If you really want to understand what is going on between Russia and the West, you must understand the concept of realpolitik first if all.

Realpolitik is not something you read in a book, it is a thing you feel and watch unfold In a blunt way. Realpolitik is the merciless placement of everyone nowhere they belong in political calculus without regard for how they think of themselves or he touchy they are and without regard for morality.

The West is telling Russia, in essence, “You don’t have the clout for the respect you claim. All you have is nuclear bombs and you’ll be a fool to use them because it takes a death wish on your part. You are poor, Mr Putin, you have neither the economy nor the alliance to make yourself into the biggie you fancy yourself to be. You’re puffed up like a toad and that is all”. Realpolitik is politics played strictly on what you are worth, with morality altogether abandoned. Once you see it through that lens, everything going on becomes very clear.

You see, this is why the thing irritates Putin so! Insults sink into the innards and inflict deep pains when they are essentially true. This is such an insult.

NATO, in my opinion wanted to draw Russia out into this war for the sole purpose of destroying it economically and deflate its morale. The fight is not about the freedom of Ukraine to choose it’s friends, but about a old aim to put Putin’s Russia down. This kind of discrimination is common among human beings as a price to pay for having no allies and friends and for going it all alone.

Putin should long ago have made Ukraine a friend and an ally. He should have polished the CIS and encouraged its constituent states. Rather he chose the paths of muscle flexing, boasting at every opportunity that he has nuclear bombs. That is a wrong approach. What was he looking at before all his neighbors became his enemies? Russia has not lived well and it is paying the price.

Instead of seeking to build alliances and strengthen its economy, Russia under Putin went about in a blind rage, motivated by bitterness about the destruction of the Soviet Union. Putin’s situation and mindset is the type Yoruba describe in their saying, ‘Anjuwọ́n ò ṣeé wí l’ẹ́jọ́, ìjà ìlara ò tán bọ̀rọ̀. (Please help translate that)! Putin is still bitter about how Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa killed Russians prodigiously, he still feels the humiliation and tragedy his nation suffered in WWII before the tide turned. Worst of all, he badly feels the humiliation with which the USSR ended. He became a taxi driver in the wake of that incident and the accompanying economic collapse in 1992. Those angers are his motivations.

Never allow envy and jealousy be your motivation for aiming high life. This is why Putin went for developing weapons, not friends or an economy.

The old USSR was dismantled by the West without firing a shot. What they waged was an economic warfare. We are back to that age of 1975 to 1991 again and Russia will bleed out its economy on this.

There is a difference, however, and this is also clear to Putin. The man at the helms this time around is not the urbane Milkhai Gorbachev, but Vladimir Putin, an angry and itchy man that has solemnly decided to attack the west with nuclear weapons if pushed to the wall. And I hope Western leaders have realized this terrible fact. Putin is not playing and he is totally unable to handle humiliation. He will launch nuclear weapons of he sees the end has come for him.

But realize too that the West will not be bullied. They won’t flinch even with Putin’s finger on the red button. The last thing the West will do is to appease him 73 years after Chamberlain and after 73 years of developing the instincts of their citizens in matters of freedom and standing up to bullies. The West thoroughly understands war and the dynamics of fear better than that. It’s philosophy is also not so clingy that death means a deal bigger than ideology and principle to it.

This is where my ideas for peace breaks down completely and I have to admit that I don’t know what can be done at this point to rescue the situation.

Evidently NATO intends to fund and fuel the Ukrainian Resistance after the formal fall of the country. Russia will start having its own Fallujah and Kandahar and all those nightmarish things will start happening to its troops in Ukraine. It will draft in more troops and more materiel, but things will not improve in the field. It’s economy will wobble and domestic woes will mount. From that point onwards several leaks will be sprung in its systems and the next steps are all sorts of unpredictable havoc.