Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation

 Storytelling computers will change the course of human history, says the historian and philosopher

Fears of artificial intelligence (ai) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years new ai tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction. ai has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. ai has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.

Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our dna. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures.

Money, too, is a cultural artefact. Banknotes are just colourful pieces of paper, and at present more than 90% of money is not even banknotes—it is just digital information in computers. What gives money value is the stories that bankers, finance ministers and cryptocurrency gurus tell us about it. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes and Bernie Madoff were not particularly good at creating real value, but they were all extremely capable storytellers.

What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new ai tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using ai to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of ai tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults.

In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around anonymous online messages, known as “q drops”. Followers collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first cults in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality.

On a more prosaic level, we might soon find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions about abortion, climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine with entities that we think are humans—but are actually ai. The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend time trying to change the declared opinions of an ai bot, while the ai could hone its messages so precisely that it stands a good chance of influencing us.

Through its mastery of language, ai could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that ai has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans it is enough if the ai can make them feel emotionally attached to it. In June 2022 Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, publicly claimed that the ai chatbot Lamda, on which he was working, had become sentient. The controversial claim cost him his job. The most interesting thing about this episode was not Mr Lemoine’s claim, which was probably false. Rather, it was his willingness to risk his lucrative job for the sake of the ai chatbot. If ai can influence people to risk their jobs for it, what else could it induce them to do?

In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is the most efficient weapon, and ai has just gained the ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people. We all know that over the past decade social media has become a battleground for controlling human attention. With the new generation of ai, the battlefront is shifting from attention to intimacy. What will happen to human society and human psychology as ai fights ai in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to convince us to vote for particular politicians or buy particular products?

Even without creating “fake intimacy”, the new ai tools would have an immense influence on our opinions and worldviews. People may come to use a single ai adviser as a one-stop, all-knowing oracle. No wonder Google is terrified. Why bother searching, when I can just ask the oracle? The news and advertising industries should also be terrified. Why read a newspaper when I can just ask the oracle to tell me the latest news? And what’s the purpose of advertisements, when I can just ask the oracle to tell me what to buy?

And even these scenarios don’t really capture the big picture. What we are talking about is potentially the end of human history. Not the end of history, just the end of its human-dominated part. History is the interaction between biology and culture; between our biological needs and desires for things like food and sex, and our cultural creations like religions and laws. History is the process through which laws and religions shape food and sex.

What will happen to the course of history when ai takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. ai is fundamentally different. ai can create completely new ideas, completely new culture.

At first, ai will probably imitate the human prototypes that it was trained on in its infancy. But with each passing year, ai culture will boldly go where no human has gone before. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.

Fear of ai has haunted humankind for only the past few decades. But for thousands of years humans have been haunted by a much deeper fear. We have always appreciated the power of stories and images to manipulate our minds and to create illusions. Consequently, since ancient times humans have feared being trapped in a world of illusions.

In the 17th century René Descartes feared that perhaps a malicious demon was trapping him inside a world of illusions, creating everything he saw and heard. In ancient Greece Plato told the famous Allegory of the Cave, in which a group of people are chained inside a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. A screen. On that screen they see projected various shadows. The prisoners mistake the illusions they see there for reality.

In ancient India Buddhist and Hindu sages pointed out that all humans lived trapped inside Maya—the world of illusions. What we normally take to be reality is often just fictions in our own minds. People may wage entire wars, killing others and willing to be killed themselves, because of their belief in this or that illusion.

The AI revolution is bringing us face to face with Descartes’ demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Maya. If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realise is there.

Of course, the new power of ai could be used for good purposes as well. I won’t dwell on this, because the people who develop ai talk about it enough. The job of historians and philosophers like myself is to point out the dangers. But certainly, ai can help us in countless ways, from finding new cures for cancer to discovering solutions to the ecological crisis. The question we face is how to make sure the new ai tools are used for good rather than for ill. To do that, we first need to appreciate the true capabilities of these tools.

