Last week, Ukraine attacked the dormitory of a pedagogical college in a place called Starobelsk, in the formerly Ukrainian and now Russian territory of the Lugansk People’s Republic. The Russians immediately called the strike what it was – a terrorist attack. The Ukrainians, uncharacteristically, did not say much about the nature of the strike at first, and then came up with a couple of contradictory narratives.

First, they claimed the Russian “RUBIKON” group of drone operators used that area as a staging base. Then, almost immediately afterwards, parts of the Ukrainian media and government apparatus claimed it was a mistake, and that Ukrainian drones went off course, hitting the dorms by accident.

Neither explanation held any water whatsoever. Foreign journalists – REAL ones who do actual work documenting what happens on the ground – quickly arrived on the scene, at the invitation and under the protection of the Russian government, and not one of them reported seeing anything like military hardware anywhere near the scene. And then the tracking data of the drones showed that the Ukrainians hit the dorms with four waves of about 16 drones in total.

A Clear-Cut Atrocity

The result was 21 dead young people – mostly girls – and a total of 60 casualties (dead and wounded).

One of RT’s correspondents who arrived first on the scene reported the horrific sound of the screams of those still buried under the rubble. Russians around the country have seen the videos sent by some of the victims, who were buried under the rubble, and sent messages to their families pleading for help – before they died, either from asphyxiation, or from additional Ukrainian strikes.

It is impossible to overstate the rage this has inspired in Russia. The entire Russian population, pretty much, is now speaking with one voice, and is demanding that their government stop dicking around and get on with destroying the neo-Nazis that rule Ukraine.

By extension, the Russian people – as a singular, unified entity – are telling the MFIC and the Kremlin, in no uncertain terms, to END THIS and take the war to NATO if necessary.

You have to understand something about the Russian psyche to realise just how scary this is.

Russians are not like Westerners. Actually, most people are not like Westerners. The Russians, due to their Orthodox faith, take much longer to anger to the point of extreme lethal violence than Americans and Europeans. As Stas Krapivnik has explained in the past, Orthodoxy does not have the concept of “just war”, the way Western Christian traditions do, stemming from all the way back to St. Augustine. In the Orthodox way of thought, killing another human being is a sin, no matter who does it, no matter what the reason.

The ONLY justification for it, is if killing that human prevents something far worse from happening – and even that does not wash away or expiate the sin. Only the forgiveness and mercy of God can do that.

So it takes the Russian mind a very long time to get to the point of flipping the “f*** this shit, kill everyone and everything” switch. But… once they do, they do not stop until whatever it is that caused the reaction, is dead and destroyed.

They are now at that point.

Khokholite Performance Indicators

It was not one singular event, one massacre of children (or, really, very young women, and a few young men), that brought the Russians to and beyond the boiling point. It is a long series of abuses and atrocities perpetrated by the Ukrainians. The khokhols, being the weaker side in this conflict, have routinely and repeatedly resorted to urban terrorism to inflict pain and fear on civilians in the border regions – and, increasingly, in Moscow itself.

Ukrainians have mounted drone attacks on villagers, killing thousands of civilians since the SMO started outright in February 2022. Before that, they killed over 14,000 civilians in the “rebellious” regions of Lugansk and Donetsk during what they euphemistically named their “Anti-Terrorist Operation”, including over 100 children in Donetsk City alone. They have attacked what they claim is their own territory, in Crimea, and since 2014 have repeatedly and successfully cut off water to the peninsula. They have dropped “petal mines” all over Donbass – these are little petroleum-filled mines in the shape of leaves that explode when stepped upon, and are very hard to distinguish from ordinary debris on the ground, and can easily kill a small child or severely injure an adult.

Those mines have killed and injured dozens, including many children, in Lugansk and Donetsk regions since 2022.

Ukrainian drones pester Russian oil refineries, at precisely the time when the global oil market is under extreme strain, thanks to the insane American war against Iran. Ukraine’s zeal for cutting off Russia’s energy exports has actually achieved very little to harm Russia economically, but has inflicted massive pain on Ukraine’s European “partners” – proving, yet again, that Ukraine simply cannot be trusted.

