This War Is Neither Russian Nor Ukrainian: It Is a Slaughter of Both, Orchestrated by Western Sanctimony Disguised as Democracy
By Scott Ortkiese | July 3, 2026 | so@throughlinesynthesis.com
Introduction
The loudest advocates of this war continue to market themselves as guardians of democracy, defenders of sovereignty, and custodians of civilization. They are nothing of the sort. They are the public relations arm of a transatlantic war machine whose tentacles run through Washington, London, and Brussels, feeding think tanks, arms contractors, intelligence networks, media platforms, political careers, and a permanent class of moral exhibitionists who call escalation virtue and negotiation betrayal.
Give peace a chance.
Ukraine entered this war with a population of roughly 44 million people. It now has somewhere between 28 and 29 million living on territory under Kyiv’s control, depending on how you count refugees, occupied regions, and the dead. That is not resilience. That is a country losing a third of its people in a single historical convulsion. A nation that once peaked around 52 million under the Soviet Union has been transformed into a depopulated frontier, and the trend line is not bending back up.
The catastrophe is quantifiable. Deaths now run at roughly three times the number of births. Recent data show hundreds of thousands of deaths per year against fewer than two hundred thousand births, with a fertility rate hovering around 0.7 children per woman, one of the lowest ever recorded anywhere. The workforce has shrunk by millions. Millions more have fled, with roughly 5 to 6 million registered abroad and serious demographers warning of a second wave toward Germany, Poland, and France as the war drags on and reconstruction money fails to appear. The cohort that matters most for war, men under 30, was under five million before the invasion. It has been chewed up for three years straight. The state has responded by lowering conscription ages, extending service obligations, drafting prisoners, and pulling in men in their forties and fifties. The most attractive job applicant in Ukraine in 2026 is a man older than sixty, for the simple reason that he cannot be mobilized.
This is what the voices of democracy in Washington, London, Brussels, and Tallinn call bravery. They have turned Ukraine into a demographic meat grinder and call it European values.
The same people howl down anyone who suggests peace. They scream appeasement at anyone who uses the word neutrality. They paint Putin as Hitler, Russia as a metaphysical evil, and NATO as the holy shield of civilization. But look at what their project has actually done. Ukraine’s economy shrank by almost a third in 2022, the worst contraction in its history. Whatever growth came after has been financed by Western transfers, not production. The defense sector eats a grotesque share of GDP. Military spending burns through billions per month. The IMF’s own projections show a financing gap over the coming years in the hundreds of billions, with public debt exploding from under half of GDP before the war to well over 100 percent and rising toward the 130 to 140 percent range.
This is not investment in democracy. It is turning Ukraine into a debt colony. Reconstruction needs are estimated in the hundreds of billions, multiple times pre war GDP, while fifteen thermal power plants have been damaged or destroyed and large chunks of industrial capacity in the Donbas and south are either under Russian control or rubble. Ukrainians live with rolling blackouts, wrecked infrastructure, and a destroyed industrial base, while Western officials pose for cameras announcing packages that barely keep the lights on. The country does not have a credible path to debt sustainability, let alone prosperity, without peace and a Marshall scale reconstruction that nobody in Washington or Brussels is actually guaranteeing.
Meanwhile, the sanctimonious Atlanticist chorus stands on conference stages and intones, Glory to Ukraine.
The truth, laid bare by Realist scholars who have been systematically blacked out of mainstream coverage, is that this war was not an inexplicable outburst of Russian madness. It was engineered. John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Richard Sakwa, and others have been saying for years that pushing NATO right up against Russia’s borders and openly promising membership to Ukraine and Georgia was a provocation that every serious Russian political actor regarded as existential. James Baker’s not one inch eastward assurance to Gorbachev was violated almost immediately. From the 1990s onward, the alliance crept east, wave after wave, until by 2008 it formally declared that Ukraine and Georgia will become members. At the same time, Washington was tearing up the security architecture, walking out of the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, abandoning the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and shredding the JCPOA with Iran in 2017.
