Putin will not end the war. But the war will end Putin.

The January 26, 1973 signing of the Paris "Peace" accord was four weeks before my 18th birthday. I was blessed by just late enough birth.

Since empire-building is a Ponzi scheme, empires always double down before they back down.

Russia's lefty useful idiots will not suddenly start listening to Ukrainian reality voiced by Ukrainians.

I forecast the war on February 14 (https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/putins-empire-restoration-project-in-ukraine-f050a8ecc604) , had privileged access to British and American veteran military experts and a Ukrainian Donbass war veteran. And I still didn't understand or foresee how Ukraine's disruptive startup war model would defeat Russia's initial invasion force aimed at rapid regime decapitation in Kyiv.

I too harbored some of the neo-colonial stereotypes about Ukrainian state corruption and failure. Even my colleague Glen Grant, who'd worked on institutional transformation for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, told me endless stories of institutional dysfunction and had underestimated his own success. (https://www.mei.edu/profile/glen-grant, https://uifuture.org/en/news-en/23094-national-security-expert-glen-grant-joined-the-ukrainian-institute-for/).

Even we got it wrong by being too sceptical about our Ukrainian territorial defense organizer friend's assurances of ultimate victory in late February and March.

So it's not hard to imagine how ideologically driven context-free ahistorical outsiders like CodePink, Gabbard and Greenwald could succumb to Bakhmut Bob's Russification machine.