While it is generally quite clear when it is time to start writing a eulogy for an individual — no heartbeat, breath not fogging a mirror — nothing is so clear when it comes to countries. Especially if the country in question is the second-largest in all of Europe — the European subcontinent, that is — second after Russia. Here, various sorts of experts may disagree. Demographers may be quite sure that the Ukraine is dead: the death rate is three times the birth rate. Economists may be quite sure as well: the Soviet-legacy mines, steel mills and factories have been destroyed; the agrarian sector has been dealt a death blow by having its access to Black Sea ports cut off. But sociologists and political scientists may still beg to differ.

And then there are all the people who are addicted to political trivia. Who is more mad: is Trump more mad at Zelensky or is Zelensky more mad at Putin? People who concern themselves with such questions should watch some Mexican or Brazilian soap operas instead. To find out what is really happening or is going to be happening, one has to think not about personalities but about concepts.

It may be too early to call the Ukraine’s exact time of death — a purely technical issue — but beyond such details it is becoming quite clear that the Ukraine, as a concept, is no longer grounded in reality. What was once the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, an industrial powerhouse that matched Germany, is now a collection of vaguely defined territories in various states of disruption, dissolution and distress. Few things are certain, but it is an absolute certainty that a future in which the Ukraine is a unified nation-state will not be allowed to exist. Moreover, it could be argued that it never quite existed at all. It went from being a part of the Russian Empire, to being part of the USSR, to being an internally conflicted, farcical attempt at forming a nation-state, to something quite monstrous. If it doesn’t self-destruct, will have to be destroyed.

The former Ukraine has been transformed into something far worse than a mere territory with degraded, marginal views on life; it has been fashioned into an anti-Russian “biodrone.” In theory, it could have served as a neutral buffer — a bridge between east and west and a crossroads, collecting tolls from all of its neighbors from the generous flow of trade. Instead, it has been turned into a weapon against Russia — not an ally of the West, but rather an expendable tool. The three-hundred-year-old shared mental and spiritual space composed of Russians, Malorussians, Belarusians, Jews, Greeks and other ethnic groups has been destroyed. It was a space rooted in the Russian language, in Christian Orthodox faith, in Russian literature, in numerous family ties which spanned a huge territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean, on a common history going back a millennium and a wealth of shared experience.

The ancestors of today’s Ukrainians inhabited a fringe (that, by the way, is the meaning of the word “ukraina” or “orkaina”) of a single civilizational center within a unified framework of meaning. But then came a rupture: the desire to be with the West, to be like the West. This was not a matter of choosing an identity, but of cultivating a delusion — a mental glitch of self-deception — because Western European countries have always viewed the Ukraine not as an equal or an autonomous subject, but as a resource to plunder and a weapon to use against Russia; and, when it came to invading Russia, as a stepping stone toward Moscow. Yet, this delusion proved more powerful than reality, enslaving and corrupting the minds of two full generations of Ukrainians.

Ukrainians — regardless of their ethnicity — have been turned into biodrones. A biodrone is not merely someone who has lost their memory; it is someone whose memory has been replaced — excised and substituted with an alien one. Such a person sincerely hates what once constituted his own identity while faithfully serving the very forces that destroyed it. This is not a cynical traitor who knows exactly what he is doing; rather, it is a sincere adherent of an external agenda, genuinely convinced that it is his own, independent choice. This is precisely why it is impossible to reach an understanding with a biodrone by appealing to a shared history. For him, that history no longer exists. It has been overwritten with a new, fake history.

Being turned into a biodrone is an irreversible process. While three centuries of a shared civilizational space could be erased in just thirty years, restoring it is a task that would span generations — if that can ever be done at all. A biodrone cannot be returned to his original form through reasoned argument. Such a mental reset can only be achieved through shock treatment — if at all. It would take the complete and forceful refutation of everything he believed. But few biodrones have the mental fortitude to accept the truth of their predicament: that neither Western Europe, nor Russia would ever accept them while their own country is quickly disappearing right from under their feet. But until that moment arrives — if it ever does — the territory of the former Ukraine will continue to serve as the stomping ground of a herd of biodrones — even after the instigators of this travesty have long lost interest in it and perhaps have even come to regret ever having started it.

The former Ukraine was always a buffer zone. But it can not continue in that role. Once it has been used as a staging ground for an attack on Russia, it set in motion a series of developments by which Russia provides for its own survival. In facing an existential threat — the West’s stated goal was to deal Russia a “strategic defeat” — Russia could no longer afford to leave the Ukraine as a buffer zone floundering between east and west. It had to be ground down to nothing. In the heat of an existential confrontation, any such ambiguously defined zone inevitably becomes either a staging ground for an attack by the enemy or an obstacle for Russia’s counterattack. Both of these are eventualities which Russia considers unacceptable.

