2 surprisingly interesting reads: Zelenskyy - and AEP!

A couple of worthwhile calls on your time today.  Let’s take the lighter one first.

From the mercurial AEP, whose regular output on energy-related issue is Pollyanna-ish net zero bilge, a lengthy take-down of the deep impracticalities of the putative AI boom as it is currently envisaged.  The energy aspect is of course one major strand; cooling-water is another, and the emptiness of “OK, well we’ll just build our own gas-fired power plants instead“.  And then the financial implications!  Somewhere in there (or maybe it was BTL), though, there is a hint of how things may progress in subtler ways.  If AEP is correct on the brick wall of physical limitations to AI’s currently-planned trajectory, it’ll need to be a subtler approach.   Otherwise … bubble is bubble.

From Zelenskyy; an open letter to Putin, suggesting face-to-face negotiations – which is worth reading in full, not just some newspaper summary.

At the very least, this is a useful and pretty comprehensive tour d’horizon from the Kyiv perspective, and a summary of just how many cards Mr Z holds right now.  Interestingly, though, whether by design or accident it’s also pretty insulting to Putin.  Maybe Z has inadvertently overdone the projection of the (current) strength of the Ukrainian position – which you might argue he was always going to do at the start of a putative negotiation.  Well, but better done in the proposed face-to-face meeting, hmm?  

Or maybe (since, at his best, Z is pretty sharp) the intended audience is Trump and the ROW anyway, if he knows Putin has no intention of negotiating with Ukraine anyway.  Remind the Donald that Z does actually hold several cards right now.

Or maybe, like the “permission” graciously given to Putin for his 2026 Victory Day parade (another sharp slap from Z), it’s purposefully intended to humiliate Putin on the eve of today’s big St Petersburg address to the SPIEF – if indeed he deigns to turn up in person after the impressive warning shots fired in that direction earlier in the week.

Or maybe it’s to bring to Putin’s attention the long list of things he doesn’t seem to know – cat among the pigeons.  Putin’s people say he “is being briefed” on the Z letter.  Yeah, they’ll be dead keen not to let him read the original in full – they lie to him consistently about the true situation on many fronts, and wouldn’t want him firing off the obvious supplementary questions.  And they may well succeed, since by repute he never so much as touches the keys of a laptop, still less knows how to log in or access the www for himself.  Old-fashioned red telephones for L’il Volodya …

ND