I spent (read: wasted) an entire week pondering how to write a mega-post on international politics, only to abandon it in the last minute, deleting everything that I managed to write so far. It just isn’t worth it.

I wanted to become zen by writing a last opinion feature on the major political issues of the moment, but eventually I’d rather just to let it go. What’s the point in it? I don’t want to write free political analyses anymore—not that many people would have cared, and even less would have understood.

It was supposed to offer a complex, multi-tier assessment of my informed view regarding the likely outcome of the conflict in Ukraine, of Russia’s stance and actions against Europe, and of Europe’s many mistakes (some of which are extremely serious) and vulnerabilities (quite severe, too). On the one hand, it was a very pessimistic outlook, but on the other hand, it was against many mainstream ideas and official positions. Being somewhat unorthodox and certainly controversial, the whole text would have done more harm than good, merely because most people are simply stupid.

In the end, it’s better to leave everyone to their opinions. Let people be brainwashed by both the EU’s stupidities and Russia’s cognitive warfare—a fancy term for “propaganda and disinformation performed by a foreign state using elements of surveillance capitalism (algorithmic microtargeting on social networks, big data, attention hacking) to provoke societal fragmentation, institutional paralysis, and possibly collapse.” It’s what the mass media labels hybrid war, but NATO calls it CogWar.

Unfortunately, NATO is spending time and money on sociological bullshit and organizing conferences where such newspeak is used: “Wargaming with AI for Neuroplasticity,” “Democratic Resilience Center,” “programmatic taxonomies,” “cognitive resilience models,” and “interinstitutional cooperation initiation.” Meantime, Russian intelligence is deploying actual, hard-coded malware, buying proxy server space, and running A/B tested psychological operations in real-time on social networks. NATO and Europe already lost all the present and future wars, and this doesn’t even depend on what happens in Ukraine!

Actually, it’s worse. The Russian doctrine is more like a “fire hose of falsehood.” A psychological operations officer who truly understands human nature doesn’t need to A/B test. The goal isn’t to find the one perfectly optimized narrative and discard the rest. The goal is to flood the enemy with so many contradictory, simultaneous narratives (A, B, C, and D) that the target population’s ability to process information simply collapses. Applied sociology and psychology are the most devastating weapons in a hybrid war—or a CogWar, if you prefer. The EU and NATO are still theorizing, and this is why it’s pointless to fight in an already lost war.

On the other hand, there are so many errors made by Zelensky, Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas, and other leaders of relevance (of France, of Germany, of the UK) that I can’t even. Add to this some Eastern weaknesses I won’t mention (incidentally, the political situation in Romania is simply cretinous), then the Iranian crisis (or should I say, “the US-Israel rogue binomial?”), the adversarial relations we have with China, and it’s easy to see how fucked we are.

But once you know what could happen (what will happen!), everything becomes much easier. No, I won’t advise you to learn Russian or Chinese, but I’d caution you that our leaders are incredibly stupid.

The trigger that made me start organizing my thoughts for an article was that abject letter to Putin. Even if Putin is the aggressor, even if he’s Hitler, this is not how one writes if they really want to negotiate! “You motherfucking piece of shit, let’s talk, because you’ll lose the war anyway!”

Then, while the EU opened “the first cluster of accession negotiations” with Ukraine and Moldova, Zelensky made another stupid error: he downgraded the status of the Russian language in Ukraine, literally transforming one of Putin’s lies into a truth: yes, the Russian minority is persecuted! As if the Russian language were at war with Ukraine… Funny thing, in exchange for supporting Ukraine, Hungary’s Péter Magyar obtained from Zelensky extended rights for the Hungarian minority in Ukraine, and the way it was legislated means that such an upgraded status applies to all languages of minorities that are part of the EU! One more time, the Russian language is the excluded one. Even funnier, the Romanian minority in Ukraine achieved a better status thanks to Hungary’s efforts, not Romania’s! However, should Ukraine eventually join the EU, how would the discrimination of a specific minority be consistent with the EU’s values and legal framework? Then, how could Moldova join the EU when it cannot control Transnistria, which has Russian troops on it? (Historical note: Transnistria was a poisoned gift from Stalin to Moldova, the same way Crimea was a poisoned gift from Khrushchev to Ukraine.)

I don’t care what happens to Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics, or even less if something were to happen to Armenia or Georgia. I care that Europe is impotent, arrogant, and stupid. Come to think of it, Europe couldn’t defend itself not only against Russia, but also not against Ukraine (should such a situation arise) or, go figure, against Turkey! NATO’s Article 5 only applies to external aggressions, but should Turkey attack Greece, another NATO member, there’d be no defense against it. Look at the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus if you still need proof of Europe’s and NATO’s uselessness.

But I don’t want to enter into the substance of what I wanted to write about Europe’s and NATO’s many mistakes. Ukraine’s, too.

The tragedy isn’t that Russia has brainwashed its people to believe we’re all Nazis. The tragedy is that probably half of the Russian population are normal people, the same way not all Americans are MAGA retards. But nothing can go back to how it was before 2022. Or before 2014, 2013… because Russia’s discontent with Ukraine started with Maidan (or Euromaidan, by its other name).

Among the many sources of video information regarding today’s Russia (including YT channels such as Russian Media Monitor, Steve Rosenberg’s press reviews, the occasional HEADSHOT interviews, and many other channels), I watched over time several channels of people from Moldova or from Romania who moved to Russia years ago, long before this war. They’re now Russian citizens with dual citizenship. I explored those channels, trying to understand, to comprehend the way their judgment was affected by living in that country. I’m not a sociologist, but the topic is fascinating. Some such people managed to isolate themselves from politics, somewhat similarly to how people tried to ignore the Communist propaganda, except that today’s Russians trust the West much less than they did in the times of the USSR. So the propaganda won. That apart, life in some regions looks almost like in a normal country. Without Russia’s actions from 2014 and 2022, I suppose Russia would have had even more the appearance of a normal country, despite the obvious dictatorship. Did you know that life in the small city of Oryol has an incredible appearance of normality? This is literally unbelievable.

Regardless of how the war in Ukraine ends, it will be nasty for us. So let’s just enjoy the small pleasures of life; let’s cultivate our curiosity for technology, culture, art, and whatever else we can still enjoy while we still can.

I should resolve to never write again about politics on the blog. Let’s take this blog back to Linux, AI, and similar shit.