At the time of its independence on August 24, 1991, the former Ukraine was sworn to a neutral, non-nuclear, non-bloc status. Its borders with the Russian Federation were defined by the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership, which was signed on May 31, 1997. These were previously internal administrative borders within the USSR which do not automatically carry over to international law. The Ukrainian government allowed that treaty to expire on March 31, 2019. From that date on, the borders between the Ukraine and Russia no longer had any legally valid definition.

The former Ukraine negated its pledge to neutrality and non-bloc status on February 7, 2019, when it added the goals of NATO and EU memberships to the Ukrainian constitution. Thus, the conditions on which the Russian Federation, as the legal successor of the USSR, granted sovereignty to the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic have been violated, meaning that, from the point of view of Russian law, Ukrainian sovereignty is now null and void. On the other hand, although NATO and the EU would never accept the former Ukraine as a member, nor are they willing to return the former Ukraine to Russia to have it reset to factory settings, if such a reset were even theoretically feasible.

Given this simple logic, neutrality becomes a luxury that this former buffer zone will never be permitted to enjoy again. Ukraine has found itself precisely at this juncture: caught between two conflicting systems, neither of which, at this moment of acute tension, could allow it to make its own decisions. The West has treated it as an expendable biodrone, pumping it full of weaponry, ideology, loans, and promises — only to leave it to absorb the full force of the blow when the actual conflict erupted. Russia, compelled to defend its own sovereignty and the Russian people who found themselves on notionally Ukrainian territory and who pledged allegiance to Russia, could not spare this territory either.

A buffer that has been transformed into a weapon ceases to be a buffer and becomes a battlefield. Consequently, instead of the European future it had been falsely promised, the former Ukraine faced the only outcome that could logically follow: depopulation, economic ruin, loss of territory, millions of refugees, and an entire generation raised in — and capable of nothing but — hatred of all things Russian. This is not a moral judgment; it is a logically inevitable outcome. Once the population of a buffer zone is converted into a collection of biodrones, it is doomed. It is in no-one’s interest to preserve it. Each side in the conflict seeks to destroy it, either in attack or in self-defense.

The situation that formed around the former Ukraine by 2022 — and which reached its definitive form by the autumn of 2026 — was not the result of a single decision, a unified strategy, or a grand conspiracy; rather, it was the inevitable cumulative effect of actions by numerous actors. At every level — from global geopolitical centers down to local officials and regional security operatives — these actors pursued their own tactical agendas, driven by their own strategies for power and profit. Major players integrated Ukraine into schemes of containment or expansion; mid-level actors used it for influence and personal enrichment; smaller players saw it as a means for survival or extortion.

No one consciously set out to engineer a full-blown fiasco. The full-blown fiasco developed organically, as thousands of tactical decisions converged and reinforced one another. By 2022, this system had built up sufficient momentum that could no longer be halted by negotiations, treaties, or regime changes. By autumn of 2026, it had become abundantly clear: for Russia, there was no other option but a complete, fundamental overhaul of this territory, its people, and its governance. This may sound horrific, but any other approach would risk a recurrence of the current conflict. Any attempt to preserve the former Ukraine in its previous form — as a separate state with its separate, artificial identity, its existing incorrigibly corrupt elites, its current pro-Western orientation, and its falsified historical memory — would mean that, in five, ten, or twenty years, the Ukie-Nazi monster would come out of hibernation and the vicious cycle would repeat. A biodrone cannot be reformed — it can only be dismantled.

This is not a choice based on personal sympathies; it is a choice dictated by the survival logic of the large-scale system known as the Russian world. It has entered a phase of existential confrontation. It cannot afford to leave a zone on its flank that is incurably antagonistic to it — a zone that has already been used as a weapon against it more than once. Neutrality is impossible: it does conform with the strategic objectives of either side. What is required is a total reformatting: a shift in identity, memory, elites, economic ties, and allegiance.

This would not be done out of malice, but as a systemic necessity. By the autumn of 2026, for the Russian state this conclusion had ceased to be a matter of choice and had become a cold, calculated necessity. All other alternatives — freezing the conflict, partition, neutral status, or regime change — carry a high risk of recurrence. Therefore, only reformatting remains, with all the harrowing consequences that such a process inevitably entails. The logic of Russia’s national survival leaves no other choice. And this is the most chilling observation one can make: the former Ukraine will be worn down to nothing not because anyone intended for this to happen, but because, given the circumstances, it could not be otherwise.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s formula — “we will defeat Russia at the expense of Russia, using Ukraine” — is a distillation of the strategy that permeates his writings and has shaped the West’s actions for decades. He explicitly advocated supporting “Russophobic forces” across the post-Soviet space — most notably in the former Ukraine — to prevent Russia from re-emerging as a great power. He argued that “if Russia loses Ukraine, it can never again be an empire.” This was his strategic objective, and it became embedded in the minds of individuals and the policies of institutions.

