Lauren Loomer vs. Lily Lynch

Laura Loomer (left) is an American far-right conspiracist and influencer from Arizona who has suddenly (supposedly) seen the light on Ukraine after actually visiting the country that has endured an unprovoked Russian invasion for the last four and a half years. Lily Lynch (right) is a leftyish American foreign affairs writer from California who, apparently, does not need to see a place with her own eyes to give her readers the all-knowing lowdown on what’s happening there. Whose account of the Ukraine-Russia war rings truer to you?

Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech at NATO’s Defence Industry Forum in Ankara earlier this month was a hymn to drone warfare. Drones, the Ukrainian president proclaimed, had heralded ‘revolutionary changes in the very nature of war’ – as significant as the machine gun in the First World War, or as the modern tank in the Second. ‘Disruptive’ drone tech had allowed Ukraine to increase dramatically the number of Russian casualties, intercept Russia’s Shahed UAVs and hit targets as far away as Siberia. Recent attacks had succeeded in blackening the skies over Moscow and striking oil refineries 2,700 km away in Omsk. The country had transformed itself into a ‘drone superpower’, in the words of the Atlantic Council. Before 2022, there were just seven domestic drone manufacturers – today, there are over 500. And now, as restrictions on drone exports are being lifted, Ukraine will soon be selling them to the world.

The man most responsible for putting drones at the centre of Ukraine’s war effort has been the telegenic 35-year-old, now former Defence Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. This much-hyped tech wunderkind has acquired a following among both patriotic liberals at home and Atlanticists in the West. He has helped promote Ukraine as a kind of ‘start-up nation’ – a high-tech defence industrial powerhouse forged in war. When barely in his thirties, he was appointed Minister of Digital Transformation, where he was responsible for the ‘state in a smartphone’ initiative – which moved government services onto a USAID-funded app called Diiya. Though beloved by the liberal NGO set, Palantir-backed Fedorov has also learned to speak MAGA’s language; in January, he announced his ministry’s objective to kill 50,000 Russians per month, explaining it would ‘make the cost of war for Russia one it cannot sustain, thereby forcing peace through strength’.

In the weeks leading up to the NATO summit, Western media reports alleged that Ukraine had turned the tide in its favour. Russia was in trouble. The narrative was reminiscent of the ‘spring counteroffensive’ of 2023, much hyped in Western media – a supposedly transformational Ukrainian battlefield push that never quite materialized and cost tens of thousands of lives. In Ankara, the latest reversal of fortune was attributed to Ukraine’s drone tech capabilities, its thriving defence industry and its innovative young leadership, who apparently ran the country less like a post-Soviet state and more like a Silicon Valley start-up.

Just one week later, however, this optimistic story began to fall apart. Zelenskyy abruptly dismissed Fedorov, a move that left many feeling furious and betrayed. Fedorov’s loyalists responded by excoriating Zelenskyy on social media and assembling in Kiev, Lviv and Odessa, holding signs bearing messages like ‘Hands off Fedorov’ and ‘Stop Sabotaging Victory’. Ukraine’s supporters in the West did not hide their opposition to the decision either. ‘Firing Fedorov, one of the smartest, most competent and innovative ministers in all of Europe, is one of the dumbest things Zelenskyy has done’, Estonia’s former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves wrote on X. A consensus formed among the Atlanticist commentariat: Zelenskyy had sided with his sclerotic ‘Soviet’ generals – particularly Russian-born commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi – against an energetic young reformer. After several days of virulent backlash, Zelenskyy responded by dismissing Syrskyi too.

The decision to remove Fedorov forced a simmering Ukrainian political crisis into the public eye. In Ankara, NATO officials were intent on depicting Russia – and only Russia – as the country in dire political and economic straits. At one briefing, I listened to a senior NATO official speak of possible tensions within the Russian political elite. These days, he said, they look outside their windows and see oil refineries in flames from Ukrainian drone attacks. This, he asserted, must be having a psychological effect, and resentment towards Putin was likely mounting. A fracture could be coming any day now. The Russian economy, meanwhile, was ‘in the worst state it’s been in for decades’. He recited a litany of grim statistics: the federal deficit was now 2.3 times what it was during the same period last year, the economy was now 70 per cent security-related expenditures, which came at the expense of the regular economy and would be ‘very hard to reverse’. And despite rising oil prices due to the war on Iran, Russia would still have to cut non-military spending by 10 per cent this year.

Russia was also reportedly performing poorly on the battlefield and any progress it was making came at an enormous cost. According to the NATO official’s estimates, there had been between 1.3 and 1.5 million Russian casualties in the war, and between 30,000 and 35,000 Russians were now being killed each month. The military was now ‘increasingly relying on convicts, indebted citizens and foreigners’ to fill its ranks. Russia’s territorial gains had also been ‘far less steady’ in recent months: its forces were now purportedly advancing at just 3.79 sq km per day, down from a reported 16 sq km last year. Another morbid statistic touted at the summit was the alleged average life expectancy of a Russian soldier: thanks to Ukraine’s drones, I was told, the average Russian recruit only lived between 20 and 30 minutes at the front.

Listening to all this, I thought about what I’d heard [sic] about life in Russia. I was certainly aware of the mounting wartime pain. I knew there were now petrol shortages in parts of the country, though these are partly seasonal, and that this has meant long waits outside stations. Whereas the war had previously been experienced by most Russians as a distant conflict – only seen on social media or television – the drone attacks on Russian oil refineries had brought the war home. But the idea that this would inevitably provoke a major anti-government backlash didn’t quite follow. Videos have even surfaced on Russian social media showing people drinking and dancing as they waited in long queues for petrol. As one commentator put it, ‘coronavirus divided us, but petrol shortages brought us together’. The domestic problems were all very real and getting worse, but Russians appeared to be weathering them, at least for now. Prophesies of the Russian economy’s imminent collapse had been issued for years, but had all come to nothing.

Polls from inside Russia also hint at a more stable situation than that depicted at the NATO summit. Russia experts always caution readers to be sceptical of polls from inside the country, but even so, the results suggest that at least some of the graver prognostications might be exaggerated. According to a survey by the independent Levada Center, Putin’s popularity is indeed in decline, but as of May, as many as 79 per cent of Russians polled still said they approved of his performance. Only 15 per cent said they disapproved. In the same survey, 74 per cent of Russians said they supported their country’s actions in Ukraine. (Still, some 60 per cent of Russians reported that they favoured peace negotiations to end the war, and only 30 per cent said they wanted to continue fighting it.) Even adjusting for a degree of wartime self-censorship, these numbers do not exactly hint at a coming cataclysm.

But the question that most nagged at me throughout the summit was: what about Ukraine? The assessment of Russia’s position in the war included a host of criteria: a survey of the situation on the homefront, elite political fractures, the economy, the demography of its soldiers. Yet Ukraine’s position was portrayed according to a single hopeful indicator, its success in drone warfare.

According to a recent Gallup poll (one that was largely buried in the Western press), Ukrainians are even less enthusiastic about fighting this war than Russians are. Less than one in four adults (24 per cent) say Ukraine should keep fighting until it wins the war, while 66 per cent say Ukraine should seek to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible. And while NATO officials were eager to tout staggering casualty figures for Russia in Ankara, there was naturally far less said about Ukraine’s dead – unless they could be presented in terms of a favourable ‘kill ratio’ with Russia. According to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (which receives funding from the US government, Lockheed Martin and NATO among others) the Ukrainian military has suffered between 125,000 and 150,000 fatalities. However, some believe the actual number is higher.

As NATO officials look for cracks in the Kremlin matrix, there are plenty to worry about in Ukraine. In addition to the rupture between Fedorov and the military brass, a ‘spectacular’ corruption scandal has implicated members of Zelenskyy’s inner circle, part of which involves corruption in drone procurement. Meanwhile, the ‘stable stagnation’ of the Ukrainian economy also rests on relatively fragile foundations – continued support from Western partners. Often missing from Western wartime reporting is the brutal economic reality of everyday life in Ukraine: the number of Ukrainians living below subsistence levels has increased dramatically in wartime; while Russians have been inconvenienced in this conflict, most haven’t faced the same material devastation.

The Ukrainian armed forces may be an even worse state than their Russian adversaries. A transition to a corps-based command structure last year may have aligned Ukraine with NATO standards, but no amount of restructuring can change the fundamentals. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is now 45. Mobilization remains a persistent problem. One of the reasons cited for Fedorov’s dismissal was his failure to fix this (ever the tech solutionist, Fedorov had reportedly pushed for a ‘digitalization’ of mobilization). The brutal practice of ‘busification’ – whereby military age men are snatched off the street – continues to inspire loathing. Reports regularly surface of forcibly conscripted men being beaten or killed. Unsurprisingly, Ukraine is suffering a desertion crisis. Though the exact figures were classified last year, in January, Fedorov said that 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers had gone AWOL.

The Russian armed forces may be filled with convicts and debtors, but they still haven’t had to resort to conscription [sic], while the Ukrainian side is partially composed of men who are middle-aged and don’t want to fight. Ukraine also increasingly relies on foreign fighters; while Russia has recruited hapless Africans to serve as cannon fodder, Ukraine now employs thousands of recruits from Colombia, Brazil and various European countries, designated as ‘volunteers’ to get around anti-mercenary laws. And there remains the fundamental problem of massive asymmetry: Russia still has Ukraine outmanned. Ukraine has attempted to make up for this difference with drones, but this has only succeeded in slowing the pace of Russian advances.

The image of a Ukraine filled with patriotic liberals eager to fight a high-tech war until total Russian collapse is a fiction. In reality, the majority of both Russians and Ukrainians want negotiations to end the war now. Only a minority want to continue fighting until their side’s most maximalist aims are met. Absent the propaganda of a youth-driven drone tech revolution in war, Ukraine looks in a remarkably similar situation to Russia: two countries hurtling toward demographic oblivion, in a conflict directed by a profiteering political elite and fought in part by the unwilling, the coerced, the foreign and the old. At the NATO summit, however, the alliance continued to promote its PR-manufactured image of Ukraine, through selective statistics and polite obfuscation.

This essay was supported by the Alameda Institute.

Source: Lily Lynch, “Costs of War,” Sidecar (New Left Review), 23 July 2026

Laura Loomer became infamous for spreading conspiracy theories online. Now, as she travels across Ukraine to see the damage inflicted by Russia in its years-long war, she wants to admit that she fell for some falsehoods of her own.

A close ally of President Donald Trump, Loomer has completely reversed her longtime criticism of Ukraine and is urging fellow conservatives to be wary of Moscow’s propaganda, which she blames for duping large swaths of the American right.

“You don’t need to listen to a podcaster and let them influence your opinion about a country. You can look at those facts yourself,” she told the Associated Press in Kyiv shortly after returning from a trip close to the front line in Ukraine’s east. The interview was supposed to take place in Loomer’s hotel, but it had to be moved to the building’s underground bomb shelter as the city faced another ballistic missile attack.

Loomer has remained influential with Trump despite not having an official role, and she said they spoke over the phone after she sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She also said that she expects to meet with Trump after returning from her trip.

Loomer’s turnaround on Ukraine has been welcomed by the country’s leaders, whose relationships with Trump have been strained at times. But it has also stirred confusion, surprise and suspicion in the United States. She continues to insist that Ukraine is not paying for her travels.

As Trump and Zelenskyy prepare to meet on Tuesday in Washington, Loomer said it’s clear that her trip has already made a difference, refocusing attention on the war as Congress debates new sanctions intended to punish Russia.

“It’s looking good for Ukraine, right?” she said. “Going into this meeting next week at the Oval Office is looking pretty good.”

Loomer says she was ‘bamboozled’ to oppose Ukraine

Loomer had spent years minimizing the war and amplifying Russian propaganda until she made a dramatic reversal this week.

“I’ve come to realize I was bamboozled by Russian propaganda and I came to believe a lot of untrue things about Ukraine. I used to think that this was a country full of Nazis,” Loomer told Zelenskyy as she interviewed him for her show on Rumble, an online video platform.

Loomer blamed her indoctrination on getting banned by American social media platforms, leading her to try Telegram, where Russian media is widely shared.

“The Russians,” she added, “are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And I was very angry,” she said, recounting her feelings about the 2020 election, which she falsely maintains was stolen from Trump despite all evidence to the contrary.

She said her change in perspective had been gradual as she started to see podcasters like Tucker Carlson “turn on President Trump” while having their rhetoric amplified by Russian sources.

Loomer, who casts herself as an independent journalist, told the AP she believed her reversal was already changing minds within Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

“Oh, 100%,” she said. “I’ve received messages all day from different people and media and politics and people just who follow me online who said, ’Wow, I didn’t realize how much we’ve been lied to.’ ‘Wow you really opened my eyes.’”

Loomer was welcomed with open arms

Ukrainian officials seemed to recognize the opportunity of winning over an ardent Trump ally with a large online following. In addition to her interview with Zelenskyy, Loomer had audiences with top Ukrainian officials and the country’s chief rabbi.

“It takes courage to come to Ukraine and not be deterred by Russian propaganda or air raid sirens,” Zelenskyy’s office wrote on social media.

Loomer also got a tour of Dormition Cathedral of Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, a monastic complex that came under Russian attack last month.

“Laura is very powerful and she’s a very authoritative in the U.S., so I hope that everything she has seen by her own eyes will help her to spread the truth when she is back at the U.S.,” Tetyana Berezhna, the deputy prime minister and Ukrainian minister of culture told the AP. “I do really hope and I believe that her visit will have a huge impact on relations with the U.S. administration.”

While some have tried to downplay Loomer’s influence with the president, he has often followed her advice. She occasionally traveled with him during the 2024 campaign, and last year he purged his National Security Council staff after she raised concerns about their loyalty in an Oval Office meeting.

Trump appears to be tracking Loomer’s trip, sharing video of her conversation with Zelenskyy on social media.

“Very good!!!” he wrote on Thursday evening.

The conspiracist denounces conspiracy theories

Loomer has a long history of spreading conspiracy theories. She once shared a video that called 9/11 an “inside job” and amplified a lie about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats in Ohio, which Trump went on to repeat during a presidential debate with Kamala Harris.

Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged.

“One thing I really love about Ukraine is I haven’t seen a single Muslim here,” she posted on Saturday. “It’s so refreshing.”

But in the interview, she bemoaned how influential podcasters can spread misinformation.

“They have been able to warp people’s minds to the point where people aren’t even capable of analyzing a subject with common sense anymore because they want to depend on these personalities to give them the opinion that they think they should have,” she said, calling the situation “a major national security threat.”

She said she thinks that “information war” has “the potential to be more destructive than any kinetic war that our country may ever face” and called on the Trump administration to take the threat of Russian propaganda, foreign interference and influence operations more seriously.

“I think that some of our leaders are being influenced by propaganda,” she said.

The White House has routinely downplayed the role of Moscow’s influence, especially because Trump has long chaffed at investigations showing that Russia worked to boost his 2016 candidacy.

Loomer has said repeatedly that Ukraine did not finance her trip and insisted she had traveled in her own capacity.

“I can guarantee you I wasn’t paid by anybody. I certainly wasn’t paid by the government of Ukraine to come here,” she said.

“If it’s fake, why did I risk my life? I’m in a bomb shelter right now. I barely slept this week,” she said.

Source: Illia Novikov, Volodymr Yurchuk and Jill Colvin, “Exclusive: In a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer explains shift on Russia’s war,” Associated Press, 26 July 2026

Reluctant Peacenik vs. Rough Beast

Tokayev reads Putin the riot act in Omsk, 25 July 2026. Source: Vesti (Telegram)

Kazakhstani President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed “freezing” the war in Ukraine during talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, 25 July 2026, in Omsk. TASS published an excerpt featuring Tokayev’s statement and Putin’s reaction.

Tokayev made the remarks during a meeting with Putin at the Forum on Interregional Cooperation between the two countries, which took place 24–25 July. The President of Kazakhstan stated that at present, “no one knows how to resolve the situation, because each side has its own position.” At the same time, he suggested that “perhaps this conflict should already be frozen and we should return to the Istanbul Formula 2.0, since significant results were achieved there.”

According to Tokayev, in connection with the war in Ukraine, he has been “receiving many signals” from Europe and the U.S., about which he had previously informed Putin. And yet, the President of Kazakhstan added that his country refuses to act as a mediator in achieving peace between Russia and Ukraine.

Tokayev: The nature of this conflict is not entirely clear to many people

Tokayev emphasized that the war in Ukraine is an “interstate conflict” and “not some sort of civil war.”

“We have always treated the Ukrainian people, their culture, and their language with respect, and we believe that the nature of this conflict is not entirely clear to many, including us,” the Kazakhstani president noted. He added that “all of this must be stopped,” since the war in Ukraine “plays into the hands” of the opponents of both Moscow and Kyiv.

At the same time, Tokayev noted that Putin had shown “the utmost diplomatic flexibility” during his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Anchorage in August 2025.

Briefly commenting on the Kazakhstani president’s remarks about the war, Putin for his part promised him that he would “definitely provide detailed information” within the day about what was happening on the “Ukrainian front.”

Source: Vladimir Begunkov, “Tokayev suggests Putin ‘freeze’ war in Ukraine,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 25 July 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Vladimir Putin ventured out in public for the first time in months and walked smack dab into an ambush during a televised meeting that went off the rails.

Fresh off a tightly controlled publicity stunt in Irkutsk on Friday—where the Russian leader, flanked by bodyguards, made a show of inspecting aircraft—Putin sat down with Kazakhstan’s president in the Russian city of Omsk on Saturday.

The 73-year-old Russian president could barely conceal his nervous grimace as Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev used the meeting, which was supposed to be about Russia-Kazakh cooperation, to throw Putin under the bus.

“I will not hide that I am receiving many signals—which I have already informed you about by phone—from Europe and the United States regarding the current state of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia,” Tokayev told Putin as a slew of Kremlin-controlled TV outlets filmed the confrontation.

He went on to call BS on the Kremlin’s narrative of the war, saying, “The nature of this conflict is not entirely clear” and seems utterly pointless. Putin, meanwhile, appeared to tense up and stared down at his lap as Tokayev spoke, seemingly caught off guard.

“This all needs to stop,” Tokayev said, urging Putin to “freeze” the war and return to negotiations. He twisted the knife by adding that despite “proposals and appeals,” Kazakhstan “categorically refuses” to act as a mediator in helping to end the war, since “Russia is a great country” and can “manage on its own.”

At the end of Tokayev’s three-minute speech, Putin nervously thanked the Kazakh president and promised to give him a “detailed briefing” on the Ukraine war, before the broadcast abruptly ended.

The tense exchange came a day after Putin flew to Irkutsk, Siberia, for an unannounced visit to the Irkutsk Aviation Plant, his first trip to one of Russia’s regions for domestic issues in more than eight months. He has drastically reduced travel to Russia’s regions and avoided public appearances in recent months, purportedly out of fear of being assassinated. Instead, amid relentless Ukrainian drone strikes and growing public outrage over economic woes, Putin has largely retreated into fortified underground bunkers, where he is said to have at times remained for weeks.

Footage shared by the Kremlin showed him flanked by bodyguards as he inspected the Yak-130M combat jet trainer and an MC-21 passenger jet, which has been plagued by repeated production delays.