The Ukrainians have escalated the war far beyond any rational point, attacking Russia’s early-warning long-range radar systems, which would potentially leave Russia – the world’s most powerful nation in terms of nuclear weapons, and therefore by far the biggest target for the American strategic missile force – blind to any incoming attacks. They have attacked Russian strategic bomber fleets during Operation: SPIDER’S WEB, which saw the destruction of at least one and as many as four irreplaceable Russian Tu-95MS strategic nuclear-capable bombers.

Such provocations would, under normal circumstances, be MORE than sufficient to justify a limited nuclear response by Russia. The logic of nuclear escalation, under normal circumstances, is straightforward: if a nuclear power cannot see incoming threats, because an enemy has blinded its early-warning radars, or cannot respond quite as quickly to them, because that same enemy has attacked one arm of its nuclear triad, then its ONLY rational option is to fire off literally everything it has, and kill the enemy – along with the entire world, if necessary.

But these are not normal circumstances, because it is not Ukraine alone carrying out these attacks. Not one of the things I have noted above, would have been possible without extensive Western and NATO assistance.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Russians are fighting against all of NATO (except Turkey, and even there, the double-dealing Turks are complicit in some of these crimes), and is doing so with one arm tied behind its back.

But now, with the attack on the pedagogical school, the Russians have finally had enough. Even the Russian leadership, which has exhibited extraordinary – some would say foolish – patience up to this point, has snapped.

Everyone in Russia, pretty much, now recognises the cold, hard reality that Russian hardliners, and foreign observers like me, have been saying for nearly 4 years now:

Ukraine is a mad-dog criminal enterprise masquerading as a state.

And we all know what you do with mad dogs.

Eyebrows-Deep in Russian Blood

More than one commentator in Russia has come to precisely that conclusion. You can see and feel the rage of the Russian people in, for example, Stas Krapivnik’s latest screed:

As he correctly points out, Brolon MuZk himself is directly responsible for the deaths of those kids at Starobelsk. The fury in Stas’s voice and face is entirely appropriate. Musk portrays himself as some sort of Randian “superman”, but in reality, he is merely an technocrat, an oligarch, and a tool of the US government.

The reaction from the Russian government was more restrained, perhaps, than that, at least in public, but there is no doubt or question that the Kremlin was enraged by the attack:

Shortly thereafter, Russia launched a simply colossal strike on Ukraine – focused heavily on the capital, Kiev – with over 600 drones, dozens of missiles, and at least one use of the fearsome Oreshnik hypersonic multi-warhead kinetic penetrator on the town of Belaya Tserkov’, about 40Km southwest of Queef itself:

There is good reason to think the Russians actually launched a second strike with an Oreshnik, on a different target, somewhere in Ukrainian-held Donetsk:

The Hazel Grove

It is worth digressing for a moment about the nature of the Oreshnik itself. Alexander Mercouris went into this in some depth in a recent long-form broadcast that he did, based on his own personal sources, where he discussed what the Oreshnik can actually do:

According to that video, the Oreshnik’s origins date back to the siege of the Azovstal factory in Mariupol’, from 4 years ago. At that time, the Russians only had their gigantic “MOAB”-type 9,000Kg super-heavy bombs that could penetrate deep underground, and they were not really designed specifically for that, anyway. Those FAB-9000 bombs are gravity weapons, which means the Russians would have to fly their priceless strategic heavy-lift bombers close to their targets before dropping those town-killers. Given the density of air defences in Ukraine at the time – which increased exponentially after Western supplies of A2AD weapons in mid-2022 – the Russians realised they needed better weapons to penetrate both air defences and underground structures.

So, the Russians adapted and built upon existing Soviet-era technologies – specifically with respect to propulsion and delivery buses – to create a modularised delivery system that no Western air defence system can shoot down. The result was the Oreshnik, which the Russians crash-developed, quite successfully, in 2 years, with a test-firing in November 2024 against the Yuzhmash factory in Dniepropetrovsk. That single strike completely changed the strategic calculus in Europe, because it showed the West that Russia now has an intermediate-range, non-nuclear, kinetic weapon that is completely unstoppable.