William Burns, then United States ambassador in Moscow, wrote the now famous Nyet Means Nyet cable literally warning that NATO membership for Ukraine was viewed as an existential threat by the entire Russian political class, not just Putin. Later, as CIA director, he urged dismissing Russian warnings as bluff. That is not defending democracy. It is baiting a nuclear power while pretending red lines do not exist.
The military industrial complex sits at the center of this entire machine. In Washington it funds the think tanks that produce the talking points, staffs the national security bureaucracy, and recycles generals, lobbyists, congressional aides, and defense executives through a single revolving door. In London it wraps geostrategic adventurism in Churchill cosplay and moral vanity, sending men like Boris Johnson to sabotage peace while the British security establishment and its media auxiliaries frame endless war as courage. In Brussels it cloaks procurement boondoggles, sanctions theater, and anti Russian escalation in the language of European unity and democratic virtue. The same tentacles touch the press, the consultancies, the NGOs, the Atlanticist conferences, and the political class that feeds off them. Ukraine is not the beneficiary of this system. Ukraine is the raw material.
The 2014 coup in Kyiv was not an organic flowering of democratic will. It was shaped in detail by Victoria Nuland and her Neocon cohort. Nuland and ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt were caught on tape discussing who would lead the next government before the elected president had fallen. Yats is the guy, she said of Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Fuck the EU, she added when Brussels tried to broker compromise. Yanukovych, a corrupt but elected leader pursuing neutrality that most Ukrainians told pollsters they preferred, was pushed out, and Nuland’s guy was in. The post Maidan government empowered ethnonationalists, suppressed Russophone political representation in the east and south, and set Ukraine on a collision course with Moscow under the protective umbrella of NATO rhetoric.
From there, the script wrote itself. Civil war in Donbas. The annexation of Crimea. Minsk agreements treated as a delaying tactic to rearm Ukraine, as Merkel and Hollande later admitted. All of this was sold to Western publics as a morality play, democracy versus dictatorship, light versus dark. In reality, it was the incremental construction of a forward operating platform aimed at Russia, using Ukrainian territory and bodies as expendable assets.
The most obscene moment in this entire saga came in April 2022, in Istanbul. Within days of Russia’s special military operation, Zelensky signaled openness to neutrality. Erdogan convened talks. Turkey and other mediators report that by late March the outlines of a deal were on the table. Ukraine renounces NATO membership and accepts neutrality. Russia withdraws its forces. The war ends. Ukraine’s lead negotiator, Davyd Arakhamia, later confirmed publicly that Russia was prepared to end the war on those terms.
Then Boris Johnson arrived in Kyiv.
He flew in unannounced on April 9 and told Zelensky not to sign anything. Keep fighting, he said. The West will give you money and weapons for as long as it takes. The preliminary Istanbul framework died that afternoon. Russia pulled back from Kyiv as a gesture of good faith. Ukraine walked away from neutrality and peace. Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis has since confirmed that the agreement was effectively concluded before Johnson killed it. Israeli and Turkish mediators say the same. Sachs flew to Ankara and summed up the Western position in one brutal line, we do not have your front, you are all going to die, but we got your back.
In other words, they would let Ukraine bleed for Western strategy, but they would not share the risk.
Since Istanbul, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died. Ukraine has lost more territory, more industry, more young men, more families, more power stations. The demographic collapse has accelerated. The debt spiral has tightened. Every month has made the terms any future peace can offer Kyiv worse than what was on the table in April 2022. Neutral, sovereign, largely intact Ukraine was traded for endless war on someone else’s geopolitical timetable.
This was not forced on Ukraine by Russia. It was chosen by Zelensky and his patrons.