The plant had apparently been cleared out for his visit, and Irkutsk locals fumed on social media about the entire city coming to a standstill to make way for what was widely seen as a PR stunt.

“Burn in hell,” one resident commented in response to Putin’s visit on a local website, according to the independent outlet People of Baikal.

“Will we need to bow when the tsar passes through?” another quipped.

“How scared he is of his own people,” a third person noted, only to be reminded, “Well, every other person is ready to kill him.”

Source: Allison Quinn, “Putin Gets Spectacularly Ambushed After Leaving His Bunker,” Daily Beast, 25 July 2026

Russian Greatness Derangement Syndrome

FBI Director Kash Patel is planning to visit Russia later this year, likely in mid-October, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the situation.

It would be an unusual and sensitive trip for an FBI chief to one of America’s top adversaries. The plans come as Washington and Moscow continue to be at odds over the war in Ukraine, with U.S. lawmakers demanding the imposition of heavy new sanctions on Russia.

Patel has a history of involvement in controversial Russia-related matters dating to President Donald Trump’s first term, including trying to cast doubt on investigations into whether Trump colluded with Russia to help him win the 2016 election — an episode he now calls the “Russiagate hoax.” Patel also is developing a track record of taking eye-catching trips in his role atop the FBI, drawing scrutiny from Congress.

According to the U.S. official familiar with the travel plans, Patel is scheduled to visit Russia on Oct. 14-15, first stopping in Moscow and then St. Petersburg. His host is likely to be the FSB, the Russian security service that is heir to the Soviet-era KGB, the official said.

The person familiar with the situation confirmed that Patel is planning to visit Russia in the fall, including stops in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Both people were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive travel plans.

It’s not clear if Patel will meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin or any of his senior political aides. Also unclear is what is on his agenda for discussion.

As with any such plans by U.S. officials, they are tentative and subject to change.

Spokespeople for the White House referred a request for comment to the FBI. Spokespeople for the FBI and the Department of Justice did not respond to similar requests.

Though it has been years since an FBI director visited Moscow, other top intelligence officials have made the trip. In a 2018 letter, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo said the open lines of dialogue were valuable, particularly in areas of mutual interest like combating terrorism.

“We vigorously defend America in these encounters and pull no punches,” Pompeo said at the time.

Robert Mueller was the last FBI director known to have visited Russia, in 2013. Mueller was later appointed as a special counsel to investigate ties between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and Russia, as well as broader Russian efforts to interfere in U.S. elections.

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded for years that Moscow has been behind efforts to sow discord and interfere in U.S. elections, findings supported by documents Trump declassified last week ahead of a speech intended to bolster support for his long-shot effort to overhaul U.S. voting laws. The Kremlin has also been suspected to be behind major cybersecurity breaches of government agencies and private sector companies.

Patel rose to prominence as a result of the central role he played as a staffer to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 and 2018, when the panel — led by then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Although Republicans on the panel concluded that Russia mounted an influence operation to “undermine the U.S. liberal democratic order,” they rejected the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia aspired to help Trump win the 2016 election. Late in Trump’s first term, Patel served on the National Security Council, where in 2020 he traveled secretly to meet with Syrian government officials in a bid to secure the release of two American hostages.

Patel spent the years between Trump’s terms amplifying doubts about the Russia probe’s origins and even writing children’s books that mock Democrats who spearheaded the investigation. He also faced questions about a $25,000 payment for his involvement in producing a film financed by a Kremlin-linked film company.

Patel’s past travel and spending decisions have blurred the lines between recreation and official business, prompting scrutiny across Capitol Hill and at times angering the White House.

The FBI director attended the gold medal men’s hockey final at the Winter Olympics in Italy, a trip he said was needed to extradite a Chinese hacker; went snorkeling last summer near a battleship sunk during the Japanese surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor; and has been accused of using a government jet to see his girlfriend, a country music singer, perform.

Earlier this month, the top Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees launched a bicameral probe into Patel’s potential misuse of taxpayer-funded resources.

News of the trip also comes amid acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s effort to win Senate confirmation and could prompt new questions from lawmakers about the Justice Department’s decision-making.

After the Kremlin launched a full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022, senior Biden administration officials steered clear of visiting Russia, although the U.S. kept open its embassy in Moscow.

Trump has sought to ease tensions with Putin. During his second term, his special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have visited Russia multiple times, including meeting with Putin, to discuss ending the Ukraine war.

Trump himself met with Putin in Anchorage last year.

And last month, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., who chairs the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Russian state media reported that he described his visit as a Washington “pivot” toward Russia.

U.S. lawmakers, on a bipartisan basis, remain wary of Russia. Some members of Congress are currently urging Trump to support a bill that uses steep new penalties, including tariffs, to punish Russian entities. Trump has recently said he wants the bill to also include sanctions on Iran.

Source: Nahal Toosi, Kyle Cheney and John Sakellariadis, “FBI Director Kash Patel plans Russia trip,” Politico, 20 July 2026

Rodney Mims Cook, Jr., chairman of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, old Atlantan, chum of King Charles, and unapologetic Russophile, recently gathered fifty guests inside a replica Roman triumphal arch, in downtown Atlanta, for an intimate performance by Mikhail Simonyan, a Russian violinist and a Deputy Minister of Culture. An hour before the show, Simonyan, who lives in Siberia, wandered into Cook’s office atop Millennium Gate Museum—the anomalous arch’s name. He walked by framed photographs of Cook with heads of state, looking for something to eat. “Is there any steaks around here?” he asked.

Cook, a ruddy-faced seventy-year-old, whose reading glasses teetered on the tip of his nose, directed Simonyan, whom he called “one of the greatest talents in the world,” to the first floor. Cook built the arch two decades ago, when resurrecting classical architecture in America was an eccentric idea. Now it’s an official plan. Empowered by his friend Donald Trump (“I had shrimp with him on his desk a few weeks ago,” Cook dropped), he’s focussing on the nation’s capital: more arches and monuments, huger facilities. It was Cook’s commission that green-lighted the plan for a ninety-thousand-square-foot White House ballroom that one prominent architecture critic described, in the Times, as a “huge, dumb box.”

“The White House has been insufficient since the Harrison Presidency,” Cook declared later, during a cocktail reception on his arch’s first floor. Among the attendees was a chronicler of Georgia’s waterfalls, two longtime members of Little Richard’s band, a retired Russian N.H.L. player, and a contingent from Atlanta’s country-club set. Cook went on, “Trump is fixing it, and I’m helping.” He added, “I assure you, you can paint things gold left and right, but you can also tone that down later. As long as the proportions are right—which they are—this man is going to leave us a legacy of such astonishing beauty!”

Another thing Cook considers beautiful is classical Russian architecture. He built a large turreted dacha in North Atlanta, “in the Russian wooden vernacular,” he said. In June, he showed photographs of the place at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a gathering known as Putin’s Davos, which he said he’d attended as, “essentially, the Minister of Culture for the United States.” During a Senate hearing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he was “unaware” of an American delegation at the forum; none had attended in nearly a decade. Cook, however, insisted that “State pushed me to go. It was entirely designed around me.” His mission, he indicated, was soft diplomacy. He recalled a State Department official telling him,“Many guys in your position would say, ‘This is quite dangerous.’ ” The actor Steven Seagal, who has had Russian citizenship for ten years, attended, as did the far-right podcaster Candace Owens, although their seats weren’t as good as Cook’s. “My six State Department dudes had me first row direct center,” he said. He added, “I requested and received Coca-Cola—not sold there currently.” (Coca-Cola suspended business dealings with Russia in 2022, but the soda is imported through other countries.)

At a filmed Q. & A., Cook rose to address Putin. “I appreciate all of the hospitality that has been afforded to me on my return to St. Petersburg,” he said. “I love this city, and I think you’re aware of that.”

“Hooray, I also love St. Petersburg,” Putin, looking amused, responded, through a translator.

The State Department, Cook recalled, “was shocked but pleased” by his polite dialogue with the Russian leader, and also with the hockey puck he’d put on President Trump’s desk as a gesture of good will from Putin. (Cook obtained the puck himself, though he would not say from where.) Simonyan’s visit, Cook said, was a thank-you from Russia.

The violinist still hadn’t got any steak when he began to perform in the ersatz arch. He opened with Brahms, followed by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and ended with a tune generally credited to an eighteenth-century British Army surgeon intent on mocking Colonial Americans. Members of the audience laughed as they began to recognize the strains of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

“I wanted ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ ” a lone dissenter said later.

Cook was misty-eyed at the music. Back in his office, he told an intern to order pizzas. As he waited for dinner, Simonyan sat on a couch with Little Richard’s bandmates Shawn (Swift) Johnson and James (Big J) Nelson, who both kept their sunglasses on. They’d come to pitch Cook on building a statue of the deceased rock-and-roll legend, in Macon, Georgia. “Anything monument-related, he’s the guy,” Johnson said.

As Cook made the rounds, pouring glasses of wine, Simonyan pitched Johnson and Nelson an idea of his own. “You know what we need?” he said. “A big peace concert at the residence of the American Ambassador. Then some stadiums in Siberia.”

“I’ve never been to Russia,” Nelson said. “We’ll bring the whole band. It’ll be like Live Aid.” They considered who else might join them.

“Steven Seagal can play guitar,” Simonyan said. “He’s actually pretty good.”

Source: Charles Bethea, “The Man Who Green-Lighted Trump’s Ballroom,” New Yorker, 20 July 2026. As a lifelong reader and longtime subscriber of the New Yorker, I’m glad to depaywall this incisive portrait of traitorous “Russophilia” for my own readers. ||||| trr

Chairman of the United States Commission of Fine Arts Rodney Mims Cook Jr. and the abbot of the monastery, Hegumen Varlaam. Photo: TASS

The President of the United States gifted an Orthodox icon to the Trinity-Sergius Hermitage in response to Vladimir Putin’s diplomatic gesture in Anchorage.

On June 2, 2026, the Chairman of the USA Commission of Fine Arts Rodney Mims Cook Jr., at the personal initiative of Donald Trump, presented a copy of the miraculous Sitka Icon of the Mother of God to the abbot of the Holy Trinity Sergius Coastal Hermitage, Hegumen Varlaam. This is reported by TASS.

Rodney Mims Cook Jr. said that this act was a response to Vladimir Putin’s visit to Anchorage in 2025. At that time, the head of state presented as a gift to the Orthodox community of Alaska an icon of Saint Herman, an early Russian missionary widely considered the patron saint of Orthodoxy in America. “I was deeply moved by President Putin’s visit to Alaska,” Cook Jr. shared details. “President Trump suggested that I ‘return’ this gesture here.”

The Sitka Icon of the Mother of God is permanently located at St. Michael’s Cathedral in the city of Sitka, USA, and is considered miraculous. Now a copy of this unique shrine has found its home in the Holy Trinity Sergius Coastal Hermitage. The American official admitted that his visit to Saint Petersburg and participation in the presentation of the icon became a very personal event for him.

As the UOJ reported, a US congresswoman visited an Orthodox church in Florida.

Source: “Trump presents copy of Sitka Icon of Theotokos to monastery near St. Petersburg,” Union of Orthodox Journalists, 3 June 2026

Leo Hare, a pious Christian from Texas, recently joined the long list of foreigners who have been mugged by Russian reality over the decades. In 2023, disillusioned by his homeland’s perceived decadence (such as tolerance for gay people), he decided to move his family to President Vladimir Putin’s empire—a society that allegedly embodied solid Christian belief and traditional family values. The Russian government granted him asylum.

How shocking, then, when Leo was swindled out of $66,000 by a Russian contact he trusted, leaving his family homeless. He also said that he became “increasingly concerned about the state of Russia’s economy and restrictions on access to information.” Now he is predictably rueful: “I believed in the propaganda,” he told an interviewer.

I feel sorry for Leo’s family. I feel a bit less sorry for the editors of the Economist, who recently fell for yet another Russia scam. The renowned British magazine (or “newspaper,” as it quaintly persists in calling itself) devoted a substantial portion of its coveted real estate to touting the claims of a heavily sanctioned Russian billionaire named Andrey Melnichenko, depicting him as a prominent voice of reform. Yet the fawning 7,000-word profile by the magazine’s Moscow correspondent and the accompanying 3,000-word essay by Melnichenko himself failed to deliver the goods.

The essay, which was notably vague about specific demands for internal change but expansive in demands for recognition of Russia’s great-power status, said nothing that Putin himself could not have said. It contained no acknowledgment of the mind-boggling destruction and the myriad crimes against humanity committed by the Russians during their illegal invasion of Ukraine, whose sovereignty appeared to interest the author little. He inveighed against the unfair rules allegedly imposed on Russia by the heartless West, never mentioning that the Kremlin itself is a party to numerous international and bilateral agreements that it has violated over the years, including several that recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders. Nor did his essay address the immense economic, social, and demographic damage that Putin’s war has inflicted upon Russians themselves.

As many Ukrainian readers were quick to point out, it’s highly unlikely that an oligarch of this stature would have dared to publish such a document in a Western publication without the tacit acceptance of the Kremlin. Indeed, Putin must be thrilled. The Economist has boosted the case for Russia’s global rehabilitation far more effectively than the Kremlin’s friends on the American or European far right could have done.

This is not entirely new. For centuries, Russian rulers have exploited the overactive imaginations of Westerners eager to project their own fantasies and desires on the empire to the east. The trend goes back at least as far as Voltaire, who conjured up an image of Russia as a tolerant civilization that he could contrast with the religious fanaticism of France. He praised Catherine the Great for imposing Enlightenment values on the barbaric peoples of the Eurasian interior, to the point that he even applauded some of her most brutal conquests. “If I were younger I would make myself Russian,” he once gushed—easy for him to say, since he never actually made it there. Catherine, who knew a PR bonanza when she saw it, was happy to subsidize his long-distance propaganda.

It’s easy, on some level, to understand the appeal. Russia has a rich cultural legacy (though foreign fans usually fail to spot the chauvinist sentiments that sometimes lie beneath). It is both part of Europe and decidedly non-European (three-quarters of its territory lies in Asia), a mixture that evokes mystery and exoticism. Indeed, an implicit racism sometimes seems to be in play: Many Russians “look European” (i.e., white), and Russian Orthodoxy is still recognizably Christian, prompting Westerners to make assumptions about the country that they would never dare to apply to other authoritarian societies in East Asia or the Middle East, whose political traditions are arguably far closer to Russia’s.

Whatever the reasons, Russophiles tend to see what they want to see and disregard the rest. The socialists who visited the Soviet Union—people like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Paul Robeson, and the rest—overlooked obvious signs of impoverishment and terror and acknowledged only the utopian trappings that their hosts put in front of them. Russia, wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1931, “is led by men of impressive ability and unprecedented freedom of thought”—three years after Russian dictator Joseph Stalin launched his first wave of show trials. Leading media are no less prone to this sort of factual and moral contortionism: In his reporting from Moscow, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty notoriously denied the disaster of forced collectivization and the resulting famines in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and southern Russia that took millions of lives.

In 1944, U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace visited Magadan, the city at the center of a huge web of concentration camps in the Soviet Far East, yet failed to notice anything out of the ordinary. His myopia derived not only from the usual socialist dogmas, but also an early enthusiasm for the woolly ideas of the Russian-born mystic Nicholas Roerich. This, too, is a characteristic pattern: Foreign enthusiasts frequently celebrate Russia as a place of deep and abiding spirituality—a stereotype that tends to overlook the Moscow Patriarchate’s long subordination to the state and resulting culture of authoritarianism and corruption.

MAGA Republicans now follow in the same tradition. When American right-winger Candace Owens traveled to Russia this spring, she gushed about the beauty of its churches, which she cited as evidence of Russia’s deep Christian piety—though she could have just as easily lavished praise on the beautiful cathedrals of Ukraine, which she regards with contempt. She was conspicuously silent when the Russians bombed the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, one of the holiest sites in the Orthodox world, a few days after her trip.

Nor did Owens seem to grasp that Putin’s Russia is also a country that persecutes Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses (which it sees as unwanted competition for state-supported Orthodoxy) even as it sponsors an aggressively Islamist regime in Chechnya. To some extent, modern-day fellow travelers like her are dupes of a regime that can draw on long memories of how to manipulate foreign sympathizers. In the United States, the Russian spy Maria Butina deftly catered to Republican notions that Putin’s traditional values must include the right to bear arms. (In fact, Russia has one of the world’s toughest gun-control regimes.) The Kremlin is happy to amplify friendly cranks like the neo-fascist Richard Spencer, who has touted Russia as the “sole white power in the world”—in flagrant ignorance of its ethnic diversity, including an enormous migrant population from Central Asia.

Tucker Carlson (of testicle-tanning fame) famously lavished praise on the shopping carts in a Moscow supermarket, which he claimed as evidence of Russia’s high level of civilization. This was revealing in ways that he clearly didn’t intend. Russia boosters rarely seem to travel beyond the boundaries of the big cities and have minimal contact with ordinary people. If they did, they might learn that Russians have to spend a far higher share of their incomes on food than Western Europeans, have extremely high rates of divorce, and are experiencing an epidemic of domestic violence, not least thanks to a law decriminalizing wife-beating that passed the Russian parliament a few years ago. Again and again, the fantasists of Russian power miss the country’s obvious signs of weakness, underdevelopment, corruption, and societal decay.

It would be wonderful if we could simply dismiss such voices as cranks. Unfortunately, though, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Owenses and the Carlsons have proved highly effective amplifiers of Russian narratives. In 2024, U.S. prosecutors indicted two Russian agents for funneling money to conservative influencers who circulated pro-Putin views on their social media platforms.

Yet right-wingers aren’t the only ones guilty of wishful thinking when it comes to Russia. In 2009, then-U.S. President Barack Obama and his foreign-policy team stumbled badly when they seized upon Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, as an imagined “moderate” and partner for reform. It became almost instantly apparent that the Americans had fallen for yet another Kremlin scam; Medvedev, far from being a free agent, was a temporary Putin puppet who had no interest in breaking with his patron’s policies. The eternal search for a reasonable Russian once again proved a mirage. (These days, Medvedev features as one of Moscow’s most rabid attack dogs on Ukraine.)

Indeed, the U.S. policy elite has long seemed to have a particular weakness for misreading Russia—from Cold War-era Sovietologists to U.S. President Donald Trump. As we’ve seen since the start of Putin’s war against Ukraine in 2014 and even more so since the full-scale invasion four-and-a-half years ago, there are plenty of military experts, academics, think-tankers, and journalists whose analyses have been warped by their overestimation of Russian capacities. In 2022, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley told then-President Joe Biden that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours. Arch-realist John Mearsheimer has persisted throughout the war in predicting Ukraine’s imminent demise—long after it should have been apparent that the Russian military, however superior to Kyiv’s in resources and manpower, has been crippled by corruption, mismanagement, and technological backwardness. In 2023, the Washington analyst Samuel Charap deemed the war “unwinnable” by Ukraine.

All of these experts have, one suspects, simply succumbed to the myth of Russian immensity, power, and strength—the same characteristics that have so long convinced Trump that Russia is the side to bet on. We should be grateful to the Ukrainians for showing the world why it is time for that myth to die.