Since 1945 we have known that nuclear technology could generate cheap energy for the benefit of humans—but could also physically destroy human civilisation. We therefore reshaped the entire international order to protect humanity, and to make sure nuclear technology was used primarily for good. We now have to grapple with a new weapon of mass destruction that can annihilate our mental and social world.

We can still regulate the new ai tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, ai can make exponentially more powerful ai. The first crucial step is to demand rigorous safety checks before powerful ai tools are released into the public domain. Just as a pharmaceutical company cannot release new drugs before testing both their short-term and long-term side-effects, so tech companies shouldn’t release new ai tools before they are made safe. We need an equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration for new technology, and we need it yesterday.

Won’t slowing down public deployments of ai cause democracies to lag behind more ruthless authoritarian regimes? Just the opposite. Unregulated ai deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When ai hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.

We have just encountered an alien intelligence, here on Earth. We don’t know much about it, except that it might destroy our civilisation. We should put a halt to the irresponsible deployment of ai tools in the public sphere, and regulate ai before it regulates us. And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for ai to disclose that it is an ai. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an ai—that’s the end of democracy.

This text has been generated by a human.

Or has it?

American Patriots nailed Putin’s hypersonic Kinzhal missile. The world has changed

 There’s much excitement around the world following the events of Monday night, in which Ukrainian air defences armed with US-made weapons reportedly neutralised a heavy Russian missile attack against Kyiv.

In particular the attack apparently included six KH-47M2 Kinzhal (“Dagger”) air-launched missiles, which are often described as “hypersonic”, frequently with the added assertion that there is no defence against such weapons. All six were reportedly stopped by US-made Patriot air defence interceptors, though a Patriot installation was apparently damaged – perhaps by debris from a downed Russian weapon.

Another Kinzhal (referred to by Nato organisations, including the British defence ministry, using the reporting code name “Killjoy”) was also shot down by a Patriot earlier this month. Monday’s interceptions would seem to have confirmed that this was not simply a lucky shot, and the Patriot does indeed offer a strong defence against the Kinzhal and similar weapons.

So, is the world different today? Can any nation in possession of Patriots or similar interceptors rest easy, unworried by the thought of hypersonic weapons – perhaps even, hypersonic nuclear weapons – in enemy hands?

The answer is yes and no: yes, the world is a little different today; and no, even if you have Patriot or similar you are not safe from enemy nukes or true hypersonics.

First let’s take a look at the Kinzhal. It’s really not much more than a modified air-launched version of the ground-launched Iskander short-range ballistic missile, which was developed in the 1980s and 1990s. The Iskander’s rocket propulsion boosts it to speeds of around Mach 6 or 2,000 metres per second. It’s been suggested that the Kinzhal is faster still at Mach 10 or 3,400 m/s.

Hypersonic speed is generally said to begin from Mach 5 upwards so yes, technically these are indeed hypersonic weapons. It’s very difficult to intercept and knock down an object travelling at this kind of speed, so the Patriot has indeed shown itself to be very capable.

However when people in recent times speak of hypersonic weapons they generally mean ones which do not just travel at hypersonic speeds, but which can swerve and jink about while doing so, making themselves still harder to intercept. This class of weapon is often referred to as a “boost-glide” system, as it is often fired atop a booster rocket, possibly out of the atmosphere altogether, before making its manoeuvrable hypersonic descent to the target.

Again, there’s nothing all that new about hypersonic boost-glide. The Nazis had drawing-board plans to use related ideas to bomb the USA during WWII, and various boost-glide projects were set up during the early Cold War. The now-retired Space Shuttle, and subsequent unmanned spaceplanes now in operation by the US and China, are all examples of successful hypersonic boost-glide systems.

