HAND ON THE HEART, TANK TOWARD THE KINDERGARTEN

Putin is a monster—but not just any monster. If he were a character in a fairy tale, even the most fearsome dragons would cast him aside. He does not seek peace unless it comes wrapped in a tank, accompanied by clear instructions: pull the trigger first, talk later. What he wants is all of Ukraine—served whole, with pickles on the side, and perhaps a garnish of global fear. Empathy? A foreign word, likely listed under “ideological enemies” in his personal dictionary. Children, the elderly, ordinary people defending their homeland? Merely logistical obstacles at best—unforeseen delays in the march toward imperial glory. If he could bulldoze through them—literally—he’d complain only that the blade dulled too quickly. In his mind, maps are playground sketches and borders are suggestions, awaiting correction by missile.

And when it comes to “peace negotiations,” he seems to mistake them for commercial breaks between bombardments. The ultimate irony? He sees himself as the savior of the Russian world, yet the only thing he appears to rescue is his own reflection each morning—whispering, “They all love me. Don’t they?” You want to laugh, but the laugh sticks bitterly in your throat. Every time “peace talks” are mentioned, Putin hears “temporary license to reload.” The ink is barely dry on a diplomatic communiqué when another city is shelled—an indulgence, a dessert after a “strategic conversation.” Civilians dying? Unfortunate, but irrelevant. Human lives are for him like pieces from a cheap chessboard—sacrificable, propagandistic, disposable in his grand design to restore empire.

I can’t shake the grotesque, almost surreal image of the U.S. president’s special envoy—one Steven Witkoff, a name that until recently belonged more to a luxury real estate brochure than a world-in-flames emissary of peace. He approaches Putin and, like a poorly directed film, places his hand on his heart—a gesture meant to appear solemn, but which instead resembles a pathetic bow before a dictator with blood under his fingernails. An involuntary tribute to death. Then, the farcical climax: the handshake. Warm, firm, elegant. A hand extended to a man who, at the same moment, presses the trigger of history like a bored child tapping a joystick. Behind that diplomatic theatre, children die beneath rubble, mothers clutch their babies in freezing bunkers, fathers never return from the improvised frontlines of survival. And I ask, without hope of an answer anytime soon: how many more must die? Donald Trump, with his unmistakable style of negotiation—convinced that every problem yields to flattery and a crushing handshake—may genuinely wish for peace. But he’s dealing with a man who confuses diplomacy with a sadistic military exercise. Trump imagines himself a Nixon in Moscow, yet instead of vodka and toasts, he’s met with drones and missile fire. And so the inevitable looms: unless he soon removes the velvet glove—or at least delivers a diplomatic slap in the form of serious sanctions—he risks becoming a willing extra in the dark pageant of a serial killer. At some point, passivity ceases to be a strategy. It becomes complicity with genocide. Perhaps at the next “peace negotiation,” Putin will arrive with a new map—Ukraine already erased. Smiling, with a finger poised above a button. How many cities must be flattened, how many children pulled from rubble with bare hands, before Trump understands: you do not negotiate with madness. You do not stroke the beast and hope it purrs. Sooner or later, he must abandon the absurd dance between neutrality and cowardice, and show what he always promises to possess: strength. Otherwise, history will not remember him as the peacemaker who tamed a tyrant, but as the man who offered a polite handshake while Europe bled.

Just like in Gaza, where each day brings a new list of dead children, and “political actors” perform long, exhausting, absurd plays on the stage of negotiation. While they debate resolutions, amendments, and diplomatic subtexts, mothers search through rubble for their children. Only the weeping can still be heard—rational voices drowned by the thunder of rockets. This must stop. Not tomorrow. Not after another round of sterile talks. Now. No compromises. No hesitation wrapped in bureaucratic language. First, the children—saved, fed, sent to school. Let them learn poetry, not missile trajectories. Let them love, not hate. Let them simply be what they are: children. Only then—only then—may the adults, those architects of destruction and tie-clad ministers of death, be allowed to talk. In silence, if possible. Or with headphones, in soundproof rooms—far from schools, hospitals, and marketplaces. But always peacefully. Otherwise, we descend—without remorse—into a world where common sense is an urban legend and the law of the jungle returns in a tuxedo with simultaneous translation. There will be no order, no civilization—only a battlefield planet where children no longer grow. They fall. And instead of building the future, we will watch ourselves bury it.