Source: Christian Caryl, “The Western Myth of Russian Greatness,” Foreign Policy, 21 July 2026. As a paid-up subscriber to Foreign Policy, I am happy to depaywall this excellent overview of Russian greatness derangement syndrome, historical and current. ||||| trr

Pride (and Prejudice)

A Pride flag near the Russian coat of arms during a protest outside the Russian Embassy in London, 16 March 2023. Krisztian Elek/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Russian authorities have banned nine groups that provide support to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people as “extremist,” Human Rights Watch said today. The apparent aim is to further suppress, stigmatize, and criminalize those who document abuses, share information, and provide legal, medical, and other assistance to Russia’s LGBT population.

Following the 2023 Russian Supreme Court decision to outlaw as “extremist” the “International LGBT Movement”—a legal and factual mischaracterization of a diverse, decentralized global human rights cause—the authorities have targeted numerous civil society organizations. Between March and May 2026, courts banned nine LGBT groups in seven Russian regions as “extremist,” namely Coming Out, LGBT Resource Centre, Parni Plus, Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives, Irida, Russian LGBT Network, Kallisto movement, T9 NSK, and Centre T. A lawsuit against Alliance of Straights and LGBT for Equality is pending.

“Russian authorities are intensifying their criminalization of those who provide critical support to the very LGBT people they have systematically persecuted,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Authorities should vacate all court decisions and criminal convictions based on these spurious ‘extremism’ charges.”

On April 22, a court in Orel banned Parni Plus, an LGBT media outlet. The court based its decision largely on an “expert assessment” by the Nizhny Novgorod Academy of the Internal Affairs Ministry, effectively a law enforcement university. It found that Parni Plus “belittled Russian spiritual values and showed contempt for Russian President Vladimir Putin,” criticized Russian laws, and attempted to create “an alternative, anti-state hierarchy of values.” Parni Plus said the authorities were “trying to label the visibility, voice and experiences of the LGBTQ community as ‘extremism’” and said it would continue its work.

A similar report formed the basis for the Moscow city court ruling banning the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives on April 23. The center said it “cannot ignore the fact that queer people have not ceased to exist and require support.” The group also said it would continue its advocacy and providing psychological, legal, and other support.

Centre T called the May 4 decision by the Moscow city court to ban the organization “unfounded and repressive.” The group pledged to continue its work to provide support and information for transgender and nonbinary people.

On March 3, the Saint Petersburg city court banned Coming Out, a prominent LGBT support group, as “extremist.” The group said the authorities have been expanding the definition of extremism to criminalize “virtually any independent activity, any dissent, or any act of solidarity to isolate, intimidate, and silence those who speak about issues and support vulnerable people.” Coming Out said it would continue its work to resist the state’s efforts “to make LGBT+ people unseen and unheard.”

Russian LGBT Network, which the Saint Petersburg city court on April 27 also banned as “extremist,” said the court’s judgment had “nothing to do with justice,” and that its activities essentially consisted of supporting the LGBT community, documenting discrimination, protecting rights, and discussing the situation of queer people in Russia. It also said it would continue its work.

On April 7, the Sverdlovsk Region court outlawed the LGBT Resource Centre. The court said the center engaged in “propaganda” and that its activities contradicted Russia’s state policy. On April 29, the Yaroslavl Region court banned Kallisto as “extremist,” claiming the movement aimed to “reshape and effectively destroy Russia’s fundamental spiritual and moral values, in particular traditional family values.”

On May 19, a court in Novosibirsk used the same reasoning to ban T9 NSK, an initiative that supported transgender people and their friends and family. The group shut down its website and social media accounts. In May, the Saint Petersburg city court registered the Justice Ministry’s lawsuit to ban the Alliance of Straights and LGBT for Equality as “extremist.” The group said it would continue working to provide support, security, overcome isolation and censorship, and focus on education and outreach. This was the last known case to be tried, in closed proceedings.

Under article 282.2 of Russia’s criminal code, participation in organizations banned as “extremist” carries penalties of up to 6 years in prison, while leading such an organization carries up to 12 years. Donations to such organizations are punishable with up to 8 years in prison under article 282.3, and repeated displays of “extremist” symbols, such as the rainbow flag or banned organizations’ logos, up to 4 years under article 282.4.

On March 6, a court in Samara convicted Artyom Fokin, the leader of Irida, a local LGBT community organization, on charges of leading an “extremist” organization and repeated violation of the country’s repressive “foreign agents” legislation and fined him 450,000 rubles (US$6,000). A Samara court subsequently banned the group on April 24.

Human Rights Watch monitoring has found that at least nine people had been convicted on criminal charges based on the “extremist” designation of the “International LGBT Movement,” including for allegedly leading organizations supposedly belonging to this movement, sharing content, organizing drag shows, conducting activism, or supporting same-sex dating. At least 25 others are facing criminal charges.

In 2023, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, condemned the Russian Supreme Court’s “LGBT-extremism” ruling. Independent UN human rights experts warned that the designation enables arbitrary and abusive application of the law and jeopardizes a wide range of activities protected under international human rights law.

“The Russian government’s banning of LGBT rights organizations is absurd, harmful, and discriminatory,” Williamson said. “Rights-respecting governments should support Russian LGBT groups and activists, including by enabling them to continue their work from abroad.”

Source: “Russia: LGBT Rights Groups Further Criminalized,” Human Rights Watch, 28 May 2026

Evgeny Pisemsky, founder and editor of Parni Plus, at the 2024 Pride parade in Bristol. Photo: Evgeny Pisemsky/DW

It has been nearly three years since the nonexistent “International LGBT Movement” was declared an “extremist” organization by the Russian Supreme Court, per its 30 November 2023 ruling. The decision unleashed a crackdown resulting in over one hundred convictions on charges of “LGBT propaganda.” Russian police have detained people at clubs and private parties, and queers have been remanded in custody and fined several thousands of rubles. Numerous LGBTQ+ organizations have been targeted, and many of them have been declared “extremist” as well, although they provided medical and legal assistance, hosted cultural events, and reported on the queer community via social media. Deutsche Welle spoke with members of these organizations about how they continue to operate in Russia and render assistance to people despite all the obstacles.

“The greater the pressure has been, the more attention we’ve paid to the LGBT movement”

Parni Plus, which has been around for eighteen years, is the principal Russian-language queer news website, and it has been closely linked to Phoenix Plus, an NGO that was founded two years earlier. Phoenix Plus focused on raising awareness, promoting free testing, and supporting HIV-positive people. Phoenix Plus’s chair, the cisgender male Evgeny Pisemsky, had also worked as a volunteer at the public awareness center Info Plus. Since Info Plus provided little specific information for HIV-positive gays, the idea arose to launch the site Parni Plus.

“Originally, running the site was my hobby, but at one point I realized it was a great way of reaching a bigger audience,” Pisemky, who became the website’s editor-in-chief, told DW.

Parni Plus has transformed along with the changing political climate in Russia. After the Russian State Duma passed a law banning “promoting LGBT to minors,” the site started publishing articles about the LGBTQ+ movement’s fight for its rights.

“The greater the pressure has been, the more attention we’ve paid to the LGBT movement,” Pisemsky explained to DW.

At one time, the media project tried to “navigate” the legal obstacles while also publishing articles criticizing the authorities for ignoring HIV prevention. This resulted in numerous instances when the authorities blocked the website.

“Our lawyer and I would send off complaints to Roskomnadzor [the Russian media watchdog] along the lines of ‘Where did you find that?’ and they would unblock us every time,” said Pisemsky.

When Phoenix Plus was declared a “foreign agent,” in 2020, Pisemsky had to shut it down in order to safeguard Parni Plus. But its consciousness-raising and activism continued, as Pisemsky consistently helped people get online HIV consultations from anywhere in Russia. The covid-19 lockdowns and Russia’s subsequent full-scale invasion of Ukraine did not put a stop to the organization’s work either: its team was ready to assist anyone and everyone remotely.

The team made the decision to reject the “18+” warning label it had been obliged to post on the website. In June 2023, they wrote that information about sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases were particularly vital to children and adolescents.

“[W]e are sick and tired of turning our back on queer children and teenagers. They are the most vulnerable segment of our communities, which are in particular need of support nowadays. We are not only freeing them from the need to lie when accessing the site. We [also] plan to publish many more articles just for minors,” they wrote.

After the LGBTQ movement was declared “extremist” in Russia, the Parni Plus team was forced to flee the country.

“We became ‘foreign agents’ twice: first as Phoenix Plus, and then as Parni Plus. Practically all our reporters were also declared ‘foreign agents’, and we racked up over twenty fines, totaling two million rubles,” Pisemsky recounted.

He argues that remaining open matters most of all.

“The ‘extremist’ label makes you worry about family members, and the authorities have been trying to erase us, but we have been surviving against the odds. It is vital to LGBTQ+ people that [our] organizations remain visible,” said Pisemsky.

80% of transgender people in Russia want to leave

Centre T is an organization specializing in assistance to trans people. It emerged in 2020 from a therapy group run by Yan Dvorkin, who is non-binary, and his colleague.

“We didn’t plan on founding a special organization. We were just psychologists who did sessions for trans people. But we quickly realized that our clients had a huge number of unmet needs in different areas, and that there was nowhere in Moscow for them to turn. There was nowhere to refer people for medical care or for meeting people and relaxing,” Yan explained.

That was how Centre T came into being. Its first project was called “Plush Toy Cat”—monthly tea parties featuring board games and dancing. These events took place for several years and, according to Dvorkin, would draw as many as 150 people.

“People from the regions would even come to hang out with other transgender people. It was an unbelievably positive experience: the participants found friends, partners, and future roommates at the get-togethers.”

Centre T gradually expanded. Its staff began providing consultations on emigration and means of obtaining medical care. They engaged in public education and community building, opened a shelter in Moscow, and set up regional associations.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Centre T team immediately sensed that negative changes were afoot in Russian society. According to Dvorkin, the active persecution of trans people in Russia kicked off precisely after February 2022, culminating in the 2023 law banning “sex change” (the correct term is “gender transition”).

“We worked with a medical board based at a clinic, and its physicians treated transgender people with respect. They issued diagnoses of ‘transsexualism’—a classification that enabled individuals to start redoing their identification papers and getting ready for surgeries. The passage of the law banning gender transition changed everything. We had fought against its adoption, and it was largely for this reason that our organization was designated a ‘foreign agent’ in 2023,” he said.

Dvorkin has no regrets that Centre T put up such a fierce fight. The team received many words of support in return.

Centre T staff members attended court hearings of cases involving LGBT individuals. Members of ultra-right gangs would occasionally attack them at the entrance to the courthouse.

Dvorkin described how the Centre T team coped with tough times.

“One time they attacked us with pepper spray and a child passing by got caught in the crossfire. His mother came to our defense and went with us to the police station. But our arguments about dangerous radicalization or the literal example of who was actually harming children fell on deaf ears in court. After losing such cases we would go to my place to ‘celebrate’ by eating a cake baked in advance and singing along to a guitar,” he recounted.

After the “LGBT movement” was ruled “extremist,” it became much harder for Centre T to operate, as many organizations voided their cooperation agreements with them, and they had to cancel in-person events. The situation in Russia changed drastically, and Centre T began moving its staff members abroad; many of them had been charged with violating the anti-LGBT “propaganda” law. Centre T also made the decision to close its Moscow shelter, which had attracted unwanted attention.

“This dude tried to kick down the door. We called the police. Our people saw through the window that he went outside, shook the policeman’s hand, and they went their separate ways,” recounted Dvorkin.

Currently, Centre T continues to operate online: it helps people access medical care and responds to crisis calls, providing support not only to trans people and their families but also to professionals at various levels. Centre T has also been providing more robust counseling on emigration matters.

“It has become clear that transgender people can no longer live a normal life in Russia. Eighty percent of transgender people in Russia want to leave and are looking for a way to do so,” concluded Dvorkin.

Although he sees Centre T’s new status as an “extremist organization” as dangerous, he has no plans to go into hiding.

“If I’m detained and extradited, then that’s life,” he said.

The MCC has gone underground

Unlike the majority of LGBTQ+ organizations, the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives (MCC) is still engaged in offline work in Russia and make it their emphasis. The MCC was formed in 2015 and conceived as a place where people could drop in, feel safe, and have a good time by reading books, drinking coffee, attending themed events, and meeting new eople. In 2019 it was transformed into a co-working café.

“We wanted casual passersby to be able to walk into our café, see the special ‘signs,’ and immediately realize they were in an LGBT space,” notes Olga Baranova, the MCC’s non-binary president.

Another of the MCC’s big projects is the queer festival OpenArt. Launched in 2017, it still takes place, under wraps, in Russia. Although it is hard to imagine now, the festival’s first edition was even guarded by police officers.

“An FSB officer arrived and asked what was going on. I told him to come in and have a look. He was afraid of possible riots and that skinheads would go after the festival attendees on the dark streets and beat them up. So we were assigned a police patrol. The provocateurs showed up at the doors, of course, but our guards kept everyone safe. No one inside noticed a thing,” Baranova recounts.

Despite the law against “gay propaganda” among children, the MCC managed to navigate the obstacles and and engage with a young audience: in 2022, for example, the festival was held in a two-story venue, with a 16+ area on the first floor. Nevertheless, it wasn’t without its challenges.

“Center ‘E’ officers [the Russian Interior Ministry’s anti-“extremism” police] came and talked with me. They asked me to shut everything down. Ultimately, though, the festival was a huge success,” Baranova recalls.

When the “International LGBT Movement” was declared “extremist” by the Russian authorities, the MCC went underground. The organization is now focused on emergency assistance, whether that means moving people abroad or getting them into a shelter.

“It’s important to remember that we cannot help everyone because we simply don’t have the resources,” Baranova points out. “If the police are pounding on your door, if you’re up against a tough situation in life, then you definitely should write to us and submit a request.”

Otherwise, the MCC continues to hold events on important topics, and their goal is to ensure that people do not end up being isolated.

“We see what are our beneficiaries need and every three to six months we change the focus of our meetings,” notes Baranova. “For example, right now many of them are looking for jobs.”

The community center wanders among various venues, and Baranova regrets the constant need to move from place to place. “In your own home you can put your favorite pillow on the bed and your favorite glass on the table. These are the things that create a sense of home, not bare walls,” she complains.

Members of the Russian LGBTQ community are persecuted for their identity

Eighteen years ago, a small community center called Coming Out opened in St. Petersburg. Since then, it has grown into one of Russia’s leading LGBTQ+ rights organizations. Coming Out also provided free psychological counseling and ran in-person solidarity groups, but its primary activities were legal support and consultations.

Thanks to Coming Out, there is an archive of accounts of discrimination against queer people in Russia.

“Long before 2022, we gatherd accounts of discrimination against queer people by law enforcement, of workplace and domestic discrimination, and of discrimination at medical and educational institutions. We analyzed the messages transmitted by the state propaganda machine and corroborated the existence of worrying trends with the numbers. We annually presented the outcomes of our work to Russian and international officials,” Denis Oleinik, a cisgender man and Coming Out’s executive director, explained to DW.

Coming Out was designated a “foreign agent” by the Russian authorities in December 2021. A few months later, realizing they could no longer work in Russia because they could not guarantee their own safety, the organization’s staff gradually fled Russia and moved its entire operations online. When Coming Out was declared an “extremist” organization, in March 2026, all of its staff members were ready for this turn of events, according to Oleinik.

“Over the past four years, we’ve learned to do everything remotely, put together a secure volunteer system, and set up systems for gathering and storing information that are as anonymous as possible. It’s really important to us that the beneficiaries of our assistance are safe and that the help we provide doesn’t harm them. To date, there have been no cases of people being persecuted for receiving support or assistance,” he explained.

Oleinik wants anti-queer discrimination to disappear in the future, but Coming Out’s research paints a completely different picture.

“In 2025, members of Russia’s LGBTQ community were subjected to persecution and discrimination not only for things they said or wrote but also for their very identity. Thus, in 2025, posting personal photos featuring kissing, publishing a blog about the lives of a same-sex couple, and organizing meetings in one’s own home were classified as ‘propaganda’ and ‘extremism,'” its report says.

This means that Oleinik and his colleagues have their work cut out for them.

Source: Dima Yelagin, “How ‘the boys’ became a threat to Russia,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 16 June 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Kolya* says they would not dare to go to a state health-care facility for the therapy they are receiving for a mental health condition. The 19-year-old from a city in Russia’s far-east, who identifies as non-binary and gay, tells The Lancet they fear that information about their sexuality could be passed on to other state institutions and used against them in some way. “I wouldn’t have told the mental health specialist treating me about my sexuality if they weren’t a private doctor. I wouldn’t tell the municipal clinic, I wouldn’t want them to have that kind of information about me in case they passed it on somewhere”, they say.

Kolya chose a private clinic because, like many in the LGBTQ+ community, they perceive them to be less likely to divulge their gender identity or sexuality to others, and less likely to be discriminatory. Kolya’s distrust of the Russian health-care system, and their avoidance of it, is becoming increasingly common among the heavily marginalised LGBTQ+ community, according to one of the largest surveys of how LGBTQ+ people are living in Russia, released in May.

The survey of more than 6000 people in Russia by the Coming Out and Sphere Foundation organisations showed a significant rise in the number of LGBTQ+ people avoiding seeing a doctor for fear of discrimination or biased treatment last year, reaching 35%.

Many of the respondents who reported discrimination said they had faced inappropriate comments, jokes, or offensive remarks from medical professionals, as well as experiencing reproductive coercion. Others specifically mentioned issues that arose when seeking help from psychologists and psychotherapists. In such cases, respondents reported instances of outing and breaches of confidentiality, including the disclosure of information about sexuality or gender identity without their consent.

The report’s authors say LGBTQ+ people, and especially transgender people, are losing access to medical services due to this distrust. “In our latest survey we saw a 6 percentage point year-on-year rise in people avoiding seeing a doctor. Historically, annual increases for this indicator have been in the range of 1–2 percentage points. A 6-point rise represents a marked departure from that trend—that’s why it is significant”, Denis Oleinik, Executive Director of Coming Out, told The Lancet.

“If this rate of increase were to continue at the same pace annually, within 5 years a substantially larger proportion of LGBTQ+ people would be avoiding medical care, with serious consequences for both individual health outcomes and broader public health. The 6-point rise may not sound dramatic in isolation, but viewed against the historical baseline and the potential trajectory it represents a genuinely concerning shift”, he added.

Over the past decade, a series of repressive anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been passed in Russia, including bans on any public information or activities supporting LGBTQ+ rights or displaying non-heterosexual orientation, on same-sex marriage, and on transgender people officially or medically changing their gender. A 2023 ruling by the Supreme Court also banned the international LGBT movement, declaring it extremist, allowing people to be fined or prosecuted for anything that could be construed as promoting “non-traditional sexual relations”.

In previous years, authorities have used these tools to crack down on groups and activists taking action to support LGBTQ+ rights, but now they are increasingly being used against individuals, with prosecutions even for displaying or wearing rainbow-coloured materials. “The persecution has moved to people being targeted not for something they have done, but just for being LGBTQ+,” said Oleinik. This in turn has made many in the community concerned about going anywhere, including health-care facilities, where their gender identity or sexual orientation could be identified and possibly disclosed.

