Telepathy and the Russian Internet

On September 5, 1982, a music festival in San Bernardino, California, organized by Apple’s Steve Wozniak, bore witness to the first-ever public television link between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two large screens on either side of the stage broadcast performances by singer-songwriter Alla Pugacheva and rock band Voskreseniye, while Soviet citizens gathered at a Moscow radio station rocked out to the American lineup—that is, until Grateful Dead promoter Bill Graham, “convinced the whole thing was a KGB trick,” as Jeffrey Kripal wrote in his 2007 book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, “literally pulled the plug halfway through the concert.”

This so-called US-Soviet Space Bridge (the first of several, including one co-hosted by television host Phil Donahue) often features in books about the cultural history of the Cold War. But what many of these books don’t tell you is that a large number of the people who organized these events also hoped to lift the Iron Curtain through another method: telepathy. In her new book Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet, journalist and “media archeologist” Natalia Konradova reveals how the story of the early Soviet internet—and the role it played during the collapse of the USSR in 1991—can be traced back to early- and mid-twentieth-century dreams of instantaneous and unmediated mass communication.

Telepathy was, for much of the twentieth century, considered a real possibility—one whose secrets modern science could and would eventually discover.

Though recognized today as a pseudoscientific fantasy, telepathy was, for much of the twentieth century, considered a real possibility—one whose secrets modern science could and would eventually discover. In the Soviet Union, scientific interest in telepathy stemmed not only from a sense of general techno-optimism shared by many countries both before and after the two world wars, but also from beliefs and aspirations particular to communist society. Like cosmism (a philosophical movement that aimed at nothing less than the colonization of space, the attainment of immortality, and the resurrection of every person who ever lived), research into “parapsychology” was expected to help usher in a utopian future.

Of course, what this future looked like depended on who you asked. Some scientists and science fiction authors envisioned a world in which doctors could diagnose patients remotely and one person could beam their skills and talents directly into the bodies of others. The CIA worried that Soviet officials would be able to steal sensitive government information and control “machines on the moon or in the ocean” with their thoughts, according to a 1973 report. Meanwhile, Iosif Goldin—a parapsychology enthusiast and principal organizer of the Soviet side of the first Space Bridge—imagined mass communication as a cure for geopolitical conflict. He once wrote that if “one realizes the observation of the sunrise simultaneously on all continents of the Earth and does it regularly, turning it into a form of bringing people together, there may be no nuclear catastrophe.”

Although the internet itself did not directly contribute to the USSR’s demise, it should come as no surprise that the appearance of one closely coincided with the disappearance of the other. Described by Konradova as a “perfected version of samizdat,” or self-published dissident literature, the rise of the internet and online communities made censorship and the suppression of information virtually impossible—at least for a time. Hacking the Iron Curtain concludes with a brief though warranted reflection on how, amid digital restrictions under Vladimir Putin, the Russian internet ecosystem—Runet—has become increasingly cut off from the rest of the World Wide Web, aiding the country’s return to autocracy.

How did you become interested in parapsychology?

I have worked on many different subjects as an anthropologist and media theorist. But I have always been particularly interested in phenomena or systems that are either created by users or shaped through their efforts and self-organization. It does not really matter whether I’m studying war memorials in small villages, which were one of the subjects I researched in the early 2000s, or internet literature—a phenomenon of the early Russian internet, when users had for the first time the opportunity to publish their literary works without them having to pass through any editorial process.

That was how my research into the Russian-speaking internet began. In the mid-2000s, colleagues in Germany invited me to join their project, where I studied internet forums. At that point, though, neither cybernetics nor parapsychology was anywhere on my research horizon. They emerged only during the research process.

What did you feel was missing from existing treatments of this subject (like Alaina Lemon’s book) that you wanted to explore with Hacking the Iron Curtain?

Because my research is interdisciplinary, I read literature from a wide range of research fields: the history of the internet and digital culture, Cold War studies, studies of utopias and technological imaginaries, “parascience,” and so on. These fields have been studied for a long time, and each has produced fascinating work. What I felt was missing was precisely the connection between them.

Alaina Lemon’s book was an important discovery for me, not only because it was the only work I encountered that placed Soviet parapsychology within the context of the Cold War, but also because she shows just how powerful the mutual desire for communication was among people in both the USSR and the US. That said, Lemon’s approach was grounded more in theatrical practices, and she was not interested in the history of technology. When Soviet parapsychology is discussed elsewhere, it is typically situated within the history of supernatural beliefs and esoteric practices, as in The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, a substantial volume edited by Birgit Menzel.

What interested me was a phenomenon identified in the 1960s by Lynn Schroeder and Sheila Ostrander, authors of the classic Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain: for a considerable period in the USSR, parapsychology was treated as a science. Researchers used scientific methods in their experiments and attempted to identify patterns in telepathy, telekinesis, and other phenomena. Yes, this no longer fits within our contemporary scientific understanding of the world, but I am talking about events that took place sixty years ago, when faith in the power of science was virtually limitless. As far as I know, before my work, no one had considered research into telepathy as one scientific field among others—regarded today as a dead end, but one that at the time could be seen as almost equivalent in status to computer science.

At what stage in your research did it become clear to you that there was a connection between parapsychology—telepathy in particular—and the early Russian internet?

I originally set out to study the history of the Russian internet. I interviewed figures from the Runet of the 1990s and worked with online archives. In those archives, I discovered that one of Russia’s first internet providers had actually been founded in the 1980s. This simply did not fit with my understanding that the internet could only have appeared after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Once I delved into the history of the first network connections from Soviet territory, I found myself dealing with an entirely new set of questions and, for me, an entirely new research field. Media archaeology is exactly the kind of (proto) discipline that is interested in dead ends, unrealized projects, and strange coincidences. It is still not particularly well known in the US, but I live in Germany, the birthplace of media archaeology.

To what extent was parapsychology research responsible for the rise of the Russian internet?

I distinguish between several levels of this connection. One is relatively simple and straightforward. The first contact between American and Soviet users on Usenet became possible thanks to American entrepreneur Joel Schatz, who came to the USSR in the mid-1980s. He did so because of his connections to the Esalen Institute in California, a well-known center of “alternative research,” now better known as a popular retreat destination for California tech people.

Esalen, in turn, had those connections because people associated with the institute had begun traveling to the USSR in the early 1970s hoping to establish contacts with Soviet parapsychologists (and they did). Later, they established a Soviet-American exchange program and joined the citizen-diplomacy movement, but initially it was the parapsychologists—with their desire for grassroots communication and their refusal to accept conventional boundaries of what was possible—who proved capable of connecting people from two countries on opposing sides of the Cold War.

How the archetype of the quirky, brilliant tech entrepreneur whose ideas could change the world migrated from high-tech hacker culture to Wall Street.

