"Trump doesn't work for Putin. He just doesn't give a damn about how wars resolve, as soon as they resolve during his term." We can assume the popular today assessment above is true. If so, Trump would be willing to use both sticks and carrots, and it's only reasonable that, considering his admiration for Putin and his early belief in the russian strength, he would first use all the carrots he could muster. Despite the intense political pressure, he denied Ukraine U.S. intelligence, cancelled the previously scheduled military aid, discontinued U.S. assistance in identifying and cataloguing russian war crimes, used the Ukraine-blaming rhetoric, sent his personal friends to Moscow, promised control over the occupied territories, ignored the international arrest warrant, forced the American soldiers to roll out the red carpet, etc.

But he's running out of carrots. And we're now seeing the first signs of a stick. If so-called russia were a rational player, which Trump might have assumed, they'd take all the carrots they could hope for and call it a day. But it doesn't seem to be happening here.

But Trump might not be the only one who makes this mistake. Now that Ukraine gains the capacity for symmetrical responses, those are actively advertised. The degenerates hit Ukraine's natural gas facilities—a few days pass, and we see the news about their natural gas facilities being hit in return. The degenerates hit Ukraine's power plants—a few days pass, and we see the news about their power plants being hit in return.

The tit-for-tat strategy is efficient in game theory, but only when your opponent is a rational player. So-called russia is not a rational player. It's a deranged monkey on a tree with grenades instead of bananas. When it frantically screams at you, would you really scream back? When it crazed and enraged gropes for things in the vicinity and throws them around, would you really mirror that? That would be asinine. What you should do instead is render it incapable of argession ASAP. Hit it when and where it cripples most. If anything, the russians would be elated to get the symmetrical responses, not least since their tolerance for meaningless suffering is so high. Let's hope it's a mere political facade for the clueless worldwide audience.