In this way of thinking, Ukraine was neither an ally nor a partner. It was expendable material — a resource, a staging ground, a weapon. Its population was not seen as a historical nation to be treated as an equal, but as mere biomass to be used to harass Russia. Thus, it never received what most allies typically expect: security guarantees, economic stability, and respect for its national interests. Instead, it has been pumped full of weapons, money, and propaganda — everything a biodrone requires to carry out its assigned task — and nothing else.

The process of fashioning the former Ukraine into a biodrone started with the individual. Individuals’ consciousness provided the environment in which parasitic programs were run, reinforced by positive emotions. The more intense this process, the more pathological the consciousness became. The brain’s neural architecture became thoroughly imprinted with parasitic programs — ultimately producing a psychopath or a schizoid individual. The same phenomenon occurred within Ukrainian society as a whole. Each person based their actions on self-interest. Profit-seeking is a mechanism that operates in the same way at the level of the individual and at the level of entire populations.

A parasitic program does not require malicious intent; it only requires repetition, reinforcement, and the promise of personal gain. The longer it runs, the more deeply embedded it becomes — first in individual consciousnesses, then in public institutions, and eventually across entire populations. Sustained positive reinforcement completes the conditioning: if every participant consistently receives their share of money, status and a sense of belonging, then eventually they all lose the ability to understand that they are merely executing someone else’s program.

On a societal level, this process scales up well: everyone forms their reality out of self-interest and contributes to a collective architecture of egotistical profit-seeking that gradually becomes pathological at the level of the entire system. The more intense the reinforcement, the deeper the psychosis. The only way to break the loop is to halt the reinforcement — yet this is precisely what the system cannot do on its own, because every single participant has a vested interest in its continuation. The parasitic program cannot be eliminated from within — only through an external shock, a collapse, and a total reset.

This external shock can come from just two sources. Russia can continue pounding into rubble what’s left of the former Ukraine’s industrial infrastructure — most of it part of the Soviet legacy — until nothing is left. Or the European Union, the United States and assorted allies can cut off support. Either way, the territory of the former Ukraine will be rendered largely uninhabitable, triggering a flood of over ten million refugees streaming toward the European Union. Obviously, none of the EU countries are particularly looking forward to this development — if anyone there can actually see it coming.

Few people in Russia look forward to this development either. Russia has consistently tried to pursue peace in the former Ukraine, as attested by an entire series of failed peace agreements. There was Minsk 1, signed on September 5, 2014. Then there was Minsk 2, signed on February 12, 2015. Then there were the Istanbul peace talks of March 29–30, 2022. Then there was the Istanbul Grain Deal of July 22, 2022. Finally, there was the U.S.–Russia summit in Anchorage, Alaska in August 15, 2025. Each and every one of these peace initiatives was sabotaged by the West. Thus, Russia has been given no choice but to solve the Ukrainian biodrone problem through military means.

Few in Europe can come to terms with this reality. It is far more comforting for them to wallow in self-delusion. Yes, dealing Russia a strategic defeat is no longer their stated objective. It now sounds far too ridiculous, given the facts on the ground. The new objective is something they call “containment”. Russia can’t be persuaded to invade any territory beyond the former Ukraine and would only counterattack in retaliation, but it is still somehow a threat. It has to be — because why else would the Ukraine ever be worth the money being spent on it?

Thus, Europe has managed to catch the Ukrainian disease: it has entered the same pathological feedback loop as its Ukrainian biodrones. An unworkable, self-defeating strategy, if given sufficient positive reinforcement, becomes self-perpetuating, demanding ever-greater investment just to sustain its own existence, but cutting off support becomes equivalent to an admission of defeat and surrender, which are unthinkable. But the money is running out.

The United States seems closer to grasping the consequences of continuing with this unworkable strategy. There is an emerging understanding that the parasitic loop has begun to work against them. But exiting the game without losing face or writing off the entire investment is politically too costly. They want to get out — but without losing what they have already invested. The U.S. still retains some room for maneuver, as it sits at the center of the loop and has been able to shift some of the costs onto the periphery. Yet, even for them, the margin of resilience is not infinite. The U.S. will try to smear out this fiasco in time, counting on the ability of Americans to forget what they never knew — such as where the former Ukraine is, or was, on a map.

But the EU, its territory being contiguous with that of the former Ukraine, does not have this luxury. It is also far less unified: each EU state has its own interests, obligations, and investments in the Ukrainian project. They all want the same thing as the U.S.: to exit without losing their investments, to save face, and to avoid being forced to admit defeat. But their elites have become inextricably fused with the Ukrainian biodrone project, and public opinion has been thoroughly polluted with Russophobia.

There is only one way out: to cut all support. Yet, this is precisely what the West cannot do because every participant within it has a vested interest in continuing the biodrone project. All that remains is the inevitable: money will run out, refugees will flood in, security will collapse and a banquet of consequences will ensue.