While studying this phenomenon, I also arrived at another, conceptual level of connection. In a sense, the internet is telepathy, except that a digital signal plays the role of the brain waves that science has never succeeded in discovering. In the 1960s, an era of techno-optimism and great hopes that human reason would triumph over war, disease, and death, computer science and the development of computer networks advanced alongside research into other possible forms of communication—forms that do not exist in nature but that, theoretically, could exist.

You mention on multiple occasions that telepathy was researched more extensively in the USSR than elsewhere. Why was this?

I think the USSR, as a project intended to realize a socialist utopia—and I am not discussing here how successful that project ultimately proved to be—had much stronger investments in radical scientific discoveries expected to fundamentally transform human life. Some of these ambitions were realized, such as spaceflight. Scientists today are still working on others, such as immortality. Others, such as telepathy, have disappeared from the scientific agenda.

One could probably add that the USSR had an obvious overproduction of specialists in the natural sciences, which was connected to the military-industrial complex. At some point, the Soviet Ministry of Defense also began investing in this new field because it seemed potentially useful for defense purposes. As a result, Soviet laboratories could often find room for experiments involving new and uncertain phenomena.

Still, I think all of this was more a consequence of the first factor: an exceptionally strong belief in scientific progress. Both American and Soviet societies were modern societies, if by modernity we mean above all a reliance on rational knowledge and technology. But in the USSR, this modernity was particularly radical and allowed virtually no alternative: it lay at the very foundation of the state as the only possible form of its existence.

You mention that Soviet scientists like Vladimir Bekhterev continued to research telepathy even after failing to find proof of its existence. Why did this interest persist, including among the CIA and US politicians?

In general, I have the impression that, from the 1920s through the end of the 1980s, scientists around the world were reluctant to abandon the subject completely. I do not know enough about Bekhterev’s activities to speculate confidently about his motives, but I do know that he was aware of the research his former student Vasiliev was conducting at his institute. I interpret this as an attempt not to burn any bridges—simply to keep the possibility open, “just in case.” What if the experiments ultimately did produce results, and you found yourself among those accused of suppressing something new and progressive? But of course, that is only my theory.

As for the CIA and politicians, that belongs to a different period. Judging from documents in the declassified CIA archives, they were deeply impressed by reports of Soviet achievements in this field and wrote alarmed assessments suggesting that the USSR might soon learn to guide missiles with the power of thought, kill people with a glance, and so on. Their primary objective, therefore, was to ensure the United States did not fall behind in this area.

Beyond parapsychology, to what extent did the Soviet internet become possible thanks to perestroika, and to what extent did perestroika become possible thanks to the Soviet internet?

I do not think I would subscribe to either proposition, because for me the causal relationship lies outside both perestroika and the Soviet internet. Rather, a second modernity—or postmodernity—arrived: a period in which users gained real possibilities to influence events. In the USSR, perestroika began, and contacts with the US intensified. In the United States, the internet became available to a critical mass of users. The mythology of the Cold War was ceasing to work on both sides: people understood that official authorities were lying and wanted to escape their control. All of this was happening simultaneously.

Of course, before perestroika, it would have been impossible for an American to walk into a closed Soviet scientific institute and ask to be connected to a classified network—which is exactly what happened when the internet provider SovAm Teleport was founded in the mid-1980s. But perestroika itself would not have happened if a significant portion of Soviet society had not already been ready for it.

You note that, at various points in twentieth-century Soviet history, techno-utopian dreams often gave way to practical and commercial applications. Between the two, which ultimately plays a larger role in this story?

Once connecting to the internet from the USSR became technically possible, there was much less room for fantasy. Why take risks and invest in uncertainty—which any grand vision requires—when a concrete technical solution already exists, and all you need is the money to implement it? More broadly, the USSR was shifting from overregulated socialism to unregulated capitalism, which would reveal itself in full force in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, pragmatism and commerce alone did not define the character of the early Russian internet. Because early users saw the network primarily as a hobby, they enthusiastically invested their time and energy in games, poetry, and all kinds of impractical inventions. Until the end of the 1990s, when the first major commercial projects emerged, the network was primarily a space for entertainment and free communication.

Can you talk about the role Russian Usenet played during and after the unsuccessful 1991 coup attempt to prevent the USSR from collapsing? Could events have played out differently if Russians had not had this window to the outside world?

This was an important moment. Information about the Moscow coup of 1991 reached American media and politicians largely through Usenet users at the Kurchatov Institute, in Moscow. They, in turn, collected information through their internal network, translated it into English, and posted it to newsgroups.

I would say the absence of the internet probably would not have changed the fundamental course of events, because the victory of the democratic forces during the coup depended much more on resistance on the ground than on support from other countries. The absence of access to Usenet might, however, have affected more specific aspects of what happened: how quickly information circulated, how much pressure came from outside the Soviet Union, and so on.

Some people think that if the Soviet internet had developed sooner, it could have ensured the survival of the USSR. Do you share this belief?

The idea that the development of the internet might have saved the USSR comes from the author of an alternate-history novel in which technologies are transported into the Soviet Union from the future. I don’t believe in this idea, because creating the internet required not only high-quality materials, which were in short supply, but also international cooperation, from which the USSR was cut off after World War II. It also required the internet itself—if, by the internet, we mean a system of communication and community formation.

I think this last factor matters most. Soviet society, and even more so the Soviet leadership, had absolutely no need for people to communicate freely with one another beyond institutional control. At the same time, Soviet engineers were already connecting computers into networks before work on ARPANET had even begun. In other words, the technical possibility existed, but neither the social demand nor the political will did. Even telephone services remained unavailable in many Soviet cities until the 1990s. To stay in touch, people exchanged letters, postcards, and telegrams.

Cybernetics, however, did produce a powerful vision that extended far beyond computers and even beyond communication itself. But because cybernetics was a product of Soviet culture as a whole, that vision faded when Soviet culture entered into crisis. The desire to imagine radically different futures was replaced by a desire to “live like people in the West,” particularly in terms of everyday life and living standards.

In the conclusion, you draw parallels between the futurism of Silicon Valley (specifically the quest for immortality) and the techno-utopianism of Soviet cyberneticians. Could you also speak to any meaningful differences between these visions?

To be honest, there are surprisingly few substantial differences, and that amazes me. Eternal life is hardly a new idea, of course, but one might still expect to see signs that these people lived in different periods and in very different cultures.

One possible distinction is that the American version of this techno-utopia is somewhat less closely tied to the public good and more oriented toward individual benefit, whereas Soviet cyberneticians had in mind, first and foremost, a new society, and only then a new human being as a member of that society. But we also have to remember that Soviet cyberneticians wrote articles and gave interviews under conditions of censorship. With that in mind, this difference may be less substantial than it initially appears.

