Source: Ozon email advertising circular, 14 November 2025
An American World War II cemetery in the Netherlands removed displays focused on Black American soldiers, sparking outrage and compelling Dutch politicians to appeal to U.S. officials this week to restore the information.
The two displays were added to the Netherlands American Cemetery’s visitor center in September 2024 after some historians and relatives of service members criticized the site for not mentioning the unique experiences of Black troops. One plaque featured the story of George H. Pruitt, a Black soldier in the 43rd Signal Construction Battalion, who died trying to save a comrade. The other highlighted how Black American service members were “fighting on two fronts” — for freedom overseas and for their civil rights at home.
The displays’ removal, American and Dutch critics of the move say, signifies an erasure of Black Americans’ contributions in the war and their work to liberate the Netherlands from the Nazis. It also represents an overstep in the Trump administration’s campaign to curb what it deems diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the critics said.
It’s unclear exactly when the plaques were removed.
The American Battle Monuments Commission, a U.S. government agency that oversees the cemetery, did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post. The commission told Dutch news outlets that one panel is “off display, though not out of rotation,” and a second panel was retired. The commission did not elaborate on either decision.
Janice Wiggins, the widow of Jefferson Wiggins, a Black WWII soldier who was quoted in one of the displays, said she had “a gut-wrenching feeling” when she learned the panels had been removed.
“Not only reading about, but actually experiencing, how history and those who shaped it can be so easily and casually erased,” she said. “It was very personal.”
“The removal of the displays is disrespectful to the Black American soldiers who served and to the legacies their families cherish,” Wiggins added.
More than 8,000 U.S. troops who fought in World War II are buried at the Netherlands American Cemetery, a solemn site in the village of Margraten in the southern part of the country. Just over 170 of these service members are Black Americans, a slice of the more than 1 million Black Americans who fought during World War II in segregated forces.
The cemetery is special to the local community, according to the American Battle Monument Commission’s website. Residents have adopted the grave sites, bringing flowers to the cemetery for decades.
The 6,450-square-foot visitor center, where the displays about Black service members were, tells the stories of the thousands of Americans commemorated at the cemetery.
One of the removed plaques described the “horrors of war” that Black service members faced while serving primarily in labor and support positions. In fall 1944, the U.S. Army’s 960th Quartermaster Service Company, a mostly Black unit, arrived in Margraten “to dig graves at the newly created cemetery,” the display read, according to a photo provided to The Post.
Jefferson Wiggins, a first lieutenant, recounted seeing service members under his command crying as they dug the graves.
“They were just completely traumatized,” the display said.
Now there is no textual information provided about Black troops at the cemetery, said Kees Ribbens, a senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. Although it’s unclear why the displays were removed, Ribbens said it’s notable that it happened during the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity efforts.
President Donald Trump signed executive orders on his first day in office banning government diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The impact has been widespread: Arlington National Cemetery scrubbed information from its website about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War. Exhibits related to slavery were removed at multiple national parks. The White House accused the Smithsonian of promoting “race-centered ideology.”
“Given the emphasis the current administration puts on DEI, it doesn’t make it that difficult to start wondering if the disappearance of Black history [at the cemetery] has to do with the current winds blowing in D.C.,” Ribbens said.
In the Netherlands, the public has been baffled that anyone would see a reason to remove the panels, Ribbens said.
Dutch politicians have demanded that the displays be reinstated, appealing to the American Battle Monuments Commission and the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands.
Alain Krijnen, the mayor of Eijsden-Margraten, where the cemetery is, sent a letter Monday to the commission: “We greatly value the story of the Black Liberators in relation to the past, present and future. In that context, we would greatly appreciate it if the story of the Black Liberators — like the 172 Black Liberators buried in Margraten — could be given permanent attention in the visitor center, and therefore reconsider the removal of the displays.”
The office of the governor of Limburg, the Dutch province containing the cemetery, said it also has “serious concerns.”
“The displayed panels depicted a history we must never forget, and from which we can learn a great deal — especially now, as global divisions are being increasingly magnified,” Bas Alberson, a spokesman for the governor’s office, said in a statement to The Post.
The mayor’s office and the Limburg governor’s office said they had not heard from American officials as of Wednesday.
Janice Wiggins, the 77-year-old widow of Jefferson Wiggins, said she learned the displays had been removed after her friends visited the cemetery in October and noticed the absence. The removal chips away at some of her life’s work, she said.
“Along with [former] US Ambassador to the Netherlands Shefali Razdan Duggal and Dutch author Mieke Kirkels, I lobbied for the inclusion of Black American soldiers in the exhibits at the Netherlands American Cemetery Visitors Center. The original exhibits included only White soldiers,” Wiggins, who lives in New Fairfield, Connecticut, wrote in an email.
Those who have family buried at the cemetery also feel the loss.
Julius Morris is a Black WWII soldier who is buried there. His nephew, Raphael Morris, who lives in St. Louis, felt resigned when he heard the news.
“Business as usual by this administration,” said Morris, 73. “Color me concerned, disappointed, but not surprised.”
On May 16, 2022, the Ukrainian artist Bohdan Ziza poured blue and yellow paint – the colours of his country’s flag – on to a municipal administration building in his home town, Yevpatoria, in Crimea.
Ziza posted a video of the action online, with a call to “adherents of graffiti culture, all the vandals of Crimea, Russia and Belarus” to protest against “the most horrific war” unleashed by “[Vladimir] Putin and the machine of state.” He was soon arrested and charged with “committing a terrorist act” and “incitement to terrorism”.
In June 2023, Ziza used his final statement to the Russian military court that sentenced him to fifteen years’ imprisonment to denounce the war again: “My action was a cry from the heart, from my conscience, to those who were and are afraid — just as I was afraid — but who also did not want this war.”
Ziza is one of ten anti-war protesters whose speeches are published this month, in English translation, in Voices Against Putin’s War: protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts. The collection also includes two statements made outside court, related interviews and letters, a summary of seventeen other anti-war speeches in court, and a survey of the anti-war protest movement and the repression against it.
