Maarten de vlugt

This is what it looks like when you’re critically out of your depth, yet still trying to speak about things you have absolutely no understanding of -- things you neither care about nor even grasp, because they lie far beyond the horizon of your knowledge and your thinking. Go ask those questions to your Russian counterparts whether they should keep grinding hundreds of thousands more of their own people into a bloody pulp over a few square kilometers of territory. And no -- you are not smarter than the Ukrainians who have been fighting for years over those “few square kilometers” in Donbas. It means nothing to you but for people here on the ground, the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk area is the largest defensive stronghold, fortified and prepared for battle for over a decade, and one the Russians have been trying to break for just as long, including four years of full-scale war. What looks like a stupid inconvenience to your boss, something standing in the way of what he imagines will be profitable deals with the Kremlin, is, for Ukraine, the main defensive line protecting the country’s heartland from a deeper breakthrough. Ukrainians refuse to surrender it not because they are less clever than JD Vance, but because they understand exactly what the consequences would be and what the word of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump is worth. And that’s not even getting into the fact that this is the homeland of hundreds of thousands of people, their homes, their land, which they would be forced to abandon. It’s about abandoning our own people and their hopes, about a nation and its sovereignty, things that are often absent from this kind of discussion. You see, people here in Ukraine are dealing with matters far more serious and consequential than posturing in front of TV cameras, talk this delusional arrogant BS, and acting as a rally agitator for a corrupt authoritarian in Central Europe that your boss likes very much.