Which is the largest country in Europe? If you said “France,” or “Germany,” then you are quite wrong. You see, the term “Europe” is a geographic designation, not a political one, and the European subcontinent joins the Asian subcontinent at the Ural Mountains in Russia. Much of Russian territory is in Asia, not Europe, but just the European part of Russia is close to four million square kilometers, leaving France, the largest country in Western Europe, at just 544 thousand square kilometers, pathetically far behind. It is not even the second-largest country in Europe, since that would be the former Ukraine, at 603,549 km². But wait, hasn’t the former Ukraine shrunk a bit over the past decade? Oh yes, minus Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson, it is now only about 450,111 square kilometers, well behind France. Congratulations, France! You are now the second-largest country in Europe (after Russia). Meanwhile, the former Ukraine is now smaller than not only France but also Spain (at 506,000 km2).

When a country’s territory shrinks by a quarter, that is a rather significant indicator of its internal collapse, but not the only one. There is also population and economy. In terms of population, it has deceased from 52 million people at independence in 1991 to somewhere between 28 to 31 million today, including 6 million internal displaced persons. This is official data, but unofficial consensus estimates put it as low as 18 million because Ukrainian government statistics do not accurately record the number of Ukrainians living abroad at any one time, the number of dead Ukrainian soldiers rotting in the fields and the forests, the number of Ukrainians who escaped by walking across mountains or swimming across rivers, etc. This makes the former Ukraine the absolute winner in the demographic contraction category in modern history, with as much as a 45% population loss since peak, with Bulgaria (at minus 28%) and the Baltics (at around minus 25%) taking the silver and the bronze.

So much for demographics; but what about the economy? If you subtract the artificial economic demand generated by international grants and emergency budgetary cash, the former Ukraine’s real, inflation-adjusted, self-sustaining economic output has effectively halved since 1991. The Ukraine ranks 130th in the world by nominal GDP per capita and sits at the very bottom of Europe by almost all major wealth metrics.

But this was before the closure of the Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, which has occurred over the past two weeks as a result of Russia’s tit-for-tat response to Ukrainian attacks on Russian shipping and port facilities. The maritime ports were responsible for 90% of the Ukraine’s heavy commodity exports such as grain, cooking oil and iron ore. The loss of the ports has cut off approximately $1 billion USD per month in export revenue. At the same time, the loss of imports of manufactured goods and consumer products (which the Ukraine can no longer produce) causes shortages and drives up inflation. The Ukrainian state’s continued existence is now entirely predicated on the continuation of foreign aid. In turn, actual disbursed financial and humanitarian aid to keep the Ukrainian state’s budget afloat collapsed to less than one-fifth of its 2025 average. Even then, much of this aid was explicitly financed using interest generated from immobilized Russian central bank funds — an action that equates to outright theft in the eyes of much of the world.

Such official, public, quantified information has a certain anodyne quality to it; it tells us what collapse looks like, but doesn’t allow us to experience what it feels like on the inside. It is not worth asking what drives one’s interest in such matters — a penchant for the macabre, perhaps, or a desire to derive some vicarious thrill from the misfortunes of others through mental self-flagellation? I would have been happy to leave such questions as an exercise for the reader, but isn’t the reader in some way implicated in this unfolding humanitarian disaster? After all, isn’t the reader part of some nominally democratic polity that has, acting from both east and west, made the Ukraine into the disaster it now is? And perhaps it would be a soul-saving exercise for the reader to come up with a more soul-searching response to it than just “Oops!”?

The Ukraine got the proverbial “raw deal” from both the east and the west. From the east, the combination of traitorous Gorbachev and drunk president Yeltsin cut the Ukraine adrift in a hostile world, then all but ignored it while wrestling with “Russian mafia,” which it allowed to get so far out of hand that at one point the United States declared it to be a threat to its national security. Meanwhile, from the west, there played a never-ending siren song: “You can join us! You can join NATO! You can join the EU!” These were either lies, or the European Union is yet to be sufficiently Ukrainianized and perhaps it too should look forward to loss of territory, loss of population and economic collapse.

Last but not least, there was the Ukraine’s own thoroughly rotten core: some initially small number of political opportunists who thought that they could carve out a position for themselves by claiming that “The Ukraine is not Russia.” No, it is just a bunch of people who speak Russian, are Russian Orthodox, read Russian books and sing Russian songs, have lots of Russian relatives and friends, are genetically indistinguishable from Russians and, generally, are (were) and integral part of the largest country in Europe.