The Oreshnik itself apparently comes in up to 5 different flavours.

The first is the one that we have seen used three times now – in November 2024 against Dniepropetrovsk, in January 2026 against a target near Lvov, and now in May 2026 against an airfield near Belaya Tserkov’. That base variant uses the 6×6 set of, apparently, tungsten-aluminium alloy penetrators, which hit the ground at hypersonic speeds and delivery a tremendous amount of energy, directed primarily downward at the impact site.

The second variant uses a set of 3 kinetic penetrators – given there are “only” 3 “leaves” dropped instead of 36, each penetrator is much heavier. This might have been used against a target in Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk recently, though there is some debate on that point.

The third variant uses a single giant unitary warhead, presumably designed to penetrate deep down and utterly destroy extremely hardened underground structures.

The fourth is a fuel-air explosive (FAE) warhead, similar to the terrifying Tos-1A thermobaric “flamethrower”, but orders of magnitude more powerful. If you have ever seen the videos of Tos-1A warheads detonating the battlefield, you know what they can do. The chemical mixture kills just about every living thing directly under the target area – and then, right after that, the detonator explodes it, igniting the air in the vicinity. That explosion ignites the air, creating a shockwave with the density of steel in the nearby vicinity, killing anything in the open near the target area. Then, the blast zone collapses in on itself, creating a vacuum that sucks in the air all around it with tremendous violence – and that vacuum is enough to rip the lungs and blood vessels out of any unfortunates still left alive in nearby structures.

That is a horrific weapon – though entirely legal under the conventions governing such things. The Ameribros have them too, though they use air-launched FAE bombs instead of ground-launched rockets.

Now imagine something with several hundred or thousand times that level of power, launched at hypersonic speeds, which cannot be stopped at all by any Western air defences, detonating over a densely populated area.

The fifth variant is a nuclear-armed version of the Oreshnik, which directly violates the INF Treaty – but then, that treaty lapsed, because the US unilaterally withdrew from it under Trump 1.0 in 2019, and the Russians stated they will no longer consider themselves legally bound by it back in mid-2025. So, from a strict letter-of-law point of view, the Russians have every right to develop and deploy a nuclear-tipped version of the Oreshnik now.

Russia at War with Europe

The reason why it is important to understand the power and capabilities of the Oreshnik, is because we need to understand WHY Russia needs such a weapon now.

If Russia were merely at war ONLY with Ukraine, the war itself would have ended 4 years ago. The cold, hard FACT is that the Ukrainian army of that time had been decisively and thoroughly CRUSHED in the opening days of the SMO. The Russians had accomplished most of their critical initial goals in the opening days of the invasion, though at considerable cost to themselves, and especially to the Donbass militias. They forced the Ukrainians to the negotiating table, first in Minsk, and then in Istanbul. The two sides wrangled out an agreement that neither was necessarily happy with, but could at least live with, and both Bellendsky and the MFIC respectively signed it.

Then Boris Johnson – one of the most evil men in history, given what he is directly responsible for creating – arrived in Queef, at the behest of his own neoclown masters in Washington and London, and told Bellendsky the Crackhead Clown that the West would give Ukraine everything it needed to fight, provided they tore up the agreement with Russia.

The rest is history. The Europeans started out by supporting Ukraine with materiel, and increasingly with men – it is an open secret that up to TEN THOUSAND Poles, alone, have died as “mercenaries” in Ukraine, and nobody with any serious interest in this war believes for a moment that the pilots flying the “Ukrainian” F-16s and Mirage-2000s are actually from Ukraine itself.