Vitaly Djuma, Executive Director at the Eurasian Coalition on Health, Rights, Gender and Sexual Diversity told The Lancet that, in many cases, an LGBTQ+ person with a particular complaint that could be linked to non-heterosexual sexual behaviour would “not give up that kind of intimate information unless they really trusted the doctor, especially if they thought it could lead to disclosure [of their sexual orientation]”. Instead, he said, they would be forced to go to a private clinic, if they could afford it, or risk seeking treatment within state health care. “They would have to just try and deny the complaint is any indication of their sexuality”, he added.

Groups providing harm reduction services in Russia say that LGBTQ+ people are accessing their services, which they can legally provide to other key populations, to resolve health issues. “The LGBTQ+ community is increasingly reaching out to us in a more discreet way, sometimes through third parties. People are afraid to disclose that they are LGBTQ+”, a worker at a non-governmental organisation in a major Russian city, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Lancet.

The situation is especially difficult for transgender people, who, the survey shows, are more likely to face discrimination in health care, and more likely to avoid going to a doctor, than other members of the LGBTQ+ community. Oleinik said there were “few cases where doctors or clinics outright rejected providing services to someone just because they were gay or lesbian, but for trans people, it’s much worse”.

He added that there had also been cases of transgender people who, with medical changing of gender banned, turned to the black market to get the medicines they needed to transition, administered them unsupervised, and subsequently became ill.

Lucy Shtein of the North Caucasus SOS crisis group, which evacuates persecuted LGBTQ+ people from Russia, pointed out that following the ban, transgender people had become even more vulnerable as a group. “After the ban on gender transition, access to medical care became even more restricted for them”, she told The Lancet.

Furthermore, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has forced groups which provided health services for members of the community, such as harm reduction, prevention of sexually transmitted infections, or psychosocial help, to either close down or leave the country, cutting off another line of access to health care for people who do not trust state medical services. Experts say it is difficult to determine what effect this avoidance of, and inability to access, health care, is having on health among the LGBTQ+ community in Russia.

Data for some common health indicators in the community, such as numbers of HIV/AIDS cases and other sexually transmitted infections, as well as depression and other mental health conditions, are not always available or lack relevant detail. Although there are official figures for the number of people currently living with HIV and new infections, specific data on epidemiological trends among key populations is either not publicly available or, according to experts, not reliable.

Routes of transmission—according to some reports most new infections are now transmitted through heterosexual contact—are determined through self-reporting, while historical data have shown the proportion of overall HIV testing carried out among key populations is decreasing year on year.

This makes it very difficult to get an accurate picture of the epidemiological situation for the disease among the community, which could indicate potential wider consequences of individuals avoiding health care.

“Data for transmission routes is unreliable with the use of self-reporting and a large amount of unidentified transmissions. The HIV epidemic is absolutely still ongoing among men who have sex with men and other members of the LGBTQ+ community, especially in big cities where the practice of chemsex is burgeoning”, Djuma said.

Oleinik added that systematic research on LGBTQ+ people has become essentially impossible as researchers, non-governmental organisations, and public health professionals cannot gather such data without risking being associated with extremist activity. “If anything does exist in official sources, it tends to appear exclusively in negative framing—for example, linking same-sex behaviour to HIV transmission in ways that stigmatize the community rather than support it. Such studies or statistics cannot be trusted as objective public health data”, he said.

Additionally, apart from physical health, there are serious concerns of a deterioration of mental wellbeing among the community, with studies having previously established links between discrimination and mental health among LGBTQ+ people.

There are no specific data available on mental health in the community— statistics for relevant indicators, such as suicide, are not up to date—but there is some anecdotal evidence of worsening mental health in the general population, and all those who spoke to The Lancet said mental health among the community was inevitably being impacted by the government’s repressive legislation and an increasing normalisation of homophobic discourse among politicians and society.

Kolya says that “aggressive government anti-LGBTQ+ narratives” were one of the key reasons they were in psychotherapy and taking anti-depressants. “It’s stressful as hell sometimes. Every queer person I know feels that same stress [caused by these narratives]”.

Groups working with LGBTQ+ people in Russia said they had seen a rise in demand for their mental health services. “We have received significantly more requests for psychological support, especially from young LGBTQ+ people. Many have become more willing to seek support, are less afraid of psychotherapy, and are more open to working with psychologists and psychiatrists. This is likely connected both to the deterioration of mental health due to repression and to a broader understanding of the importance of mental health in general”, said Shtein.

“The number of people who come to us seeking psychological support is higher than last year and it’s growing every month”, added Oleinik. “The number of people thinking about suicide or who [harmed] themselves is also growing every year”, he said.

Kolya, and others who spoke to The Lancet, said that suicidal ideation and attempts were common among the community, again especially among transgender people. However, Oleinik said that despite the grim situation facing the community, groups like his would continue to help LGBTQ+ people access health care. “Our role in the current situation is increasingly important. We understand that people in the community need us—a lot of organisations have closed, stopped offering some programmes, but we can still reach the community. It might look like there is little hope at the moment, but we won’t stop”, he said.

Source: Ed Holt, “LGBTQ+ Russians increasingly avoiding doctors,” The Lancet, 25 June 2026

A magistrate in Moscow has been delivered a complaint of “LGBT propaganda” (as defined by Article 6.21.3 of the Russian Federal Code of Administrative Offenses) filed against Olga Baranova, program director of the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives. Apparently, this is her first fine—coming after the MCC was designated an “extremist” organization.

The hearing will take place on July 8, according to the court’s website. The court has not disclosed which agency drafted the report. Cases involving “LGBT propaganda” can be launched by various agencies: the Interior Ministry, the Prosecutor’s Office, or Roskomnadzor. However, in politically motivated cases, the instigator is most often Center “E”—the Interior Ministry’s department for “combating extremism.”

In late April, a court ruled in favor of the Justice Ministry and designated the MCC an “extremist” organization. It is one of ten LGBT groups that were given this designation in 2026. The Center is currently appealing the decision, so it is not yet listed in the registry of extremist organizations.

Source: “MCC director Olga Baranova gets her first ‘propaganda’ citation,” Parni Plus, 27 June 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Alexander Klimov, art director of the Orenburg bar Pose. Source: Social media/Moscow Times

A court in the Orenburg region on Monday handed down prison sentences to a bar owner and two of his employees in Russia’s first criminal case targeting people accused of belonging to what authorities call the “International LGBT Movement.”

The trio was arrested on LGBTQ+ “extremism” charges in March 2024, representing the first instance of criminal charges being pressed in connection with the Russian Supreme Court’s designation of the non-existent “LGBT movement” as “extremist” the year before.

Bar owner Vyacheslav Khasanov received a seven-year sentence, according to Ostorozhno Novosti. Manager Diana Kamilyanova was sentenced to six years and three months, while art director Alexander Klimov received two years and three months.

All three were accused of organizing events that demonstrated “affiliation with individuals of unconventional sexual orientation under the guise of running a nightlife venue.” According to the exiled news outlet Mediazona, the bar hosted drag shows.

The trio denied the charges during the court proceedings, which were held behind closed doors.

While the case represents the first instance of criminal charges being brought under the LGBTQ+ “extremism” designation, Russia’s first actual prison sentence under the ban was issued separately in January 2025 in the Kemerovo region.

The Orenburg court said Monday that its verdict has not yet taken effect and remains subject to appeal.

In addition to the prison terms, the court seized 1 million rubles ($12,800) in revenue from Khasanov. It also barred all three defendants from working in the entertainment and hospitality industries for two to three years following their release.

Source: “Orenburg Court Jails 3 Bar Employees for LGBTQ+ ‘Extremism,’” Moscow Times, 29 June 2026

Kyrgyzstan: Pro-Russian Outpost in Central Asia and Cannabis Heaven?

When Sadyr Japarov took power in Kyrgyzstan in 2020, he was a young, energetic nationalist president determined to build his own authoritarian power vertical—the first leader to pull it off since Askar Akayev. For decades the country had been notoriously unstable: storming parliament was practically a standard feature of the political repertoire.

Japarov had already begun edging closer to Moscow before 2022, but Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine handed him a historic opportunity. Kyrgyzstan quickly became one of the Kremlin’s main cryptocurrency hubs for shadow trade. The scheme was orchestrated by Ilan Shor, the fugitive Moldovan oligarch notorious for the “billion-dollar theft” from Moldova’s banking system. At the same time, Moscow and Shor built a propaganda network in the country under the brand “Eurasia.”

Yet loyalty to Moscow has so far delivered Bishkek surprisingly few tangible dividends. Kyrgyz citizens working in Russia face the same harassment and discrimination as other Central Asian labor migrants. The only concrete assistance the Kremlin has provided is a few hundred school buses and plans to build nine Russian-language schools.

The War and “Our Own”

Which post-Soviet state drew markedly closer to Moscow after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine? Georgia immediately comes to mind—and for good reason. After years of rule by the “Georgian Dream” party, society proved unable to resist a corrupt system that had steered the country toward Moscow. Politicians warned citizens that any show of solidarity with Ukraine could turn Batumi into another Mariupol. Today Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze openly recounts how he was pressed to open a “second front” against Russia, even as the Georgian Border Police simultaneously denies entry to both anti-war Russians and residents of Crimea and Donbas carrying Russian passports.

But there is another mountainous nation that has followed a strikingly similar path. Once the most volatile and politically turbulent state in Central Asia—where pro-Russian and pro-Western media and NGOs coexisted—Kyrgyzstan has transformed into a textbook post-Soviet autocracy.

You can still enter Kyrgyzstan on a Russian internal passport, but if you are an opposition activist the authorities may simply hand you back. The human-rights project “Ark” advises its clients not to remain in the country even temporarily. This is not standard practice among Moscow’s formal allies: in Kazakhstan, the odds of avoiding deportation are noticeably better, and local activists are far more willing to assist Russians.

A telling case is that of a young Kyrgyz man named Samat. He held dual citizenship—his parents had obtained Russian passports while he kept his Kyrgyz one. After completing compulsory military service in 2019, he signed a contract with Russia’s Defence Ministry and failed to terminate it before the war began, despite trying. In March 2022 he managed to flee back to Bishkek. Smart cameras linked to the CIS wanted-persons database spotted him at the airport. He was arrested and taken to a pre-trial detention center in Bishkek. What happened to him next is unknown; no media outlet ever followed up.

Ironically, local residents who volunteered to fight for Russia—whether as regular contract soldiers or Wagner mercenaries—have also ended up behind bars. Outcomes vary. Askar Kubanychbek uulu was sentenced to ten years for mercenaryism but was released on a three-year probation period. He promptly returned to Russia and signed another Defence Ministry contract.

Such legal contradictions are common across Central Asia, but they have flourished most extravagantly in Kyrgyzstan thanks to pervasive corruption and a weak judiciary. Even so, Bishkek still maintains a certain distance from Moscow’s direct orders. In Tajikistan, for example, not a single citizen has been charged with mercenaryism for fighting in Ukraine; the prosecutor-general explained last year that anyone who accepts Russian citizenship must “observe the requirements and obligations of that state.”

Reliable data on Central Asians recruited into the Russian army come from the Ukrainian project “I Want to Live“: Uzbekistan (4,955), Tajikistan (3,489), Kazakhstan (2,420), Kyrgyzstan (1,474), and Turkmenistan (581). The relatively modest Kyrgyz figure reflects simple demography—a small country with a modest population. Yet by every other measure of loyalty, Kyrgyzstan now ranks among Moscow’s most reliable post-Soviet partners, second only to Belarus.

Just Don’t Irritate Them

In the first days after the invasion, every Eurasian state felt the ground shift. Even in Central Asia, where leaders usually comment on global affairs only in the vaguest terms, governments were forced to take a position.

Japarov, then in office for barely a year, chose the safest possible tone. “The situation is complex and has worsened in recent days,” he told parliament. “We are a small country with no influence to stop the conflict, so we must remain neutral. We are already seeing rising food and fuel prices and a stronger dollar. In these difficult times we need unity.”

He repeated the “small country” line in an April interview with the state news agency Kabar. That appears to be Bishkek’s genuine stance: no hidden agenda, no double game. Claims that Japarov “condemned Kyiv’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements” or “supported Russia’s decisive actions” should be left to the Kremlin’s press service.

Kyrgyzstan’s version of neutrality, however, has its own flavor. Compare it with neighboring Kazakhstan, where President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev consistently affirms international law and maintains contact with Volodymyr Zelensky. Even after the lavish welcome he gave Putin in Astana in May 2022—calling the Russian leader’s mission “fateful for the Russian people and the Russian state”—Kazakhstan’s position could still be described as neutrality, albeit with a clear northern tilt.

In Bishkek, neutrality is simpler: do nothing that might annoy those who can make life difficult. Above all, that means Moscow and Beijing. The Japarov government regards relations with those two capitals as the only ones that truly matter.

Kyrgyzstan cannot expect serious Western investment anytime soon, so it has little to lose by keeping its head down. Besides, Japarov built his political career in large part by confronting Western capital. One of his signature achievements was the nationalization of the Kumtor gold mine from Canada’s Centerra Gold. The mine passed fully under state control in 2022, though experts question how effectively the new owners are running it.

Japarov has continued tightening state oversight of foreign investment, limiting the list of deposits open to foreigners and drafting a new Mining Code. Curiously, he has proposed using British law to resolve disputes; a special International Dispute Resolution Centre based on UK rules opened in February 2025 in the Tamchy investment zone on Lake Issyk-Kul.

Had Japarov’s background been different, he might have joined the conversation about rare-earth metals that Donald Trump loves so much. But at the first Central Asia-US summit in Washington, the Kyrgyz president was noticeably more restrained than his colleagues. While Tokayev told Trump he was “sent from above” and Uzbekistan’s Shavkat Mirziyoyev declared that only the American president could stop the war in Ukraine, Japarov spoke through a Kyrgyz-language interpreter and focused on the digital economy and artificial intelligence—both in the main session and in his brief one-on-one meeting with Trump.

Among the issues raised by Sadyr Japarov was hydropower—in particular, preparations for launching the Kambarata hydroelectric power station. Mining was conspicuously absent from his remarks. That is hardly surprising: Kyrgyzstan has virtually no remaining deposits attractive enough for the kind of large-scale joint ventures Donald Trump prefers.

The Authoritarian Turn

Kyrgyzstan’s growing distance from the West has allowed its new elites to extract maximum value from Russia while consolidating domestic power without apology. Japarov’s rise in 2020 marked the republic’s decisive shift to a rigid vertical of power and full-blown authoritarian rule. According to Freedom House, Kyrgyzstan was still rated “partly free” in 2019 with a score of 38 out of 100. It has since fallen to 25 points—firmly in the “not free” category.

During this period the country adopted a new constitution that dramatically expanded presidential authority, along with a law on non-commercial organizations that many describe as a local version of Russia’s foreign-agent legislation. The logic is identical: any NGO receiving foreign funding must register as a “foreign representative” and be placed on a public list. The registry went live in September 2024 but has grown slowly—starting with three organizations and now standing at just five. For now, NGOs apply for inclusion themselves. The law is also easily circumvented by re-registering as a limited-liability company (OOO), the Kyrgyz equivalent of an LLC.

A vivid illustration of Bishkek’s loyalty to Moscow came during Vladimir Putin’s visit to Bishkek in November 2025. The new presidential residence sits next to the Ukrainian embassy. To ensure that Putin, walking along the avenue to the main entrance, would not see the Ukrainian flag—and that Ukrainian diplomats would not see the leader of the aggressor state—authorities erected a massive screen directly in front of the embassy. It displayed the flags of Russia and Kyrgyzstan along with greetings to the Russian president.

The Kremlin’s Financial Hub

Kyrgyzstan’s self-proclaimed “neutrality” has turned the country into a convenient instrument for Moscow to evade Western sanctions, including in the military-technical sphere. Setting up a legal entity in Kyrgyzstan is straightforward—especially an LLC. Russian businesses no longer need local partners; they can simply incorporate their own company and route transactions through it. Corrupt customs procedures and notably liberal currency and cryptocurrency regulations only add to the appeal.

In 2022, Kyrgyz exports to Russia jumped 2.5 times to $920 million. The subsequent surge never materialized; trade volumes stabilized. By the end of 2025, exports had actually declined 13.4 percent. Analysts attribute the drop to a deliberate reduction in re-exports.

Western sanctions began hitting Kyrgyz firms in 2023, when the U.S. Treasury added Weitmann Handeln Allianz LLC—a supplier of computers to Russia—to its list. Other equipment exporters followed, but banks only came under fire in 2025.

The first and most prominent target was the state-owned Keremet Bank. According to the U.S. Treasury, it assisted Russia’s Promsvyazbank (PSB) with overseas operations. PSB is the financial backbone of the Russian military and defense industry; its chairman is Pyotr Fradkov, son of former prime minister and ex-SVR chief Mikhail Fradkov.

The same Treasury notice mentioned another notable name: Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor. After siphoning roughly a billion dollars from Moldova’s banking system, Shor relocated to Russia and threw himself into political projects. He has worked with PSB since at least 2024, using the bank to funnel money into Moldova ahead of elections. It was therefore no surprise that Keremet appeared in the same schemes.

Later, the Financial Times published an investigation into the ruble-pegged stablecoin A7A5, created by PSB specifically to circumvent sanctions. Trading in the coin took place on Grinex, an exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan. In April 2025 the exchange suffered a cyberattack that wiped out roughly a billion rubles’ worth of user funds. By then, its ties to both PSB and Shor were an open secret. Project head Oleg Ogienko had stated in February that up to 10 percent of Russia’s foreign-trade settlements flowed through the coin.

A parallel instrument with a similar name also exists: the payment agent A7, another PSB-linked project that allows businesses and individuals to transfer money abroad without SWIFT. Its CEO is likewise Ilan Shor.

After the U.S. sanctions, Britain and the European Union followed suit against Keremet. London also targeted two other Kyrgyz banks—Capital and the Eurasian Savings Bank—along with the state brokerage firm and a virtual-asset issuer. The same institutions (plus Tolubay) appeared in the EU’s 19th and 20th sanctions packages.

The most significant consequence of the EU’s 20th package for Kyrgyzstan was the introduction of sectoral restrictions: the bloc now prohibits exports of CNC machine tools and data-transmission equipment (switches and routers). This is the first such precedent and could have a noticeable deterrent effect on the willingness of regional states to provide Russia with technical assistance. While Kyrgyzstan itself has few high-tech industries, the restrictions could deliver a serious blow to neighboring Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

According to Moldovan outlets Rise Moldova and IPN, Shor has become deeply embedded in Kyrgyz elites; President Japarov himself has reportedly used aircraft from Shor’s companies. The Russian investigative outlet Proyekt claims that Roman Abramovich serves as Shor’s patron within Russian elite circles. It was with Abramovich’s backing, the outlet asserts, that Shor launched both the A7 project and the large-scale sanctions-evasion scheme built around cryptocurrency in Kyrgyzstan.

The Humanitarian Dimension

When asked about helping Russia circumvent sanctions, Kyrgyz officials usually respond with flat denials. Last year President Japarov reframed the issue in familiar terms—combating “foreign agents.”

