Aleksey Arestovich's latest idea is that the two warring countries should sue the US-led bloc together

Ukraine needs to come to an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then Kiev and Moscow should unite to sue the West.

You may think the above idea is rather radical and unusual. Sue the West? Where? In what court? The same West that has no issue with either Ukraine or the US (or both) blowing up Germany's – and the EU's – vital energy pipelines? Or the West that ignores its leaders' complicity in Israel's genocide in Gaza, a crime explicitly proscribed – the complicity no less than the act itself – in Article III (e) of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention?

But wait till you hear about the fertile mind that produced this very outside-the-box idea. It's none other than Aleksey Arestovich, once an adviser to Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky. Not necessarily a household name (yet) outside Ukraine, Arestovich was, until very recently, a man of extraordinary influence in Kiev, and used it to energetically promote the very proxy war that he'd now like to end and to then blame on the West alone.

University dropout, sleazy pop psychologist (of the how-to-manipulate-others-to-succeed type), former military and virtually certainly also intelligence officer, blogger and would-be-geopolitics guru with very adaptable views, and, of course, Zelensky aide from 2020 to 2023,  Arestovich is not merely an individual but a syndrome: He stands for a social type, the smart but psychopathically empathy-less conman who managed to ruthlessly exploit the disorientation left behind in post-Soviet societies with a coldhearted cynicism that would have made Machiavelli blush.

Now he deplores that Ukrainians and Russians are killing each other in droves over a couple of provincial towns. "And for what?", it has occurred to him to ask himself. Arestovich's answer is of the kind that not long ago would've got you canceled in the West as a Putin stooge and appeaser: "We have pleased the head honchos from the Washington and Brussels obkoms – [a now derogative term from the Soviet lexicon, designating a district administration] – who stand around us and applaud, watching as two apes with knives have a go at each other."