Boost-glide for delivering nukes fell out of favour, however, in the mid Cold War with the arrival of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), whose warheads fall into the atmosphere to reach their targets travelling at Mach 20, perhaps 7,000 m/s. This was deemed to be so fast that nothing could possibly stop such a weapon. Once ICBMs began to be put on nuclear powered submarines, meaning that it would be impossible to locate them in order to knock them out in a sudden pre-emptive strike, the balance of terror seemed to be assured. The world could rest safe in the knowledge that no nation would launch a nuclear first strike, as the enemy’s ICBMs would respond and nothing could stop them.

This balance began to be somewhat upset, however, as long ago as the 1980s. The US in particular began making somewhat serious efforts at defence against inbound ICBMs. This had various effects, one of which was to stimulate the Soviets and then the Russians into looking at ways of making their ICBMs harder to stop. In particular they began working to replace the warheads with manoeuvrable hypersonic glide versions which would be harder to intercept.

This work took a very long time due to the financial and political troubles that beset Russia through the 1990s and 2000s, but at last in 2018 Vladimir Putin (at the same time he introduced the Kinzhal and other supposedly “new” Cold War era weapons) announced that the “Avangard” hypersonic glide vehicle was in production and ready to go into service atop Russian ICBMs. Avangards reportedly descend at Mach 20, swerving and jinking as they come, which should mean they can beat any interceptors they might face. China has also carried out work and flight tests aimed at deployment of such weapons.

Another effect of the US missile-defence aspirations of the 1980s and 1990s was to greatly alarm the kind of people who would really like to ban all nuclear weapons but have reluctantly accepted that isn’t going to happen. People like that were very worried that missile-defence would upset the safe balance of terror: they thought that an America with working defences might be tempted to eliminate Russia, or that the prospect of such defences might push Russia into making a first strike while it still could.

Missile defence technology had its first trial as early Patriots were used to defend against Scud ballistic missiles launched by Saddam Hussein in 1991. This led to a massive disagreement about the Patriot’s effectiveness in which then US President George H W Bush claimed it was 97 per cent effective, the US Army claimed rates between 40 and 80 per cent, and the famous anti-missile-defence activist Theodore Postol claimed it had not worked at all.

Postol and members of his school of thought have since then been very effective in limiting how much money and effort the US has put into missile defences, helped by the fact that various missile-defence projects and programmes have indeed been prone to exaggerate the effectiveness of their equipment. Today the US National Missile Defence effort is explicitly limited to defence against the sort of attack that might be mounted by a rogue state such as North Korea: it is specifically forbidden to work on things which might be able to stop Russia’s vast ICBM force, to avoid panicking Vladimir Putin.

This has meant that to be quite honest, Putin doesn’t really need the Avangard or its like: he can blow up America and its allies whenever he wants, as long as he’s willing to accept Russia becoming a lake of molten glass in its turn.

Putin will still be unpleasantly surprised to find, however, that today’s Patriots can knock down Kinzhals. The Kinzhal may not be a true swerving-and-jinking Mach 20 Avangard, but it is Mach 10 and it is claimed to have some manoeuvrability: it would need at least a bit to make precise strikes, of course.

One of the things which might turn the Ukraine war around for Putin would be the ability to suppress Ukrainian air defences, so permitting his powerful air force to dominate Ukrainian skies as it has so far completely failed to do. It now seems clear that even Russia’s best standoff weapons have little chance of achieving this.

And it won’t just be Vladimir finding Monday night’s events upsetting. Taiwan has the Patriot too. It seems likely that Xi Jinping will be setting up a talk with the head of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Forces to find out just which of his weapons now seem likely to be effective in any future invasion attempt.

Success denied: Finding ground truth in the air war over Ukraine

Maximillian K. Bremer, Kelly A. Grieco

Ukraine’s recent two-front counteroffensive has dealt a heavy blow to the Russian military. Contrary to Western military orthodoxy, air superiority was not a prerequisite for battlefield success. Ukrainian forces advanced rapidly despite the absence of aerial cover and fire support from high-end fighter jets and bombers—two mainstays of the American way of war. Some observers may conclude – all too hastily – that the air domain and airpower is less relevant to future wars, or that Russian ineptitude renders lessons about airpower’s role unhelpful.