In Russia, dissenters since the Populist rebels of the 1870s have used their final statement in court to urge resistance to power. The tradition flourished in the workers’ movements that preceded the 1917 revolution, was broken by the 1930s Stalinist show trials with their formulaic confessions, and reborn after the 1950s “thaw”, with dissidents such as the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yulii Daniel.
In 2022, Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine was followed by a brutal crackdown on civil society in occupied territory, Crimea included, as well as repression of domestic dissent. Protest was driven off the streets. Individual non-violent direct actions like Ziza’s, or writing or speaking against the war, were punished with long jail sentences, such as those now being served by most of the protagonists in Voices Against Putin’s War.
Ruslan Siddiqi, the Russian-Italian anarchist, went further: he is serving twenty-nine years’ imprisonment for derailing a train that was carrying munitions to Russian army units in Ukraine.
In court, he declared himself a prisoner of war, rather than a political prisoner: “My targets were Russian military equipment and the logistical chains used to transport military hardware and fuel. I wanted to impede military operations against Ukraine.”
Acting according to one’s conscience, in a dystopian world of militarism and big lies, was a central consideration for many of the protagonists.
Alexei Rozhkov, who firebombed a military recruitment centre in Sverdlovsk region, fled to Kyrgyzstan while on bail, before he was kidnapped by Russian special forces and returned to be put on trial.
He told the court that sentenced him to sixteen years: “Although I have never been a politician or a statesman, I could not remain indifferent when the war began. I have a conscience, and I preferred to hold on to it.”
The book’s protagonists oppose the war from a wide range of political viewpoints. On one hand, there are pacifists such as Sasha Skochilenko, the artist jailed for seven years for replacing labels in a supermarket with handwritten anti-war messages (and later freed in a prisoner swap between Russia and Western countries), who told the court: “Wars don’t end thanks to warriors — they end thanks to pacifists.”
On the other hand, there are political activists who spoke of Ukraine’s right to resist Russia militarily. Aleksandr Skobov, 67, the oldest protagonist, first jailed for activity in the socialist wing of the Soviet dissident movement in 1978, refused to stand when the judge came into court.
Skobov wished death on the “murderer, tyrant and scoundrel Putin.” He said he would never stop calling on honest Russians to join the Ukrainian armed forces, and for air strikes on Russia’s military facilities.
No less adamant in support of Ukraine was the youngest protagonist, Darya Kozyreva, 19, sentenced to two years and eight months’ imprisonment for laying flowers and a poem at the statue of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, in St Petersburg.
In court, Bohdan Ziza denounced not only the 2022 invasion but also the frenzied assault on Crimean Tatar organisations that preceded it in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. “Those who so passionately seek ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine have not opened their eyes to the Nazism in Russia, with its ephemeral ‘Russian world’,” with which the armed forces have “tried to extirpate Ukrainian identity”.
(Last month Ziza, on his own demand, had the Russian citizenship that was imposed on him along with all Crimean residents revoked. He is today in Vladimir Central jail, where “politicals” have been incarcerated since the 19th century.)
Voices Against Putin’s War results from the work of a small volunteer group of translators supporting Russian anti-war organisations, of which I was part, and is supported by the European Network for Solidarity With Ukraine. On top of the speeches published, we have summarised seventeen more from the wonderful “Poslednee Slovo” (“last word”) website.
The trials highlighted in the book also provide a snapshot of Russia’s wartime lurch towards a form of fascism. Against those who take non-violent direct action, charges under terrorism laws were standardised in 2022, with jail sentences of between ten and twenty years. Torture of detainees is routine.
Long sentences are designed to terrorise people into silence: Andrei Trofimov got ten years for social media posts justifying Ukrainian military actions against Russia.
For his two-minute speech in the military court, which ended “Glory to Ukraine! Putin is a dickhead” he was charged with “condoning terrorism” and “defaming the army”: a further three years were added to his sentence.
The monstrosity of Russia’s domestic repression may properly be understood in the context of the bloodbath it has visited on Ukraine, and especially on the occupied territories.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and wounded in action, and millions of Ukrainian civilians have been uprooted from their homes by bombing. Added to that, people in the occupied areas have faced enforced imposition of Russian citizenship, mass deportations including of children (the basis of a case against Putin in the International Criminal Court), legal nihilism, and an economic slump.
The primary instrument of social discipline in the occupied areas is enforced disappearances, including imprisonment. In September 2024, Ukraine’s register of persons “missing under special circumstances” counted some 48,324 names, of which 4,700 were confirmed by the Ukrainian government to be in captivity, although the true number may be far higher.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe estimated that 16,000 people on the register were adult civilians. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group identified 5,000 victims of enforced disappearances while preparing material for the International Criminal Court, and the Ukrainian ombudsman is working on 1,700 such cases. (All these numbers relate to civilians detained or missing, as distinct from Ukrainian prisoners of war, of which there are some 8,000–10,000.)
In short, Russia has taken many thousands of civilian prisoners in the occupied territories, whose fates often remain unknown. Many are political prisoners: 585 journalists, community leaders and activists from newly-occupied territories identified by human-rights organizations, 265 counted by the Crimean Human Rights Group, and others.
Furthermore, there are the thousands of civilian prisoners jailed by the so-called “People’s Republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk between 2014 and 2022, including for political offences, who have been transferred to prisons in Russia.
Alongside this orgy of violence, Russia’s machine of domestic repression has gone into overdrive.
A swathe of new censorious laws, for instance penalizing “disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian military” (which includes calling the war a war) have been added to the pre-existing laws on “foreign agents”, “undesirable organizations” and “extremism” from the last decade. Deranged police sweeps of people whose critical comments are harvested from social media have intensified.
The leading human-rights organisation Memorial: Political Prisoners Support, now based abroad, lists over 3,000 political detainees today, compared to just 50 in 2015 and 420 in 2021. After the post-Stalin “thaw”, historians reckon the number of political detainees in the Soviet Union fell to 5,000-10,000 in the 1970s (in the fifteen-republic union, with a population nearly twice that of Russia alone).