“We suggested that Ambassador [of the United States] Vigeri invite independent auditing firms to examine Keremet and Capital banks, review the results together, and then make a decision,” he declared. “They refused… They simply claimed to have certain information. But we know perfectly well where it comes from. It comes from local NGOs and our internal adversaries who send them anonymous false reports.”

There was one notable exception. Speaking at SPIEF-2025, Temir Sariyev, chairman of Kyrgyzstan’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, openly acknowledged that “when the special military operation began, the first country that extended a hand without fear was the Kyrgyz Republic. Others followed later. This prompts Russia to regard the KR as its most reliable partner—in both business and politics. Reliability is a very rare and scarce commodity.” Sariyev did not spell out the nature of the assistance, but everyone in the room understood: he was referring to the provision of loopholes for gray imports and parallel financial transactions.

Such candor is driven by straightforward pragmatism. Bishkek had hoped that loyalty would bring tangible benefits for Kyrgyz labor migrants in Russia. Officials have repeatedly complained that EAEU membership has not delivered the expected advantages—particularly access to medical care and schooling for children.

The introduction of mandatory Russian-language testing made the situation worse for all children with foreign citizenship living in Russia. Kyrgyz representatives raised the issue without success. From next year onward, Russia is imposing even stricter rules on migrants, with an exemption granted only to citizens of Belarus. In all regions except Moscow and Moscow Oblast, the hiring of foreigners will be permitted solely through organized, targeted recruitment programs.

At the same time, Moscow announced in 2023 plans to build nine joint Russian-Kyrgyz schools in Kyrgyzstan with mixed teaching staffs. Three are promised for 2027. Any mention of the project reliably irritates Russian nationalists, yet the Kremlin uses the rapprochement with Bishkek to bolster its image among the Kyrgyz population as well.

It is in Kyrgyzstan—according to the limited polling available—that public solidarity with Moscow over Ukraine is highest. A 2024 Paper Lab survey found that 36 percent of respondents blamed Ukraine for the war, 14 percent blamed Russia, and 13 percent blamed the United States. These figures largely reflect media consumption patterns: Russian outlets dominate the foreign-media landscape. In 2024 Bishkek launched the pro-Russian television channel Nomad, which is linked to both Ilan Shor and RT and is headed by a former RT employee.

Another Shor project, the non-profit organization Eurasia, has also expanded significantly. In other post-Soviet states it has mainly organized propaganda tours for young people, flying selected students and schoolchildren to Moscow for lectures by pro-Kremlin speakers. In Kyrgyzstan, thanks to the authorities’ accommodating stance, the organization has been able to operate locally. Bishkek now boasts an Eurasia Park, a Russian-language support center, and a network of social stores under the same brand. In September 2024 the organization donated 50 school buses to rural districts.

The newest objective of ANO Eurasia in Kyrgyzstan is the creation of a unified educational space with Russia. The initiative, according to Kyrgyz officials, came from Bishkek rather than Moscow—and specifically from President Japarov. At SPIEF-2025, First Deputy Prime Minister Daniyar Amangeldiev stated: “Vladimir Vladimirovich supported the initiative of our president. I know that ANO Eurasia is already working on this issue; let us define our joint next steps.”

One practical outcome appears to have been the recent meeting of the Russian-Kyrgyz expert-consultative council on history, organized in Moscow by the Russian Military-Historical Society. Scholars from both countries discussed the content of school textbooks and clashed sharply over whether the period of Russian imperial rule in Central Asia should be described as the “colonization” of the Kyrgyz people. The Russian side, as expected, insisted on alternative wording—”administration” or “administrative measures”—that the Kyrgyz scholars found unacceptable. Academician Abylabek Asankanov remarked: “You are setting us an extremely difficult task—to abandon the word ‘colony.’ That is very hard to do.”

Such friction was predictable. Despite Bishkek’s calculations that closer ties with Moscow would solve financial problems and provide protection, nationalist and anti-imperial sentiments remain strong in Kyrgyzstan. They are also an important part of Sadyr Japarov’s own political brand. In April, for example, he promised to rename the remaining villages that still bear Russian names—only for his press service to disavow the statement the following day.

In seeking to consolidate personal power in a traditionally turbulent country, Japarov has bet on Moscow as a source of external legitimacy. While some of his efforts have been appreciated in the Kremlin, he should not count on serious long-term support. Years of experience have shown that the Kremlin never clings to any particular politician in Kyrgyzstan; it assumes the country is already firmly within Russia’s orbit. Yet by his actions Japarov is helping Moscow entrench itself still more deeply in the republic.

The combination of Russian propaganda among the population and the corrupt ties linking local officials and banks to Russian structures provides a sufficiently reliable guarantee that Kyrgyzstan will remain the most pro-Putin country in Central Asia for the foreseeable future. The price is secondary sanctions and the risk of falling behind in the development of genuinely competitive economic sectors.

Source: Roman Chernikov, “Putin’s Outpost in Central Asia,” Riddle Russia, 6 June 2026

In his 1986 novel Plakha, translated into English as The Scaffold, Chingiz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstan’s great writer, tells the story of Avdiy Kallistratov, an idealistic young man who joins a group of drug smugglers travelling to a remote corner of Central Asia. To Kyrgyzstan, to be precise, where large swathes of cannabis grow wild in the picturesque Issyk-Kul region.

Aitmatov describes in vivid detail the brutal process of harvesting and trafficking the drug by a criminal group. But how close is this depiction to reality?

This is a question I put to Gulzat Botoeva, Associate Professor of Criminology at Swansea University and an expert on illegal economies in Eurasia, including cannabis production in Kyrgyzstan. We discuss how the harvesting began, who benefits from it, and how local authorities respond to the phenomenon. Is there any incentive in Kyrgyzstan to legalise the crop?

Here is a list of Gulzat’s publications on the topic:

Botoeva, G. (2014). Hashish as cash in a post-Soviet Kyrgyz village. International Journal of Drug Policy, 25(6), 1227-1234.

Botoeva, G. (2019). Use of language in blurring the lines between legality and illegality. In Governance Beyond the Law: The Immoral, The Illegal, The Criminal (pp. 67-83). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Botoeva, G. (2021). Multiple narratives of il/legality and im/morality: The case of small-scale hashish harvesting in Kyrgyzstan. Theoretical Criminology, 25(2), 268-283.

Source: Agnieszka Pikulicka, “Episode 41: Hashish and survival in rural Kyrgyzstan,” Turan Tales, 4 June 2026

botoeva-use of hashish money in Kyrgyzstan Download

• Botoeva, G. (2015). The monetization of social celebrations in rural Kyrgyzstan: on the uses of hashish money. Central Asian Survey, 34(4), 531–548. https://doi-org.mpc.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/02634937.2015.1092742

This article focuses on the embeddedness of hashish production in the local economy of Toolu, a village in Kyrgyzstan. It explores how transformations in social relationships and the monetization of gift giving put constant pressure on families to find cash in a semi-subsistence agricultural economy. Although not produced on an industrial scale in the community, hashish is used as a cash crop in times of deficit. Based on a mixed-methods study combining ethnographic fieldwork with survey data, I show how the hashish economy is intertwined with different forms of reciprocal relationships based on gift-giving practices and the monetization of social relationships. In doing so, I illustrate how the hashish economy is embedded in local livelihoods and shapes emerging forms of economic morality in Kyrgyz society.

Source: EBSCO Host

This documentary is an ethnobotanical and cultural exploration. It does not promote or facilitate the sale of cannabis or cannabis-related products. In Episode 3, the expedition moves deeper into Kyrgyzstan’s highlands as the Strain Hunters cross paths with one of Central Asia’s most iconic cultural gatherings — the world-famous Nomad Games. Set against the dramatic mountain landscape, the games offer a rare glimpse into the traditions, skills, and nomadic heritage that have shaped life in this region for centuries. Leaving the celebrations behind, the team continues their journey into increasingly remote terrain. As they explore valleys and high-altitude environments shaped by wind, cold, and time, the Strain Hunters encounter some of the most promising wild cannabis populations of the expedition — plants that show clear adaptation to their harsh surroundings. Through careful observation and documentation, the team identifies ancient landrace traits that reflect cannabis’ long history in Central Asia. These encounters represent a key moment in the journey, deepening our understanding of cannabis diversity and reinforcing the importance of preserving rare genetics before they disappear. This expedition is brought to you by Green House Seed Co. and GH Medical, continuing our mission to explore the planet, preserve rare genetics, and document cannabis culture worldwide.

Source: Strain Hunters and Green Seed Co (YouTube), 25 December 2026

BISHKEK — Kyrgyz cannabis is reputed to be among the most potent in the world, making it a lucrative cash crop for drug traffickers.

It appears ironic, then, that a homegrown addiction specialist in Bishkek wants marijuana to be legalized to reduce the number of Kyrgyz drug addicts, fight organized crime, and increase tax revenues.

Jenishbek Nazaraliev, a former presidential candidate who opened Bishkek’s first private narcology clinic in 1993, wants the Kyrgyz government to consider a pilot program for the legal production of cannabis near Lake Issyk-Kul.

Rivaling the potency of marijuana from Afghanistan, international experts say cannabis is already being harvested by about two-thirds of all the families in Kyrgyzstan’s Issyk-Kul and Chui regions.

Pot plants grow wild on thousands of hectares of land there. During the first eight months of 2013, up through the annual August harvest, Kyrgyz authorities say they destroyed more than 154 tons of cannabis in the Issyk-Kul region alone.

Nazaraliev says more effective regulation over the production and sale of marijuana is an issue that eventually must be tackled by the government.

He says the illegal drug market in Kyrgyzstan is now “fully controlled by the black economy.”

Nazaraliev also argues that the producers, sellers, and consumers of cannabis could be better controlled — and that the government would bolster its tax revenues — if pot were legalized.

But Kyrgyzstan’s State Drug Control Service disagrees. Authorities there say winning the battle against drug traffickers is the key to social stability and development in Kyrgyzstan.

And they argue that legalization won’t rein in organized criminal traffickers because Kyrgyz-grown cannabis is exported through a network that extends far beyond Kyrgyzstan’s borders — a smuggling route for illegal Afghan cannabis, opium, and heroin that passes through Kyrgyzstan on its way to Russia and the European Union.

Naked Harvest

RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service has spoken with villagers in the Tiup and Ak-Sui districts around Lake Issyk-Kul who are involved in the harvest and sale of Kyrgyz cannabis.

For centuries, cannabis has been harvested in Central Asia by horsemen who would ride naked through wild cannabis patches and then scrape the resin from their skin and the hair of their horses.

But most villagers around Lake Issyk-Kul now harvest the drug by rubbing cannabis plants between their palms to get a layer of black resin that they scrape off with a knife and package in matchboxes.

Local dealers buy the drugs from the harvesters and then sell them to bigger dealers who tour the area, forwarding their purchases abroad through international trafficking channels.

Kyrgyz villagers who harvest cannabis every August make no secret about paying bribes to police who turn a blind eye.

For their part, local police tell RFE/RL it would be impossible to eradicate a trade that is integral to the survival of so many people.

Former Kyrgyz Vice President and Prime Minister Feliks Kulov — who also headed the National Security Service — suggested during the 1990s that state-managed cannabis farms near Lake Issyk-Kul could help the authorities control drug production in the country.

But Kulov’s proposal was derailed by critics who cited the negative experiences of opium growers in Afghanistan.

Nazaraliev, the narcologist who wants the authorities to reconsider legalization, ran in Kyrgyzstan’s 2009 presidential election under the campaign slogan “Everything is Within your Reach.”

He is now asking the authorities in Bishkek to consider whether “progressive European countries” and U.S. state governments that decriminalize marijuana care more about the health and welfare of their citizens than Kyrgyzstan.

Source: “Addiction Doctor Wants Kyrgyzstan To Legalize Pot,” RFE/RL Kyrgyz Service, 7 January 2014

You’re Getting Discombobulated (and You’re Getting Ebola)

Making America great again, fifty-two deranged social media posts at a time: what does it say about America’s alleged greatness that seventy-seven million Americans voted for this exercise of “executive time”? ||||| trr

President Donald Trump spent much of Saturday flooding Truth Social with a torrent of memes, AI slop, political attacks, and fan-made tributes.

The six-hour posting marathon unfolded on a day when the only item listed on the president’s public schedule was “Executive Time.”

Beginning at noon, Trump shared or reposted more than 50 pieces of content ranging from patriotic fantasy art and self-congratulatory graphics to crime memes, military imagery, celebrity tributes, and attacks on political rivals.

Among the more unusual posts were separate images showing Trump riding horseback beside George Washington on a dirt road next to a NASCAR race.

Another showed Trump looming over Greenland beneath the words “Hello, Greenland!”

Trump has repeatedly argued that having Greenland as U.S. territory is vital for national security, though both Greenlandic and Danish leaders have forcefully rejected any suggestion that the territory could be acquired by the United States.

One particularly strange image showed Trump dressed as a military commander as fighter jets exploded across the sky behind him, beneath the caption: “YOU’RE GETTING DISCOMBOBULATED.”

The post appeared to reference Trump’s claim that a secret U.S. weapon he dubbed a “discombobulator” helped capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Trump also revived one of his longest-running grudges, sharing a meme depicting five photos of Rosie O’Donnell as the stages of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

The jab was the latest installment in a feud that stretches back nearly 20 years and has survived multiple presidential campaigns, two administrations, and countless social media broadsides.

Former President Barack Obama was also a recurring target.

Trump shared multiple memes attacking Obama, including one depicting the Obama Presidential Library as a giant trash can and another blaming Obama and former President Joe Biden for problems at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The feed also featured a barrage of side-by-side graphics contrasting “Biden’s solution” to problems such as theft, shoplifting, squatting, fentanyl use, and illegal immigration with what supporters portrayed as Trump’s tougher approach, which typically involved arrests, imprisonment, or deportation.

At other points during the spree, Trump shared multiple images of Chinese President Xi Jinping, including one showing the pair shaking hands beneath a caption lamenting Democratic opposition to his long-desired White House ballroom.

Trump pointed to Beijing’s sprawling Great Hall of the People as an example of the kind of grand venue he believes the White House should have.

Construction is already underway on the site of the White House’s East Wing as part of the $400 million project, which Trump has described as “a gift to the United States of America.”

Trump now also claims the ballroom would conceal a vast underground bunker complex containing a military hospital, meeting rooms, and top-secret research facilities.

Another image shared on Saturday appeared to nod to those ambitions, depicting a futuristic “DronePort” perched atop the White House roof as aircraft buzzed overhead.

Taken together, the posts offered a remarkably unfiltered look at the subjects occupying Trump’s attention on a quiet Saturday: Greenland, Rosie O’Donnell, military power, drones, and himself.

By the end of the six-hour barrage, the president’s feed looked less like a communications strategy and more like a running stream of consciousness.

Source: Olivia Ralph, “Trump, 79, Spirals into Fantasy-Fueled Meme Bender,” The Daily Beast, 31 May 2026

DOCTORS AROUND THE COUNTRY are baffled, disturbed, and in some cases aghast at the Trump administration’s plan for Americans who get Ebola overseas—in particular, the decision not to bring these patients back home, to one of the facilities that the federal government created precisely for this purpose.

And if you want to know why these medical professionals are upset, ask infectious disease physician Tara Palmore.

Palmore knows better than most what Ebola care looks like in the American facilities, because she provided it during the 2014 outbreak. Although most of the cases were in West Africa, nearly a dozen infected Americans got treatment in the United States, including one who ended up at a facility inside the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

That is where Palmore was working at the time. And in a phone interview on Thursday, she described the unit to me—how the surfaces are all nonporous, lest they absorb infected bodily fluids that can’t be fully wiped away, and how there’s extra space for medical equipment, because staff have to bring machines to the patient rather than the other way around.

Another distinguishing feature of the unit, Palmore said, is the sealing of every wall, door, and window seam. It’s part of a system to maintain negative pressure, so that air is circulated only through special filters—a system that patients and staff cannot see but can sometimes hear, because of the high-powered fans. “It can be a little loud in there,” Palmore said.

For her and her colleagues, though, a bigger issue was learning how to effectively administer care for patients with such an aggressive, awful disease while protecting themselves and others from infection.

It took years of regularly scheduled training, plus more intensive sessions that had started months before they actually got a patient in October 2014. She and her colleagues practiced feeling for injection points while wearing two layers of gloves. They went over why it’s important to scrub the wheels of scanning devices and, when appropriate, to decontaminate equipment or rooms with hydrogen peroxide vapor.

“I was part of drilling and simulations all summer, because we saw this epidemic growing,” Palmore said. “It was working with the chest x-ray guy to get his system down, making sure the nurses involved knew how to put in a line, making sure the intensivists figured out how they were going to put someone on dialysis or intubate them for a ventilator. We drilled with dummies, we drilled with people.”

The work paid off: Nine of the Ebola patients in American facilities survived, the only two deaths coming from people who arrived in advanced stages of the disease. And no facility staff got sick.

But while the United States now has thirteen fully stocked, fully staffed facilities capable of providing such care, the Trump administration has no plans to make use of them. Instead, the administration has decided to transfer Americans who are exposed or infected abroad to a quickly constructed field hospital in Kenya, and then—when necessary for more serious cases—to specialized facilities in Europe.

Supposedly this is all for the sake of the patients, given that it will be easier to get American patients infected in Africa to Kenya or Europe than all the way back to the United States. “These decisions were made to make sure we provide the best care,” a senior administration official told reporters during a White House background briefing this past week, to “optimize what can be done for our American citizens who are overseas.”

It’s possible the administration’s plan will accomplish that, just as it’s possible Trump and his lieutenants truly made this decision with patient well-being foremost in their minds. But infectious disease physicians I interviewed over the last few days were highly skeptical, and it’s not hard to see why.

THE MOST IMMEDIATE QUESTION about the administration’s scheme—at least as of this writing—is whether it will even go forward.

The plan had been to open the Kenya facility in stages, starting with a fifty-bed unit on Friday following an agreement with the Kenyan government. But that was before the Kenyan union representing health care workers objected and threatened a nationwide strike—and before a Kenyan judge temporarily blocked the facility, arguing that the country’s government had not shown that it had taken the necessary precautions to protect its citizens.

The U.S. State Department late Friday acknowledged the ruling, announcing via tweet that “We are in touch with Kenyan authorities and are optimistic we can resolve objections.” CNN on Saturday reported that the American health officers had arrived, and that Kenya’s government intended to allow the plan to proceed, despite the court order. By the time you read this, the facility could be operating.

But there are plenty of other questions that officials have yet to answer definitively. At the very top of the list is what level of care the field hospital will be expected to provide, and whether it will be able to do so.

It was hard to tell from the guidance senior officials gave to reporters in that White House background call this week. At times, they described the Kenya facility almost as if it were a triage center for watching people in quarantine, unless and until they test positive and show symptoms, at which point they would get transport to tertiary care in Europe. But officials also mentioned the advanced care available, and said several times staff on site would make decisions about when a patient’s status warranted transfer. That made it sound more like a place for treatment.