This is a dangerous misreading of events.

Far from irrelevant, control of the air domain was the battle’s center of gravity. By adopting an air denial strategy, that is, maintaining an air defense in being to keep Russia’s manned aircraft at bay and under threat, Kyiv thwarted Russia’s ability to not only to ascertain the disposition of Ukrainian forces but also to respond rapidly to events once it became obvious where the counterattacks were taking place. Quite simply, air denial – not the traditional concept of air superiority – was a prerequisite for Ukraine’s battlefield success.

For months, Kyiv telegraphed its plans to launch a counteroffensive in the southern Kherson region. But Ukrainian forces had a surprise in store for the Russians: they not only counterattacked in the south, as expected, but they also pushed north in the Kharkiv region. This second – surprise – counteroffensive caught the Russians off guard: they had redeployed many units in anticipation of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson and left their defenses in the northeast too thin. As Russian forces fled, Ukraine liberated more territory in a few days than the adversary had captured over the last five months.

How did Ukraine manage to catch the Russians unawares? Ukraine’s strategy of air denial enabled its counteroffensive in two key ways:

First, it facilitated Ukraine’s use of military deception to pin down Russian forces in the south. Without air superiority, Russia could not freely operate its manned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft over the battlefield, which limited its ability to track Ukrainian movements. The alternatives, employing unmanned aircraft (drones) and space-based assets in ISR roles, were not effective. Though less costly than manned aircraft, ISR drones’ high attrition from both being shot down and electronic jamming meant they were needed in mass. Russia, however lacked sufficient numbers of ISR drones, particularly the Orlan-10 which took heavy losses early in the war, and have become problematic to replace due to Western sanctions.

Russia’s only other “eyes in the sky” are its space-based capabilities. But Russian satellites lacked the coverage and resolution required to detect a coming counteroffensive. Pavel Luzin, a Russian military expert, admits as much, explaining: “Our two optical reconnaissance satellites yield such [low] resolution [images] they can only map flight missions [for launching] missiles.” These satellites, he added, “pass the same point only once every 16 days. There’s no possibility to quickly receive data.” Far from limiting Ukraine’s military effectiveness, a strategy of air denial made operational deception possible by effectively blinding the Russians.

Second, Ukraine’s air denial strategy prevented Russia from responding rapidly to halt the Ukrainian advance even once it recognized a second counterattack was underway in the Kharkiv region. The comparative advantage of airpower is the ability of aircraft and other airborne systems to bypass terrain that would otherwise impede the movements of ground forces for the rapid maneuver of firepower over significant distances. This combination of lethality and responsiveness makes airpower particularly effective against mechanized ground forces operating offensively. Whereas a defender in position is harder to detect from the air, an attacker on the move generates noise, heat, and electronic signals that makes it easier to find and attack. Ukrainian tanks and military vehicles rumbling down highways and across open fields in broad daylight should have made easy work for the Russian air force. But Ukraine’s air denial strategy made Russian pilots wary of flying into Ukrainian airspace at all, much less loitering and hunting for targets on their own.

Instead, Russian warplanes reportedly only attack targets with known coordinates, as called in by Russian ground forces. But Russia’s shortage of reliable tactical reconnaissance drones means many of its ground units cannot see what is over the next hill, further degrading reconnaissance-strike capabilities. In sum, Ukraine’s air denial strategy in combination with insufficient quantities of attritable Russian drones were critical enablers of Ukraine’s counteroffensive success.

Airpower’s contribution to victory was perhaps more subtle and indirect but no less vital than the role it played in recent U.S.-waged wars. To be sure, Ukraine’s strategy of air denial resulted more from military necessity than deliberate stratagem, given the relatively small size of the Ukrainian air force. But the key point is that Ukraine’s success stemmed from more than merely capitalizing on Russian failure.