The trend reflected in these numbers justifies the term we have used in Voices Against Putin’s War: a “21st-century gulag.”
Amidst an international tide of rising right-wing authoritarianism and militarism, culminating in the genocide in Gaza, the speeches in the book are significant far beyond Russia. In his foreword, John McDonnell, a left-wing Labour MP in the UK, calls them “an inspiration to all those across the globe who see an injustice, and who refuse to passively comply”, from Israeli draft refuseniks and Palestine Action supporters in Britain to women demonstrating for life and liberty in Iran. That is where hope lies in our dark times.
□ Thursday 20 November, 7:00 p.m. TRY ME FOR TREASON. Readings from anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, and book launch for Voices Against Putin’s War. Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green London E1 5QJ. Register free on Eventbrite here.
ICE agents in the U.S. have detained Alexander (“Sasha”) Bolokhoev, a cofounder of the movement Tusgaar Buryad-Mongolia, which advocates for Buryatia’s independence [from the Russian Federation].
Sasha left Russia in 2021—that is, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In April 2022, he arrived in the U.S. and claimed political asylum. Unlike many of our compatriots, however, Sasha did not lie low and do nothing, pointing to the fact that he had been persecuted on ethnic grounds in Russia. He immediately joined the fight. He and Marina Khankhalaeva founded the Tusgaar movement, which has already been added to Russia’s official list of “extremists and terrorists.” He also spearheaded a congress of Buryat political organizations in New York.
Sasha’s detention by ICE was in no wise connected to his activism. He was detained in the state of Oklahoma during one of the anti-immigrant dragnets which have become a daily fact of life under Trump. Sasha was stopped on the highway and taken directly from his vehicle, which was left standing there.
Sasha is in the US completely legally. He has all the necessary papers, including a work permit. In the current reality, though, this may not matter much. Even green card holders and U.S. citizens have been detained and deported from the country.
Sasha is currently in custody in a deportation detention center in Oklahoma. He is held there along with a Chechen man who was also detained during a similar raid. The worst possible outcome for both of them would be deportation to Russia. I agree with Marina that torture and death would await Sasha in a Russian prison.
The Trump administration has instituted the systematic deportation of Russians on standalone flights to Moscow. As of October, at least three known charter flights have deported over a hundred people from the U.S. back to Russia. Upon landing in Moscow, all of these people are screened by the FSB (Federal Security Service) and they are often sent straight to a detention center.
Source: Julia Khazagaeva (Facebook), 21 October 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader. A special thanks to Ms. Khazagaeva for sending me the subtitled video interview with Sasha Bolokhoev, above.
The full interview with Buryat activist in exile Alexander Bolokhoev (in Russian and Buryat, with no subtitles)
Alexander Bolokhoev is a Buryat Mongol who immigrated to the United States and is a nationalist. He graduated from school with straight A’s, but soon left to work in Korea and then in the United States, where he currently is employed as a truck driver. In his featured spot “Saashyn Zam” (“Sasha’s Path”), Bolokhoev will talk about everyday life in the United States and his journey in life. You can join the discussion and ask questions every Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. (Ulaanbaatar time) on the channel @MiniiMongolGer.
Source: Buryadmongol (YouTube), 12 June 2024. You can watch a subtitled six-minute excerpt from this same interview in my translation of Ms. Khazagaeva’s Facebook post, above.
Buryat Emigrant Detained in US: Faces Deportation and Criminal Prosecution in Russia US
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained Alexander Bolokhoev, an activist for the Buryat independence movement who has been living in the country since 2022 and seeking political asylum. The news was reported by Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal).
According to the publication, Bolokhoev moved to the US in the spring of 2022, where he worked as a truck driver and participated in anti-war protests. He is an activist for the movement “Tusgaar Buryaad–Mongolia,” which is recognized as “terrorist and extremist” in Russia. In 2023, Bolokhoev participated in a congress of Buryat political organizations in New York, signed a declaration of Buryat independence, and joined the Buryat Independence Committee.
The movement’s leader, Marina Khankhalaeva, stated that if Bolokhoev is deported to Russia, he could face imprisonment or death due to his outspoken position and participation in the activities of the banned organization. The activist is currently being held in a detention center, and his status and a possible court decision on deportation are not yet known.
The movement “Tusgaar Buryaad–Mongolia” (“Independent Buryat-Mongolia”) was founded in the US by former opera singer and current homemaker Marina Khankhalaeva, and historian and professor Vladimir Khamutaev. The initiative advocates for “the self-determination of the Buryat people and the creation of an independent national state.”
Both founders have lived in the US for over ten years. Khankhalaeva was not previously involved in politics and stated she turned to activism after the start of the war in Ukraine. Khamutaev is known for his research on the annexation of Buryat lands to Russia and has been a proponent of Buryat autonomy since the 1980s.
The movement gained notoriety after Khankhalaeva spoke at the European Parliament during the Forum of Free Peoples of Russia, where decolonization issues were discussed. In 2023, the organization “Tusgaar Buryaad–Mongolia” was designated as terrorist and extremist in Russia.
According to Sota sources, the movement actively sought Buryat emigrants, suggesting they build their asylum cases through anti-war and “decolonization” speeches. However, after Trump came to power and mass migration acceptance was halted, such actions ceased to be beneficial for the emigrants but created a threat for them in Russia.
On a rainy evening in March, a Russian man named Dimitry stumbled through the dark, looking for a hole in a fence. In a former life, Dimitry worked as a fitness trainer for cops and bureaucrats in St. Petersburg, so he figured he could jump the barrier — “Honestly, with the shape I’m in, it wouldn’t be a problem.” But he was less confident about landing cleanly on the jungle terrain on the other side. Better, he thought, to look for a break in the chain-link.
