I understand, I hear, and I respond to what society is saying.

We are fighting for freedom and democracy. People have the right to do what they want.

If they wanted to come out and protest, then they were right to do so.

During wartime, the president should not be making choices in such a situation. I would very much like to see unity.

The parties haven't found it, and the problem is not only with the parties, but also with me.

I am not absolving myself of responsibility.

Fedorov will remain in my team, but the exact role he will hold will be announced later.

For the first time, we built a real-time battlefield analytics system that tracks losses.

We began receiving daily reports on casualties. But decisions about whom to support, whom to reinforce, and where to allocate resources are still not made on the basis of data.

They are made on the basis of loyalty. You cannot build or develop a successful system that way.

Another major problem is the blocking of initiatives and endless bureaucratic battles.

During six months at the Ministry of Defense, we were unable to establish centers of competence or reform the organizational structure because the General Staff would not approve it—claiming the name wasn't right or something else was wrong.

Instead of bringing in new people capable of generating ideas, the system kept resisting change.

The war has changed completely. Drone technology changes constantly—new capabilities and new features appear at least four times a year.

Technology itself evolves 20 to 30 times within a single year. The entire system of command and control has changed, and we must change with it.

We cannot keep relying on what worked back then.

Authorities say the operation was linked to online recruitment funded through crypto exchanges registered in Russia and China.

Source: Reuters

One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism is that it sounds good in theory but it never works in practice.

That's actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory.

They despise the West because the West is great.

A conventional war continuing for five years in 21st-century Europe in an increasingly destructive manner — there is no justification for this.

The risk of escalation is growing — geographically, toward new targets including infrastructure, and God forbid, with new types of weapons being deployed.

After all tools have been used, we see that both sides are psychologically becoming ready for a ceasefire.

They always say the darkest hour of the night is the one closest to dawn. We want to believe that this destructive moment we are struggling through in the war is the herald of a near peace and ceasefire.

One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice.

That's actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul.

The world it envisions is a world without courage. A world without creativity or ambition. A world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards. A world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things.

And the world communism envisions is a world without God.