The distinction is crucial, and has implications for the facility’s basic design. Patients sick with Ebola would ideally have their own bathrooms as well as their own bedrooms, Boston University infectious disease specialist Nahid Bhadelia told me in a phone interview, because it’s through exposure to bodily fluids that the disease spreads. And because Ebola can cause multiple organ failure, Bhadelia said, facilities need both ECMO devices (which act as artificial hearts and lungs) and dialysis machines (which function as surrogate kidneys).

But the personnel may matter even more than supplies, Bhadelia said, especially because this latest outbreak comes from the rarer Bundibugyo version of the virus. It has no approved treatments, unlike the more common Zaire version. That could leave clinicians relying more on the traditional approach: managing the various complications in the hopes of keeping patients alive until their bodies’ defenses can finally get rid of the disease.

“Ebola is a very labor-intensive disease to treat,” said Bhadelia, who has treated Ebola overseas and managed a biocontainment facility here in the United States. “You have patients who are losing a lot of fluids, so you have to deal with fluid replacement, and then beyond that you have to provide multi-organ support including potentially renal support, ventilatory support. It’s not just about the stuff. It’s making sure you have the right ratio of human resources to patients.”

Administration officials said they have dispatched roughly thirty commissioned public health officers to supplement staff already in central Africa, with a possibility of adding more. The physicians I interviewed said it was impossible to know whether that number would be enough, just as they said they weren’t sure whether the workers would have the proper training.

But they were nervous, they said, given that administration officials have been telling reporters that the newly dispatched health workers had three days of instruction and drilling. That doesn’t sound like the kind of preparation that staff at the specialized American facilities have gotten—or that Brown University public health professor Craig Spencer recalls seeing as a patient in 2014, when he was one of the Americans who got Ebola and received treatment at the special unit in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital.

“They were so well-practiced and well-prepared,” Spencer told me in a phone interview. He added: “Whether I needed an x-ray, whether I needed dialysis, they had thought about how they were going to make those things happen—who was going to be responsible for doing that, how they would get them into the room, how they would keep them safe. These are all protocols that exist beforehand and, quite frankly, can’t be taught over a three-day weekend at a training.”

Palmore noted that staff at the existing facilities “have been preparing for years, drilling and training, and some of them have taken care of people with other hemorrhagic fever viruses.” She went on from there: “The idea that a few days of training and, like, some kind of modular hospital is going to create any sort of equivalent care setting for people with Ebola infection, which requires incredibly complex care, just does not seem realistic to me.”

And in such an ad hoc medical setting, Bhadelia pointed out, “the chances of potential staff exposures go up. It reduces the quality of care for the patient, but also makes it a more dangerous equation for the health care workers themselves.”

As for the possibility the Trump administration truly plans to move sicker patients to tertiary hospitals in Europe, that comes with its own set of uncertainties, starting with the issue of where. Administration officials haven’t specified which countries have agreed to take Americans. And transporting Ebola patients gets a lot more difficult as the disease progresses, Spencer said, putting a lot of pressure on the medical staff.

“The reality is, you get them out as quickly as possible or you’re not going to be able to get them out at all,” said Spencer, who had contracted the disease while treating patients in Guinea as part of the Doctors Without Borders team. “We’ve seen this before, getting people on a plane who are acutely ill with the worst parts of Ebola—vomiting, fever, diarrhea. It doesn’t go well.”

HOWEVER COMPLICATED, the administration’s plan is consistent with the broader approach it has taken ever since this outbreak started—a focus on “insulating the United States rather than on stopping what already is a disaster from becoming much, much worse,” as Helen Branswell of STAT News wrote in a poignant essay last week.

And it’s not like the administration has been especially subtle about this motivation. “We cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared at a cabinet meeting Wednesday.

That instinct is easy enough to understand, even outside of MAGA circles. And there are circumstances when it’s not hard to defend. Sometimes protecting Americans from biological threats requires taking difficult measures. But scientists I interviewed said the record from 2014, in which there was no Ebola transmission once patients were under proper care, suggests there’s little risk of repatriation leading to an outbreak here.

If anything, the administration’s strategy might backfire in two separate ways that are not mutually exclusive: by discouraging health professionals and relief workers from going to Africa, and by giving anybody exposed to Ebola incentive to return without reporting it. The former would increase the chances of more cases there, the latter more cases here.

Lurking behind all of this are moral and legal issues that come with effectively blocking American citizens from returning to the United States, although it’s not clear any of that matters to Trump—who in 2014, before he was president, made his thoughts pretty clear. “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” he tweeted. “People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!” Now he’s putting that impulse into action, evidently oblivious to what those consequences might turn out to be—or who might ultimately feel them.

Source: Jonathan Cohn, “Ebola Veterans Are Aghast at Trump’s Plan for the Outbreak,” The Bulwark, 31 May 2026

Russians and Republicans Hate Black People

I’ve spent most of the last 48 hours doomscrolling through people’s reactions to the destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. The people I follow most regularly have split into predictable camps. There are people like me and Adam Serwer who are trying to put the court’s decision into the larger context of the long-standing white hostility to Black voting rights and Black political power. There are the folks like Ian Millhiser who have tried to explain the immediate legal effects of the court’s unconscionable decision. The activist set is taking some time to digest what has happened and plan for next steps, with some vowing to “fight” and ultimately “win” in some fashion.

Predictable, too, has been the reaction from the right. White supremacists and, to the extent there’s a difference, Republicans have been giddy. I read one particularly risible piece of trash in National Review crowing about how the Supreme Court’s decision will allow Republicans to gerrymander away Black political power while stopping Democrats from restoring that power. I think that legal analysis is wrong. But what struck me was not the stupidity of the argument but how happy they were to make it.

That happiness, from whites, is something that most of the articles and analyses, including mine, have failed to capture sufficiently. It is as distressing to me as the actual decision and the terrible results that will result from it.

The Voting Rights Act was once considered a pillar of American democracy—so much so that it was extended and expanded in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan. It was reauthorized in 2006 by President George W. Bush, and that reauthorization passed the Senate 98–0. In just 20 years, the VRA has gone from being such a mainstay of the democratic project that even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives didn’t dare vote against it to something that barely hooded mouthbreathers at National Review are happy to trash.

I don’t really know how to process that information. It’s not just that we’re going back to a Jim Crow state of affairs—it’s that white people are happy about it. As if the 60 years of post-apartheid America that were ushered in by the VRA were just an unfortunate detour, and now white people can get back to their preferred route.

Republicans always want you to believe that they’re not racist “in their hearts,” that they just happen to prefer a set of policies that coincidentally result in inequality, oppression, and less opportunity for non-white Americans. But this reaction to the death of the VRA proves they’re lying. They hate Black people, and they hate Black people who have political power most of all.

And now, they’re happy to finally be able to take that political power away.

Source: Elie Mystal, “Republicans Can’t Contain Their Glee Over the Death of the VRA,” The Nation, 2 May 2026

Is there even one series with a cover like this (you know what I mean) that actually has good ratings? Why on earth are they making THIS????

Source: Ororo.tv. Racist comment translated by the Russian Reader, who has unfortunately read and heard thousands of such comments in Russian during his thirty-plus years on the Russia desk. ||||| trr

John Watson and Sherlock Holmes’ fates intertwined one last time in the Season 2 finale of Watson, which serves as a series finale as the CBS medical drama has been canceled.

In the closer, as Watson (Morris Chestnut) traveled with Mary (Rochelle Aytes) to Baltimore to get surgery for the glioblastoma that had been causing his Sherlock visions all season, a disoriented Holmes — in the flesh — was admitted to the Holmes Clinic in Pittsburgh. When Watson got word, he abandoned his surgery plans and returned to treat his friend. He deducted the cause of Sherlock’s illness but the delay of his own life-saving surgery cost him, and Watson suffered a debilitating seizure.

He eventually woke up and professed his love to Mary who reciprocated. With his surgeon coming to Pittsburgh, the finale ended with Watson in the OR and a vision of him and Mary living at 221B Baker Street in London, the future he had laid out for them in their heart-to-heart hours earlier. (In the Sherlock Holmes lore, the brilliant detective shared his apartment at the famous address with Watson.)

Speaking to Deadline, Watson creator/executive producer Craig Sweeny addressed how he approached the finale and its ending and provided one explanation for the Baker Street flashforward.

“The season finale was tricky to write in that, even while we were filming it, we didn’t know if the show was coming back or not,” he said.

CBS’ cancellation decision came after Watson had wrapped production on Season 2.

“We opted to treat it mostly as a season finale, with a coda appended that nods to a possible future for Watson and Mary,” Sweeny added. “The coda, set at Baker Street, has several possible interpretations — among other things, it could be a fantasia Watson is seeing as he’s on the operating table in what may be his dying moments. I have my own interpretation but prefer not to comment on it beyond what’s on the screen so audiences can make up their own minds.”

At the time of the Watson January 2025 series premiere, Sweeny told Deadline that he had built the show on the presumption that Sherlock is dead. “I don’t want to be held to that if there’s some great story that presents itself, but I don’t believe that we’re ever going to feature Sherlock as an ongoing character in the show Watson at this time,” Sweeny said back then.

Following the Season 2 finale, Sweeny explained to Deadline how the idea of bringing Sherlock onto the show started and evolved — from a hallucination stemming from Watson’s brain tumor to a real person — and what the Season 3 plan for the Watson/Sherlock storyline was.

“In Season 3, Watson would also have been Sherlock’s doctor treating ongoing complications from the ailment that plagued Holmes at the end of Season 2,” Sweeny said. “We originally conceived the Watson/Holmes storyline to have Holmes exist only as a delusion in Watson’s head as a means for Watson to learn about his glioblastoma, but quickly revised those plans after we saw what Robert Carlyle brought to the role of Sherlock Holmes. Watson’s Holmes and Watson were fun to write and watch, and so we devised a way for Sherlock to be present in the real world.”

The Season 2 finale of Watson left storylines open-ended for the young doctors too, including the ongoing investigation into Beck’s death, the search for Sasha’s birth mother and Sasha (Inga Schlingmann) breaking up with Stephens (Peter Mark Kendall). Season 3 would’ve wrapped their fellowship arcs.

“The heart of Watson was the cases, so if we had come back we would have continued to hunt the strange and amazing scientific outliers that made up our strongest episodes,” Sweeny said. “Of course, medical fellowships last three years, so a major theme of season three would have been exploring what would have happened to Ingrid, Stephens, Adam, and Sasha at the end of their Fellowships and how many new doctors would be worked into the mix.”

Sweeny took the opportunity of the Watson finale to reflect on the series’ two-season run.

“We had a lot more to say with the show, so of course it’s sad we won’t be making any more,” he said. “But I’m grateful that we got to write and produce 33 episodes. I love to write procedurals with cases that are set at the edge of what humans know, and Watson gave me and our team the chance to do that every week.”

Sweeny previously spent five years on CBS’ Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson procedural Elementary, most of them as executive producer. He went on to acknowledge Watson executive producer Dr. Shäron Moalem, who “shared insights from decades working in genetics and was singularly important in crafting cases set on the vanguard of what’s possible.”

Sweeny also praised the work environment on Watson and its No.1 on the Call Sheet.

“Making Watson for two seasons was a rewarding experience for the producers, cast, and crew. We had tight-knit communities in Los Angeles and Vancouver,” he said of the series, which was written in Los Angeles and filmed in Vancouver. “I’ve been blessed to have career highlights and happy experiences on shows, but I’ve never known anything quite like the warm and collegial vibe that prevailed on Watson. I’m especially grateful to Morris Chestnut for his role in making that happen. When Morris was considering the role, we met for coffee and talked about the environment we both hoped to foster. His tireless leadership and example helped make the Watson set a happy experience for everyone who worked there.”

As he closes (prematurely) the chapter on Watson, Sweeny chooses to focus on the positive.

While thanking the “special group of people” who worked on the series, his producing partners, the cast, the writing staff, the casting and post departments, he said, “Naturally, all of us mourn the loss of the show and the community around it while also being grateful for the opportunity to make as much Watson as we did.”

Source: Nellie Andreeva, “‘Watson’ Finale: Creator Craig Sweeny Reflects On How Series Ended, Its 2-Season Run And What Could’ve Been For John & Sherlock In Season 3,” Deadline, 3 May 2026

USA Today, “Louisiana redistricting met with fiery testimony opposing Trump as ‘last breath of the Confederacy,” 15 May 2026

Source: USA Today (YouTube), 15 May 2026

IN A WORLD OF MIKE JOHNSONS — BE A MARSHAWN An angry Louisianan, known only as Marshawn [sic], gave an impassioned speech in a state Senate hearing this week in the lead-up to the vote to eliminate a majority Black district that — until last week — was protected by the VRA.

If you watch ONE THING today — let it be this

“I have no doubt in my mind that the map’s gonna pass,” Marshawn said. “If y’all can give us less than zero seats, you would do it. Y’all do this under the orders of somebody that said the Civil Rights Act was harmful to white people, that it caused reverse racism.”

“You showed us what you want to do. And I believe the country as a whole is rebuking your party. Y’all are in a death spiral. That’s why y’all have to redistribute. That’s why y’all have to cheat. That’s why Trump got to go to Texas and say he was entitled the five more seats. It’s because y’all know what y’all doing is abhorrent.”

“So I’m positive y’all gonna be okay with the maps. But the beautiful thing is, the children that y’all have made and the people that’s younger than y’all don’t support none of this racism that y’all want. The MAGA party is the last breath of the Confederacy. And I’ll be happy to see millennials and Gen Z bury y’all. There will be no more of your party. The midterms gonna come, y’all gonna get wiped out. Trump gonna get dragged out of the White House and I’m gonna love every second.”

“Because y’all loved every second of the suffering that he caused to everybody in this country and worldwide. We starvin’ Cuba. We bomb Nigeria. We holding Zimbabwe and Zambia hostage for the minerals. We don’t want to give them AIDS support. The pro-lifers that say all life is special, y’all letting kids die of AIDS. What part of your Bible say that?”

“Point out the scripture. I think everybody would love to see it. And we would love to see y’all in the midterms.”

MIC. DROP.

Source: Christina Lorey (Facebook), 16 May 2026

In September 2022, Zambian officials were notified that one of their citizens had been killed in action, in Ukraine. Lemekhani Nyirenda’s death has sparked interest in Russia’s continued presence in Africa and how Africans are treated within Russia’s borders. Nyirenda’s death is one recent example of how Russia — and, before it, the Soviet Union — used and abused Africans to create their reputations as anti-imperialist and anti-racist states. There is a growing amount of literature being written on Soviet-African relations, particularly on Soviet interests and engagement on the African continent as a foreign policy concern. Yet less attention is being paid to the African experience within the Soviet Union. The experiences of African citizens reveal the paradoxical nature of Soviet anti-racist ideology and praxis. While the USSR recruited and welcomed thousands of African students to study technological and scientific disciplines to fight the legacies of imperialism in their home countries, Soviet citizens often treated the Africans in their midst with disdain and hostility.

This December will mark the 60th anniversary of the death of an African student in Moscow. The Ghanaian citizen Edmund Assare-Addo, who was studying medicine in Moscow, was found dead on a country road on the outskirts of the Soviet capital in 1963. As the historian Julie Hessler has shown, the contested death of Assare-Addo marked a watershed for Soviet-African race relations. It sparked one of the USSR’s largest protests since the 1920s, with some 500 African students marching through Moscow. Many of them arrived from St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) and other Soviet cities to participate. Wearing traditional Russian fur caps with ear-covering flaps, they gathered by the Kremlin’s gates, holding up signs saying, “Stop Killing Africans” and “Moscow, a second Alabama.”

While the Soviet media was relatively silent about the unrest, Western media covered the African student protests widely. Students interviewed by the New York Times on Dec. 19, 1963, complained of regular harassment by Soviet citizens and physical assaults. There was a discrepancy between the ideal of an anti-racist, multinational Soviet society and the existence of Black Africans within its borders.

Race relations between Black residents and students in the Soviet Union and their white (Slavic-presenting) counterparts are difficult to trace. As the USSR did not use race to categorize or organize society, it is hard to know how many African students studied there. Soviet citizens, however, were categorized within the ethno-federal state by “nationality,” with categories like “Jewish” or “Tatar.” Yet there was a clear ideological rejection of race and racism.

What we do know is that thousands of Africans moved to the Soviet Union, beginning in the 1950s, to gain access to Soviet higher education and military training. Generally, 1957 is seen as a turning point in the Soviet approach toward Africa and Africans.

In the 1920s and ’30s, African Americans were a focal point for Soviet anti-racist ideological practice. Dozens of African Americans moved to the Soviet Union for better economic opportunities and the chance to experience life in a country that officially condemned racism. The writer and poet Langston Hughes was the most famous of these visitors. His early writing on his experience reflected the hope that African American visitors to the USSR held for a society that actively struggled against racism. Other African American visitors, such as Homer Smith and Paul Robeson, lived in the Soviet Union for years, where they enjoyed special privileges as representatives of the “oppressed class of workers and an oppressed race,” according to the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in 1928. The combination of foreignness (Americanness) and Blackness worked to the advantage of Black Americans. I would argue that, because African Americans were Americans, they were not only representatives of some of the most oppressed workers, but also of a pantheon of modern industrial developments — the United States.

There were considerably fewer Africans present in the Soviet Union during the early Stalinist era, yet those who were there did notice the difference between how the USSR talked about imperialist oppression and how it depicted Africans. The historian Woodford McClellan’s study of Black students at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), a training academy in Moscow during the 1920s and ’30s, includes an example of Black African students taking issue with the depictions of Africans and Black people in Soviet public media and discourse. For example, some objected to the portrayal of Blacks through Blackface in plays, while others complained of being called “monkey” and the prevalent juxtaposition of Black Africans with apes and monkeys in theaters. My research on early Soviet children’s books up through the late 1930s reveals that, even in one of the most experimental periods in Soviet artistic production, Black people — specifically Africans — were often depicted as wild, animalistic figures far removed from modernity.

It was following the 1957 International Youth Festival in the Soviet Union that one could see the impacts of these depictions in Soviet children’s and popular culture. There were visible tensions between Soviet citizens and the Africans in their midst. African students recruited to study in the USSR received benefits and opportunities unavailable to Soviet people. They received stipends from the government, had more freedom of movement around and outside the Soviet Union, and could shop at foreign stores that were off-limits to most Soviets. Coupled with these privileges was the fact that foreign students from the global south often had different curricula from their Soviet counterparts, focusing on transferable skills they could implement when they returned to their home countries. Return was key in the eyes of Soviet officials. African students were not allowed to remain in the USSR for extended periods after completing their studies. In her essay describing her 1976 trip to the Soviet Union, the African American writer and feminist Audre Lorde noted the difference between her lodgings in a first-rate hotel and a shabby hostel where some African and Asian participants in a conference were housed.

So how did the Soviet Union get to the situation in December 1963 in which African students accused their Soviet hosts of racism and, worse, of killing one of their own? In accounts from the 1960s to the Soviet collapse in 1991, African students described carrying knives to protect themselves and being called racial slurs by their Soviet classmates. When Assare-Addo died, rumors swirled. African students alleged he was killed because of his interracial romance with a white Soviet woman. Such relationships were not unusual for the time. As Harold D. Weaver has written when detailing his experiences as a Black American in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, there were numerous sexual escapades between African men and Soviet women. This was one of the touchstones of racial strife between Soviets and Africans, particularly between men: the assumption that African men were taking white Soviet women (and most African students and residents in the Soviet Union were men). Clearly, anti-racist ideology reached its limits when it replicated long-standing Western stereotypes of Black men as violators of white women.