The fence enclosed CATEM, a de facto immigrant detention center in Costa Rica where Dimitry, his wife, and their 6-year-old son were sent in February, along with 200 other asylum-seekers from Armenia, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Russia, among others. They were part of the first wave of migrants and asylum-seekers to be deported by the Trump administration to third countries — places other than their country of origin where, generally, the migrants had never been.
Dimitry’s plan, quickly formed a year earlier in an attempt to evade Russian authorities, had seemed straightforward. The family would fly to Tijuana, where they would download the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s app, file a claim for political asylum, and wait to be given an appointment. But on January 20, 2025, after eight months of waiting, their appointment was canceled. They drove to the Tecate border crossing and restated their political-asylum claim. After being handcuffed and fingerprinted, the family was placed in a holding facility at the Otay Mesa border crossing. They spent a month there, separated, before they were put on a military plane to Arizona. In Arizona, they were led to a bus. One of the migrants asked the driver where they were being taken next.
“Costa Rica,” the driver replied.
Costa Rica, Dimitry thought. Is that a city or a country?
School of Rock performs System of a Down’s “Toxicity” (2022)
Actors Martin and Janet Sheen, John Cusack and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek have signed an open letter urging Russian prison officials to end the solitary confinement of jailed activist Mikhail Kriger, who has been on a dry hunger strike for more than a week.
They join Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson, who earlier this week called on the local prison chief to end Kriger’s isolation.
Kriger, 65, first launched a hunger strike in late September. He started a dry hunger strike — meaning abstention from both food and water — last Friday after a planned visit with his daughter was canceled.
Kriger has accused prison authorities of deliberately trying to isolate him to prevent contact with other inmates.
The latest signatories of the letter to the head of Correctional Colony No. 5 in Russia’s Oryol region claimed Kriger’s condition “has now become critical,” according to the letter published by the exiled news website Mediazona.
“[Kriger’s] speech has slowed, his gaze is unfocused and he is extremely weak. Dry hunger strikes cause organ failure and quickly lead to shock and death,” the Sheens, Cusack and Žižek wrote.
Kriger was in 2023 sentenced to seven years in prison for “justifying terrorism” and “inciting hatred” over anti-Kremlin social media posts. The activist said during trial that he was being persecuted for his anti-war views and open pro-Ukrainian position.
The Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial designated Kriger a political prisoner.
The anti-Kremlin activist group Pussy Riot raised alarm over Kriger’s hunger strike earlier this week, calling on followers to write letters to him and the prison administration.
It was not immediately clear whether authorities in the Oryol region prison colony intended to respond to the international appeals.
It was also not clear when Kriger was expected to be moved out of solitary confinement and whether his medical condition was being properly monitored.
Kriger’s support group said the activist was taken to a regional hospital on Wednesday for tests, the results of which have not been shared.
Kriger’s lawyer said he was “cheerful, wrote poems and even offered to hop on one leg to show his strength,” the support group said in an update Thursday.
“Forced feeding will only begin if he loses consciousness or doctors deem his condition critical,” Kriger’s support group wrote on Telegram.
Yegor Shramko holding a placard that reads “No to the war with Ukraine” in Petersburg’s Palace Square
Our correspondent reports that activist Yegor Shramko did an anti-war picket in Palace Square and was detained.
The Petersburg man held a blue-and-yellow placard bearing the slogan “No to the war in Ukraine” and stood this way for around an hour. Shramko told our correspondent that although passersby supported him, the police were summoned by animateurs dressed as Russian emperors and empresses who offer to take photos with them for money on the square.
“I cannot keep silent. A life in which you have to fear everything, keep quiet, and be afraid of every little noise has no value for me,” Shramko explained to Bumaga.
He told RusNews that he had been wanting to stage the protest for four months but only worked up the nerve today.
This past summer, Shramko was jailed for twenty-four hours on charges of “displaying extremist symbols.” The “extremist symbol” in this case was the portrait of Alexei Navalny which Shramko brought to the Solovetsky Stone on the murdered politician’s birthday. At the time, Shramko told Bumaga that Navalny’s own words—”I’m not afraid, and you shouldn’t be afraid either”—had encouraged him to take the plunge and risk arrest by carrying out the proteest.
The activist held a solo picket for about an hour. St. Petersburg residents approached him—some offered words of support, while others began arguing with him. More than 50 minutes after the picket began, security forces in full uniform arrived and detained Yegor.
As you have probably heard, recently, on a Swiss train, a Russian man (with Latvian citizenship) attacked a family. The family was speaking Ukrainian among themselves. He started threatening to kill them and their baby.
It’s easy to dismiss this as just another “fait divers” (which, in a sense, it is), but I think it says something larger. To understand his actions, you have to understand where it comes from.
For centuries, the inhabitants of the Russian state lived in a situation where order depended on fear and extreme forms of violence. This was true in much of the world, but while many countries began to change over the last century (let’s put aside the reasons behind the change), in the Russian/Soviet empire the situation actually became worse. Much worse.
The rules were never something people agreed to follow together (after all, you need to feel a part of a society and thus to share common imaginary to do it, and it is impossible to do it if you live in the empire, however much some contemporary researchers might wish it). It is something they were imposed from above, by the state, or by whoever had power over you at the moment. People learned that laws only mattered when someone strong was watching. So when a person raised in that kind of world finds themselves in a place like Switzerland, where rules work because the majority respects them voluntarily, they see the absence of fear and coercion as a sign that anything goes.
The man in that train was in a setting where no one was looking as capable to physically stop him and he took that as permission to dominate others, those people that he hates for the mere fact of their existence.
This same pattern plays out on a global scale. The Russian state elites see Europe much like that man saw the train: as a place without explicit “real” (military) force. It looks fake, easy to break, like a house of cards, because it relies on trust, and thus, in their view, on NOTHING.
People and societies shaped by fear and domination can’t imagine relationships built on any agreements (that require trust). They assume that if no one is dominating explicitly, it’s an invitation to act.