In your conclusion, you write that the “historical connection between the attempts to rebuild the power lost during the collapse of the USSR and the current reality cannot be ignored.” To what extent did the Russian internet contribute to Russian world ideology and its consequences, including the war in Ukraine?

The figures of the early Russian internet did not make the decision to launch a military attack on Ukraine, and they should not be held responsible for it. The concept of the “Russian World” emerged from the political technologies of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although political technologists participated in the development of the Russian internet, they were not the ones who made the decision to launch Russia’s most recent military aggression.

Nevertheless, I do see—and describe in the book—a conceptual connection between the expansive space of Russian-language verbal culture, which became the first meaningful content of the Russian-speaking internet, and the “Russian World.” The fact that this connection is conceptual is important.

Until very recently, the expression “Russian internet” was something of an oxymoron, because the internet is, by definition, a global network. Yes, you can write in any language you like, but technically you are still writing on a common, international internet that does not recognize state borders. This is no longer entirely the case. In Russia, a “sovereign Runet” whose borders increasingly coincide with the state’s borders has, by now, almost become a reality.

In other words, Russians first entered the American internet; then they developed the concept of the “Runet,” which technically remained part of the global network but was culturally understood as a unique and independent phenomenon; and decades later, they physically carved out a segment of the global network in which international conventions no longer operate in the same way and where an antiwar post can result in a prison sentence. I am not sure I would call this a “Sonderweg,” but it is a remarkable development. One can only hope that the rest of the world will not follow the same path, although there are reasons for concern.

Resources

Soviet Power Plus the Digitalization of the Entire Country

By: Natalia Konradova

Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet, pp. 11-36

University of Wisconsin Press

Natalia Konradova

By: Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet

Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet, pp. 37-57

University of Wisconsin Press

Reviewed Work: ESALEN: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal

By: Sara M. Patterson

Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Winter 2007-2008), pp. 430-432

Historical Society of Southern California

Review: The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions

By: Alexander Agadjanian

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Feb., 2014), pp. 136-138

University of Pennsylvania Press

SOURCE: Tim Brinkhof, “How Telepathy Helped Build the Russian Internet,” JSTOR Daily, 28 October 2026. Image courtesy of University of Wisconsin Press

Path to Open Books on JSTOR

Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet is part of JSTOR’s Path to Open initiative, which helps nonprofit university presses meet the challenges of open access publishing. Books in the program become open access three years after publication. JSTOR Daily is making the first and second chapters available for free now to drive awareness of the program.

Yan Shenkman: The Meaning of the Network Case, Nine Years On

The Network Case defendants, during their trial in Penza. Photo courtesy of Yan Shenkman

Around this time nine years ago, the so-called Network Case kicked off in Penza. It was a harrowing case concocted by the FSB against antifascists, whom they tortured. Eleven young men were convicted and sent to prison. Some have already served their time and been released. The key defendant, Dima Pchelintsev, has served half of his sentence and remains in prison. He was sentenced to a total of eighteen years.

While in custody, Pchelintsev has written a book entitled Shooting Fireworks (Strelba iz feierverka). I highly recommend it, since it provides a detailed account of the entire story.

A lot has happened since then: covid, war, exile. Criminal cases based on confessions obtained by torture have become routine, commonplace. People are imprisoned in large numbers, for any reason at all.

It is important to remember that if the sadists at the FSB had been stopped in their tracks back then, in 2017, we would be breathing easier today.

Evil must be battled before it’s too late. Its victims must have our backs when it matters.

You hesitated, you harbored doubts, you were too busy, and before you knew it, you were living under a dictatorship, missiles were raining down on civilians, and you were forced to flee the whole mess.

Back then, public opinion still meant something. Now, it means nothing at all.

All you have to do is show concern when it counts.

SOURCE: Yan Shenkman (Facebook), 20 October 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader. For a list of all the articles on the Network Case that I have published since January 2018, go here. |||||trr

Network Case Defendant Vasily Kuksov Released from Prison

According to Mediazona, [o]n October 16, 38-year-old Vasily Kuksov was released from Penal Colony No. 16 in the Nizhny Novgorod region. [On the] 17th of October he arrived by train in Serdobsk, in the Penza region, where he [was] reunited with his family.

In 2020, Kuksov, a musician and design engineer, was sentenced in Penza to nine years in a penal colony in the case of the “Network organization” (the defendants in this case received sentences of up to 18 years in prison).

The criminal case was opened in October 2017. At the time, FSB officers accused anti-fascists and anarchists, many of whom shared an interest in airsoft, of creating a “terrorist organization” and planning to “mobilize the masses to further destabilize the political situation in the country.”

Over the course of that month, security forces detained Kuksov, as well as Ilya Shakursky, Dmitry Pchelintsev, Andrey Chernov, Arman Sagynbayev, and Yegor Zorin. The formal grounds for initiating the criminal prosecution were Zorin’s confession. The young man had been detained with drugs and gave testimony about a terrorist organization. The case against him was subsequently dropped. In January 2018, Viktor Filinkov and Igor Shishkin were detained in St. Petersburg in connection with the same case. On April 11, another St. Petersburg resident, Yuly Boyarshinov, was also charged.

Initially, most of the defendants made confessions, but later retracted them, stating that they had been tortured. Viktor Filinkov, Dmitry Pchelintsev, Ilya Shakursky, Arman Sagynbayev, and Andrey Chernov reported violence and electric shocks inflicted by security officers. The Investigative Committee did not open a criminal investigation into any of the defendants’ allegations of torture. Five witnesses in the case also reported torture and pressure from security forces.

Vasily Kuksov told the court that FSB officers beat him during his arrest, saying, “You’re screwed, your life is over,” and threatened to cut off his finger. Despite this, he never made a confession.

During the investigation, while being held in Penza’s Pre-Trial Detention Centre No. 1, he was diagnosed with active tuberculosis shortly before his sentencing. He was not hospitalized and continued to be held together with other defendants in the case.

After the verdict in the Network case came into force, Kuksov was transferred in November 2020 to Medical Correctional Institution No. 3 (LIU-3) for tuberculosis patients in Nizhny Novgorod. He was discharged from the medical facility in January 2022. After that, at Penal Colony No. 16 in the Nizhny Novgorod region, he was repeatedly placed in a punishment cell.

Anarchist Black Cross Moscow

You may find the contact addresses of all prisoners in Russia supported by Anarchist Black Cross Moscow here. If you want to make a donation to a particular prisoner or case, please contact us beforehand via e-mail to make sure that the supporters of the prisoner or case are currently gathering donations, our e-mail is the same as the listed PayPal account. We are present in Telegram and Facebook, you may sign up to our e-mail newsletter here.