Interracial relationships and, worse, interracial sex, were stigmatized throughout and after the Soviet era. Research by the sociologist Charles Quist-Adade on mixed-race, Afro-Russian children in the late 1980s and early 1990s highlights the racist undertones of Soviet views of interracial romances between Soviet women and African men. His respondents and their white, Soviet mothers describe regular public and private hostility toward them. Soviet women who had romantic engagements with African men were called prostitutes and shamed by their families and communities.

Worse was the treatment of Soviet women who became pregnant with mixed-race children. Women reported being pressured to end their pregnancies or give up their children for adoption to make their lives easier. Soviet women generally were not allowed to follow their African partners to their homes on the African continent, so those who chose not to terminate their pregnancies were often forced to raise their children alone, with little social support.

Some heartbreaking testimonies include childhood ostracization in school, name-calling and feelings of rejection throughout their school years. Yelena Khanga, an Afro-Russian television presenter and producer, is known for her work on the early 2000s daily talk show “The Domino Effect.” In an interview with NPR, she shared her feelings of isolation and loneliness among her Soviet classmates. Her Russian boyfriend even referred to her as his “little monkey” as a racialized term of endearment.

Compounding these feelings of isolation were the continued depictions of Africans as wild and Africa as a dangerous place. A popular Soviet children’s cartoon from 1970, “Katorok,” features a song, “Chunga Changa,” which depicts Africans as jet-black, barely human figures who commune with wild animals while dancing. Worse, the song’s lyrics include a recitation of the stanza “chew coconuts and eat bananas.” What kind of feelings could these depictions engender toward Africans? Moreover, as waiting lines for basic consumer goods grew longer and few had access to foreign goods, the privileges of African students and visitors aggravated public hostilities against them. Ultimately, a general attitude of “how can these people come here and live better than we do, on our dime, when they are so underdeveloped and behind?” flourished.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 represented a nadir for Africans living in the newly formed Russian Federation. Suddenly, they found themselves the unwanted guests of a government that no longer existed. They began to bear the brunt of anger about the Soviet system. Beatings, verbal assaults and murders of Africans, among other visible minorities, exploded. The 2010s were a harrowing period for any visible minority in Russia, as stabbings and physical assaults became commonplace in the major cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. [Actually, the peak of this “harrowing period,” in St. Petersburg at least, was the late 2000s — trr.] Quist-Adade’s respondents described being harassed in the street and told they had AIDS because they were mixed-race (or had a mixed-race child).

Most recently, Africans and Afro-Russians have decried the racism and discrimination they face daily. From racial slurs to discrimination in housing, Black people struggle for equality in the Russian Federation. Lemekhani Nyirenda’s odyssey of studying in Russia, only to be accused of drug trafficking and sentenced to 9 1/2 years in a Russian prison, is the latest example of Black people’s hardships in Russia. That Nyirenda’s death occurred in Russia’s brutal campaign in Ukraine while Russia is courting additional African support is the culmination of the decades-long tension between ideology and praxis in the Soviet Union and Russia toward Africa and Africans.

The conception of Africans as representatives of “backward” countries needing Russian material aid has continued and flourished in the latter years of Vladimir Putin’s rule. Nyirenda’s death, allegedly as a member of the Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries, is ironic because it is this same group that has boots on the ground across the African continent, extracting precious minerals and resources at the expense of Africans.

The experiences of Africans and African Americans in the Soviet Union are often flattened into a single “Black” experience. However, African Americans were treated better than people from Africa and were respected by their Soviet counterparts as representatives of the United States, the USSR’s most significant competitor and a model of industrial modernity. Moreover, Africans were representatives of countries that were seen as the little brothers of the Soviet Union in the quest to decolonize and liberate the Third World. Africans were in the USSR to learn skills to improve their home countries, which were often depicted as wild and backward. Unfortunately, these assumptions about Black Africans led to Afro-Russians’ ostracization in the late Soviet era and beyond. From throwing bananas at Black soccer players to wearing Blackface in ballet performances, some of the worst stereotypes of Blackness continue to thrive in the Russian Federation. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not end one form of internationalism in which the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, participated — which is that of global anti-Blackness.

Source: Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, “The Racist Treatment of Africans and African Americans in the Soviet Union,” New Lines Magazine, 17 February 2023

Outcasts in Their Own Land: Russia’s Political Prisoners

Over four years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, some of the Russians imprisoned in its early days are still in jail. Even people with no previous political activism have been landed with long prison sentences in order to crush dissent.

Yevgeny Zateyev and Anna Arkhipova attend a court hearing in the case against the Vesna movement, one of the leading voices of antiwar protest in Russia. A court in St Petersburg sentenced six defendants in the case to prison terms of up to 12 years. (Andrei Bok/ SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Russia’s political prisoners are “outcasts in their own land,” Sergei Dudchenko, a biker tortured and framed by the security services, told his trial judges this month before being handed a seven-year prison sentence.

Those arrested for opposing the war in Ukraine had “fewer rights than a stray dog, and on top of that they bear the humiliating brand of ‘terrorist’ — and all this for their active civic stance.”

Dudchenko and his friend Nikolai Murnev, who received the same sentence, were arrested with others in October 2022 in Stavropol, in southern Russia.

While in detention on minor charges (petty hooliganism and drug possession), they were brutally tortured. A case was put together that they were preparing a “terrorist act” — setting fire to a military recruitment office. Another of the group died in pretrial detention, one fled the country, and one turned state’s witness.

The invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, “split life into before and after, it divided the world into black and white,” Dudchenko told the court.

Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Turkmens, Jews, and others had “paid an unimaginable price” to resist Nazism in World War II. How, decades later, could “so much hatred and anger” be directed against Ukraine?

Within days of the invasion, Dudchenko made a solo protest — a motorbike ride with the Ukrainian flag. In court, four years later, he said: “When I sped along, with the banner of the oppressed streaming behind me, past an astonished crowd of militarists, I felt the human in me come into bloom.”

Dudchenko is one of dozens of wartime protesters who have exercised one of the few constitutional rights that remains accessible: to say a “final word” before sentencing.

Some who exercise this right, like Dudchenko, are citizens whose antiwar protest was their first political action. Some, like the powerlifting champion Yulia Lemeshchenko, are Russians who joined the Ukrainian armed forces. She told her trial, in November of last year: “I am not a citizen of the country for which I decided to fight, but for me, Ukraine is home.”

Some are political activists, like Anna Arkhipova, one of six members of the Vesna protest network sentenced at a show trial in St Petersburg last month. “When the war began, it was my conscience that would not let me stand idly by,” she stated.

On Sunday May 17, Try Me For Treason: anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, an English-language film featuring readings of speeches, will be released on YouTube.

The title comes from a speech by Andrei Trofimov, who is serving ten years for pro-Ukrainian statements on social media — plus three for ending his “final word” to a closed court by saying: “Glory to Ukraine! Putin is a d–khead.”

At the second trial, before getting the three extra years, Trofimov scorned the charges of “discrediting the armed forces” and “justifying terrorism,” and invited prosecutors to charge him for deserting to Ukraine’s side. “Try me for treason. I betrayed your deranged state,” he told the judges.

The fifty-minute documentary was put together on a zero budget by a group of actors in Britain, to make the Russian antiwar movement more visible internationally.

Maya Willcocks, the actor-producer who reads a speech by Darya Kozyreva, said: “These are not well-known political leaders, they are people who have taken a stand against the state. I felt it was very important to have their words translated into English and out there for people to hear — to send the message that occupation is a crime, whether in Palestine or in Ukraine.”

Anthony Aldis, the videographer, said: “What I found compelling about these stories is that the beginning of any fightback is very often when people stand up against an apparently unassailable power.

“These people are not organized. It’s a raw push against something that they don’t believe they can beat, but they think they have to take a stand anyway, in solidarity with someone else who is being attacked and murdered.

“That idea is very important to us in the West, given what we face here in the UK, and in the USA, with the rise of the far right.”

As one of a small group of translators that helped prisoner support groups, I worked on the script, and on the book Voices Against Putin’s War from which it derived.

Having traveled to Russia and Ukraine since Soviet times, I was struck by the political depth and heterogeneity of antiwar protest, even as it is constrained by state terror to individual acts of defiance. Those punished with long sentences range from pacifists who quote Leo Tolstoy to Soviet-era dissidents who ooze contempt for the judges, and Russians who go out of their way to justify Ukraine’s defensive military action.

It would be easy — and stupid — to dismiss the “final words” as atomized cries into a dark, authoritarian night. Rarely are they pleas to judges or government; more often, they are consciously crafted appeals to society.

The “last words” often try to situate those who say them historically. Sergei Dudchenko, born in 1987, said in court that “people like us will always keep emerging, to pick up the fallen banner of good and reason” . . . and recalled the seven protesters arrested on Red Square in 1968 for opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Noteworthy, too, is the infrastructure of support for political prisoners, comprising established human rights organizations such as Memorial: Support Political Prisoners, OVD-Info, and Mediazona; newly formed groups such as Fires of Freedom and Solidarity Zone, a website featuring “last words” going back to the 1950s; and Telegram groups caring for individual prisoners.

From California to the Caucasus, dozens of informal groups of Russians in exile gather and write letters to prisoners.

All these organizations support lawyers and activists in Russia who visit prisoners, send parcels, and support relatives — themselves now risky activities.

Ukrainian human rights groups including Zmina, the Crimea Human Rights Group, and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group have a challenge of a different order in supporting Ukrainian civilian prisoners in Russian jails.

Bohdan Ziza, who features in our film, has family and friends who know where he is. (He is serving fifteen years for throwing blue and yellow paint, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, as well as a petrol bomb that was quickly extinguished by a security guard, at a municipal council’s office in Crimea.) So do many Crimean Tatar activists victimized by Russia’s racist, Islamophobic crackdown in the peninsula in 2017–19.

But hundreds, possibly thousands of Ukrainians are at unknown locations in Russia’s twenty-first-century gulag.

The Ukrainian government today counts ninety thousand people as “missing”: many are soldiers, imprisoned or killed, but at least sixteen thousand are civilians, according to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Many are victims of abductions, widespread in the territories occupied by Russia. Ukrainian lawyers and human rights activists have compiled a register of more than five thousand “enforced disappearances,” in addition to the widely publicized cases of kidnapped children.

Long prison sentences, imposed with little or no pretense of legal procedure, and savage torture — especially of those suspected of sympathizing with Ukrainian resistance — are ubiquitous in the occupied territories. The indefatigable Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group’s website reports a stream of life-destroying sentences for peaceful activities deemed dissident.

Doing all we can to provide practical support for political prisoners and engaging with their compelling articulations of their motives is central to international solidarity.

Try Me For Treason premieres on Sunday, May 17. You can sign up to watch it here.

Source: Simon Pirani, “Russia’s Antiwar Prisoners Are Outcasts in Their Own Land,” Jacobin, 16 May 2026

TRY ME FOR TREASON: anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts

The trailer to “Try Me for Treason”

The filmYoutube premiere, Sun 17 May, 20.00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FHacVH8tK8

More info trymefortreason.org

London launch event, Sun 17 May, 18.00 https://ukrainesolidarityorg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/invite-colour-bck.png

Source: Ukraine Information Group (Facebook), 15 May 2026. Thanks to Simon Pirani for the trailer.

Central Asia and Russia(n): Is It Farewell?

Excerpt from “Tashkent: The End of An Era” (Mark Weil, 1996). A full, subtitled copy of the film can been seen here.

Recent trends in world politics have led several analysts to emphasize the idea of the retreat or recession of Russian power abroad. Yet few have commented on a key aspect of this retreat, namely the growing movement across Central Asia to unseat the Russian language from its position, often enshrined in law, as an official language on a par with the native tongue. Trends across the region demonstrate state action to diminish the role of the Russian language, growing political discussion of the issue, or socio-economic trends working to reduce the hegemony of the Russian language. These trends also display both Russia’s mounting anxiety about such trends and its increasingly visible inability to reverse or stop them.

BACKGROUND

Russia’s recent reversals in Syria, Venezuela, the Caucasus and potentially Iran have triggered a flood of articles proclaiming the retreat of Russian power. However, none of these writings noticed the parallel ongoing dethronement of the Russian language from its previous eminence in Central Asia. Nevertheless, this epochal development, like Russia’s aforementioned geostrategic defeats, possesses profound political as well as cultural significance. Given the importance of linguistic policies in the Tsarist, Soviet, and now post-Soviet regimes, the retreat of the Russian language from a position of linguistic-political primacy in Central Asia signifies major political and cultural transformations.

Specifically, Kazakhstan’s new constitution subtly but overtly downgrades the status of Russian as an official language. Article 9 of the new constitution establishes Kazakh as the dominant language of the country, relegating Russian to the status of an official language used by the government “alongside” Kazakh. This new constitution obtained massive public support although much of it was probably engineered from above, forcing Putin to congratulate President Tokayev on its ratification. However, those congratulatory remarks, as Tokayev and his team well know, probably came through clenched teeth and were preceded by much Russian public criticism of Kazakhstan’s language policies.

An analysis of Russian press perspectives on the return of Kazakhstan’s Latin alphabet, originally introduced in the 1920’s, from the Cyrillicization of the alphabet during the height of Stalinism, displays a politicized perspective where this process is seen as a repudiation of a Russian orientation in favor of a Turkic-Western one. Insofar as Turkey and Western powers like the EU and the U.S. have stepped up their presence and interest in Kazakhstan and Central Asia as a whole, this politicized perspective sees language and alphabet policies as manifestations of the growing regional presence of those parties at Moscow’s expense. Thus, Russian press coverage warns Central Asian audiences against alleged foreign plots of an imperialist nature.

Russian media also minimize or deny the agency of Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states in formulating and then executing their own alphabet and language policies while implicitly and often overtly extolling the superior, imperial role of Russia’s language and culture as a vehicle for connecting Central Asia with modern civilization and culture. In other words, much of this literature reflects an imperial echo with deep roots in late Tsarist and then Soviet imperial policies that Russian elites seek to preserve.

IMPLICATIONS

Kazakhstan’s assertion of its linguistic sovereignty challenges the Russian dream of maintaining its cultural-political hegemony over Central Asia because it is losing the means to enforce that claim on Kazakhstan and because Astana’s example is being replicated across Central Asia, e.g. in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In Uzbekistan, as a 2024 paper makes clear, Russian must coexist if not compete with Uzbek and Tajik while English, a global lingua franca, is rapidly gaining on it as well. In Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan’s example has simultaneously stimulated debates on emulating its language policy.

Predictably the Russian government, sensing another threat to its receding hegemonic pretensions, has reacted strongly. On March 19, its embassy in Bishkek forcefully demanded that Kyrgyzstan’s government suppress “provocative statements of certain public figures” about the place of Russian in Kyrgyz society. The statement also complains about “language patrols” where vigilantes purportedly try to intimidate people to stop speaking Russian and speak only Kyrgyz. The embassy deemed such calls incitement to ethnic hatred and a threat to Russo-Kyrgyz strategic partnership and, in a conscious echo of Soviet propaganda, “deep alliance between our fraternal peoples and countries – Russia and Kyrgyzstan.”

This atavistic employment of Soviet tropes is no accident. Whereas Lenin’s language policies, likely inspired by his father’s work in teaching Orthodoxy to Muslims, wagered that teaching socialism would lead Soviet Muslims to socialism; Stalin decisively imposed Russification by giving the Russian language primacy and Cyrillicizing Central Asian alphabets. Putin’s consistent attacks on Lenin’s nationality policies, many of which stemmed from an appreciation of socio-political realities during the early Soviet period, reflect his clear preference for the centralizing, Stalinist, and more openly imperialist policies of Stalin and his successors.

Nevertheless, a generation after independence and having devoted much effort to fostering large-scale national identification among their populations, Central Asian leaders are openly moving to assert not just their foreign policy sovereignty, but also their linguistic nationalism. The use of Russian across Central Asia will likely remain pervasive because of the benefits it offers in economic relations with Russian and possibly Central Asian entities. However, Russian will not be the only regional lingua franca or the language of Russian imperial hegemony either in the Caucasus or in Central Asia. Since we can readily imagine a similar outcome in Ukraine due to Russia’s war against the country, which underlies many of the causes for the retreat of Russian hegemony, the trends discernible in Central Asia go far beyond its borders.

CONCLUSIONS

Even as the Russian government is currently discussing legislation allowing it to intervene anywhere abroad on behalf of its citizens, Central Asian developments presage the ongoing erosion of Russian cultural and thus political power. The whole idea of the “Russkii Mir” (Russian World) based on speakers of the Russian language that furnishes a pretext for interventions abroad is rapidly falling to pieces. From Tsarist and Soviet times, Russian authorities consistently regarded Russian as the sole “civilized” and therefore hegemonic language of the empire and often sought to enforce that hegemony by coercion. Those days are visibly ending as Central Asian governments are, with increasing confidence, asserting their own native tongues while also opening up to greater economic-cultural interaction with other countries. While Russian will not disappear in Central Asia; it is being decentered and increasingly deprived of its superior legal-political standing.

This process is clearly linked to the global recession of Russian power even as Russia fights to retain its erstwhile imperial and global great power status. For its rulers, expression of that status through all the forms of cultural power, e.g. alphabets and languages, was a critical component of empire. Yet what we see today, despite Moscow’s threats or even forceful efforts to arrest or reverse that decline, is an imperial sunset that evidently cannot be stopped either in culture or in hard power.

AUTHOR’S BIO

Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, www.fpri.org.

Source: Stephen Blank, “The Retreat of the Russian Language from Central Asia,” Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 23 April 2026

When anthropology researcher Ashley McDermott was doing fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, she says many people voiced the same concern: children were losing touch with their indigenous language. The Central Asian country of 7 million people was under Russian control for a century until 1991, but Kyrgyz (pronounced kur-giz) survived and remains widely spoken among adults.

McDermott, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, says she also heard that some kids in rural villages where Kyrgyz dominated had spontaneously learned to speak Russian. The adults largely blamed a singular force: YouTube.

McDermott and a team of five researchers across four universities in the US and Kyrgyzstan have released new research they believe proves the fears about YouTube’s influence are valid. The group simulated user behavior on YouTube and collected nearly 11,000 unique search results and video recommendations.

What they found is that Kyrgyz-language searches for popular kid interests such as cartoons, fairy tales, and mermaids often did not yield content in Kyrgyz. Even after watching ten children’s videos featuring Kyrgyz speech to demonstrate a strong desire for it, the simulated users received fewer Kyrgyz-language recommendations for what to watch next than, surprisingly, bots showing no language preference at all. The findings show YouTube prioritizes Russian-language content over Kyrgyz-language videos, especially when searching or browsing children’s topics, according to the researchers.

“Kyrgyz children are algorithmically constructed as audiences for Russian content,” Nel Escher, a coauthor who is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, said during a presentation at the school last week. “There is no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.”

McDermott recalls one frustrated Kyrgyzstani mother in 2023 explaining that she paid the internet bill a day late each month to regularly have one day without internet and, thus, YouTube at home.