The man on the train and Putin’s crew are two versions of the same story. Both come from a social setting that sees respect as submission, peace as weakness, agreements as empty shells and absence of explicit force as an invitation to unlimited violence.
Donald Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday to make a deal with Russia, pouring cold water on Kyiv’s push for Tomahawk missiles as the U.S. leader pursues a diplomatic solution to the war.
Trump said as recently as last month that he believed Ukraine could take back all its territory — but a day after agreeing to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin for a new summit the American had changed his tune.
After meeting with Zelensky at the White House, Trump said on social media that their talks were “very interesting, and cordial, but I told him, as I likewise strongly suggested to President Putin, that it is time to stop the killing, and make a DEAL!”
Trump also appeared to suggest both sides should accept their current front lines. “They should stop where they are. Let both claim Victory, let History decide!” he said.
Zelensky said after the meeting that Russia was “afraid” of the U.S.-made long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, but that he was “realistic” about receiving the weapons from Washington.
He told reporters that while he and Trump talked about long-range weapons they “decided that we don’t speak about it because… the United States doesn’t want escalation.”
‘Get the war over’
Zelensky came to Washington after weeks of calls for Tomahawks, hoping to capitalize on Trump’s growing frustration with Putin after a summit in Alaska failed to produce a breakthrough.
But the Ukrainian left empty-handed as Trump eyes a fresh diplomatic breakthrough on the back of last week’s Gaza peace deal.
Trump has appeared far more upbeat about the prospects of a deal since his two-and-a-half hour call with Putin on Thursday, in which they agreed to meet in Budapest.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to get the war over with without thinking about Tomahawks,” Trump told journalists including an AFP reporter as he hosted Zelensky at the White House.
Trump added that he believed Putin “wants to end the war.”
Zelensky, who came to the White House to push for the long-range U.S.-made weapons, said however that he would be ready to swap “thousands” of Ukrainian drones in exchange for Tomahawks.
Zelensky congratulated Trump on his recent Middle East peace deal in Gaza and said he hoped he would do the same for Ukraine. “I hope that President Trump can manage it,” he said.
‘Many questions’
Diplomatic talks on ending Russia’s invasion have stalled since the Alaska summit.
The Kremlin said Friday that “many questions” needed resolving before Putin and Trump could meet, including who would be on each negotiating team.
But it brushed off suggestions Putin would have difficulty flying over European airspace.
Hungary said it would ensure Putin could enter and “hold successful talks” with the United States despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant against him for alleged war crimes.
Since the start of his second term, Trump’s position on the Ukraine war has shifted dramatically back and forth.
Initially Trump and Putin reached out to each other as the U.S. leader derided Zelensky as a “dictator without elections.”
Tensions came to a head in February, when Trump accused his Ukrainian counterpart of “not having the cards” in a rancorous televised meeting at the Oval Office.
Relations between the two have since warmed as Trump has expressed growing frustration with Putin.
But Trump has kept a channel of dialogue open with Putin, saying that they “get along.”
The U.S. leader has repeatedly changed his position on sanctions and other steps against Moscow following calls with the Russian president.
Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, describing it as a “special military operation” to demilitarize the country and prevent the expansion of NATO.
Russia now occupies around a fifth of Ukrainian territory — much of it ravaged by fighting.
On Friday the Russian Defense Ministry announced it had captured three villages in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions.
All last week, Republican leaders tried to portray the No Kings protests scheduled for Saturday, October 18, as “Hate America” rallies. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers partnered with Atlanta-based science newsroom The Xylom to estimate that as many as 8.2 million people turned out yesterday to oppose the Trump administration. The mood at the protests was joyful and peaceful, with protesters holding signs that championed American principles of democracy, free speech, equality, and the rule of law. As the Grand Junction, Colorado, Daily Sentinel put it in a front-page headline: “‘This is America’ ‘No Kings’ protests against Trump bring a street party vibe to cities nationwide.”
Then last night, after the protests, the president’s social media account posted an AI-generated video showing Trump in a fighter jet with “KING TRUMP” painted on the side. The president sits in the airplane in front of something round that could be seen as a halo. He is wearing a gold crown; weirdly, the oxygen mask is over his mouth and chin, rather than mouth and nose.
Once in the air, the plane drops excrement on American cities, including what seems to be New York City. The excrement drenches protesters, one of whom is 23-year-old liberal political commentator and influencer Harry Sisson. Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who shares media clips that reflect politics, commented: “Trump posts AI video showing him literally dumping sh*t on America.” Historian Larry Glickman noted that media outlets make much of alleged Democratic disdain for ordinary Americans, but have had little to say about the disdain for Americans embodied by Trump’s video.
Several administration videos and images have responded to Americans saying “No Kings” by taking the position “Yes, We Want Kings,” an open embrace of the end of democracy. But they are more than simple trolling. Led by Trump, MAGA Republicans have abandoned the idea of politics, which is the process of engaging in debate and negotiation to attract support and win power. What is left when a system loses the give and take of politics is force.
The idea that leaders must attract voters with reasoned arguments to win power and must concede power when their opponents win has been the central premise of American government since 1800. In that year, after a charged election in which each side accused the other of trying to destroy the country, Federalist John Adams turned the reins of government over to the leader of the opposition, Thomas Jefferson. That peaceful transfer of power not only protected the people, it protected leaders who had lost the support of voters, giving them a way to leave office safely and either retire or regroup to make another run at power.
The peaceful transfer of power symbolized the nation’s political system and became the hallmark of the United States of America. It lasted until January 6, 2021, when sitting president Trump refused to accept the voters’ election of Democrat Joe Biden, the leader of the opposition.
Now back in power, Trump and his loyalists are continuing to undermine the idea of politics, policies, and debate, trying instead to delegitimize the Democratic opposition altogether. Yesterday, during the protests, President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D Vance, and the official White House social media account posted a video of Trump placing a royal crown on his head, draping a royal robe around his shoulders, and unsheathing and brandishing a sword (an image that raises questions about why Trump wanted one of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s swords so badly that he had the museum director who refused to hand it over fired). In the video, Democratic leaders including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and what appears to be Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first kneel and then bow to Trump.
