In my most recent article for Byline Times, I described the Vance/Trump plan to resolve the war in Ukraine as "Obscene, Illogical, and Unworkable" and it is all of that.

Maybe the worst thing about this call to appease Vladimir Putin and capitulate to his biggest demands is that it is incredibly poorly timed, because any analyst who understands the dynamics of the battle between Russia and Ukraine knows that Russia is not in a good position, and that is because Putin has directed his forces into a Catch 22 situation where he is trapped between only bad choices.

On the one hand, as Trump and Vance are advocating, Putin's troops are desperate for a pause in the fighting. While on the other, Putin has engineered a mentality pervasive across Russia that lays the foundation, in the minds of his voters, where it is normal for the country to be at war. After all, under Putin, that is all the people of Russia have known for a quarter of a century.

Related reading: How Russians Went from Outrage at Putin's War in Ukraine to Not Caring - and Why Those Feelings will Outlive his Presidency

While it is true that what the population of Russia is allowed to think is a direct outcome of the filth that is poured into their minds by state propagandists, and so it is in theory possible for a new narrative to be created exalting the Russian withdrawal from Ukraine as some kind of victory, that is something that will certainly fire up a lot of cognitive dissonance among a very confused citizenry.

What about when their own propagandists began asking the question, "What was the point of even starting this whole thing?"

The problem, for the Kremlin regime, is that they are trapped now in a war of their own making, fed by lies of their own fabrication factories, and generally supported by the war-hungry population.

And at the same time, it is a war that they cannot win. While there is again breathless commentary about the possible imminent fall of the town of Prokrovsk in Ukraine's Donbas region, we have to recognise that the capture of a newly destroyed former town or city every few months is the limit of the Russian ground war machine.

So it is a war that Putin cannot turn off, in that it has a life of its own now that feeds like a parasite from the minds of the population who greet the idea of an even bigger war with the West with glee, though they'd be incapable of fighting it. And Putin can't turn the war off because some kind of victory over this foe is needed, though it remains undefined and open-ended.

At the same time, as was pointed out by Sir William Browder in a recent interview with Byline TV hosted by Peter Jukes, Russia faces a perfect storm of problems with the economy as a result of sanctions, frozen Russian central bank assets, and a workforce decapitated by massive losses in Ukraine (640,000 and counting) and because of the large numbers of Russians who fled the country to avoid becoming a statistic in that body count.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f9kQocrdiQ

From the beginning, as Browder points out, the security of the Putin regime was predicated on a simple trade-off, he would raise the living standards in the country and end the chaos that accompanied the earliest post-Soviet years, as long as that body public did not become a body politic. And they agreed to this.

A new Lada Niva and foreign holiday once a year seemed attractive enough for them to overlook the imprisonment of those who exposed the corruption of the regime through media or political action. But that economic bubble is teetering too, and along with it that aforementioned security wobbles too.

After Browder lists other dictators that have failed (Mubarak, Ghaddafi, Yanukovych) as examples that this, too, can happen to Putin, he then calmly explains why. "The one thing that I will predict is that, as time goes on, in order for him to stay alive and stay in power, the repressions in Russia are going to get worse and worse, because that's all they have left."

H...