From the LinkedIn page of Mykhailo Skliar.

Sept 25

(c) Alexandr Kushnar

But Russia strikes Ukrainian territory every day.
Grain silos burn every day. People die every day. Property is destroyed every day. This happened again today in Odessa. Ordinary news from Ukrainian officials looks like this: “Almost everything was shot down, but there were hits.” It’s a kind of sad optimism meant to cover up the terrible fact that Russia has literally inexhaustible tools of terror, while Western capitals are not seriously committed to enforcing sanctions.

NATO has withdrawn from the Black Sea and hopes that Ukraine, a non-member of the North Atlantic Alliance, will be able to defend the Black Sea waters from the aggressor. This is a terrible nightmare, and we’ve been plunged into it by utterly powerless, weak, and cowardly leaders raised in sterile conditions, who have no concept of real adult politics. The whole world admires how Ukrainian rockets, Western-made rockets, hit the Russian command center in occupied Sevastopol, but no one has wondered why there were only a few rockets, not ten, not twenty, not thirty, even though Russia can afford to launch that many at Ukrainian cities sometimes, several times a month.

It’s because Ukraine simply doesn’t have that many rockets, and there’s no corresponding production in the West. There’s no production because there’s no wartime economy, and there’s no wartime economy on the twentieth month of the war because Western leaders lack a deep understanding of the reality we’ve found ourselves in since February 2022. There’s no long-term vision. There’s no total, all-encompassing, and truly captivating information work that would make billions of people understand that Russia is a dangerous and cunning enemy of humanity, bent on destroying the West, not just a bunch of old men who, out of boredom, decided to annex Crimea, seize Bahmut, and annex four Ukrainian regions, parts of which they don’t even control.

There’s only a defeatist position that “Putin must not win.” There are decorations, routine speeches, and peacetime bookkeeping in Berlin, Paris, and Washington without a real understanding of the strategic danger to the entire Euro-Atlantic community. There’s the volunteer group Oryx, which counts casualties, and whose data professionals trust more than the statements of official representatives from all sides. There are ninety-nine percent of the population of the Euro-Atlantic community—I observe them every day personally—who continue to live as if they are not facing an existential catastrophe and as if there is no war. Somewhere out there, in the distant port of Odessa, in some Kleschivka and Rabotino, in the forests near Kremenets, in the front-line villages of the Kharkiv region, on the streets of Orekhovo, in the “annexed by Russia” de-occupied Kherson, where they no longer count the number of bombs and shells killing civilians daily.

(c) Alexandr Kushnar