In the old days, there were many what highway engineers used to call "runaway truck ramps," escape lanes that enabled vehicles with braking problems to stop safely. These were typically long sand- or gravel-filled lanes connected to steep downhill sections of a main road, where a large truck or bus with failed brakes could enter and dissipate its kinetic energy to come to a safe stop. Nowadays, thanks to the engineering marvel of modern braking systems, trucks and buses no longer suffer brake failures as frequently. However, as relics, you may still see these ramps on U.S. Interstate 40, the Great Eastern Highway in Western Australia, or in Muğla, Türkiye.
But no thanks to the imperial political systems in the United States or in the Russian Federation, we do not have runaway ramps, runaway escape lanes, or emergency arrester beds for those leaders whose brakes fail too often. As a result, they cannot dissipate their countries’ potential energy before it turns into kinetic energy. If you remember your high school physics class, when you prepare to kick a ball, you transfer potential energy into kinetic energy. If you cannot stop your leg mid-swing, you will hit the ball. Similarly, when you swing a hammer at a nail, and it goes awry, you cannot cancel its force; you end up hitting your finger instead.
It is not only U.S. President Donald Trump who is about to turn 80 and still runs around without thinking where he’s going, tallying up genocidal Zionist murderers of other countries. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently launched deadly strikes on Kyiv and Dnipro in his ill-fated war on Ukraine, adding at least 10 more people to his shooting and terrorizing inventory.
Putin has actually been chaperoned to this war by a duo of presidents: former U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Relations between Ukraine and NATO began in 1991, right after Ukraine’s independence, and gradually strengthened during the 1990s and 2000s. During this period, Russian leaders, especially Putin, carefully managed what was approaching them. Ukraine aimed to eventually join the alliance. It participated in NATO’s Intensified Dialogue program in 2005.
All those times, Putin tried to reach an agreement with NATO about its enlargement plan. He called it and the military development of Ukraine “unacceptable.” Consequently, at the 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO declined to offer Ukraine a membership action plan but said that Ukraine would eventually join the alliance.
Putin, leveraging the old Soviet relations with Ukraine, managed to secure Viktor Yanukovych as the president of the country, who, in turn, had the Ukrainian Parliament vote to abandon the goal of NATO membership and reaffirm Ukraine's neutral status.
But two years later, the "deep NATO" using its “color revolutions” and the neocons implementing their plan to open “a road to Peking through Moscow," managed a coup, removed Yanukovych, and had Putin succumb to their plan. Then Russia occupied and annexed Crimea. The Orange Revolution then showed its true face, and the new parliament voted to seek NATO membership and adopted a new constitution stating this goal. NATO condemned Russia's actions and affirmed its support for Ukraine's sovereignty, while a few NATO members began helping Ukraine's military.
The more NATO was involved, the more completely Putin went off the rails. As they say, the rest is recent history. Four years ago, Putin finally started the full invasion of Ukraine.
Putin does not suffer from "histrionic personality disorder" as Trump does. He doesn't have a strong desire for attention. He doesn’t make loud appearances or exaggerate behaviors and emotions. But still, Putin has a highly “individualistic” system of rule in Russia that apparently makes him seek exit ramps from his wars.
The famous (or infamous) first imperial, then Soviet, later modern, but always bureaucratic Russian state is now subordinated to Putin. As much as Trump needs a peace to get out of the Middle Eastern quagmire that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dragged him into, Putin needs to get out of this war, which is dissipating Russia’s strength, money and patience of that legendary Russian bureaucracy.
But just as Trump has been trapped between the rock and a hard place, Putin seems to be having difficulty ending the war and keeping a face, too; that is, wanting to eat a fish without first catching it from the waters, in Russian.
The more a war is protracted, the less winnable it becomes. That is the lesson we all learned from the history of wars in Russia. It only makes you severely unpopular among the young Russians. The only thing Russia needs to do is to call it quits, resist the temptation to show more territory than the Donetsk People's Republic. You don’t have midterm parliamentary elections as Trump does this coming November, which seems to be the end of his indisputable authority as president. Not yours.
Take the first exit to the runaway vehicles ramp. The Russian truck will dissipate its kinetic energy gradually.
