At the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, in the company of Putin (who desperately needs to deprive Ukraine of, if not nominal independence, then at least its subjectivity) and Lukashenko (who is helping him in this), Chinese leader Xi Jinping condemns states that engage in bullying other, weaker states. Make no mistake, this is not about China, which is consistently waging a large-scale political, economic, and information campaign to regain de facto independent Taiwan, but, of course, about the United States.

It must be said that the person who is tirelessly fighting to ensure that countries that are still neutral or states that have reasons to fear Chinese domination (such as India) listen more and more closely to China, apart from (naturally) the Chinese leader, is Donald Trump himself. He managed to offend the Indian prime minister so much, while at the same time inviting Putin into his car in Alaska, that Narendra Modi demonstratively repeated this gesture, literally a few days after additional tariffs were imposed on a large number of Indian goods because India buys Russian oil. It was he who legitimized Putin's voice (both in Alaska and, more importantly, in his latest chaotic statements about the Russian war), who is now seizing the moment to declare to the whole world that the issue is not about Ukraine at all, but about the predatory West and NATO expansion. It is ultimately Donald Trump, with his stubborn conviction that Europeans are standing between him and his Nobel Peace Prize by “denying” Ukraine a damn good peace agreement, who is showing countries like Indonesia, which are not very interested in what is really happening in our hemisphere, that everything is not so clear-cut. This is the gap that today's speech by war criminal Putin (whose arrest warrant, thanks to Trump, has almost reached the absurd inflation of the Venezuelan bolivar) is filling. It was NATO that led Ukraine to lose a fifth of its territory, it was NATO that forced Russia to violate the Budapest Memorandum, and it is NATO that is preventing Kyiv from agreeing to peace (and poor countries in the South from getting cheap Russian oil and cheap Ukrainian grain at the same time, without any threat of sanctions).

“The domestic rules of a few countries should not be imposed on others,” Xi Jinping urges in his speech to the twenty leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (and many others who were not yet there). By domestic rules, he means, for example, basic human rights. The funny thing is that even by this logic, Russia had no right to bring its “protection of the Russian language” to Ukraine, but such trifles do not bother the great Chinese statesman. International analysts around the world, including yours truly, have been repeating for four years that Xi Jinping is monitoring the dynamics of the Russian-Ukrainian war to take his own steps. This year, he saw everything he needed to see. Taiwan had better get ready.

It is no coincidence that the plane of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was hit by Russian electronic warfare this Sunday. The interference was so strong and prolonged that the pilot was forced to land manually. This is the same demonstration of power by a newborn, still unnamed bloc, as the military parade in China scheduled for September 3. On the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. The problem with the part of the modern world that likes the rules established after it — the rule of law, for example, or the unacceptability of any form of genocide — is that it has become too accustomed to these rules and has decided that they are an immutable status quo. As a result, people who do not understand the functioning of politics as a whole have come to power. The same people who, looking at Picasso in a gallery, say, “My seven-year-old daughter could paint that,” only in politics. The cooks Lenin dreamed of are convinced that they can now handle everything: first, because the people love them, and second, because what's so difficult about it? Against the backdrop of the fatal shots fired at their own feet every day by the United States of America, the fact that Ukraine has the same problem is almost imperceptible. Washington could respond symmetrically to Russia right now, because ruining the head of the EU bloc is tantamount to approaching Article 5.

But I do not doubt that Trump, upon hearing this, sincerely gloated and applauded the strong leader, Vladimir. And maybe he was a little jealous. He still does not understand that in a world remade according to the Chinese model, the United States is assigned the role of a state that suddenly loses control of everything and is left with a cosmic external debt and a broken four-letter trough. It is quite possible that some politicians in the United States, who under democratic conditions would remain marginalized forever, will even be satisfied with this. Following the reproductive violence already introduced in most states, it will be possible to revive the Ku Klux Klan and deprive godless same-sex adulterers of their rights.

Ukraine, meanwhile, can only hope for external factors that are impossible to predict — such as the violent protests in Indonesia, which briefly delayed the warm embrace between its still nominally neutral president and Putin at the Chinese parade, forcing Prabowo Subianto to stay at home. In the absence of a series of such factors occurring simultaneously, there is no bright scenario for us in the near future. The worst will begin after the end of the hot phase of the war, wherever it ends. The good news is that we still have to live through it. There was an old joke: optimists learn English, pessimists learn Chinese, and realists learn how to use a Kalashnikov. Unfortunately, modern warfare cannot be won with automatic weapons alone.