Volodymyr Zelensky ran on a platform of peace in Donbas, winning more than seventy percent of the vote. Once in office, he was pulled between Washington’s Neocon establishment, which viewed any settlement as unacceptable appeasement, and the Azov aligned ultranationalists who threatened him politically and physically if he compromised. He chose them. He has banned opposition parties, tightened control over media, gone to war with his own anti corruption institutions, and presided over scandals that even the Atlantic Council calls the biggest corruption case of his presidency. The Pandora Papers show him entangled in offshore vehicles buying London property, funded via oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky’s networks. His former press secretary describes him as a narcissist and a personal obstacle to peace. He knows that if the war ends, there will be a reckoning he may not survive. The war, for Zelensky, is safer than peace.
Around him, the warmongers have done their work. Victoria Nuland, wife of Project for the New American Century co founder Robert Kagan, was the through line from the Orange Revolution to the 2014 coup to blocking Istanbul. Boris Johnson swooped in, killed the best peace offer Ukraine will ever see, and went home to collect donations. Kaja Kallas, now running European Union foreign policy, wraps personal anti Russian animus in rhetoric about values and pushes escalation after escalation, long range missiles, drones, deeper NATO operational involvement. The CIA and Western intelligence services help plan strikes deep inside Russia while maintaining the polite fiction that they are just Ukrainian operations.
From Moscow’s perspective, and from any sober Realist lens, this is an existential fight over security, not a morality play. The West is openly arming Ukraine to attack Russian territory, conducting reconnaissance from NATO platforms, and talking casually about drones and missile strikes that bring the war home to Russia. European leaders boast about building up their militaries and preparing for war with Russia in the next decade. American and European politicians treat Article 5 as a magic talisman that will somehow prevent Moscow from ever striking back at NATO states, no matter how far they escalate support for attacks on Russia.
Mearsheimer and Sergei Karaganov have spelled out where this logic leads. If Russia cannot establish credible red lines with the West by conventional means, pressure builds for one deeply dangerous step, to strike targets in Europe, first with conventional weapons, then potentially with nuclear ones, to force recognition of those red lines. Dmitry Peskov has started talking openly about Russia’s nuclear deterrent as the only ace in the hole. Putin consistently describes the situation as the West waging war on Russia through Ukraine. This is not an eccentric fringe view. It is the mainstream in Moscow.
The people who accuse anyone of appeasing Putin when calling for peace are the same people who are steadily walking the world toward this cliff.
They do not live in Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, or Dnipro. Their children are not being conscripted at fifty. Their cities are not going dark because fifteen thermal plants have been cratered. Their future is not 137 percent debt to GDP, a fertility rate below one, and a shrinking, traumatized population. They sit in Washington think tanks, Brussels conference halls, London studios, and Tallinn offices, praising Ukrainian courage and European unity while they expend Ukrainian lives to prove a point about Western credibility.
They are not defending democracy. They are defending their own reputations, their own sunk costs, and their own institutional prestige.
So yes, give peace a chance.
Not because Putin is a saint. Not because Russia is beyond criticism. But because the actual, measurable cost of this war is being borne by Ukrainians whose country is being erased in real time, demographically, economically, and socially, while Neocons and Atlanticists posture as guardians of civilization. Because the only realistic way to prevent further Ukrainian collapse and a broader European catastrophe is to return to what was on the table in Istanbul, neutrality, security guarantees, and a negotiated settlement that accepts what everyone in serious circles already knows. Ukraine cannot win this war, and pretending otherwise is a lie paid for in Ukrainian blood.
The enemies of peace are not in Moscow. They are in the comfortable offices where fight to the last Ukrainian is a strategic concept, not a moral abomination.
Related reading
- Not This Time: Why the Global South Refused to Play Its Assigned Role in Washington’s War Against Russia
- Why Russia’s Future Looks Less Precarious Than Washington’s
- Murder by War: You Voted for Peace, but Their Money Said War. The Money Always Wins.
- The Self-Inflicted Collapse: How Trump Handed the World to Everyone Else
