Russian Unchanged Core Terms and Their Sphere of Influence

A Great Power, obeys no moral laws. It follows its own logic, spheres of influence, zones of control, and the invisible boundaries that great empires draw around their perceived security and access to wealth.

Imagine for a moment if Russia or China were to build military bases on Canadian or Mexican soil. Washington would not respond with diplomacy or reason. It would respond with force. American troops would move north and south, and the CIA would weave its dark art of regime change, as it has done countless times before in other countries. This instinct is not new, it is the living spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, a 200 year-old declaration that the Western Hemisphere belongs to America’s strategic sphere of influence.

We see this doctrine in motion today, massive display of U.S. naval presence along the Venezuelan and Colombian coasts. Washington’s hand moves quietly behind regime changes, and not so quietly when it places a bounty, fifty million dollars, on the head of Venezuela’s president! The justification is always the same, to defend democracy, when in truth it is about controlling markets, resources, and acquiring more wealth.

Both Venezuela and Colombia possess vast oil and gas reserves, much of which flow eastward to China. That, in itself, is enough to provoke the American empire’s unease.

And yet, the American empire refuses to see the mirror image of its behaviour in others. Russia’s actions in Ukraine, however brutal and unforgivable, are also guided by this same logic: geopolitical spheres of influence. For centuries, Ukraine has been intertwined with Russia, in bloodlines, in culture, in trade, and in war. To Moscow, NATO’s creeping expansion eastward is not an act of defense but an overlapping spheres of influence of a growing NATO into Russia's sphere.

Russia’s demands remain consistent, almost ritualistic, recognition of its annexations, neutrality for Ukraine, and the severing of military ties with NATO. Behind these terms lies the cold, pragmatic truth of war, the strong demanding space to breathe. The Western narrative casts Ukraine as a "beacon" of democracy, but the reality is more sinister. Ukraine has become a proxy killing fields, a sacrificial pawn of 38 million people between NATO and Russia, Ukraine's soil soaked with the blood of millions of Ukrainians and Russians.

The world watches with growing disgust. Ordinary people, Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, Europeans, Canadians are united by one shared fatigue, the exhaustion of endless killing, the lies of propaganda, the prayers for an end.

When the bombs fall silent, the true work will begin, not of politics, but of a long painful process of humanitarian reconciliation, of the slow human labour of rebuilding trust, families reunited, economies repair, and a deeper understanding and meaning from the proxy war.