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You are letting Vladimir Putin play you for a fool.
Moscow is floating maximalist, insulting demands: ordering Ukraine to surrender fortified territory Russia never captured, demanding veto power over Ukraine's domestic laws, and insisting on gutting NATO's presence across the Baltics.
Doing Putin's bidding does not make you look like a master negotiator. It makes an American commander-in-chief look submissive, compromised, and afraid of a dictator who is running on empty bluster.
Russia is not winning; they are bleeding out and collapsing from within. Independent tracking and frontline records put total Russian military casualties at over 1.6 million men -- with the vast majority dead on the battlefield due to medieval battlefield medicine and zero casualty evacuation.
This war now ranks as the fourth leading cause of death across the Russian Federation. For the first time in modern history, Russian men are dying in this war faster than boys are being born to replace them, plunging the nation into an irreversible demographic death spiral.
Over a million working-age men fled across the borders to escape mobilization, gutting their domestic workforce.
Ukrainian deep strikes have already pulverized fifteen of Russia's thirty-eight major refineries and crippled over half of their refining capacity, costing billions and forcing desperate domestic fuel export bans.
Russia's liquid wealth reserves are nearly wiped out, their banking system is teetering under the fear of deposit freezes, and the Kremlin is so starved for hard currency they have begun fireselling vessels from their illicit shadow fleet just to pay for shells.
When Ronald Reagan broke the Soviet Union, he did not run to Moscow offering pipeline profits, allied land, or diplomatic concessions. He practiced genuine peace through strength.
Release the air defense interceptors our European allies have already paid for, stop tying Ukraine's hands, and break Putin's war machine once and for all. Ending this war by driving a reeling adversary completely out of Ukraine is how you write history.
Eric Newman
Wailuku