Photo: Rupression

SOURCE: “Vasily Kuksov, sentenced in the Network case in 2020, released from prison,” Avtonomnoe Deistvie, 20 October 2026. Photo courtesy of Rupression. Thanks to Simon Pirani for the heads-up. For a list of all the articles on the Network Case that I have published since January 2018, go here. |||||trr

Russian Business Daily Paints Ukraine as the Aggressor, Europe as Its Victim

A drone’s-eye glimpse of my favorite place on earth: Imatra, South Karelia, Finland. SOURCE: Imatri.fi, via Delovoi Peterburg

Major foreign travel agencies have begun canceling bus tours to southeastern Finland’s Lake Saimaa region en masse, according to Yle.

The companies consider the risk of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) entering Finnish airspace to be a security threat.

Armi Hatakka, manager of the castle-like Imatran Valtionhotelli hotel in Imatra, reported that organized bus groups from European countries virtually stopped visiting the area in the summer of 2026

She noted, however, that the threat posed by drones deterred only major tour operators. Individual foreign travelers continued to visit the region on their own.

With Russians no longer visiting the Finnish border region, Germans have become the largest group of foreign tourists there. The number of overnight stays by tourists from Germany in Imatra more than doubled, reaching 2,400 over the summer.

Since the tourist influx from Russia ceased, the number of foreign tourists in the region has been declining for the fifth consecutive year, and domestic tourists are not enough to sustain the growth of local businesses, the article notes.

Since May of this year, the Finnish military has regularly imposed restrictions in the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland and closed the airspace to aircraft due to Ukraine’s attacks on neighboring regions of Russia.

Preparing for the possible arrival of UAVs in Finnish airspace has become a standard part of planning for all major events in the country. Finns have been advised to be prepared for threats from drones throughout the country, though it was noted that the risks are higher near the border with Russia.

In Latvia, the local tourism industry described the situation in the sector as catastrophic: Ukrainian drones have scared off all the tourists. Mass cancellations of trips to the eastern part of the country began in the spring, and the summer season as a whole fell short of expectations.

SOURCE: “Foreign tour groups are cancelling trips to Finland due to drone threats,” Delovoi Peterburg, 20 October 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Traitor

Trump says Russia is being “fine” on Ukraine

Writing in the New York Times, David Sanger highlights the extent to which Donald Trump is going all out to support Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine:

President Trump’s intensifying effort in the past few weeks to rehabilitate Russia and usher President Vladimir V. Putin back into diplomatic society is remarkable for its speed, its characterization of Mr. Zelensky as the primary obstacle to peace, and its brazen denial that Russia is continuing the war that Mr. Trump says he is trying to end.

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, speaking to reporters outside the White House as he left for a campaign rally. “They haven’t been doing much,” he said, making no mention of the Russian missiles and jet-powered drones that have been targeting apartment buildings in Kyiv and Ukraine’s surviving electricity grid.

In contrast, he said, “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given nothing to us. Remember that.”

As Sanger notes, Trump’s support for Putin is unique in American history. Previous administrations have made deals with erstwhile adversaries, as Nixon did with China, and given up on support for failing allies, as the U.S. did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But never before have we outright switched sides, let alone supported an aggressor while vilifying that aggressor’s victim.

What makes Trump’s support for Putin even more remarkable is that Russia has, by many accounts, been actively aiding Iran against America in the war Trump started. Who says so? Well, among others, Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the aid goes beyond intelligence sharing that has helped Iran target U.S. forces. Russia has also reportedly been sending Iran explosives and weapons components.

What would Republicans be saying if a Democratic president were supporting a foreign dictator even as that dictator was helping another nation kill American troops? They would be crying “treason.” But this is all apparently “fine” with Trump.

What’s going on here? It’s important to understand that — as Phillips O’Brien documents — Trump hasn’t “pivoted” away from Ukraine toward Russia. He has been a Putin supporter all along.

Thus when Trump says that “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine,” who, exactly, does he mean by “we”? He cut off all economic and military aid to Ukraine as soon as he took office. Here’s total support for Ukraine, by country, since January 2025:

True, the U.S. continued to share military intelligence with Ukraine while allowing Ukraine to use Elon Musk’s Starshield and permitting European nations to transfer some U.S. weapons to Ukraine. But these actions cost America nothing. The most you can say is that until recently Trump shied away from actively sabotaging Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

And now even that restraint is gone. According to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. intelligence sharing was blocked “for some period of time,” although it appears to have resumed for now. Ukraine’s access to Starshield has been limited. And the Washington Post reports that the U.S. has been holding up European transfers of Patriot missiles to Ukraine.

There are two questions here. First, why does Trump love Putin and hate Zelenskyy? Second, why has he ripped off the mask and gone full pro-Russia in the past few weeks?

On the first question, Zelenskyy gave a blunt answer in a recent interview with the Financial Times: Trump, he asserted, has an instinctive affinity for autocrats and the super wealthy: “He speaks about it openly that he loves such people and he respects such people.” That’s clearly right.

I would add three points. First, Trump and his inner circle don’t just love autocrats. They hate democracy and rule of law — which means that they hate America and American values.

Second, Putin-worship was widespread on the authoritarian right even before Trump entered the picture, with many celebrating Russia’s anti-wokeness and perceived masculinity. Remarkably, the valorization of Russia’s supposed toughness has survived despite Russia’s repeated military humiliations. So Trump has been following a well-trodden path.

Finally, whatever else you may say about Zelenskyy, he’s a genuine hero, who showed great personal courage by staying in Kyiv when Russia invaded. And Trump surely resents the fact that Zelenskyy is everything he is not.

The second question is, why now? Why has Trump chosen this moment to switch from covert, deniable support for Putin to overtly, explicitly taking Russia’s side?

As I suggested yesterday, the answer lies precisely in Trump’s collapsing support at home. Nothing he does now is likely to avert Republican catastrophe in the midterms. Republican politicians have been going out of their way to avoid being seen with him on the campaign trail. Trump officials are already lawyering up in preparation for the probes a Democratic Congress will launch.

At this point, then, Trump effectively has nothing left to lose on the political front — and his political bankruptcy has freed him to become his worst self, indulging himself by doing what he always wanted to do — which includes supporting corrupt, murderous dictators.

And there will be much more of this to come. Trump can’t and won’t make America great again. But he can betray everything America stands for, and he’s doing it as we speak.

SOURCE: Paul Krugman (Substack), 20 October 2026. I subscribe to Mr. Krugman’s Substack, and I’m happy to share it occasionally with my own readers. }}}}}trr

Donald Trump claims Russia has been “fine” in Ukraine, and Michael Weiss, who has witnessed Russian atrocities firsthand, is furious. Weiss and former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos examine Trump’s increasingly alarming alignment with Putin, reports that Elon Musk interfered with Ukraine’s satellite defenses, Pete Hegseth’s refusal to release desperately needed Patriot missiles, and whether Trump now fits the intelligence definition of a Russian agent of influence.