Russia’s suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) campaign failed, but Ukraine’s employment of vertical depth, layering the effects of air defenses, electromagnetic jamming, drones, and missiles in increasing degrees of strength together with the advantages of dispersion and mobility suggest the defender now has the advantage. Put simply, the widespread diffusion of advanced technologies indicates the SEAD mission is harder than many Western air forces and defense analysts fully appreciate. It may be possible to suppress the adversary’s air defenses for a while or in a small area, but not to the point of making the airspace operationally useful as in the past. To maintain combat credibility, modern air forces – built around smaller numbers of expensive and exquisite systems operated by highly skilled crews – need to avoid attrition risk. But procuring large numbers of these high-end systems is a losing game against cheaper and more sustainable networked air denial technologies. Today, and for the foreseeable future, it is exceedingly difficult, nigh impossible, to deny a strategy of air denial.

Two significant policy implications follow from this recognition. First, Ukraine ought to avoid an attempt to gain air superiority outright against Russia. The United States has sent Ukraine high-speed anti-radiation missiles (HARMs), fitted for MiG -29 fighters, to allow the Ukrainian air force to hunt Russian air defense radars in Ukraine. In addition, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl has said the transfer of fourth-generation Western fighter jets to Ukraine is not “inconceivable.” These capabilities raise the prospect of Ukraine shifting operational objectives from air denial to the achievement of air superiority outright. Such a change misses the real lesson of the air war – the success of Ukraine’s air denial strategy stems not from Russian shortcomings but a more fundamental and systemic shift from offense to defense dominance. Any attempt by Ukraine to achieve air superiority would thus likely fail for the same reasons that Russia’s did.

Second, the United States Air Force ought to pay attention. Instead of insisting on expensive and exquisite capabilities – such as next-generation fighter jets and stealth bombers to conduct deep strikes and pulsed operations – it ought to move more rapidly toward unmanned and autonomous systems and swarming tactics with thousands of small and cheap drones. Otherwise, the Air Force runs the serious risk of repeating Russia’s mistakes by holding tight to a force structure centered predominately on manned aircraft, creating a situation where the force is too costly to risk and too small to sustain losses during a prolonged war of attrition.

Future attempts to overcome defense dominance are likely to falter, because air denial favors defense. Ukraine’s recent battlefield success is no exception to this rule. Russia is on strategic offense, and the Ukrainian counteroffensive is precisely that – a response to Russian aggression.

Critically, air denial enabled Ukraine to survive and regroup. Ukraine traded time for space to grind down the Russian offensive, weakening Russia’s attacking forces and rendering them vulnerable to counterattack. As Clausewitz wrote, “the defensive form of war is not a simple shield, but a shield made up a well-directed blows.”

Similarly, a strategy of air denial aligns well with U.S. strategic objectives. The United States is on the strategic defensive in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific, and it seeks to preserve the territorial status quo. If the Air Force moves away from the few and exquisite high-end fighters and bombers it continues to favor, and invests instead in low-end, attritable capabilities, it will make it next to impossible for future adversaries to succeed on offense. But if it clings to an offense-first, air superiority mission, it may share the fate of Russia’s air force: surprised, unprepared, and largely sidelined from the fight.

U.S. Air Force Col. Maximillian K. Bremer is the director of the Special Programs Division at Air Mobility Command. The opinions in this commentary do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Defense Department or the U.S. Air Force.

Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and an adjunct associate professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

Putin has become a problem. The main indicator of Russia's defeat

 A process that began on April 24 during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's historic meeting with the head of the U.S. State Department Antony Blinken and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in Kyiv continued throughout the last week.

It included a meeting in the U.S. Ramstein airbase of the defense ministers of the 40 most industrial powers in the world. They, in fact, entered into a military alliance in support of Ukraine. The West has finally clearly formulated its goals.