YouTube, which has “committed to amplifying indigenous voices,” did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. The researchers are attempting to meet with YouTube’s parental controls team to discuss the potential for language filters, according to Escher.

The researchers say their work is the latest to show how online platforms can reinforce colonial culture and influence offline behavior. Under Soviet control, people in Kyrgyzstan had to learn Russian to succeed. Today, many adults are fluent in both Russian and Kyrgyz, with Russian remaining important for commerce. Kids are required to learn at least some Kyrgyz in school. But many spend several hours a day online, and watching YouTube is the leading activity, McDermott says. Quoting from Russian language videos is common, whether creators’ refrains like “Let’s do a challenge,” adaptations of American words such as “cringe,” or parroting accents and syntax.

In one of the researchers’ experiments, they searched for several subjects which are spelled the same in Russian and Kyrgyz, including Harry Potter and Minecraft. The results were predominantly Russian. Overall, just 2.7 percent of the videos the research team analyzed appeared to even include ethnically Kyrgyz people.

YouTube “socializes youth to view Russian as the default language of entertainment and technology and to view Kyrgyz as uninteresting,” the researchers wrote in a self-published paper accepted to a social computing conference scheduled for October.

The researchers say there is ample Kyrgyz-language children’s content for YouTube to promote. In 2024, the 35th-most viewed channel on YouTube across the world was D Billions, a Kyrgyzstan-based children-focused content studio with a dedicated Kyrgyz-language channel that has nearly 1 million subscribers.

Azamat Duishenov, head of the program management office for D Billions, tells WIRED that their team believes Kyrgyz content helps promote the language. Duishenov suspects YouTube may find it worthwhile to err toward recommending content in Russian because Russian speakers outnumber Kyrgyz ones.

The researchers suggest potential remedies to parents such as creating playlists of Kyrgyz-language content or sharing devices with their children. When the researchers simulated adult users watching non-kid’s content in Kyrgyz, they received predominantly Kyrgyz-language recommendations. Then, when kids later used the same device, they experienced a moderate uptick in exposure to Kyrgyz-language videos, despite younger users gravitating toward Russian content during their sessions.

Source: Paresh Dave, “This Indigenous Language Survived Russian Occupation. Can It Survive YouTube?” Wired, 1 May 2026

The Hidden Face of the Confessional Empire: Islamophobia in Russia | A book talk by Paolo Sartori

Thursday, May 7, 2026 | 12:00 PM — 1:15 PM CT

Online

Please join the East Asia Research Forum as they host a Zoom talk with Paolo Sartori.

Description:

In May 1854, the Russian imperial authorities arrested Ishan Muhammad Sharif Mansurov on suspicion of conspiratorial activities. The investigation, which lasted about nine years, sparked a media frenzy and rumors of possible mass unrest in the Kazakh steppe on religious grounds, and drew public attention, including from ruling circles. Why was the figure of the Sufi Mansurov of such interest to the colonial administration, and what danger did he pose? What knowledge did government officials possess regarding Sufism in the Kazakh steppe at that time? By analysing the documentary traces left by the Mansurov case, I offer a set of reflections on the relationship between the Russian confessional state and Islamophobia.

Speaker Bio:

Paolo Sartori (PhD 2006) is Distinguished Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences where he presides over the Committee for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia. He is the author of A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan (1943-1991) and, more recently he has guest-edited a theme issue on Russian Colonialism for the Slavic Review.

Please register for this online event.

Source: PlanIt Purple Events Calendar (Northwestern University)

My guest today was born in 1991, the same year as the independent states of Central Asia. A few years ago, he set out to explore what’s happened in the former Soviet republics since the collapse of the USSR, and whether they have flourished over the last 35 years without the “big brother” Russia.

His book, Farewell to Russia: A journey through the former USSR, has just been published in the UK and the US. His name is Joe Luc Barnes, and you might also recognise his voice from our audio documentaries. In this episode, we talk about his book, travelling and living in Central Asia, and the (often problematic) craft of travel writing.

Source: Agnieszka Pikulicka, “Episode 33: Lessons on independence from the former Soviet republics,” Turan Tales, 18 March 2026

Mark Weil, who has died aged 55 after being stabbed on his way home from a rehearsal, was the founder and director of the first independent theatre in the Soviet Union – the Ilkhom, in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. To this day, the Ilkhom remains the only venue for original, uncensored drama in a country where freedom of expression is severely limited. An extraordinary man, he created an artistic space in which people could ask questions and explore their experience.

Born in Tashkent, Mark was not an Uzbek but a Russian Jew, part of the world of central Asian Russians that is now disappearing. Russian-speaking, but with much of the style and gentleness of Asia, these people were insiders, but often with the outsider’s powers of perception. Russian traders had first come south to central Asia during the Arab empires (a cross-cultural theme that Mark loved) but the Russian presence really took off in the Soviet era. An intellectual, nonconformist scene began to grow. Solzhenitsyn’s time in Tashkent (in 1953) became Cancer Ward. Mikhail Bulgakov’s widow managed to hide the manuscript of The Master and Margarita until it was safe to publish.

This eclectic, offbeat world was Mark’s heritage. He studied drama in Moscow and St Petersburg in the early 1970s, but returned to take his MA in history and artistic theory in Tashkent in 1974. In 1976, he opened the Russian-speaking Ilkhom – the word means “inspiration” in Uzbek – with a piece of improvisation that came straight from central Asian street culture, called Makharaboz-76 (Clown 76). Throughout the Brezhnev era, he staged the debuts of young playwrights at the Ilkhom, the only theatre in the Soviet Union that had no state funding.

After the collapse of the USSR and birth of the new country of Uzbekistan, Mark made contacts with foreign theatre groups, thrilled to meet experimental, thoughtful people from all over the world. The Ilkhom company took its shows to France, Germany and Italy. In 1988, he visited Seattle and held workshops at US universities. But along with new freedoms came disappointments. President Islam Karimov’s rule became ever more authoritarian.

Most Russian-speaking intellectuals queued for Russian passports and got out. Mark did not. “This is my city, I was born here, and I will never leave,” he often said. But he never courted collision with the authorities. He simply got on with his work.

In the 1990s, Mark set about a huge project close to his heart, a documentary history of Tashkent. He hunted down and restored lost archive of the city, and added his own footage. Laughing wryly, he told me how he went out to film part of the medieval quarter that was being ripped down and built over with flats. “I was just standing quietly, filming, when the foreman saw me. With no warning, the shovel swivelled round and tipped its load over my camera and tripod, and broke it.”

With the government denouncing “foreign” entertainment, the Ilkhom produced Brecht (a constant in the repertoire) and Gozzi (1992). It put on a musical version of John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1996). It staged Edward Albee’s Zoo Stories (2005). It examined the forbidden theme of homosexuality through the short stories of the Uzbek writer Abdullah Kadiri. Mark relied heavily on foreign partnerships, including the British Council, to fund these ventures, but money was extremely tight. The actors worked for almost nothing.

Disaster struck Uzbekistan in May 2005, when thousands gathered to call for jobs and a better life in the ancient eastern city of Andijan. The army moved in and shot dead about 500 people, almost all of them unarmed. The government denied this account – it said it had scotched an Islamic uprising – but refused an international inquiry. It then closed down many foreign agencies, while others left in protest. For the Ilkhom, its vital sources of funding were reduced still further.

Mark was attacked on his way home from the dress rehearsal of Aeschylus’s tragedy, the Oresteia. It was to have been a triumphal start of a new season, in the bleakest times, and he was thrilled by the production and its exploration of revenge and the rule of law. He is survived by his wife Tatyana and daughters, Julia and Aleksandra. His death has not been reported in Uzbekistan.

· Mark Yakovlevich Weil, theatre director, born January 25 1952; died September 7 2007

Source: Monica Whitlock, “Mark Weil,” Guardian, 10 October 2007

Russia’s Pride

KYIV, Ukraine — In the early 2000s, I was still a kid. Every summer, my grandma and I would travel to visit her relatives in Tuapse, a city in southern Russia on the Black Sea’s coast.

We took the ‘platzkart,’ the cheapest sleeper train where strangers shared one open space with no compartments, and always brought our own bed linen because it cost us less that way. The train stopped at what felt like every small town along the way. With a border crossing, the journey stretched well past twenty-four hours.

My grandma Lilia looked forward to every summer, as the children had a holiday from school. She skimped on everything just to save up for this trip. Soon, she would see her sister, and they would spend the whole summer together, just like they used to when they were kids.

I had no idea that twenty years later, I would watch that same city burn and feel nothing but satisfaction.

Today I woke up to news that Ukrainian long-range drones had attacked Russian oil refineries in Tuapse for the third time in the past two weeks — the latest in a campaign that has shut down the plant, destroyed the majority of its storage tanks, and left Russia’s only Black Sea refinery incapacitated with no signs of recovering

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already said that Ukraine’s partners asked him to halt strikes on Russian oil refineries during the war in the Middle East. In their view, these strikes could further drive up the prices of oil and other energy resources, which have already reached record highs in recent months. The Ukrainian side, however, believes the impact on prices is limited because Russia still has restricted capacity to export its oil. So it will continue striking Russian oil, as this is one of the most effective ways to put pressure on Moscow.

At first glance, mockery and gloating over destruction deep inside Russia may seem cruel to many. But for me, it is the logical conclusion of a shattered identity — and a story about how war destroys not only homes but the very possibility of remembering anything good about the enemy.

Until my teenage years, I would spend the entire summer in a village called Nebug in Russia. It was just 17 kilometers from Tuapse, where our relatives owned a huge plot of land with several small houses, some of which they rented out to vacationers. From there, we often made trips to Tuapse, wandering between the nearby towns and soaking up every bit of the coast.

My relatives’ property in Nebug was massive. The house was located at the foot of a mountain, and if you headed down the stone steps, you would find yourself right by the river, which led you straight to the Black Sea. My distant cousin and I would come back inside at lunchtime to eat and then head right back to the water. Sunburned, skinny, and exhausted.

The best part was escaping to the wild beach to snorkel and explore the underwater world. When you’re ten, there’s nothing more captivating than that. Or we’d tie bits of sausage to a stick to bait crabs. The kittens living under the bridge got a share of that sausage, too. We had to smuggle it out in our mouths at breakfast so the grandmas wouldn’t scold us.

I still remember when Putin was elected president for the first time in 2000.

My relatives were overjoyed, and my grandma celebrated along with them. I was still too young to understand much, but from their conversations, I gathered that Russia was a “better” country than Ukraine. For the first time in my life, I felt ashamed of where I was from.

I was still holding on to those memories. They were my happy place. But in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, the last thread connecting me to my grandmother was gone, and communication with our relatives dwindled to almost nothing.

In 2022, they called and told us not to worry, promising that “Russia will save you very soon.” They were sincerely convinced that we were trapped in the clutches of ‘Ukro-Nazis.’

We’ve never picked up the phone since then.

Over the past two weeks, black smoke has stretched for dozens of kilometers from Tuapse. The city has seen ‘oil rains,’ coating it in black soot and ash. Russian authorities asked residents not to leave their homes and even announced an evacuation on several streets near oil refineries.

Ukraine has struck this facility multiple times. The recent strikes were the most devastating — waves of drones, fires that burned for days, 28 out of 47 storage tanks destroyed or seriously damaged. The port stopped functioning.

The consequences are felt across Russia. Production cuts, refineries shutting down one after another, gasoline prices up over 20 percent. Russia is losing around $100 million every single day, which means $100 million that will not be spent on shells, missiles, or soldiers killing Ukrainians.

The Tuapse refinery is the region’s main oil export hub. When it functioned properly, it processed 240,000 barrels a day, most of it shipped to China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Turkey. With Middle Eastern oil supplies disrupted, major buyers like China and India dramatically increased their imports from Russia, thereby massively boosting Russia’s fossil fuel revenues. In the first quarter of 2026, 90 percent of Russia’s crude exports went to China and India alone.

Russia found its window of opportunity in the chaos of the Hormuz crisis — oil prices up, buyers desperate, and sanctions suddenly weakened. But Ukraine is closing that window.

When I saw the news about Tuapse burning, I felt nothing for the people there. No grief, no worry about my relatives there. Just satisfaction.

I found a term — ‘schadenfreude.’ It’s a German word made up of two parts: Schaden — ‘damage’ and Freude — ‘joy.’ Literally, pleasure from someone else’s misfortune. Researchers at Emory University identify three forms of this emotion. Aggression-based is the satisfaction of seeing someone you actively hate suffer. Rivalry-based is the pleasure of watching a competitor fail. And justice-based, where a person feels that someone’s misfortune is a deserved consequence of their own actions.

What I feel is the third one.

Living in circumstances you can’t control, like war, people often feel a deep sense of powerlessness. But when Ukrainians see Russians also facing the consequences of their country’s actions, it creates a sense of reclaiming at least some control over the situation. It feels well-deserved, like finally, Russians are experiencing at least a fraction of what Ukrainians go through every day.

For twelve years — since the occupation of Crimea — my relatives chose not to notice the war in Ukraine, posting Russiaʼs propaganda on their social media. Not the war in Donbas, not the missile strikes, not the mass graves.

They went to the beach. They drank beer. They posed for photos in occupied Crimea.

The environmental disaster unfolding in Tuapse, with water, soil, and air polluted, seems to go unnoticed by Russian officials. Neither Putin nor other high-ranking officials have reacted to the catastrophe.

The only ones I pity are the animals. They have no part in this war. They are being widely contaminated by fuel oil from the ‘oil rains.’ Water from puddles or troughs, where stray cats and dogs might drink, can be dangerous for animals.

So, do I have the right to feel joy when my family i[n] Russia suffers? I think I do. Not because I hate them for who they are. But because for twelve years they chose not to see.

I can remember the smell of the sea in my childhood, and still know exactly what is on fire: the war machine that kills my people.

Source: Kateryna Antonenko, “Why I am happy when oil prices rise,” The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak, 28 April 2026. I subscribe to The Counteroffensive and am happy to depaywall their articles for my purposes here, but I would suggest you subscribe to them too. ||| TRR

In this week’s bulletin: Ukraine defence update/ Ukraine and Palestine/ Russia “Spring” trial/ Try Me For Treason: the film/ Russia fails to silence Crimean Tatars/ Could Belarus join war?/ Kherson torture diary/

News from the territories occupied by Russia:

Russia banned the voice of the Crimean Tatars — the Mejlis — 10 years ago, but failed to silence it (Crimea Platform, April 26^th)

Russian FSB tortured Kherson men and fabricated “terrorism” case against them (Meduza, 24 April)

26-year-old Ukrainian sentenced to 22 years for alleged ‘plan to kill’ a Russian occupation prison chief (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 24^th)

Russian occupation court sentences 66-year-old doctor to 14 years for supporting Ukraine through war bonds (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 24th)

Mission Discusses the Situation of Women’s Rights in Temporarily Occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, April 24th)

EU Imposes Sanctions on Individuals Involved in Illegal Excavations in Crimea and the Militarisation of Ukrainian Children (Crimea Platform, April 24th)

The Face of Resistance: Crimean Tatar Activist Seyran Murtaza (Crimea Platform, April 24th)

From hell: the secret diary of a Ukrainian imprisoned and tortured by the FSB in Kherson (Mediazona, 23 April)

Russia stages fourth ‘trial’ of 67-year-old Crimean political prisoner to ensure he dies in captivity (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 23^rd)

Russia abducts Crimean Tatar trying to see dying aunt and accuses her of ‘treason’ for donations to Ukrainian Army (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 22^nd)

Birthday of illegally imprisoned Andrii Kuliievych (Crimea Platform, April 22^nd)

Weekly Update on the Situation In Occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, April 21^st)

Ukrainian ex-military man sentenced to 18 years in Russian-occupied Crimea on surreal ‘treason’ charges (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 21st)

Russia’s war for demographic control (Engelsberg Ideas, April 14^th)

News from Ukraine:

How Ukraine solved the hardest problem in defence (Exponential View, April 24^th)

Miners’ union new organisation near the front line (Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, 8 April)

War-related news from Russia:

Required Reading: Russia’s new mandatory history textbook offers a glimpse of the present (The Insider, April 28^th)

Russian losses in the war updated (Mediazona, 24 April)

Toxic smoke and ‘oil’ pours from fire at Russian oil terminal (Meduza, 24 April)

Censorship is reshaping Russia’s publishing industry (The Insider, 24 April)

Putin restores Soviet secret police founder Dzerzhinsky’s name to FSB Academy (Ukrainska Pravda, April 22^nd)

The Verdict on Spring: The Vesna Case (Russian Reader, April 21^st)

Security forces raid Russia’s largest publisher and detain its CEO in ‘LGBT propaganda’ case (Novaya Gazeta, April 21^st)

Analysis and comment:

Russian ministry spokeswoman in lying attack on Latvian “Nazism” (The Insider, 25 April)

Zelensky claims danger: Might Belarus join Russia in the war? (iStories, 22 April)

Some facts: Ukraine, Russia, Palestine and Israel (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 21 April)

Research of human rights abuses:

Growing up waiting for their fathers: photo exhibition on children of Crimean Tatar political prisoners opens in Berlin (Zmina, April 20^th)

How to prevent torture in places of detention: ZMINA held a specialised training (Zmina, April 21^st)

ZMINA joined the presentation of the Crimea Global outcomes and the discussion of plans for 2026 (Zmina, April 17^th)

Upcoming events:

Sunday 17 May: premiere of Try Me For Treason, the film. In-person premiere in London: 6.30pm, Upstairs room, the Lucas Arms, 245a Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8QY (arrive for drinks from 6.0pm). Youtube premiere at 8.0pm. Information at trymefortreason.org.

This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. To receive it by email each Monday, email us at 2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com. To stop the bulletin, reply with the word “STOP” in the subject field. More information at https://ukraine-solidarity.org/. We are also on Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook and Substack, and the bulletin is stored online here.

Source: News from Ukraine Bulletin 193 (27 April 2026)

The Finnish Defence Forces will construct permanent combat positions in the Kymenlaakso region, which borders Russia.

The combat posts will be erected during May exercises of the Finnish Coast Guard, the Finnish Navy’s press office announced on Wednesday, 29 April.

“The fortifications built will remain in place after the exercises. Due to the construction work and the exercises, construction equipment will be present in and around the port of Klamila, checkpoints will be set up, and public access will be restricted,” the statement said.

The exercises will take place across a vast area of the Finnish coastline, including Kotka, Hamina, and Virolahhti.

The “vast” area in question can be traveled by car in 45 minutes. Snapshot of Google Maps by the Russian Reader

The exact locations of the combat positions have not been disclosed.

It is understood that they will be constructed from reinforced concrete modules, and some of the fortifications will consist of underground bunkers.

Finland has been building a fence along its border with Russia and plans to complete the bulk of the work by early autumn this year.

Estonia is fortifying its border with Russia with bunkers. The country’s Ministry of Defense has announced plans to construct 600 concrete structures by the end of 2027. They are modular structures that are buried underground.

In April, the Estonians began digging a twenty-kilometer-long anti-tank trench in Setomaa Parish, which borders the Pskov Region’s Pechora District.

Source: “Finnish Army setting up combat positions near border with Russia,” Delovoi Peterburg, 29 April 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader