Russia Maintains Lies and Drones

What do you call someone who looks you square in the eyes and says he’s interested in peace but nonetheless continues bombing a neighboring country, its cities and towns, and residential neighborhoods with impunity?

Some may say extreme recidivist.

But the shorter answer is Russia.

Russia continued bombing Ukraine’s energy facilities with 300 drones and 37 missiles in its latest heavy, virtually daily bombardment of the country’s power grid, authorities said Thursday, October 16.

But hope for peace has not evaporated, at least not in Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has already arrived in Washington, is prepared to ask President Donald Trump at a White House meeting on Friday for more American-made air defenses and long-range missiles that have filled Putin and his cronies with concern and trepidation.

As he considers Zelenskyy’s push for US missiles, Trump said after Thursday’s call with Russian President Vladimir Putin that they will meet in Budapest, Hungary, to try to bring the war to an end. No date for the meeting has been set. 

Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he will discuss his call with Putin “and much more” when he meets Zelenskyy on Friday, adding that “I believe great progress was made with today’s telephone conversation.” 

Trump is either naive or thinks Zelenskyy and everyone else are morons. Trump reportedly raised the issue of ending his war against Ukraine countless times, claiming have no fear, all is going well. He has also told Zelenskyy, after berating him in the Oval Office, yelling that the Ukrainian president doesn’t have the cards to pursue a victory, that all is going well, the Tomahawks will help, and he’ll tell Putin the same later. But Russia is continuing bombing Ukraine and making the American president look foolish.

The aerial attack against Ukraine continues in between meetings, conversations, paragraphs, sentences and words. Moscow’s strategy is death and destruction.

Meanwhile, eight Ukrainian regions experienced blackouts after the barrage, Ukraine’s national energy operator, Ukrenergo, said. With the cold weather just around the corner, DTEK, the country’s largest private energy company, reported outages in the capital, Kyiv, and said it had to stop its natural gas extraction in the central Poltava region due to the strikes. Natural gas infrastructure was damaged for the sixth time this month, Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state-owned oil and gas company, said. 

Rest assured that Ukraine and Zelenskyy will not budge in the negotiations. Russia invaded Ukraine for its own imperial reasons. Fear and panic are not part of that. Moscow simply wants to re-subjugate Ukrainians and rebuild its prison of captive nations.

To return peace and stability to the region, the US and other countries must ensure that Russia is disarmed, that it is forced to pay reparations, and that Ukraine is allowed join NATO or any alliance that it wants.