SOURCE: “Michael Weiss Goes Nuclear After Trump Says Russia Has Been ‘Fine’ in Ukraine,” The Bulwark (YouTube), 20 October 2026

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven’t been doing much,” U.S. President Donald Trump remarked to a group of journalists outside the White House on Oct. 19.

The comments came as tensions between Kyiv and Washington are rising after reports that the U.S. stopped warning Kyiv of incoming Russian ballistic missiles and limited the use of Starshield, a military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink, for Ukraine, making it difficult to intercept Russian attacks on Ukraine.

While Russia wages its war with no regard for civilian lives or human dignity, these are just some of the things that Trump seemingly considers “fine.”

The U.S. president spoke only hours after Russia had launched another deadly attack on the people of Ukraine a few hours before he made his comments. A Russian drone struck a park in the town of Nova Vodolaha, Kharkiv Oblast, killing six and injuring at least 15 others.

Inna Mariukhna, a 28-year-old teacher at a local school, was one of those killed in the attack. She was pushing her 1-year-old daughter, Anhelina, in a stroller when the Russian jet-powered drone struck them both. Anhelina was killed instantly, while Inna succumbed to her injuries in hospital.

Pictures showing Anhelina’s bloodied and lifeless body, still strapped in her stroller, her small shoes still perfectly tied, were posted on social media by many including President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Arina Koval, an 8-year-old girl, was also killed in the drone strike, as were 34-year-old Yulia Spichak, 36-year-old Marianna Tsymbal, and a sixth victim who has not been named.

Zelensky described the attack as an “absolute atrocity.” Trump thinks this is “fine.”

In the morning hours of Oct. 20, at least three people were killed and four people injured after a Russian drone struck early morning commuter traffic in the Holosiivskyi District of Kyiv.

Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported Russia’s drone strike, saying: “The enemy is once again cynically attacking civilians. Behind each such blow are human lives, pain, and ruined destinies.”

This was but one of hundreds of continuous Russian strikes on Ukraine’s capital and dozens of other cities and communities across the country, as the Kremlin is pursuing another theory of victory — attempting to bomb Ukrainian cities into submission.

“328 civilians were killed and 2,105 injured in September 2026.”

According to the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, at least 328 civilians were killed and 2,105 injured in September 2026, an 85% increase from September 2025. The deadly trend is continuing into October, according to the mission. “The first two weeks of October were among the deadliest periods for civilians in years,” Danielle Bell, head of the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, said.

Recent U.S. actions have increased the threat for Ukrainian civilians. Ukraine’s Starshield satellite internet terminals, which Ukraine uses to control anti-drone interceptors, have been impeded, while deliveries of vital Patriot interceptors have been deliberately delayed by the Pentagon, Zelensky said on Oct. 18, an allegation corroborated by reporting in the Kyiv Independent and the Washington Post.

The New York Times, meanwhile, reported a Russian plan, presented to the publication by Ukrainian authorities, to destroy Ukraine’s beleaguered energy system once and for all. While Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy system have been ongoing throughout the year at a low level, Moscow has recently ramped up mass attacks to wipe out power plants, substations, and gas infrastructure for its fifth winter offensive during the full-scale invasion.

At a recent official event of Russia’s International People’s Unity Club in Moscow, Russian Lt. Col. Alexey Selivano said: “Wherever Russian troops arrive, Ukrainians cease to exist.”

From the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Russian forces have inflicted countless atrocities against Ukraine.

In March 2022, Russian forces carried out a massacre of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war in Bucha, a suburb to the west of Kyiv, after their failed attempt to take the Ukrainian capital. Liberating Ukrainian forces found the bodies of victims, some with their hands tied, lying in the streets. The bodies of 458 people were eventually recovered from Bucha. The majority of them had been shot, tortured or bludgeoned.

From the opening days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the people of Mariupol suffered horrifically during the 86-day Russian siege. To this day, the exact number of Ukrainian civilians killed in Russia’s assault on the city is unknown. According to preliminary estimates by Ukraine’s Center for the Study of Occupation, at least 22,000 civilians were killed during the siege. The true figure might never be known, as Russia has deliberately destroyed graves and cremated bodies in an attempt to conceal the true death toll in Mariupol. Some estimates put the actual figure as high as 87,000.

A Russian airstrike on March 16, 2022, likely killed 300 to 900 people hiding inside the Mariupol Drama Theater, according to different estimates, including an Associated Press investigation and figures by exiled local authorities. They were awaiting evacuation from the then-besieged Mariupol amid heavy Russian bombardment. Footage of the theater shows that the word “Children” in Russian was written in large letters on the square in front of the theater. Russia bombed the building regardless.

Across Ukraine’s occupied territories, Russia has been kidnapping Ukrainian children. Russia’s forcible transfer of children constitutes crimes against humanity, according to a probe by an U.N.-mandated independent commission.

“Based on new evidence, the Commission has now concluded that the Russian authorities committed two types of crimes against humanity: deportation and forcible transfer of children, as well as their enforced disappearance,” Erik Mose, chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, said in a statement on March 12.

This was an issue the White House at least appeared to care about previously, with the U.S. State Department allocating $25 million in funding in March 2026 to help trace and rehabilitate Ukrainian children abducted by Russia.

In May, the United Nations also blacklisted Russian armed and security forces for carrying out systematic sexual assaults, rape, and widespread torture of Ukrainian prisoners. Despite Russia’s refusal to grant access to U.N. human rights investigators, they were still able to independently verify 310 cases of conflict-related sexual violence in Russia and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The victims were prisoners of war and civilian detainees, the vast majority of them men.

SOURCE: Jimmy Rushton and Jonas Heins, “Things Russia has done to Ukraine that Trump thinks are ‘fine,'” Kyiv Independent, 20 October 2026. As a paid-up supporter, I’m happy to share the Kyiv Independent’s excellent journalism with my readers occasionally. }}}}}trr

Though they deny any involvement, the Trump administration and Elon Musk are apparently helping Putin escalate his campaign of terror against Ukraine. Civilian casualties across Ukraine are rising—including women and children—but Trump said Monday that Russia “has been fine on Ukraine.” At the same time, Team Trump looks to be lining up business deals with Russian energy companies. And Marco’s whitewashing of it all is sickening. Plus: Zelensky is tired of Trump’s games, China is playing a curious role on both sides of the war, and JD has another whopper to add to his stack of lies. Former Amb. Michael McFaul joins Tim Miller.

SOURCE: “Former Ambassador NUKES Pathetic Sellout Marco Rubio (w/ Michael McFaul),” The Bulwark (YouTube), 20 October 2026

Donald Trump Is Helping Russia Win the War

It’s already been said many times that the U.S., under President Donald Trump, was turning its back on Ukraine.

