Andrew Chakhoyan writes:

In Netflix’s House of Dynamite, a ballistic missile hurtles toward the United States, the nightmare scenario that keeps defense planners awake at night. Yet the West’s Russia policies, over the past decade, have done more to increase the odds of such a catastrophe than prevent it.

Washington’s unwitting effort to teach Moscow that nuclear threats work and aggression pays has culminated in a 28-point dictator’s wishlist, bizarrely presented as a “peace plan.”

The United States, the world’s most powerful nation, is chasing Kyiv for territorial sacrifices while meekly pleading with the predator state to accept them.

This approach to peacemaking is as helpful as pouring vodka on a raging fire. Expansionist wars end only in one of two ways: the aggressor is defeated, as Hitler reminded us in 1945, or the cost of continuing outweighs the gains, as Russia learned in Afghanistan in 1989. There is no third way.

Zoom out from the 24-hour news cycle and the absurdity slaps you in the face. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. For nearly a decade, Western capitals buried their heads in the sand, offering only halves of half-measures. Moscow predictably read this as a green light to escalate. But after 2022, when Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine’s sovereign border en masse, looking the other way ceased to be a viable option.

In early 2025, the Trump administration recognized that peace negotiations are a two-step process – hostilities must be halted first, and everything else comes after. Within 24 hours of the March Jeddah talks, Ukraine accepted the unconditional ceasefire – demonstrating it wants peace, not war.

And Russia? Before the Americans put a ceasefire on the agenda, it was murdering Ukrainian children in their beds with depraved regularity, and so it continues to this day. Russia commits unimaginable, most heinous war crimes; the world watches. [Continue reading…]