Administration imagery doesn’t simply insult opposition leaders; it undermines the idea of politics by suggesting that Democrats are un-American. Last night the White House continued its racist crusade against Democratic leaders by posted an AI-generated image of Trump and Vance wearing jewel-encrusted crowns positioned above an image of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wearing Mexican sombreros. The caption reads: “We’re built different.”
The administration’s hostility to loyal opposition is translating into direct assaults on our government. House speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to seat a member of the opposition. Voters chose representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) on September 23 to fill a vacant House seat, but Johnson has come up with one reason after another not to seat her. Until she is sworn in, she has no access to government resources and cannot represent her constituents. She also cannot be the 218th signature on a discharge petition that would force a vote on whether to demand the release of the Epstein files, the final signature needed.
Grijalva recorded a video reinforcing the political system, saying: “We need to get to work, get on the floor, and negotiate so we can reopen the government.”
But Republican congressional leaders are refusing even to talk with Democrats to reopen the government, let alone to negotiate with them. They are trying to force Democrats simply to do as they say, despite the fact that 78% of Americans, including 59% of Republicans, support the Democrats’ demand for an extension of the tax credit that lowers the cost of healthcare premiums on the Affordable Care Act markets. Lindsay Wise, Anna Wilde Mathews, and Katy Stech Ferek of the Wall Street Journal reported today that more than three quarters of those who are insured through the ACA markets live in states that voted for Trump.
A video of Trump in a bomber attacking American cities carries an implied threat that the disdain of throwing excrement doesn’t erase. This morning, Trump reinforced that threat when he reminded Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo: “Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act. Fifty percent of the presidents almost have used that. And that’s unquestioned power. I choose not to, I’d rather do this, but I’m met constantly by fake politicians, politicians that think that, that you know they it’s not like a part of the radical left movement to have safety. These cities have to be safe.”
That “safety” apparently involves detaining U.S. citizens without due process. On Thursday, Nicole Foy of ProPublica reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents. She reports they “have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.”
On Friday, the Trump administration pushed its attempt to use the military in Democratic-led cities, asking the Supreme Court to let it deploy troops in Chicago immediately. Chris Geidner of Law Dork notes that four judges, two appointed by Democrats and two appointed by Republicans, have rejected the administration’s arguments for why they must send in troops. Now the Department of Justice has appealed to the Supreme Court, asking for a decision on the so-called shadow docket, which would provide a fast response, but one without any hearings or explanation.
The administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court warned that there was “pressing risk of violence” in Chicago—a premise the judges rejected—and said preventing Trump from going into the city “improperly impinges on the President’s authority.”
How much difference will the No Kings Day protests, even as big as they were, make in the face of the administration’s attempt to get rid of our democratic political system and replace it with authoritarianism? What good is an inflatable frog against federal agents?
Scholar of social movements Lisa Corrigan noted that large, fun marches full of art and music expand connections and make people more willing to take risks against growing state power. They build larger communities by creating new images that bring together recognizable images from the past in new ways, helping more people see themselves in such an opposition. The community and good feelings those gatherings develop help carry opposition through hard moments. Corrigan notes, too, that yesterday “every single rally (including in the small towns) was bigger than the surrounding police force available. That kind of image event is VERY IMPORTANT if you’re…demonstrating social coherence AGAINST a fascist government and its makeshift gestapo.”
Such rallies “bring together multigenerational groups and the playfulness can help create enthusiasm for big tent politics against the monoculture of fascism,” Corrigan writes. “The frogs (and unicorns and dinosaurs) will be defining ideographs of this period of struggle.”
Some of Ukraine’s youngest defenders (clockwise from upper lefthand corner): Serhiy Dodurov, Oleksandr Romanuk, Deniz, Ivanna Tsimerman, and Sofiya Yanchevska
As Russia’s full-scale war enters its fourth year, a generation raised under air-raid sirens is now old enough to fight. Despite not yet being subject to conscription, these young Ukrainians are voluntarily joining the military, trading lecture halls for dugouts, or trying to balance both worlds.
Their decision comes at a time when Ukraine is facing mounting pressure to address critical manpower shortages. In 2024, the government lowered the mobilization age from 27 to 25 and later introduced one-year “special contracts” aimed at 18 to 24 year-olds, with Hr 1 million ($24,000) pay and free higher education.
Meanwhile, many young Ukrainians are making another choice — to leave the country — heightening fears of a looming demographic crisis.
The Kyiv Independent spoke to five young Ukrainians about why they enlisted, how they balance study and service, and what they hope for after the war.
LOCAL INSPIRATION of the day. This quilt by Joleigh Kambic is part of a larger quilt titled “Babies in Gaza Who Never Made It To Their First Birthday.” The quilt is composed of smaller quilts created by nearly 40 quilters from across the Monterey Bay, commemorating the children who were killed in the Israel-Hamas war. It is on display through Oct. 3 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Monterey Peninsula, 490 Aguajito Road in Carmel.
Jade Bird, “American Pie” (Don McLean cover). Thanks to the amazing Dick Gregory for the heads-up.
Nearly 3 million Americans identify as transgender, including one in 30 of those aged 13 to 17, according to a new report. But data on the country’s trans community may soon be hard to come by, its authors warned, as the Trump Administration and a number of GOP-led states seek to limit the recognition, and rights, of transgender people.
The UCLA Williams Institute has been publishing reports about transgender Americans since 2011, tracking information such as the race, ethnicity, age, regional location, and mental health of transgender individuals.
Trans adults and youth make up 1% of Americans aged 13 and older and 3.3% of 13-to 17-year-olds, according to the institute’s Wednesday report. Researchers found that younger adults, those aged 18 to 34, were more likely to identify as transgender than their older counterparts, making up more than 50% of the country’s transgender population.
