This Resurfaced was captured near the train station in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2021.

It’s been almost a year since the unbelievably tyrannic, hostile, and war-mongering Vlad invaded Ukraine after amassing troops on his Belarusian dictator pal Lukashenko’s border.

The other day here in Malmö, I spoke with a young couple from Kyiv. They both live here temporarily (just like the Ukrainian family we have housed in our co-op’s guest house) but miss family, friends and the life they so drastically were forced to leave behind about a year ago. It was the second time in a week, the first being in Bansko at our hotel, that someone from Kyiv told me that cafés, bars, and restaurants are starting to open up again in the capital.

How will this war ever come to an end? How will Putin ever accept an uncompromising retreat, i.e, defeat without losing face? A seemingly unsolvable conundrum.

The only feasible solution is if he and his closest pundits and allies are peacefully or forcefully removed from the Kremlin. But I’m not hearing of any such shifts in the works.

In any case, it was brave of the eighty-year-old Biden to covertly take a 10-hour train ride from Warsaw to Kyiv and back. It strikes me as interesting that the Russian armed forces haven’t taken out Ukraine’s rail system. How hard can that be? What is the strategy behind that decision? Questions, questions.