America announces an energy ceasefire. Ukraine abides by it. Russia doesn’t. America punishes Ukraine for abiding by the energy ceasefire it announced.

By depriving the defending side of the resources it needs to defend itself, you are not stopping the war. You are turning it into a massacre.

Most of the time, those who say they want to “achieve peace” and “stop killing” make decisions that lead to more killing and more war. Because by making Ukraine defenseless, you don’t satisfy Russia; you make it even more bloodthirsty. We, Ukrainians, want peace. More than anybody else. But we know that we can achieve peace only by depriving Russian aggression of resources, not by depriving Ukrainian defense of resources.

a very sober analysis of the war - with Andriy Zagorodnyuk, @Andriypzag ukraineworld.org/en/podcasts… choose your platform: li.sten.to/explaining-ukrain… How can Ukraine protect itself against Russia's ballistic missile threat? What role can Europe play, particularly through joint production? Can Ukraine develop its own anti-ballistic missile? Who is winning this war now?

Russia wants to turn Ukraine into a concentration camp. Into one vast prison. The principle of the concentration camp is relentless pressure. You are given not a single minute for yourself, for your own world, for your own thoughts. Constant, grinding pressure. They take away your ability to switch off. You cannot sleep. You cannot dream. You cannot think. You cannot simply be alone with yourself. They take you away from you. All that remains is the shell. This is what Russia is now trying to do with Ukraine with these endless missile and drone strikes, with its endless air raid alerts which never stop. Broken people have no inner core, no will of their own. They become automatons. Robots. While the world is creating an artificial humanity by rapidly expanding intellectual capacities through artificial intelligence, Russia has spent centuries creating its own artificial humanity through the slow degradation of the intellectual, emotional, and volitional capacities of people who already exist. While the world is trying to turn robots into human beings, Russia has spent centuries trying to turn human beings into robots. Now it wants to tell us: you are in prison, and we are your guards. We will watch you, punish you, kill you. But most importantly, we will strip you of your intelligence, your feelings, and your will. The empire’s method is simple: drain people of their intelligence, their feelings, and their will—and then you can do whatever you want with them. This is what has been done to much of Russia’s own population. And this is what Russia wants to do to us. The inner resistance to this is equally simple: to preserve an intelligence of your own, feelings of your own, a will of your own. In other words, to have a culture of your own, a society of your own, and a state of your own. This is what resilience means.