The desperate yelping, piercing wailing of a father who lost his 16 year old son to a Russian rocket are haunting my ear canals. I shudder writing about it now. My stomach sends out acid bolts all over my body just thinking of this man and his son. This has been happening ten to fifteen times a day since I saw this poor man break down on my computer screen. As a father I know he wil never recover and every day of his life will be a living hell from now on. That man would have given his life so his son could have lived.

The suffering of the Ukrainian people hits me hard. Ask my wife. She has too listen to me practically bursting open with grief when I recite the events of the day during this ongoing military operation.

But… You felt a but coming, and yes there is a but.

I don’t let those emotions and that intense empathy switch off a rational part of my mind. Or at least a part of me that desperately wants to analyze this conflict as correctly and as close to the truth as possible with consideration for every single aspect.

I feel a lot of sadness for the Russian mothers and fathers who are losing their teenage sons in Ukraine too. Few, if any, wanted to go there. Fuck… When you’re 18 you wanna get laid, hang out with your friends. Explore. Feel alive. Travel. Not in a tank, but in a Ryanair aircraft.

There is way more to this conflict than what the media is telling you. This is not the rape of innocent little Ukraine by disgusting monstrous Russia. This is an ill-fated, ultimately doomed, destructive attack in an attempt to annex a fiercely independent nation. BUT. There is that word again. BUT.

The US paved the way for this attack. It did many things to provoke a violent reaction from the Russians. The US is sacrificing Ukrainian blood in its decades long, undeclared, but very real, war against Russia. It’s using this people as a pawn in their larger strategy of being the biggest bully on the block. They just have a much better PR machine than the Russians, a catchier story culture and their oligarchic system is still believed to be a democracy by many people. Putin’s rule is more obviously an oligarchy than the duopoly of the US with its largely illusionary options in the voting booth. Democrats or Republicans. Both serve the American oligarchs. When they’re American you don’t call them oligarchs, you call them successful entrepreneurs or ‘job creators’ or business moguls. Never oligarchs. But that’s what they are. Russia and the US have – in practical outcomes – the same political system. The American one is more sophisticated in obfuscating how it really works. Its best tools are its mass media with its veneer of objectivity and Hollywood and American stories in general. America creates the catchiest stories. America itself is a fiction, albeit a catchy one. The Russian story is a very bleak one. It’s easy to demonize a country with a reputation for being cold, sullen, cranky, with a literature best known for novels you can’t finish unless you are a masochist.

That sixteen year old boy? His blood is on Putin’s hands, but also on Biden’s hands.

A nation is a bullshit story with an army and borders on a map. The US has a better bullshit story than the Russians.

That’s my position.

It’s a more painful realization than the soothing illusion that only one demonic villain is responsible for all this.