As Ukraine has slowly and inexorably lost ground and men, the Europeans have become increasingly desperate, and increasingly involved with the war. These days, they are now acting as Ukraine’s manufacturing base, and quite openly so. Ukraine itself has no real war industry left – every time the Ukies try to set anything up, the Russians pretty much immediately destroy it. So now, Ukraine’s artillery shells, vehicles, tanks, howitzers, and just about everything else, all come from various factories in Germany, the UK, France, Czechia, Italy, and other non-European NATO-aligned countries, like South Korea and Japan.

Ukraine’s only real domestic wartime production comes from a cottage industry of drone manufacturers, who largely assemble things by hand in small underground factories scattered throughout the country. These drones range from the very small short-range FPVs, assembled from predominantly Chinese kits, to large long-range drones that are the size of small Cessna planes. Those drones absolutely do cause the Russians problems – many of the larger Ukrainian drones now have the range to go all the way past the Ural mountains and strike Russian factories and oil refineries as far afield as Chelyabinsk and beyond. Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries over the past year have certainly irritated the Russians, and have definitely caused them minor problems with supply.

However, those drone attacks remain nothing more than pinpricks. The reality is that the Russian economy is growing, and has shrugged off the impacts of these attacks on their refineries and factories.

So the Ukrainians, and their European backers, have gotten desperate.

They are now routing Ukrainian drones through Baltic airspace, sending them through Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, for the express purpose of attacking the big Russian oil refinery at Ust-Luga. This has not had much of an effect, but it has cemented in the Russian mind the absolutely inescapable reality that EUROPE IS A DIRECT PARTICIPANT IN A WAR AGAINST RUSSIA.

And the Russians have had quite enough of being patient.

A Fight to the Death

Following the attack on Starobelsk, Russia’s entire government united around a single sentiment, expressed in the statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry on May 25th:

In the early hours of May 22, the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched a bloody drone attack on the academic building and dormitory of a college of the Lugansk Pedagogical University in Starobelsk, the Lugansk People’s Republic. It became yet another glaring manifestation of the Nazi and terrorist essence of the Kiev regime which deliberately attacks civilians and does not hesitate to cold-bloodedly kill children.

The Zelensky junta and its Western sponsors supplying the Ukrainian Armed Forces with weapons for committing crimes against our people have shown to the whole world their rude disdain for the norms of international humanitarian law. They are openly trampling upon the Geneva conventions of 1949 and their additional protocols that regulate the protection of the civilian population during conflicts, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child and some other prominent international acts.

All this has exhausted our patience. In this situation, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are beginning to launch consistent and systemic strikes at enterprises of the Ukrainian defence industry in Kiev, including specific facilities for designing, manufacturing and programming drones and preparing them for operation. The Kiev regime uses these drones with the assistance of NATO specialists who supply components, provide reconnaissance and target acquisition data. The strikes will target decision-making centres and command posts.

Due to the fact that the above-mentioned facilities are scattered across Kiev, we are notifying foreign citizens, including the personnel of diplomatic missions and international organisations of the need to leave the city as soon as possible. We are urging residents of the Ukrainian capital not to approach facilities of the military and administrative infrastructure of the Zelensky regime.

I have highlighted one specific sentence, which actually loses some of its impact in translation. The original Russian says, “Всё это переполнило чашу терпения”. The literal translation of this is, “all this overflowed/overfilled the cup of patience”. This is a more poetic reading, perhaps, than the English translation, but its impact is far greater.

The Russians are saying, in absolutely no uncertain terms, that they are DONE playing nice. Now, Queef is directly in their sights for constant attacks on decision-making centres.

Unfortunately, the Russians have REALLY shitty media-handling “skills” – hell, compared to the Iranians, who are MASTERS at trolling the West using AI-generated Lego cartoons, the Russians are rank amateurs who keep making life much harder for themselves. Right after they came out with that statement about targeting decision-making centres and command posts, one of their most senior government figures, Andrei Kartapolov – who is the head of the State Duma’s Defence Committee, and previously served in the Russian Armed Forces as a colonel-general, in command of the Western Military District – stated the following:

Deputies do not control the troops and do not determine where and when to launch strikes. The same can be said about the office of the President of Ukraine. We all understand that Zelensky doesn’t appear there. He sits in a bunker, and in his office there are two guards and five cleaners. Does it make sense to spend expensive ammunition on, in effect, an empty place?