But the past few days show something worse than abandonment: Trump is now actively helping Russia win the war.

Many media and commentators have been far too careful in their phrasing, saying that Trump is “squeezing Ukraine” or putting pressure on it. We all need to do the responsible thing and call it what it is, as ugly as it sounds: Trump is not trying to reach a deal — he is trying to “end the war” by simply helping Russia win.

Since last week, the Trump administration has been in a downward spiral of betraying Ukraine and embarrassing the U.S.

It started when Trump announced that he had reached a deal with Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Russia. By doing so, he went against the sanctions bill he himself had signed less than a month ago, which sought to penalize countries buying energy from Russia.

The deal is not going to help bring down fuel prices for regular Americans, but it sends a tremendously harmful signal: That it’s alright to make deals that pump cash into Russia, despite its brutal ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

That move was followed by Trump announcing a surprise energy ceasefire that Kyiv didn’t know about. When Russia ignored it and continued to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Trump said nothing about it.

It only got worse from there. For the past two nights, Russia has hit Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles that came without any warning. That is, the early warning alerts that Ukraine typically receives about missile and drone launches from its partners — chiefly, the U.S. While there is no confirmation yet, there is a strong possibility that the U.S. has limited some intelligence data sharing.

If true, it would mean more Ukrainians killed. No warning means there is no time to get to the shelter. At least three people were killed in such an attack in Kyiv last night — civilians in their homes.

No warning means there is no time to get to the shelter.

Finally, this morning, we learned that Ukraine’s military use of Starlink had been restricted without warning, undermining Ukraine’s middle-strike capabilities that are critical for its front-line operations against Russia. In the rear, it hurts Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian drones targeting civilians.

This betrayal comes after one of the deadliest weeks for Ukrainian civilians. Last week, Russia killed more than 150 civilians in Ukraine. Just one of the strikes, on a bus stop in Kramatorsk, killed 33 people. In another Russian attack, in Pryluky, three one-year-old children were among the dead.

Most strikingly, Trump has repeatedly condemned Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries — Moscow’s largest source of revenue to fund its war effort — but remained silent on Russia’s slaughter of Ukrainian children.

The most recent time we found Trump publicly condemning Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilians was in 2025.

While Trump has shown his disdain for Ukraine on many occasions (you will remember the Oval Office episode, surely), his latest cynicism should shock even his most ardent supporters.

But what may come as a surprise to the American president is that giving a boost to Russia’s war effort, while a big help, cannot force Ukrainians to stop fighting. That is not up to the U.S. What is up to it, and to its president, is whether it wants to uphold the values of democracy by supporting a country under siege from its aggressive neighbor that wants to determine its future.

Because helping Russia to win the war won’t stop it. It will simply give it the ability to cause more death and more destruction. In other words, it will help prolong the war.

And the danger isn’t confined to Ukraine — the rest of Europe is at risk. U.S. intelligence last month warned that Russia could launch a limited attack on a NATO country as early as this fall.

An emboldened Putin makes that more likely. Trump is endangering the security of the entire European continent in an attempt to score short-term political points. It’s difficult to name a time when a U.S. president has acted so recklessly on the international stage.

We all need to start calling it what it is:

Trump indeed wants the war to end quickly. He’s just choosing to end it with a Russian victory.

Source: “Editorial: Donald Trump is helping Russia win the war,” Kyiv Independent, 14 October 2026. I’m a proud, dues-paying member of the Kyiv Independent’s community of supporters, which I urge you to join if, like me, you support independent journalism and Ukraine. |||||trr

Image credit: U.S. President Donald Trump (L) and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (R) at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, U.S., on Aug. 15, 2025. AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, via the Kyiv Independent.

The Ninth Circle of Hell

Woodcut for *Inferno*, canto 34. Pietro di Piasi, Venice, 1491

So now, after more than a decade of pretending that he is not associated with Russia and that he would honor the U.S. national security position of support for Ukraine and our European allies, Trump is openly backing Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

Asked today by a reporter about concerns that his dropping of sanctions against Russian oil yesterday would funnel money to Putin’s war on Ukraine, Trump blamed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky for prolonging the war:

“Zelensky could have settled this war many times. Many, many times,” Trump said, “And he chooses not to.” Trump blamed Zelensky for the high cost of diesel because Ukrainian forces have targeted Russian oil refineries, although since Russian oil was sanctioned, the actual chokepoint for diesel prices is the Strait of Hormuz, largely closed because of Trump’s war on Iran.

Trump accused Zelensky of wanting “to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel, because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world.” Ukrainians have hit Russian oil refineries to stop the flow of money into Russia as it evades sanctions and sells oil through its so-called shadow fleet. Russia, in contrast, has been striking civilian targets in violation of the laws of war.

Trump continued with a warning to Zelensky, saying “he’d better damn well stop.”

Ukraine continues to fight against Russia because Russia has invaded Ukraine and is trying to occupy Ukraine’s eastern industrial area in violation of the United Nations charter that vows no country will use threats or force against another’s territorial integrity. Until Trump took office, the United States was the key guarantor of this principle.

The U.S. has stood against Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine not only because of the principle of territorial sovereignty, but also because of security guarantees the U.S., along with the United Kingdom and Russia, gave to Ukraine in 1994. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine.

Then Russian leader Vladimir Putin worked to bring Ukraine under the sway of the Russian oligarchs who rose to replace the region’s communist leaders, monopolizing formerly publicly held industries as those industries were privatized. American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered in 2004 after calling attention to what the oligarchs were doing.

In that same year, a Russian-backed politician, Viktor Yanukovych, appeared to be elected president of Ukraine. But the election was so full of fraud—including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe—the government voided the election and called for a do-over. Yanukovych needed a makeover fast, and for that he called on an American political consultant with a reputation for making unsavory characters palatable to the media: Paul Manafort.

For ten years, from 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. He made a fortune thanks to his new friends. In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency on a platform of rejecting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through which Europe joined together to oppose first the USSR, and then the rising threat of Russia. Immediately, Yanukovych turned Ukraine toward Russia. Then, in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. He fled to Russia.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in the United States and in its territories. These sanctions hurt Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs, including Putin.

Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to allies of Yanukovych and Putin, especially Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and Manafort was happy to step in to help. He did not take a salary. He began as an advisor in March 2016 and became the campaign chairman in late June, after meeting on June 9 with Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Russian operatives.

It turned out that Russia was looking for a way to grab the Ukrainian land it wanted without continuing to fight. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort and his partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”

The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that would carve off much of Ukraine and make it subservient to him. This was the exact opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.

According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik wrote: “[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.” Kilimnik further suggested that Manafort “could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals,” and that “once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018. Trump could not make it happen during his first term, although his operatives spent a great deal of time messing around in Ukraine and trying to smear Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden from there, and after Biden took office, Putin invaded Ukraine again in 2022.

