading nuclear power by a combination of economic and military means.

Speaking at the Munich conference in 2022, days before the start of Russia’s all-out invasion, the same Boris Johnson — then still in office — said that “Russia must fail and be seen to fail”. Just over a month later, Johnson would help derail the peace talks in Istanbul, which could have ended the armed conflict at the outset, according to top Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia and a plethora of other sources.

Addressing a huge crowd in Warsaw in March 2022, then-US President Joe Biden effectively pledged to topple Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”. He also claimed that Western sanctions had “reduced the rouble to rubble” and that the dollar was trading at 200 roubles at the time of speaking. It was a direct lie. The real rate on that day was 95 roubles per dollar. It is less than 80 roubles per dollar today. Last year, the rouble emerged as one of the world’s best-performing currencies, surging by 44 percent against the dollar year on year.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas kept saying that she believed in Ukraine’s ability to defeat Russia as late as October 2025 — an assessment that completely contradicted the reality on the ground since 2023 when, after the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russia began its slow offensive, which continues today, while Ukraine’s crucial infrastructure is being turned into rubble and the country is rapidly depopulating.

Coming from people who claim to be “liberals”, this unhinged populism creates a paradoxical situation in which certified far-right populists, such as Trump or Hungary’s Orban, as well as the leaders of Germany’s AfD, begin to come across as reasonable and conflict-averse people when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine. They’ve long figured out that they can exploit their opponents’ Russophobia by exposing their incessant lies, exaggerations and unfounded boasts.

The West’s entire policy towards Russia and Ukraine for the last 30 years has been a catastrophic failure, which has created a great boon and an inexhaustible source of political fuel for anti-establishment actors. The never-ending postponement of peace in Ukraine derives from the fact that too many people have been too badly invested in unrealistic outcomes of the war, so they keep buying more and more time to mitigate the impact. But it comes at a huge cost that Ukrainians are paying with their lives and their country’s future.