Kyiv, September 2025.
Like every doomed spectator hooked on the gaudy freak show of American decline, I crawl out of bed, mainline coffee, and open the feed — the night’s harvest of presidential droppings, a neatly bagged crop of brain-shit dangling from the branches of the Truth Social tree of absurdity.
The posts scream like neon sirens: all-caps paranoia, grievance by the pound, the Adderall-spiked ravings of a first-world dictator running on gas-station speed. The content doesn’t burn your eyes — that’s expected. It’s the slab-headed stupidity of the whole enterprise, the bull-nosed idiocy of a man already sensing the icy call of the box, the faint whine of the engraver’s pen etching his name into the brass plate of oblivion.
I have to kick it. Trump’s been rampaging through my skull like a late-night drunk hunting a cheap hooker. I grab the Nikons, throw the bags in the boot, and light the fuse. Nine hours flat-out across the steppe — black autumn sunflowers, bad roads, bitter coffee — until Kramatorsk looms, strangled in the claws of a pinch-faced vampire in a Loro Piana suit.
I pull up at my apartment, kill the motor, and step out. An old babushka — ninety if she’s a day — stands framed by the black crater of a fresh rocket strike, stooping to gather litter from the patchy grass in front of her Soviet-era block. She drops each scrap into a sagging cardboard box with priestly care. For anyone who’s never heard an attack drone on its death run, think dragonfly swollen on growth hormones and juiced on The Rock’s gym bag — and you’re close. The drone screams overhead, low, descending fast. The blast comes a few blocks away. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t even look up.
Head buzzing from the drive, I lug my kit upstairs and dump it inside. On the last run to the car, a pickup rattles past. Six soldiers, mud-caked and exhausted, stare out. One catches my eye and nods. They’re so damn young — but tough. Not ICE-agent tough — flabby Alabama bubbas in Walmart armour, waving AR-15 “school-shooter” specials. These are wake-up-every-day-to-hunt-Russians tough.
The buildings here are solid — blunt, brick-stacked fortresses. Just as well, considering what the Russians hurl at them every day. Inside, it’s Stalin chic in full decay: bile-green walls, morgue-grey ceilings, colours rarely seen outside an autopsy room, all bathed in the glow of fizzing embalming lights. A perfect sanctuary for sweating out Trump-induced dysphoria.
I lived in Kramatorsk for six months in the early days of the Russian invasion. Back then, the sallow-faced hordes were a safer forty clicks away; now they’re less than fifteen, and the town is buried in Dante’s ninth circle — Grad rockets, one-ton bombs, attack drones dropping with the relentless, cold ticking of a Sturmanskie watch.
In the marble corridors of power, hapless politicians waltz a choreographed danse macabre, powerless to halt the slaughter. In the autumn streets of Ukraine’s east, people sip dark coffee like a tennis crowd, heads swivelling in unison — eyes locked on Geran drones that hammer into the pavement a few hundred meters away. The disconnect hits like a sucker punch to the gut.
I meet Sasha, an army chaplain, and he drives me toward the frontlines. The roads are strewn with twisted carcasses — tanks, vans, metal husks still reeking of fire. Sasha is calm, unflappable, steering us to a cottage smothered in camouflage nets, a defiant middle finger to the ever-present eyes in the sky.
An army medic collapses into hysterical laughter when I mention Trump and Putin’s Alaskan tryst. “The thing about Trump,” he gasps, “is there’s always hope. Two weeks, ten days, a month — he’ll change his mind. That’s the beauty of Donald Trump: he’s pure meta. Chaotic.” Then more manic laughter.
Artillery slams in the distance, rattling the truck windows as we weave through the apocalyptic landscape. In the villages, the sun burns down on stooped figures queuing for bread. An old woman in a black-and-white floral dress grips her Zimmer frame and says, “We live, we live. We want to keep on living.” Her voice is steady, though her knees threaten to fold beneath her.
Back in Kramatorsk, the word spreads fast. A Russian bomb has torn through a nearby village. Twenty-five elderly people, queuing for their pensions, blown apart in a split second of mindless, explosive violence.
I’m back in my autopsy room. The detox is working. Frontline life sharpens the lens. Then — out of nowhere — the American nightmare floods back in. Charlie Kirk, Trump’s pet influencer, gets shot, and the world goes insane. Thoughts and prayers are mandatory. Skip the ritual, and the MAGA goon squad is at your door.
I sigh, lean back, and let the shit wash over me in waves. I think of the old woman on her Zimmer frame — “We want to live.” Then I think of the twenty-five pensioners vaporised by a Russian bomb. Thoughts and prayers, anyone? Thoughts and prayers…
Man I love the way you tell the story ! Slava Ukraini. F&@k djT!
Good to hear from you back at the front. And to be reminded why we admire the Ukrainians so much.
And at the same time despise Trump and his MAGA Republicans, as they grovel to Putin and Netanyahu