Two days ago the world watched with entirely undeserved anticipation the changing of the guard in Washington’s stately pleasure dome, the capitol rotunda. Oaths were pronounced and three reverends — a Jew, a Protestant and a Catholic — intoned their blessings, quite in line with the original Latin meaning of “inauguration”, which is a search for signs of divine approval. But what is there to approve? To be sure, the US banana republic is still in business, exhibiting its essential trait of bipolar politics: Trump immediately cancelled a raft of Biden’s executive orders just as Biden had done with his.

In some ways this flip is in a healthier direction. Proclaiming that humanity consists of just two sexes (the term “gender” should be outlawed altogether) is good, but, as the speaker of the Russian parliament poigniantly observed, it won’t restore the testicles of those who had them snipped, as had happened with Elon Musk’s son, making Musk justifiably incensed. However, given the bipolar condition of the country, just this commonsense pronouncement is likely to lead to a great deal of strife and litigation, generating a lot of heat and little light.

Other Trumpian initiatives seem doomed from the start.

• Expelling millions of illegal aliens while simultaneously gutting the federal agencies and picking a fight with narcocartels is not something that has ever been attempted, successfully or otherwise, and there is no reason to think that the venture will end well.

• The “Drill, baby, drill!” mantra with regard to oil and gas also seems rather misguided, given that most of what’s left is shale and appears to have peaked last year for geological reasons. Attempting to breathe new life into the Permian shale patch will likely amount to burning money.

• It is also unclear what, if any, qualified economic advice Trump is getting. His proposed tariffs on everyone and everything imported will be nothing less than a direct tax on US businesses and consumers and will inevitably result in higher inflation.

• And it certainly does not augur well that the US Treasury is running out of money, poised to stop paying out federal pensions as a stopgap measure, and that Trump faces a legislative battle to raise the federal debt limit as almost the first order of business.

But while these are all chronic illnesses of a tired old empire that are not immediately terminal, there is also a massive inflammation in the form of a hot war in the former Ukraine. In spite of hundreds of billions of dollars of support thrown in the general direction of the Kiev regime, that war is being lost. What’s more, Russia is winning the war of attrition against not just the Ukraine, but against all of NATO, which is now out of options for preventing an outright Russian victory. And while Trump has backed away from his initial hyperbolic promise of ending the conflict in the former Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office, his latest order is to negotiate an end to it within 100 days.

The conflict will end in Russian victory sooner or later, but sooner would certainly be better. The Russians can keep this up practically forever while the Ukrainian side is gradually running out of men who can fight and not so gradually out of men who are willing to fight. In rough numbers, in the course of the Special Military Operation the Ukrainian side has run through half of their draft age males while Russia has run through 0.5% of its.

Ending the conflict within a 100 days — in time for the 80th anniversary of Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany — is a worthy goal. It would be a wonderful spectacle to see Ukrainian Nazi flags thrown on the ground during the parade on Red Square on May 9, just as was done with German Nazi flags during the victory parade on June 24, 1945. Everyone, including most of the people in the former Ukraine, would cheer. It would symbolize the end of their 25-year-long nationalist nightmare and the healing would begin.

Putin has recently proposed what is to be done with the territory of the former Ukraine. He pointed out that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic had been formed willy-nilly out of bits of other national territories: mostly Russian ones, but also Polish, Hungarian and Romanian. The following map is accurate except that the section labeled “Украина” is entirely gratuitous. That is actually Malorossiya — Russian territory for many centuries.

Just like a child’s Lego creation left on the living room floor that you stepped on barefoot on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, it should come apart the same way it came together:

• Variously named Lvov/Lwów/Lemberg rejoins Poland, as does Rovno.

• South Bessarabia and North Bukovina go back to Romania

• Transcarpathia goes back to Hungary

• The rest once again becomes Russia

This plan seems quite practical because everyone except some rather unloved Ukrainian Nazis gets something they want. The EU and NATO grow a tiny bit; Poland, Romania and Hungary gain territory and international stature as winners of the Ukrainian conflict. Russia regains the territory it accidentally lost in the collapse of the USSR. And Trump gets to walk away from “Biden’s Ukraine Disaster” having fulfilled a major campaign promise.

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What, in practical terms, does Trump have to do to make all of this happen? He doesn’t have to do anything! Specifically, he doesn’t have to send any more money or weapons to the Kiev regime and it will fold up like a folding chair in a church basement. But it would help if he said a few things, such as “Zelensky is not the president, his term expired last May” and “There is nobody for us to talk to in Kiev.” Next, Trump could wash his hands of the entire Ukrainian mess: “I told Putin, you broke it, you fix it.” Here is what the result would look like:

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Mariupol two years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U6gtfe-lBQ

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Mariupol today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scSDknXFhMo