He went on to say, in the same interview:

[I]n this case, decision-making centers refer to the deepened and protected command posts of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, their branches, units, possibly other security structures, including state administration structures.

Much of the Western whore-media immediately interpreted this as a “walking back” of the initial harshness of the Russian statement. The problem is that the Russian mind is much more literal than the Western one, and to a Russian, that statement is not at all contradictory to the original one from the MFA – but to a Western mind, it looks like a classic display of Russian sabre-rattling, followed immediately by a climbdown.

This is a catastrophic mistake, on both sides.

The Russians are now at boiling point. They are ready, and willing, to go to war with THE WHOLE OF EUROPE, if necessary – and that starts with the Neo-Tsar himself, whose rhetoric has hardened dramatically over the past few weeks, down to the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry, and the entirety of the Security Council of Russia.

The West mistakes Russian patience for weakness. This is quite literally insane. The Russians are not weak, at all. They have the capacity and the power, should they so choose, to turn the whole of Western Europe into a post-nuclear-apocalyptic wasteland. They can easily launch Oreshniks, Sarmats, Burevestniks, and Poseidon nuclear torpedoes, that would all, between them, render continental Europe totally uninhabitable.

They simply do not want to do this.

Why?

Because, believe it or not, the Russians are a humane and civilised people.

This is something about other cultures that Westerners, and especially Americans, simply do not understand. They think that the West is the most civilised and cultured part of the world. This is blatantly false, because “Western” civilisation, as we understand it today, is actually very young.

The original ancient European Christian Western civilisation died in the slaughter-pens of the First World War. The postmodern secular nightmare that replaced it, is empty, meaningless, spiritually dessicated, and disconnected from the real world. It is a “civilisation” rooted in materialism and modernity, NOT in the things that actually matter.

Other civilisations, by direct contrast, are far older, contiguous, and rooted in things that genuinely count. The Russians have a continuous civilisation stretching back over a thousand years. The Iranians, Indians, and Chinese have civilisational traditions going back two, three, or even five times as long as that.

By comparison, American “civilisation” dates back less than 400 years, and its modern incarnation dates back perhaps 70. Western European “civilisation” is barely 100 years old.

The common feature of genuinely ancient civilisations, is that they are polite, courteous, cultured, and – above all – HUMANE. They have different standards of what it means to be humane than Westerners do – just look at what the CPC did during the Lung Pao Sicken 6 years back to their own people. But they all recognise that war is VERY BAD for humanity, and they strive to avoid it.

On top of that, the Russians know, better than literally anyone else, what a true pan-European war looks like. They have fought one THREE TIMES, losing millions of their people in each one – Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, WWI, and WWII, combined, cost Russia alone at least 35 MILLION people over the space of 130 years.

In the words of Dmitryi Polyanskiy, former Deputy Ambassador to the United Abominations, and now Ambassador to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (another moribund organisation – one has to wonder whether he pissed off someone senior in the MFA), it is not Russia’s weakness that prevents it from attacking Europe, but rather, Russia’s humanity:

Conclusion – Rearranging the Stones

One major question remains, based on the following syllogism:

If the Russians can quite easily destroy the West’s capitals and militaries…

… and they know and fully accept that all of Western Europe is in fact fighting a war to the death against Russia…

… then why the hell DON’T they simply launch hypersonic missiles into the heart of Europe, cripple its industries and power plants, cut its internet cables, destroy its military bases, and accept the inevitable, potentially nuclear, conflict that follows???

To me, the simplest answers are usually the best, because they are the ones that require the least additions and explanations.

The most parsimonious factual answer here is that the Russians, being a legalistic and literal bunch, started out their Special Military Operation back in February 2022 with three specific goals:

• Protection of the Russian-speaking natives of the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics;
• Demilitarisation of Ukraine;
• De-Nazification of Ukraine;

Of these three aims, the first is almost complete. The Russians have completely liberated Lugansk, and control 85% or so of Donetsk.