For its initial 2011 report, the institute relied on just two state-level population surveys. Researchers noted that they have since been able to access broader and higher-quality data through the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): To generate the most recent findings, they used data from the CDC 2021-2023 Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System and 2021 and 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. The report authors noted that the Youth Risk Behavior Survey in particular “currently provides the best available data for our estimates of the size and characteristics of youth who identify as transgender in the U.S.”
But the agency will no longer collect information on transgender people in compliance with President Donald Trump’s Executive Order calling for federal recognition of only two biological sexes.
Since Trump returned to office in January, information regarding trans people and health resources for LGBTQ+ people has been quietly removed or modified on federal websites. And the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has stepped away from its previous practice of supporting gender-affirming-care, in spite of numerous statements from all major medical associations in the U.S., including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, declaring the care as best practice. In May, HHS called for “exploratory therapy” or psychotherapy to treat individuals with gender dysphoria instead of the medically recommended care.
Multiple states have also sought to restrict access to gender-affirming care, particularly for minors, amid broader global efforts to target such care for trans youth. A June Supreme Court decision upholding a Tennessee state-level ban on gender-affirming-care for youth delivered a heavy blow to the U.S. LGBTQ+ community, permitting similar bans that have been enacted across the country and presenting a significant obstacle to future efforts to challenge restrictions in the courts.
Amid the current political climate, the authors of Wednesday’s Williams Institute report say they are unsure whether survey respondents will accurately respond to questions regarding their gender identity moving forward. In addition to the uncertain future of data on the U.S. transgender population, they wrote, “It is also unclear whether individuals’ willingness to disclose on surveys that they identify as transgender will remain unchanged in the years to come.”
Despite those looming challenges in gathering information, however, the authors noted it is already clear that younger people are more likely to identify as transgender and they anticipate that to continue being true.
“This has implications for institutions in our society, including educational institutions, the U.S. Armed Forces, civilian workplaces, health care settings, and other areas, regarding how to meet the needs of and provide opportunities for current youth and future generations,” they said.
Jade Bird, “I’ve Been Everywhere” (Johnny Cash cover)
In the Central Coast, where my father farmed strawberries, the land is mostly flat for miles in every direction so it was easy to spot the green vans and trucks of the Immigration and Naturalization Service heading our way in the distance, kicking up a cloud of dust in their wake. It was the late ‘70s and raids were an occasional part of working in the ag industry.
When the trucks were spotted — most often by a worker — a loud call would go out: “La Migra, la migra.” That’s when immigrant workers without legal status would drop what they were doing and sprint away, either for a nearby riverbed or over a set of raised railroad tracks adjacent to the fields. The immigration raids on my father’s strawberry fields fascinated me when I was a boy. It wasn’t until I was older that I understood the impact on the workers who were rounded up and deported, as well as the effects on the families left behind. I now recall them in a more somber light.
My father worked as a sharecropper in the Central Coast. He oversaw several acres of strawberries and managed up to a dozen workers for Driscoll Inc., the berry company headquartered in my hometown of Watsonville.
From the time I was about 6 or 7 years old until I was 16, I spent my summers and most weekends in the fall in my dad’s strawberry fields. It was backbreaking work. I have the chiropractor invoices to prove it.
Immigration raid methods have changed. The toll they take has not
The ICE raids of the past few months across Southern California reignited my boyhood memories of the strawberry field raids.
What has not changed is the impact on the immigrant families, especially the children. Children of immigrants sustain deep emotional scars from immigration raids.
A study published last month on Psychiatry News said immigrant children or children of mixed-status parents endure serious trauma when their parents are deported.
“Forced family separations, particularly those resulting from immigration enforcement (e.g., detention, deportation), introduce acute psychological risks,” according to the study, which list the results as an “elevated risk of suicidal ideation, externalizing behavior and alcohol use.”
Even living under the threat of having a parent deported is traumatizing to children.
“These fears have been shown to lead to school absenteeism, academic disengagement, and heightened emotional distress,” the study says.
Even as a boy, the fear and desperation were palpable
When I worked in the fields, the raids came about once or twice a summer. I didn’t witness this myself, but the family lore includes the story of a worker who was so desperate to escape the INS that he jumped into a nearby port-a-potty — hiding among the feces and urine in the holding tanks — until the INS agents departed.
Each summer, two or three of my father’s workers would be deported, only to return the following season. That was more common back in the ‘70s than it is today. My dad tried to help his workers without green cards by connecting them with legal aid groups or lawyers so they could straighten out their legal status. Not all of them did and some who had green cards ran at the sight of INS trucks anyway.
In a recent conversation with my younger brother, Peter, he recalled panicking during the first raids he witnessed. He said he asked my older siblings if he should run from the agents, too.
“No, you’re an American. Just shut up,” they told him.
Jade Bird, “Grinnin’ in Your Face” (Son House cover)
[…]
A lost white race of Bible giants—literally bigger, stronger, and whiter than everyone else—fashioned as a symbol of everything conservatives wanted to remake America into, is an all-too-convenient bit of lore for the conspiracy-besotted right. (Never mind that the Nephilim were technically the villains in Genesis!) And the Smithsonian was, if anything, a useful foil for a fringe movement looking for an enemy to accuse of suppressing the truth.
Soon enough, claims that the Smithsonian intentionally hid the bones of Bible giants went mainstream, presaging the country’s own rightward shift. By the 2010s, the Smithsonian’s secret giants appeared in popular paranormal books, on late-night radio shows, in multiple cable TV documentaries (including at least two separate History Channel shows), and across a network of evangelical and far-right media outlets.
Among the most popular of these were the Christian DVDs and later podcasts produced by Steve Quayle and his Nephilim-hunting partner, Timothy Alberino. Quayle, an archconservative, blamed Bible giants for “teaching” men to be gay. He and Alberino were regulars on the right-wing podcast circuit in the 2010s, often appearing with figures like Alex Jones and Jim Bakker so Quayle could hawk their merch, attack Democratic politicians as demonic, and advocate for a targeted genocide of Nephilim-controlled liberals.
