What is the relevance of the date? Nov 4th is the day after the U.S. midterm elections, which says a lot about the state of the U.S. allegiances these days.

Trump, Elon and Putin have something planned, that is very clear from the coordinated actions of all of them. Their futures are completely intertwined, and you’d be foolish to expect they are just going to roll over and accept a Republican defeat in the midterms - it is literally their lives and fortunes at stake for them. They’re going to cheat like hell to keep Trump where he is and their pet projects of misery running.

It also suggests Russia’s basic framework is to have the U.S. bully Ukraine into a peace favorable to Russia that it can’t get on it’s own military and strategic merits.

Sounds bleak right? It is, but also - it shows desperation from Russia. They are the ones asking to normalize the U.S. imposing peace terms on Ukraine, despite the fact that the U.S. is no longer a backer of Ukraine in any way. Europe is specifically excluded. Russia’s threat of mass mobilization didn’t happen, and probably won’t in meaningful numbers. They continue to try to bring in poor africans to die for them instead. There is essentially no movement on the battlefield and nothing Russia seems to be doing to change that fundamentally. Instead, they pivot to corrosive, bad-faith peace talks and the U.S. doing it’s best to extort Ukraine by denying it support, Starlink and trying to make them diplomatically isolated.

It’s absurd. Its also desparate. But that’s not the story here - the story is Ukraine and Europe still ‘hold the cards’ about how this conflict ends. Russia, Trump and Elon fully understand the danger they’re in.

In the longer term, if the Russians are successful at seating their corrosive populist stooges in France and Germany in the next couple of years - then things will get very bleak indeed for Ukraine. But we’re not there yet, the russian army and economy will be even weaker by then and a lot may change with Trump if he isn’t successful at pulling off his coup against american democracy, or better yet - if he croaks trying.