The contours of a Ukrainian victory are already taking shape. Three things indicate this

The first explosion echoes over Kharkiv around 11:00 p.m. The lights go out, but come back on after a few minutes. Then another explosion—and the lights go out again, this time for a longer time. More explosions follow, one after the other. An orange glow illuminates the sky. I go outside in front of the house. I look down the street in both directions; there's no one there. I've never seen the area so empty. Without electric light, it's black, but still well lit by the low-hanging clouds, which reflect the flames from the fires.

The ghostly light makes you feel like you're swimming in an aquarium, except the glass walls are actually the black outlines of buildings. I step onto a playground. There's a swing, a sandbox, and a bench. From here, the part of the sky reflecting the inferno is clearly visible. Repeated flashes of bright flames high above me, and then a rolling noise rolls across the street. Suddenly, it becomes very quiet again—so quiet that I can hear people talking behind one of the windows.

A man tries to persuade a woman to call all her relatives and advise them to hide in the hallway immediately. Then the man flicks a cigarette butt out the window, which slowly falls into the darkness until another flash of lightning bathes the street in a blindingly bright, deadly orange light. Today, all Russian drones are heading for the same spot in Kharkiv, attempting to wipe out another power plant in Kharkiv. For this very reason, there is no electricity in the houses, nor any hot or cold water.

Whatever Ukraine's victory looks like, it will be a Pyrrhic victory: A large portion of Ukrainian territory has been destroyed, cities have been wiped off the map, and millions of people have left the country forever. No matter how Ukraine is rebuilt after the war, it will be a different Ukraine—the Ukraine in which we were born and have spent our entire lives no longer exists.

Even this playground, over which one explosion wave after another sweeps, will never again be the playground where children played so peacefully before the war. He won't forget those explosions. I won't forget them. And the small children now cowering fearfully in the corners of the hallways will remember those explosions forever.

Other cities, however, have been far less fortunate than Kharkiv. For example, Marinka in the Donbass, where only one of the ten thousand inhabitants who lived there before the war remains. The Russian news agency TASS is showing horrific images of the devastated town. The last resident says that all these ruins should simply be bulldozed and new multi-story buildings erected on the empty spaces. Perhaps this will happen; perhaps a new city will be built in place of Marinka and called Marinka—but it won't be Marinka.

After the victory, Ukraine too will one day be rebuilt and restored, but it will be a different Ukraine. Who is to blame for this? Certainly, those who have been using Ukraine as a shield between themselves and the Russian hordes for three and a half years. Only as a shield, not as a sword.

It is very difficult to win if you fight with only a shield.

Before appearing in many places in Europe, Russian drones first flew to Poland.

"Whether it was intentional or not, it is absolutely reckless," said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, adding, referring to Putin: "Stop violating Allied airspace."

In contrast, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin stated: "We have tested one of our worst enemies, Poland, but also the entire NATO. Russia's drones have revealed the impotence of our enemies. It is time to declare total mobilization and exploit this weakness to attack!"

Russia is fighting by the rules of a prison war, where it's not the strongest who wins, but the most brutal. If we compare Rutte and Putin, the NATO Secretary General seems infinitely more sympathetic as a person, yet what he said resembles the cry of a helpless and condemned man. Only one word is missing – please: Please stop violating Allied airspace.

We are gradually slipping into darkness. The dragon of world war is already growing a third head, but the Western world is merely watching from the sidelines, waiting for this growth to somehow disappear on its own instead of trying to cut it off. No one is punishing the tyrants and dictators for their violations of rules and laws. It will take years for the EU to fully train its pink pony to fight the hungry and desperate Russian bear. How the battle will end is written in the stars.

A large part of the world is ruled by older, incompetent leaders who have more power and means of destruction than ever before. With each month and each year, their incompetence grows. This is unlikely to end well. Millions of young people will be forced to die in war instead of living, loving, and dreaming.

Of course, not everything is so bad yet. Yes, the pink pony is indeed building muscle and learning new tricks. But still, it sometimes seems that it's not Ukraine that should join NATO, but rather NATO that should join Ukraine. Because Ukraine knows how to fight much better—and it even knows how to win.

The contours of Ukraine's victory are already taking shape. Putin's Russia has three critical points at which its collapse could begin. The first of these is Putin himself.

Anyone who has seen Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson might think that Putin is obsessed with Ukraine. In fact, this isn't the case: He's not interested in Ukraine, Russia, or anything else. Putin is only interested in himself, and now Putin, who, through stupidity, arrogance, and amorality, plunged himself into the adventure of conquering Ukraine, doesn't know how to get out of it.

Putin now finds himself in the same situation as his "orcs" crawling through gas and sewer pipes to reach Pokrovsk or Kupiansk: He can neither turn back nor evade. This is certainly not a winning position. As soon as Ukraine puts an end to this snail-like crawl into nowhere, Putin is lost. As soon as it becomes clear that Putin is losing this war, his own people will overthrow him. He will be overthrown by the hawks who want victory and only victory, and they will be helped by the pragmatists who are tired of this senseless and endless war.

Yes, this is Putin's personal war, but not because he is trying to realize any ideas, nor because he hates Ukraine, but because for him it is nothing less than a fight for survival.

The second factor that has already begun the destruction of Putin's Russia are the Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil, gas, and military infrastructure. The vast country simply has no counter to the latest Ukrainian drones and missiles. I don't really believe we'll have American Tomahawks anytime soon—I'd like to be wrong, but we'll most likely be wronged again—but it seems Ukraine is doing quite well on its own. The de-petroleumization of Russia is going according to plan.

The third point is Crimea. Since 2022, Ukraine has been persistently and methodically destroying Russian air defenses in Crimea. As soon as these are eliminated, the Crimean Bridge will be destroyed, and then the Ukrainian Air Force will begin liberating the peninsula from the invaders. Once Crimea is lost to Russia, a chain reaction of the collapse of the front will begin in the south. This will be followed by the liberation of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, and Mariupol could soon be back in Ukrainian hands. By then, at the latest, it will become clear to everyone that Putin is losing the war.

Russia does have one last trump card up its sleeve: the rusty nuclear weapons it used to produce in large quantities. Judging by what Putin discussed privately with Xi Jinping in Beijing, however, he hopes to be obsolete for a very long time. Therefore, the nuclear weapons will continue to rust. Putin's propagandists can rant as much as they like about Russia being ready to cover the entire world in nuclear fire so that the world will simply go out and the Russians will go to paradise. That will never happen – not only because Putin wants to live a very long life, but above all because the Chinese leader wants to live even longer. And he will never allow his comrade, who is a year older than him, to do something so colossally stupid.

I think of the words that the last great Russian poet, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky, addressed to the Ukrainians:

"Only when it's your turn to die, you scoundrels, will you gasp and scratch at the edge of the mattress, / for lines from Alexander, not for the nonsense of Taras!"

Alexander is Pushkin, the Russian poet laureate. And Taras stands for Shevchenko, the national poet of Ukraine. In other words, Brodsky believed that when Ukrainians died, the words of the Russian poet would pass from their lips, not those of the Ukrainian one. He considered Ukrainians and the idea of ​​Ukrainianness to be fake.

Most Russians today are far dumber than Brodsky. No matter how much we demonstrate to them the power of our own language and the value of our culture, they will continue to view us as someone who only pretends to be a separate nation. They will not take us seriously and will consider us a kind of second-class Russians, something like mentally handicapped children who suddenly want to free themselves from adult control. They will continue to impose themselves on us and try to impose their own, correct order here.

Joseph Brodsky, who wrote these words, was undoubtedly a very intelligent man. Why did he think the way he did?

For too long, Ukraine has been a diluted solution to Russia. Yes, there were scattered elements of European mentality in that solution, and bubbles of personal freedom constantly rose to the surface. Sometimes there were so many bubbles that the solution began to boil. But soon the bubbling stopped, and everything returned to normal—soon we were again something like a diluted Russia.

Ukraine's victory must not only be an outwardly visible victory over its eternal northern enemy, Russia, but also a victory over deep Russia. This does not mean trivialities and silliness like banning Russian books, the Russian language, or Russian songs, but rather something much more profound and far more serious: the eradication of the Russian mentality that the state is everything and the individual is nothing.

The worst Russian practices—police, bureaucratic, and political methods of suppressing freedom—which Ukraine has often, though not always successfully, tried to copy, must come to an end. It must no longer happen that a person who comes to power only serves his own interests and becomes a mini-Putin—even if he speaks Ukrainian well. If we fail in this, there will be no real victory.

Even if we regained all our lost territories. Even if the Russians were forced to pay reparations and all the crimes of this war were punished. Even if our terrible northern neighbor crumbled to dust and disappeared—without a victory over ourselves, there will be no true triumph.

Sergei Gerasimov lives as a writer in the large city of Kharkiv, which is still being shelled by the Russians. – Translated from English by A. Bn.