The Moral Inversion I Have Been Warning About Is 100% Here

The end-state has arrived: the invader is being positioned as the reasonable party, and the invaded is being indicted as the obstacle to peace. I have been warning that this was the terminus of the long lie chain—an outcome engineered over many months, not stumbled into by accident. This week it became explicit presidential language.

On January 15, 2026, President Trump told Reuters that Vladimir Putin was “ready to make a deal” and that Ukraine was “less ready,” naming President Zelenskyy as the holdup. The Kremlin immediately affirmed the framing. Within twenty-four hours, Zelenskyy answered with the only thing that matters in war—observable behavior—pointing to ongoing Russian strikes as proof that Russia is not pursuing peace at all.

When the aggressor continues the aggression and the victim is blamed for refusing capitulation, you are no longer witnessing a messy peace debate. You are witnessing moral inversion operating as policy.

And make no mistake about it. Moral inversion is not “spin.” It is instead a strategic weapon. It is the deliberate sort of reversal of culpability that makes abandonment feel like virtue and surrender feel like wisdom. It is the conversion of self-defense into guilt.

What moral inversion is, operationally

In normal moral logic, the party that initiates violence bears the responsibility to stop it. The aggressor is culpable; the victim is entitled to resist. In moral inversion, that relationship is flipped. The aggressor is recast as a pragmatic peacemaker—reluctant, reasonable, tired of bloodshed. The victim is recast as stubborn, fanatical, unwilling to compromise, addicted to war. The more the victim refuses to sign away its future, the more the victim is blamed for the killing field.

This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the only narrative structure that can make a coerced settlement sellable in the West.

A rigged “peace process” is a delivery mechanism for this weapon. The aggressor places a “deal” on the table that encodes defeat. The victim must reject it to survive. That rejection is then repackaged as proof that the victim “doesn’t want peace.”

The public is then trained to confuse refusal to self-destruct with a desire to continue war. The result is consent manufacturing: support for the victim collapses not because the facts changed, but because the moral frame was inverted.

This is why I have insisted, over and over and over again, that the war’s decisive battlefield is not only the Donbas or the Black Sea. It is the West’s capacity to keep its moral categories intact under sustained and Kremlin-backed manipulation.

Why so many people slept on the danger

The West is structurally vulnerable to moral inversion because it carries three habits that are virtues in domestic politics and liabilities in asymmetric conflict.

First, symmetry addiction. Democracies are trained to assume conflicts are mutual, narratives are contested, and compromise is the default virtue. That instinct becomes a vulnerability when the conflict is not a dispute but an invasion. “Both sides” framing does not produce nuance here; it produces acquittal for the aggressor and indictment for the victim.

Second, process worship. Western institutions often treat the existence of a “process” as evidence of good faith. But in an asymmetric environment, process is frequently the weapon. A “peace plan” can be a trap designed to force a binary choice: accept national dismemberment or be branded the problem.

Third, Trumpism’s normalization of reversal. In the domestic arena, President Trump has long rewarded moral flips: cruelty reframed as strength, corruption reframed as authenticity, predation reframed as dealmaking. Once a population has been trained to accept these reversals as normal, foreign-policy inversion becomes easier to install. The mind no longer rebels; it shrugs.

Those three conditions are why I have continually described moral inversion as an end-state. You do not arrive there by one lie. You arrive there by thousands of lies that teach the audience to distrust reality, distrust institutions, and distrust moral clarity itself.

The Kremlin’s long plan, and why this week matters

Russia’s strategic need is not merely to seize territory. It is to break the West’s deterrence and unity while laundering conquest into legitimacy. For that, Moscow requires not only a pause in fighting but a narrative victory: sanctions relief, reduced aid, fractured alliances, and a rehabilitated Russia that can rearm and strike again.

A stable democratic coalition cannot be brought to support that outcome directly. It must be tricked into endorsing it indirectly. That is the function of this inversion we are seeing.

If Ukraine is framed as the problem, then cutting Ukraine off becomes “peace.” If Zelenskyy is framed as obstinate, then pressuring Zelenskyy becomes “responsibility.” If Russia is framed as ready for a deal, then Russian violence becomes background noise rather than the center of the moral ledger.

That is why this week is not merely another headline. It is the moment the United States’ highest political office overtly placed the burden of peace on the victim and described the aggressor as ready. This is the breakout from propaganda space into policy space.

Raymond Method analysis

My framework has always been about intent, incentives, and harm. The present move becomes fully legible under what I call The Raymond Method.

Pillar One: Regime Security is the prime directive

Autocrats and aspiring autocrats do not act to serve national interest as a moral abstraction. They act to preserve power. Putin’s survival requires a war narrative that does not end in humiliation or accountability. President Trump’s survival at least partially requires the performance of domination and dealmaking. When those regime incentives converge, moral inversion becomes a tool that Putin and his American puppet Trump can both use.

Trump promised he could end the war quickly. When that outcome fails to materialize on demand, he needs a scapegoat that preserves the myth of control. Blaming Ukraine preserves his self-image as the would-be peacemaker and positions him to coerce the party most dependent on U.S. support.

Pillar Two: Asymmetric warfare

In asymmetric warfare, language is not commentary. It is terrain. The objective is not to win a debate; it is to alter the public’s willingness to sustain cost. “Peace” becomes a weapon word. “Negotiations” become a weapon structure. “Realism” becomes a weapon morality.

The aggressor’s goal is not a fair settlement. The aggressor’s goal is to make the victim’s refusal to accept defeat look immoral. And this is all done so the man in the street is tempted to look away.

Pillar Three: The Byzantine traitor-general paradigm

Alliances are defeated from within when a powerful actor inside the coalition transmits the enemy’s preferred framing. The mechanism may not always be the explicit coordination we are seeing now. It is often incentive alignment and narrative capture. But the effect is the same: the aggressor’s propaganda becomes the alliance leader’s language.

The Kremlin’s immediate endorsement of President Trump’s victim-blaming is not incidental. It is diagnostic. It signals recognition that this framing produces strategic advantage: time, leverage, and Western division.

Minimax corollary: assume the harm intent

When a proven adversary benefits from your confusion, treat the confusion as engineered. What harm does this victim-blame framing enable? It enables reduced aid to Ukraine, coerced concessions, the freezing of lines that reward conquest, and the normalization of future aggression.

This is not speculative. It is the obvious incentive structure of the aggressor.

The moral truth that cannot be negotiated away

Ukraine did not invade Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine. This is the moral fulcrum. Everything else is a part of the details.

If Russia stops attacking, the killing stops.

If Ukraine stops resisting, Ukraine stops existing.

That is why moral inversion is so dangerous: it trains people to treat those two statements as morally equivalent.

When President Trump names Zelenskyy as the obstacle to peace while Russia continues to strike, he is not describing reality. He is attempting to replace reality with a frame that makes capitulation feel like maturity.

What must be done now

A democracy’s most precious strategic asset is moral clarity. Not sentimentality. Not slogans. Moral clarity: the ability to name aggressor and victim correctly, to assign responsibility correctly, and to understand that “peace” without justice and deterrence is merely an intermission.

The West must therefore refuse to launder conquest through “process.” It must refuse to accept rigged terms as a serious starting point. It must refuse to treat Ukraine’s refusal to surrender as some great moral failure when it is fully the opposite.

Above all, it must see the inversion for what it is: the war’s second front.

This week, the inversion stepped fully into the open. I have been shouting into the void that this day was coming. But now it is here.

And yet, the question is not whether we can call it what it is. The question is whether we will act like we believe in morality for nations, or for those that lead them.

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