Putin urgently needs a break from the war. Ukraine can achieve victory without the U.S., says Yevgeny Diky.

Well, my kittens and bunnies, have we all moved from the stage of "the astonishment machine is broken" to the stage of "acceptance and understanding of the new reality" in which we must survive and prevail? Not yet? Well, it’s about time.

We could spend a long time pondering why and how the American people chose what they did. How democracy turned out to be defenseless against a narrative first constructed in Russia, but picked up by the entire "axis of evil" and the dregs of the world of "post-truth", and how social networks transformed from a means of communication into tools for hacking democratic systems.

Why did what seemed to be the foundation and essence of Western civilization turn out to be an extremely fragile construct and a thin veneer that shattered under the joyful cheers of Nazis and various advisors, while from beneath the glossy photos on the cover of "Forbes", Ilona "zig" burst forth victoriously.

How did it happen that in the 21st century, the three largest nuclear arsenals and the two largest economies in the world are led by a trio of inadequate old men from a distant past?

What will the world look like de facto without NATO (since if the strongest NATO country plans to annex a piece of another NATO country, and fully incorporate yet another NATO country, this defense bloc can no longer be considered a protection for anyone), and what will Europe be like without the American security umbrella?

In short, what will this new amazing world be like, in which the new American administration, in a flash of Herostratus, dismantles the entire global architecture that the collective West has been carefully reconstructing since 1945?

A world without rights and rules, largely regressing to the level of the first half of the 20th century, but with the caveat of the accessibility of modern technologies.

We really need to pay attention to the realization that the familiar world of the last few decades will never be restored, and after the current period of shock, something completely new will take its place.

Where, accordingly, our place will be quite different from what we imagined in the shattered Trump-centric world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

But for now, we should primarily take care of ourselves in the short term and respond to the first challenge of this new world – directly concerning our survival.

We must accept the reality in which, on the other side of the Atlantic, we no longer have an ally. Moreover, the White House is now an ally of the Kremlin, and they are now together against us.

There is nothing fundamentally new or impossible in this. On the contrary, this state can even be considered more natural than the temporary support of the Biden administration.

Historically, the States were "allies of Ukrainian nationalists" and "destroyers of the USSR" exclusively in Soviet and Russian propaganda. In real life, it was exactly the opposite.

The victor over Nazism, Roosevelt, calmly divided the world with yesterday's ally of Hitler, comrade Stalin, and in this divided world, we were not supposed to have any other place than to be part of Russia. Why are we now surprised when the Trump administration assumes that we are destined for the same future?

George H.W. Bush, during whose presidency we gained independence, diligently tried to dissuade us from that independence and to force us to "build a future together with democratic Russia." At that time, the States did not only not "destroy the Union," but they also tried in every way to preserve it.

And when it became impossible to restrain our movement towards independence, the condition for recognizing our right to exist was precisely that the States (and not Russia, paradoxically) set our nuclear disarmament and the transfer of the third-largest nuclear arsenal from "unreliable" young Ukraine to "democratic" and "friendly" Russia in exchange for a piece of toilet paper from Budapest. So why are we now surprised when Trumpists try to force us to sign papers on our knees, stating that we must give them all our resources in exchange for the "non-repayable" aid provided by the "paper pushers"?

When in 2008 we, together with Georgia, could have received an invitation to NATO (which at that time would have been a real guarantee of security), it was the States that denied us this, thereby de facto granting Russia permission to intervene in Georgia in the same 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014.

During the annexation of Crimea, the role of the States was reduced to categorically dissuading Kyiv from defending the peninsula by force under the threat of non-recognition of the legitimacy of Ukrainian authority. Why are we now surprised when Trump categorically rejects the idea of our NATO membership and publicly states that we "should not have entered this war," meaning we should have capitulated three years ago?

In fact, it is rather surprising that under Biden, the position of the States was not the same as always. It seems this old man, despite all his shortcomings, was the last in the White House who saw the interests of the U.S. not only in temporary deals but, first and foremost, in maintaining the World Order. But he was the last to consider direct betrayal of Western values as something indecent and strategically disadvantageous, even if defending these values costs certain inconveniences.

Biden was not the best ally. He set himself a false goal ("not to let Puylo win," instead of "defeating Russia"), and this false goal-setting did not provide us with sufficient resources at a time when there was a chance for relatively quick military victory (autumn – winter 2022-23). He constantly wavered between the desire to help us and the fear of "escalation," yielding to the nuclear blackmail of the Kremlin, and therefore he very wrongly dosed our military assistance. The "red lines" he drew for himself became far from the last reason we got mired in a protracted war of attrition.

But despite all this, he was our ally. Trump is not only not our ally; on the contrary, by his very nature, he is an organic ally of the Kremlin, and we need to understand this from the very beginning.

There is no difference between Putin's statements about "Crimean achievements" and Trump's statements about Greenland, Panama, and Canada – none, and this is not a coincidence.

The masters of the Kremlin and the White House share a common worldview and a common value system, which precisely defines the building of strategic partnerships.

They do not strive to follow rules and restrictions, nor do they consider it necessary to abide by agreements and treaties. They aspire to live in a world where the weak have no rights, and the strong have the right to do whatever they please. This applies to both the strong and the weak in society (goodbye, inclusion…) and to geopolitics.

They are both naturally dictators (no wonder Trump is so appealing to Orban and Xi, and so irritating to Trudeau or Scholz). Only one country is historically very prone to dictatorship, so he has long enjoyed all the advantages of "autocracy", while the other has not been so fortunate – the country has a lot of safeguards against the usurpation of power. Therefore, he diligently breaks these safeguards one by one but humanly envies his Kremlin colleague. He envies and sympathizes.

The "marriage dances" of Puylo and Trumpushka, as he is affectionately called in Russia, are completely natural and very reminiscent of the period of "gentle friendship" between Hitler and Stalin, with the division of Europe between two dictatorships, a common contempt for "decayed democracy", and common parades in violation.

Of course, one can recall the continuation of history and hope that one day they will fall out over something – but we still have to live to see that. Spoiler: both surviving and even outliving these two new lovers of dividing the world is within our power. We just need to set the task accordingly and direct those same forces accordingly.

One of the points of convergence between the Kremlin and the new White House is the complete denial of subjectivity. In the worldview of both Puylo and Trumpushka, we have no right to a voice at all, we cannot determine our fate, and we are either in Russia's or the States' sphere of influence. Moreover, they both believe that we "naturally" belong to Russia, and only Biden "foolishly intervened in someone else's sphere of influence", and now we need to solve the problem caused by this.

It is this worldview that determines that while you are reading this blog, negotiations between American and Russian delegations have already begun in Riyadh – negotiations about us, of which we are not even informed, let alone invited to the negotiating table.

And it is precisely on such a vision of us as an object that the agreements between the Kremlin and the White House will be based. Agreements that will determine our brief and tragic future fate – of course, provided that we silently accept and agree to what Putin and Trump will negotiate.

Why is it about a "brief and tragic" fate? Why do I not share the infantile hopes of many Ukrainians that