THINK TWICE, STAN

Peace as Rearmament or Negotiating for War What exactly are Ukraine’s European partners doing    - having lost the war and now being saved from disaster at the last moment by Trump? Let us leave aside the fact that not a single Russian demand made it into their “plan.” Perhaps they intend to bargain further at the negotiating table. But to sit at that table, they first have to convince Russia that there is any point in substantive negotiations over the Ukrainian crisis. Exchanging plans remotely can continue forever. If Trump is interested, he can read them. They propose that negotiations begin with Ukraine retaining an 800,000-strong peacetime army, armed and trained by the West. Ukraine’s army is currently smaller. The Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Syrsky recently complained that it needs to be increased at least to 700,000. I will not even discuss the shortage of weapons and ammunition, or the grim prospects for solving these problems. In other words, they are open...

  A Zero-Sum Peace For the West, any agreement with those outside its sphere is always temporary. The task of everyone else is to use moments of American and European weakness  - those rare periods when they are forced to consider concessions  - to their own advantage. It is impossible to change the fundamental nature of the Western strategic approach to the outside world. It has always been built on a zero-sum logic, where one side’s gain is automatically the other side’s loss, and every agreement is nothing more than a pause in hostilities before the next round. Even if the current acute phase of the military-political confrontation in Ukraine eventually comes to some kind of interim conclusion, it will not mean the West is ready for a durable peace. Perhaps the clearest formulation of this worldview came from the Dutch-American scholar Nicholas Spykman on the eve of the Second World War. Writing about geography and foreign policy, he observed that a country’s ter...

 WHO IS HE? For another bit of Friday fun, my friends in the Analysis Department at Gulfstream Foundation ran a neurosemantic and facial assessment on someone many of you have likely heard of - some of you, probably more than once. They usually use this type of assessment as a nonverbal component within a broader, structured personality analysis. Here is what their system produced after reviewing a few of his publicly available photos and a few social media posts. Can you guess who it is? SYSTEM OUTPUT: BASIC ANALYTICAL SUMMARY SUBJECT: GUESS WHO DATE: 14 FEB 2026   I. OVERALL STRATEGIC DIAGNOSTIC The DUNE integrated analysis reveals a subject operating through a deliberately volatile communication style and a distinctive psychological architecture. At the linguistic level, the subject employs a “Chaos-Engine” communication model. Linguistic volatility is not accidental; it functions as a strategic tool designed to maintain dominance and algorithmic cent...

Shall the Twain Ever Meet? Spoiler: Nope. No durable peace agreement will be signed today, tomorrow, or in a few months. That will change only if something happens on the front or in the Ukrainian rear that forces the leadership in Kiev - clearly not Zelenskiy himself - to sober up and accept harsh terms. Russian-Ukrainian negotiations under American mediation have been dragging on for months. At times they look like a dead end. Russia, as the side that holds the military advantage, insists on its terms. The Kiev authorities categorically reject them. Ukraine, unwilling to admit defeat, puts forward its own demands, which Moscow finds unacceptable. The Americans, meanwhile, keep speaking of mysterious “progress” and hint that a peace deal could be signed within months. In reality, no one in this process is in a hurry - at least no one who actually wants the war to end. A peace agreement must be not so much “just,” as the Ukrainian side insists, as it must be durable. It has to stop...