As Jim Rutenberg wrote in his coverage of the Mariupol Plan in the New York Times Magazine, once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.

Biden pulled together countries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), along with other allies and partners, to stop Russia’s attack and to support Ukraine’s heroic efforts to repel the Russian invasion. Russia’s troops, meanwhile, have committed atrocities and are attacking civilians. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicted several Russian officials and commanders, including Putin himself, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But once Trump was back in office in 2025, he promptly tried to swing the U.S. behind Russia. His appointees insisted that the real story of the 2016 campaign was not Russia’s support for Trump, but rather a Democratic conspiracy to push the story of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Repeatedly, Trump has threatened Zelensky and tried to cajole him into surrendering the territory Russia wants.

After the ICC indictment, Trump welcomed Putin to American soil in Alaska in August 2025, ordering U.S. soldiers to roll out a red carpet for him, and he has invited Putin to a gathering of the Group of 20 nations with advanced economies at Mar-a-Lago in December. Yesterday, the U.S. announced sanctions on the ICC itself, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has vowed to take the organization apart “brick by brick.”

Meanwhile, Putin has behaved like someone who has a strong hand over Trump. In August 2025, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up at the Alaska meeting wearing a sweatshirt with the Cyrillic letters “CCCP,” which translates to USSR, suggesting that the Soviet Union had won the Cold War after all.

On Friday, despite the fact that Russia is backing Iran, whose military is killing U.S. soldiers, Trump proudly announced he was removing sanctions to let Russia sell its oil on global markets. Ukrainian attacks have curtailed Russian production, so the amount it has available to help the diesel squeeze in the U.S. is negligible, but the ability to rake in cash as the world’s current oil shortage has driven up prices is invaluable to Putin for his desperate war effort.

Also yesterday, Trump asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on a lawsuit over the 2016 election that he brought in 2022 against Hillary Clinton and former members of the Department of Justice, including former director of the FBI James Comey, Clinton’s campaign chair, and a grab bag of others. Trump sued them for conspiring to tie him to Russia in order to undermine his campaign.

As John Fritze of CNN reported yesterday, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit as “frivolous” and ruled that Trump’s attorneys were liable for nearly $1 million in sanctions. The 11th U.S. Circuit of Appeals upheld most of that decision last year. “This case should never have been brought,” U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida wrote. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.” Now Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court.

But at this point, how much more evidence is necessary to assess that Trump has undermined U.S. national security and is working for Russia? And how much longer will Republicans in Congress continue to protect him as he does it?

—

Notes:

https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-sergei-kuzhugetovich-shoigu-and

https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and

https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/07/us-to-seek-dismantling-of-international-criminal-court-rubio-announces

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/08/15/lavrov-ussr-russia-trump-putin-ukraine-summit-alaska/

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/24/politics/trump-sues-hillary-clinton

https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/09/politics/trump-supreme-court-hillary-clinton-lawsuit

https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-war-russia-sanctions-trump-congress-b322eec6b33610ebf4048daa5d621483

https://ia903105.us.archive.org/10/items/mueller-report/mueller-report.pdf

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-documents-report-volume5.pdf, pp. 99 and following

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/23/trump-putin-g20-miami-01089850

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html?searchResultPosition=111

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/U-S-journalist-author-shot-to-death-in-Russia-2742901.php

Bluesky:

thesauruswrecks.bsky.social/post/3mxjxyzk4ec27

ssiderod.bsky.social/post/3lwje6wb7gc2n

anne.sheshed.rocks/post/3lwjrlxxals22

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/42215

Source: Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 10 October 2026

[…]

First, the big news on U.S. foreign policy was that Trump announced that he was buying 300,000 tons of Russian diesel. He’s not allowed to do this: Sanctions preventing purchase of Russian oil are law, not a choice on Trump’s part. But under Trump laws are suggestions at most, so it might happen anyway. In any case, the main lesson here, as Phillips O’Brien explains, is that Trump isn’t even hiding the fact that he is supporting Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine.

But being a nerdy economist, my first printable reaction to the announcement was, 300,000 tons??? That’s a bit over 2 million barrels. America consumes approximately 4 million barrels of distillates — diesel (mostly) and heating oil — every day.

So Trump is betraying an embattled democracy, demonstrating our faithlessness to the whole world, seriously damaging whatever is left of America’s leadership in the world, for the sake of maybe 12 hours’ worth of diesel. Really?

Of course, Trump and those around him don’t care about the national interest. But I would strongly guess that they didn’t do the math, that 300,000 tons sounded like a lot to them and that they had no idea that it was trivial for an economy the size of America’s. I might add that this is general issue with Trump: he often touts trivial policies as major achievement, and it often seems obvious that he has no idea how big America and the world are.

Arithmetic, I guess, suffers from Trump derangement syndrome.

[…]

Source: Paul Krugman (Substack), “Arithmetic Suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” 12 October 2026

A bipartisan group of six senators on Sunday called for President Donald Trump’s administration to “immediately reverse course” on a plan to purchase diesel from Russia as part of an effort to lower high fuel prices.

Trump shocked lawmakers when he announced on social media Friday that he struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call. He said Russia will immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel to the American and global market, followed by an additional 500,000 tons in November and 1 million tons “immediately thereafter.” Russia will deliver an additional 3 million tons “within a short period of time” after that, he wrote.

Four Republican senators and two Democratic senators signed onto the statement released Sunday in protesting the deal. They said the administration failed to consult with Congress or submit any explanation to justify its decision as required by statute.

“The United States should not provide Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians. The Administration must immediately reverse course,” they wrote.

The Republican senators who signed onto the statement are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Curtis of Utah. The Democratic senators are Sens. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

Tillis, in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said there’s a legitimate case for saying the president is not following the law if the administration goes through with its diesel purchase plan.

“We were very clear that Russia is the aggressor. Russia is the one who can end this war by backing out of territory that they occupied,” Tillis said.

Trump’s announcement came just a few weeks after Congress passed legislation that directed Trump to impose substantial tariffs on the top importers of Russian oil or natural gas, with an exception for countries that import less than 15% of Russia’s natural gas exports and have taken significant steps to reduce those imports.

The congressional effort was aimed at cutting the flow of money Russia receives from oil and gas sales to finance its war against Ukraine.

The lawmakers also noted that Congress explicitly banned Russia energy imports in 2022 to prevent the United States from financing the war.

“Congress was clear: the U.S. should not import oil from Russia until it ends its aggression against Ukraine and ceases threats against our NATO Allies,” the six lawmakers wrote in their statement. “President Trump’s decision to allow Russian diesel imports to the U.S. runs directly counter to that law.”

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said Trump is focused on reducing the cost of energy when asked whether the president’s action would be in violation of U.S. law.