Read also: Soviet identity is gone forever, but Putin doesn’t get it

When asked what the purpose of the war was, Austin replied: “The purpose of the war for the United States is the victory of Ukraine. Restoration of its territorial integrity, and that Russia, as a result of the war, is weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

That is, the West has already formulated a program not only for the victory of Ukraine in the war but also for the post-war structure. This is a common practice after world wars, but in essence, this is not a Russo-Ukrainian war, this is a world war that the insane dictator Putin declared against the entire West and the free world. After the world war, the victorious powers form a new world order. And now Ukraine will be the main victorious power in this process.

During these two months of the war, the Americans spent a long time hesitating, they were cautious. But, in the end, with its heroic resistance, Ukraine, as it were, pushed them back into the arena of world politics, which they were almost about to leave. After such a reputational disaster as Afghanistan, the dictators of the world were sure that two more blows needed to be struck — to conquer Ukraine and Taiwan. Then the West and the United States would be completely discredited, and entirely different orders would reign in the world.

However, the heroic resistance of Ukraine has prevented this scenario. The free world has gone on the attack, and the West has overcome its fear of nuclear blackmail, which Putin has used quite effectively for himself for 15 years. He constantly threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons in the war with NATO, hoping that NATO would get scared and retreat in horror. He was dealt an answer.

Read also: Amnesty International says Russian invaders must face justice for war crimes in Kyiv Oblast

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley called General Valery Gerasimov and made it clear to him, to tell his boss that they will not retreat, they will not capitulate, but on the contrary, they will retaliate with a nuclear strike. So don't even think about resorting to nuclear weapons. U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland was even more straightforward. The West got rid of this fear of nuclear blackmail, and clearly defined its program — victory over Putin's fascist Russia.

If we consider the significant events of recent days, then the indicator of the largest political defeat of Russia was the position of Israel. Which, in response to Sergei Lavrov's anti-Semitic attacks is taking a tougher stand in the face of Russia.

It is removing restrictions on the transfer of military technology and assistance to Ukraine. Many did not notice, but Israel participated in the meeting in Ramstein. This is very important. Israel has technology that the Americans cannot provide.

In turn, China, although it continues a cold war with the United States, is not going to rush to the aid of the Russian Federation. It primarily protects its own interests. What is happening suits Beijing — weakening, isolated from the West, from all modern technologies, financial resources, Russia is rapidly becoming easy prey.

No one in China, not one of the 1.5 billion Chinese who are taught from school textbooks, forgets what vast territories of Siberia and the Far East are inherent Chinese territories, torn away from it by the tsarist government in the 19th century. And it is waiting for the return of these territories — as they like to say in Moscow — to their native, not Russian, but Chinese harbor.

Watching all this, powerful people in the Kremlin are becoming a danger for Putin. Influential people outside the Kremlin do not pose a danger for him. The soldiers included. Let's not delude ourselves: they are not liberals, but the same Russian imperialists, they would not mind snatching off some piece of Ukraine. But even before the start of the war, retired generals warned Putin that the occupation of Ukraine was a fool’s errand. And everything that is happening confirms it.

Now Putin has become the main problem of the Russian authorities and the mafia group that is in power. He is destroying the country, which is a source of food for them, where they had it made.

I think they are now considering very seriously the question of the possible removal of Putin from power. And each new success of Ukraine at the front (and these successes will sharply increase in two weeks, when the most modern weapons in the world will arrive in full), pushes them to this decision. It's inevitable.

Some say they are even worse than Putin. But it is not a question of who is good or bad. The question is who will sign the surrender. There is such a thing as military logic, and the victory of Ukraine is unavoidable. Putin only hinders them in this process.

And do not forget about the goals of the war, which are declared by the entire world community — to weaken Russia so that it will never be able to repeat this aggression again. Therefore, after the war, both Ukraine and the rest of the world will not rely on good or bad Russian leaders. They will create conditions so that no leaders, good or bad, can ever commit aggression against neighboring countries from the territory of the Russian Federation.