Marijn Markus
AI Lead | Managing Data Scientist | Public Speaker
Universiteit Utrecht
Capgemini
Rotterdam, South Holland, Netherlands
May 29, 2026
🎯 Ukraine is using mid-range drones to 𝐞𝐧𝐝 the one thing Putin’s Empire needs most to survive: forward momentum.
The Kremlin can absorb massive losses but it cannot survive stagnation.
Once the Russian army is frozen in place for a long period, the internal pressure will break the regime.
🔺 Throughout the Tsars and Soviets and Putinists today, the Russian Empire runs on Ponzi scheme logic:
Society is a status pyramid. Putin is at the very top, then his cronies, then top government and business elites, then Moscow, then other big cities, then rural and minority areas at the bottom.
Poor Russians and ethnic minorities are the lowest-status people in Russian society (the “петух”, in Russian pris0n slang). Their resources and labor are extracted to feed the people in Moscow, they are treated badly by the state, and they are used as cannon fodder in Russia’s wars.
☝ You’d think these people at the bottom would rebel. But the Ponzi Empire promises them that if they conquer someone else (e.g. Ukrainians), they will no longer be on the bottom rung. Someone else will be the “петух” instead of them, and they will get to lord it over that poor bastard, and extract their resources.
This is why the Russian Empire has to keep conquering. If the borders are frozen and the exploitation machine grinds to a halt, the lowest-status people in the empire realize that their horrible situation is permanent. They then have nothing to lose, so they rebel.
💡 This is how the Tsarist Empire was brought down in 1917. Russia’s advance in WW1 stagnated and reversed, so the soldiers in the army rebelled and brought down the empire.
This is also how the Soviet Empire was defeated: when its expansion was checked for decades, various outlying regions who had been kept p00r by Moscow – the Warsaw Pact countries, various Soviet republics – rebelled and left the communist bloc.
This is why containment and battlefield stalemate are the way to defeat Russia.
Simply stop the Ponzi Empire from conquering new subjects, and the whole thing unravels.
Only after russia stops being an empire (currently stretching from Norway to Japan!) can its successors have any hopes of reforming and becoming modern democratic nation-states.
Comment from :
The whole of the developed democratic community should be posing themselves a question “what our real priorities are in the face of ruZZian aggression?” We are playing with fire, with the eyes wide shut, totally unprepared since 1998 still. The non-proliferation treaty was a pathetic nonsense. Ukraine, as much as the whole of the Eastern Block with the Baltics and Scandinavia should’ve been armed to their teeth by now, with the every young job seeker doing military training and the population informed of the real dangers. Instead, the attention is on the creatures comforts, benefit systems, cheaper holidays and more of the pleasurable options, when no country has a sufficient air defence, and still buying some of the enemies fuel as it’s a bit cheaper. Can we really afford their “cheap” merchandise? Shall we still trade with a genocidal terrorist state scheming to destroy our ways of being, to k1ll and enslave us.
Very good, very very good. And allow me to Correct it : at the maximum it was a self-declared empire, based on lies-propaganda-crimes-abuse….a disgusting piece of human history that created….nothing but poverty.
There will be many more countries there.
I’d rather have Ukraine administer Russia until Russia becomes civilized.
The empire must be disbanded and its people set free before any of it can become ‘civilized’ Otherwise, it’d just lead to another russian empire down the line. And unlike classic empires like the Romans, who at least built roads and spread education, it’s hard to argue that Moscow spread ‘civilization’ of any kind.
Kuban, Belhorod, & Kursk can rejoin Ukraine 🇺🇦 as reunited Oblasts, Zelenyj Klyn (Green Ukraine 🇺🇦) can rejoin Ukraine as a Territory!
Marijn’s thoughtful article hit a nerve in the troll farms. I think new fake accounts were opened. Here is one kremkrapper :
Robert Endert
“This is exactly why the globalists wanted this war. They organized the 2024 coup to bring the Banderite Nazis to factual power. So that these thugs could start the genocide of the Russian population in order do provoke Russia to a war. A war, so they hoped, would implode Russia so that the globalists could divide it in weak States they could plunder of their rich natural resources and use them against China. This story was supposed to be “Russian propaganda”. How funny that our unhinged Ukrainian propagandist proves the truth of the story by publishing the globalists map from the plan that was outlined before the 2014 coup! This demonstrates why this war is considered as existential for Russia. And as the “Project Ukraine” failed, Russia not only was not defeated, it came out stronger.”
This is how those imperialist Nazi cokksukkaz think.
That’s why they’ve got to be denazified and broken up.
Did the commenter just admit that ruSSia actually stepped into this trap? 🤣 BTW, it was 2014, not 2024.
Kremkrapper comments are distinctive: word errors like “in order do provoke Russia to a war”, date errors and the big one : “globalists.” *
*Popularised by putler-rimming bastard Alex Jones.