“The president is balancing and has to make tough decisions,” Barrasso said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

He also encouraged Trump to enforce the sanctions law that Congress passed last month.

“This is just another point of leverage for the president to use against Putin in an effort to get a long-term solution in that part of the world,” Barrasso said.

Energy experts say the Russia deal is unlikely to make a dent in high prices at the pump.

Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, noted that the total amount of diesel appears to be less than what the U.S. uses in a day.

Nephew argued that Iran and Russia might benefit more than the U.S.

“The Iranians are probably very excited because it shows that there’s a lot of pressure still on the U.S. And the Russians are excited because it puts a big hole in the sanctions regime,” he said.

Trump has recently sought to blame record U.S. diesel prices on Ukraine rather than the U.S.-led war in Iran, which has elevated world energy prices.

Source: Kevin Freking, “Six senators call for Trump administration to ‘immediately reverse course’ on Russian diesel plan,” Associated Press, 11 October 2026

Something I Learned Today: Churl(ish)

Source: “Churl,” American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, 2022 (online)

When a coworker recently suggested that my approach to a thorny problem might be churlish, I sought out—and found!—a graphic tee that would let me publicly embrace my true identity. Little did I know the word’s bewildering and contradictory etymology and far-flung linguistic cousins, as adumbrated above. Image source: Tribe Lacrosse }}}}}trr

Farsh Farce Forcemeat Cannon Fodder

I’ve never cooked farsh like this before! The results are amazing!

Ingredients for farsh:

2 kg eggs
2 sticks butter
50 g onion
1 red sweet pepper
1 potato
1 carrot
1 head garlic
2 sprigs dill
10 g parsley
10 g salt
2 g black pepper
2 g sweet paprika
200 g cream cheese

Plus:

7 eggs
800 ml water
200 g ice
100 g mayonnaise
10 g mustard
1 lemon
1 g black pepper
2 g salt
2 slices bread
20 ml vegetable oil

Source: Appetitno TV (Facebook). Translated by the Russian Reader

President Vladimir Putin signed an executive order on Monday that raises the strength of the Russian military by 15,500 troops, bringing the total number of active-duty servicemen to 1.55 million.

Putin has raised the number of military personnel several times since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Monday’s order does not explain the reason for the latest increase. The Russian military’s total strength now stands at 2,441,630 personnel.

This year, the military has created 52,500 new positions, according to the exiled news outlet Meduza, the vast majority of which are active-duty military slots rather than civilian support staff.

Ukraine has accused Russia of preparing for a new mass mobilization of troops after holding parliamentary elections last week.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed Russia has “in effect” begun the process of surging troop recruitment “through various means,” though he did not provide details.

Putin, who last ordered a “partial” mobilization of reservists in September 2022, has dismissed the mobilization claims as “disinformation.”

Some military experts have argued that the Kremlin is unlikely to issue a new draft order like in 2022 due to the fact that “partial” mobilization remains in effect.

Others have cautioned that another mass call-up of service-age men would encounter logistical hurdles and fail to address challenges on the front line.

Source: “Putin Orders Russian Army to Increase Troop Size to 1.55M,” Moscow Times, 29 September 2026

Sources: OED; Word Hippo; OED. Feature image courtesy of Biamp

Elena Kostyuchenko: We’re No Longer Eyeless in Gaza

I just saw NAZA at the New York Film Festival. There were a dozen cops outside the theater checking people’s bags. Protesters were anticipated but there were no protests—just a car with the message “NO PROOF” plastered on its door, circling the block.

Several people spoke briefly before the screening. One of them was Harry Davies, an investigative reporter at the Guardian, which co-produced the film. Harry reminded the audience that investigative reporting is based on information obtained from sources whose anonymity is a vital institution. He also said the Guardian’s investigations department (that is, he and his colleagues) had fact-checked all the assertions made by interviewees in the film and had corroborated all of them. Many of the things recounted in the film had been previously published in the Israeli-Palestinian online magazine +972 (whose journalists I know personally). The film itself was the result of nearly three years of work by this team.

As for the film, I can’t say whether it’s great or not. It is staggering. People talk about the work they do with Tel Aviv in the background: we see people in the windows and imagine other people in other windows sixty kilometers down the coast. The interviewees describe a well-oiled machine for murdering people, not a one-off totally fucked-up incident amidst the war. Many of the film’s critics have overlooked the Israeli army’s use of AI to select its targets for murder. According to their own estimates, the system is now approximately eighty-five percent effective, meaning that a minimum of fifteen percent of its targets had nothing to do with Hamas. Moreover, a target doesn’t equated to a victim, hence the term NAZA itself, which is an acronym for “collateral damage” [in Hebrew]. The [IDF] officers in the film explain that a NAZA value of twenty is the threshold of hesitation. Killing twenty bystanders to take out a single alleged insurgent could be problematic, but any number below twenty is a-okay. And yet the officers recall instances where NAZA values of 500 and 200 were green-lighted. Why such [high] numbers? Because alleged or genuine members of Hamas are killed at night, in residential buildings, along with everyone in their vicinity. The estimate of potential victims can be made quite accurately due to the total system of surveillance [used by the IDF]. They can hack a telephone and use it as a microphone. Do you hear a baby crying in the background? The baby is only a single NAZA.

There are many other harrowing details in the film.

The Israeli secret services will have a tough time identifying the interviewees. We don’t see their faces, and sometimes even their heads are hard to make out; their voices have been altered, and their handwriting has been blurred. Many of the interviews draw and caption on paper what they saw on their [computer] screens. Many of them are involved in combat remotely. One of the interviewees had been in Gaza itself, burning down houses.

There was no ovation [when the screening ended]: no one applauded at all, so the credits rolled down the screen in profound silence. I could hear several people crying, and the person to my left intoned, “Oh Jesus, Jesus.”

Something else that struck me as vital is the extent to which war is no longer waged blindly, the extent to which every decision, every step in this war, and in all contemporary wars, is weighed and documented, and yet people continue to make those decisions nonetheless.

Some of the interviewees describe their role as a technical one, while others speak of the prestige of working in reconnaissance, about their mission, about [being part of] the speartip pointed at the enemy. One person talks about having “fun.” Judging by what they say, nearly none of them feels hatred. Hatred isn’t obligatory for committing murder, nor is ignorance. Remember the parable about the smoke constantly streaming from the crematorium and how “we were looking the other way”? You can’t say that anymore.

The film will soon be viewable on the Guardian’s website. I heartily recommend that everyone see it. Don’t be in a hurry to sound off now [about this post]: you might feel like an idiot only a couple of weeks later. Wait and see the film, and then we’ll talk.

Source: Elena Kostyuchenko (Facebook), 27 September 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader, who thanks Simon Pirani for the suggestion.