But they are not Russian, don’t you see? If you declare them to not be Russian, then all they have left is some village dialects (incompetently concocted by amateur linguists into a fake national language), some embroidery, a few folk songs and dances and endless arguments over whether Ukrainian borscht is distinct from Russian borscht. This all may seem rather minor, but what it amounted to is a loss of identity. “Not Russian” is not a valid identity because a valid identity cannot be derived through negation. And what makes it a major problem is that a loss of identity is psychologically very unhealthy, both for individuals and for communities and countries. Deprived of their normal, healthy, organic identity, people tend to hallucinate an abnormal, unhealthy, morbid one. The following excerpt “from the field” should give you an idea of what that looks like.

First, here is a puzzle. Ukrainian soldiers fight to the last and almost never surrender. Yet they can’t counterattack. To counterattack, there are Nazis and all sorts of private military companies. But the defensive resilience of Ukrainian raw recruits is nothing short of astonishing. How does this happen? Ukrainian citizens are grabbed off the streets, brutally beaten, treated like bio-trash, given weapons, and instantly transformed into steadfast tin soldiers. They face death with equanimity, and none of them ever thinks of killing their tormentors. The recruiters beat them up, even break a few ribs, and a week later a recruit cheerfully reports from some trench on the frontline that he is repelling aggression. This is a fairly common occurrence. Something’s wrong with this picture!

The Ukrainian soldiers are asocial. They hate their officers, each other and the Russians, and if a fellow-soldier dies, that is his own personal problem. No one collects the bodies, because they don’t matter. They are just allowed to litter the landscape. The most anyone will do is lift the corpses out of the trenches and throw them in the bushes to make room. Of those who escape from the front and run away home, many want to return to the trenches, because, paradoxically, they claim that “It was good there.” This is quite abnormal. Normal people are not drawn to life in the trenches; they accept it out of a sense of duty. They don’t sit in trenches next to people they hate and some rotting corpses… and have a good time!

What is this war for? What will happen after it ends? These questions are not raised at the level of the state, the society or the Ukrainian soldier. The Ukrainian soldier cares about these questions least of all.

Why are there so many drug addicts and drooling idiots locked up at the recruitment centers and at the front? Drug addicts and drooling idiots are not specifically targeted by recruitment officers who roam Ukrainian neighborhoods looking for cannon fodder, so why do those who are rounded up end up like this? Why are there never any riots in the lockups at the recruitment centers? The answer is that they are all drugged into submission.

Poland has developed an entire industry for the production of synthetic drugs. All reasonably proficient synthetic chemists in Kharkov work for the Americans in the drug testing center, testing the effects of, supposedly, topical antiseptics. They are paid huge salaries and are given total exemption from the army. Why is this happening? The simplest and most reflexively offensive answer would be that “the people of Ukraine are a bunch of morons.” But the inhabitants of Ukraine, for the most part, are not morons, although there are plenty of psychopaths there.

But in the Ukrainian Army it’s a different matter. Medical morons are quite convenient and even valuable in the form of biorobots. They do not reflect, are reliable, do not make demands and have few needs. At the same time, they are asocial, lack initiative, and are incapable of independent action. At this stage, psychopharmacology is able to induce various forms of debility and then maintain them chemically. The Ukraine has been a wonderful playground for these socio-chemical experiments.

The experimental protocol is as follows. The population is packed into recruitment centers and there divided into three parts. Some bribe their way out; others have official papers based on which they are released, the rest are forced to serve and are split up as follows:

• Healthy specimens are sent to special reserve units, there to wait until a request for donor organs comes in. Then they die, supposedly from air raids or accidents, are expertly dissected and the organs shipped out to transplant clinics in Israel and elsewhere.

• The self-identified Nazis are assigned to assault units and retreat blocking detachments. These are treated as an elite and are expended only in counterattacks, which are generally futile but politically necessary for impressing foreign aid donors.

• The rest receive a shock dose of drugs and are further sorted into three subgroups. The first subgroup is stupefied, indoctrinated, learns reflex actions and goes to the front. There, under the control of the Nazis, they drool, consume pills/rations/water as maintenance therapy and offer resistance to the Russians until they are killed or, after four months at most, die from the drugs. The second subgroup immediately goes insane and is killed and disposed of right at the recruitment center. The third subgroup refuses the drugs or does not respond to the drugs, attempts to make trouble and is also killed.

The Ukraine is suffering horrific population losses. A good quarter of the losses is at the front, from bombs, drones, etc. The brain-damaged psychotics who return from the front (if any of them survive) will not be able to reproduce. As a country, the Ukraine is at an end.