Their aims have expanded since then, to include the taking of Zaporozh’ye and Kherson regions, but their primary focus remains the liberation of Donetsk. They are close to this now – it is quite within the realm of possibility that they will take Slavyansk and Kramatorsk by the end of this year.

The demilitarisation of Ukraine is almost complete, believe it or not. Peter Turchin argues that, based on his quantitative model, and based on a similar model created by Warwick Powell, the Ukrainian military is likely to hit what Carl von Clausewitz called the “culminating point”, or what we normies would call “total collapse”, somewhere in the summer to autumn of this year. The Ukies are not merely grabbing men off the streets as cannon fodder – they are now forcibly mobilising (or “mogilising”, as I call it – playing on the Russian word, могила, meaning “grave”) women into the AFU.

The de-Nazification is well underway, and will be accomplished once the Ukrainian military itself collapses, though it will take longer to fully achieve.

All of this means that the Russian military is preoccupied with clearing out the single most heavily fortified and dense belt of obstacles, not just in Ukraine, but in ALL OF EUROPE, right now. From their point of view, it makes sense to finish that task, before taking on the much bigger and broader – but in some ways easier – task of fighting all of Europe.

Simply put, the Russians only want to bite off what they can chew.

Right now, that amounts to Donbass, with secondary, and still highly kinetic, operations in Zaporozh’ye. Once they clean up and liberate Donbass, I project that they will pause and offer Ukraine terms of surrender, specifically pertaining to a complete withdrawal from Zaporozh’ye and Kherson regions.

The Ukrainians will, of course, refuse to comply. Which means the Russians will then go on the march again – this time, much more aggressively, into southern Ukraine. And now, they will move to take Odessa – without which a Russian victory is incomplete.

Once that is done, THEN they will be ready for outright war with Europe.

And, make no mistake, that war will be BRUTAL. From the Russian perspective, their war in Ukraine is surgical. This sounds ridiculous to a Western mind, until one realises that only about 15,000 civilians have died in Ukraine since the SMO started. That is 15,000 in a little more than 4 years. Even in the latest gigantic missile and drone strike, a total of SEVEN civilians died, most of them due to falling debris, or Ukie AD missiles gone wonky (which happens all the time).

Contrast that to the barbaric, evil way the West fights. In the first day of the illegal war against Iran, the US slaughtered 168 schoolgirls in Minab. In nearly three years of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the Izzraelis have slain over 75,000 people, the majority of them women and children, and are continuing to murder people in southern Lebanon with absolutely zero cause.

The Russians, to repeat, fight humanely and carefully against their fellow Slavs. This is, for them, a civil war. Despite harsh rhetoric from the Russian side, they WILL NOT destroy central Kiev – for the Russians, Kiev is the Mother City, the very historical and spiritual heart of their civilisation and culture. To destroy Kiev is to destroy Russia, and NO serious Russian, from the MFIC all the way down to the lowliest grunt in the Russian Army, wants to do that.

Against Europe, though, which regards Russians as subhuman degenerate Mongoloid-Slavs… there will be no mercy.

The Russians, if provoked, will raze Europe’s cities to the ground. They have all the means to do so. And they will NEVER allow a European power to threaten them again. If that means they need to rearrange the stones in the centre of Berlin, and shatter Germany as a unified nation, then they will do it.

We in the West, in our arrogance and blindness, do not take the Russians seriously. We think we can win a war against them. We cannot and will not – even at the nuclear threshold.

For the sake of humanity, for the sake of our very survival as a species, we MUST pull back from this madness.

The Russians are winning the war in Ukraine. They have learned to hate the West. Europe’s reaction should be to give them whatever they want in Ukraine – which is THEIRS by historical right – and seek accommodation with a Russia that has no interest in conquering them. Let the Baltic Chihuahuas go hang, let Finland turn into a territory of Russia again, let Sweden and Norway declare neutrality, and let NATO fall apart.

Europe has enough problems now without adding an unwinnable war with Russia to the list.