Burlinson told Blaze TV that he had been radicalized against the Smithsonian through Alberino’s podcasts and videos. In his podcasts, Alberino has described Bible giants as a “superior race society.”
In recent years, Alberino has made moves to go more mainstream. He has appeared on Ancient Aliens, the History Channel show advocating historical conspiracies, where David Childress is a featured star. That same show also hosted Tucker Carlson, Tennessee Republican Representative Tim Burchett, and others to peddle conspiracies about government cover-ups of space aliens, interdimensional beings, demons, and more.
For the far right, the E.T.s of Ancient Aliens—the same ones Congress is currently hunting in various UFO hearings—are actually angels and demons, and those demons are the souls of the giants who died in the Flood, according to a nonbiblical text Alberino endorses. Burlinson said in 2023 that he thinks UFOs could be angels, and more recently he promised that a congressional UFO hearing to be held on September 9 would feature witnesses who “handled the bodies” of these beings.
Conspiracies about Bible giants are basically the Christian version of UFOs and aliens, and it’s no wonder there is significant cross-pollination between believers in the two camps, even in Congress, where several representatives like Burlinson and Burchett have publicly discussed their belief in both. In fact, both conspiracies give pride of place to the Nephilim narrative from Genesis 6:4 as proof of either fallen angels or alien intervention.
It would be laughable if the Smithsonian conspiracy theory and tales of Bible giants now being spread on Blaze TV, on Joe Rogan’spodcast, and across right-wing media, were not a kind of Trojan horse to soften up the public to accept political propaganda in place of history and complete the assault on America’s museums that failed in the 1990s. But the conspiracists continue to spread their lore, and mainstream conservative politicians continue to escalate their attacks on the Smithsonian—a far-right pincer movement directed at an institution that is both the nation’s premier repository of historical fact and a potent bolsterer of America’s civic fabric. And that is no laughing matter.
THE BIZARRE TWISTS AND TURNS of Donald Trump’s Ukraine peacemaking project continue: Just three days after the president announced in a triumphant Truth Social post that Vladimir Putin was willing to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky—either one on one or in a trilateral summit with Trump—and to accept an arrangement in which NATO countries would provide postwar security guarantees for Ukraine, the Putin regime has unequivocally shot down both proposals. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov (last seen sporting a “USSR” sweatshirt on his trip to Alaska) has made it clear that there won’t be a meeting with Zelensky until “all the issues” have been resolved—including the question of Zelensky’s legitimacy as president, given that Ukrainian elections have been put on hold on account of the war—and that Russia will not accept the presence of foreign troops, presumably other than its own, on Ukrainian soil.
Trump’s stormy bromance with Putin seems to be off again, too: in social media posts on Thursday, he criticized “crooked and grossly incompetent” Joe Biden for not allowing Ukraine to strike back at Russia and (speciously) compared his chummy-seeming interaction with Putin in Alaska with Richard Nixon’s confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959.
It’s impossible to tell whether Trump’s social-media posturing will translate into action. There is still no word, for instance, on whether the administration is greenlighting Ukraine’s proposal, unveiled after the Monday White House meeting, for $100 billion in U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine (with the Europeans footing the bill) and an additional $50 billion project for joint U.S.-Ukrainian drone production. Nor is there any word on whether or when new sanctions will kick in.
WHILE THE CIRCUS PLAYS ON in Washington and Moscow, the war on the ground—and in the air—continues in Ukraine, and sometimes in Russia. Ukraine is in an undeniably tough position, though nowhere near the desperate predicament imagined both by haters and by worriers who keep predicting an imminent “collapse” of its defenses. On August 12, just before the Alaska summit, many thought they saw a sign of such collapse in a Russian “breakthrough” not far from the long-contested city of Pokrovsk (Donetsk region), near the former coal-mining town of Dobropillia, where Russian forces managed to make rapid advances past severely undermanned Ukrainian lines, move about nine miles forward, seize three villages (now mostly deserted, though some residents who have not been able to get out still remain there), and cut off a vital supply route for Ukrainian troops. These gains appeared to augur the fall of Pokrovsk itself, a prospect that has been discussed since late last year.
But a few days later, the supposed catastrophic defeat turned into an impressive Ukrainian victory thanks to the quick deployment of new units from the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the National Guard, which retook two of the captured villages as well as four previously occupied settlements and cleared the area of Russian troops, reportedly inflicting significant losses. As for Pokrovsk itself, there have been some clashes inside the city, with incursions by small Russian units; but observers such as expatriate Russian military expert Yuri Fedorov think it’s extremely unlikely that the city will fall before inclement weather forces the Russian offensive to wind down.
It is true that momentum is on Russia’s side, in the sense that only Russia is currently conducting offensive operations. But Russian forces’ progress is snail-paced and intermittent, with the Ukrainians often successful in pushing them back (and using drones to make up for manpower and ammunition shortages). The result, more often than not, is a ghastly tug-of-war over small patches of devastated land—contests in which a “win” may consist of planting a flag in a ghost settlement.
Overall, analysts agree that Russia has no chance of capturing the entirety of the Donetsk region—as it has tried to do since the start of Putin’s covert war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014—anytime in the foreseeable future; doing so would require taking heavily fortified urban areas, and even the most cavalier willingness to sacrifice men may not accomplish that goal without several more years of costly fighting. Hence Russian demands for Ukraine to surrender the remainder of the region without a fight.
Ukraine also continues to score successes in its aerial war on strategic Russian targets such as oil refineries, arms and ammunition depots and factories, and trains carrying weapons and fuel to the frontlines. (Russian troops aren’t the only ones feeling the effects: there are reported miles-long lineups for gasoline in parts of Russia.) And, Western arms deliveries aside, Ukraine is making strides in developing its own weaponry, like the new Flamingo long-range cruise missile capable of hitting targets more than 1,800 miles away; Zelensky has said that it could be mass-produced by February.
In other words: Ukraine is still not losing. But there is no question that it is exhausted—and that the enemy’s continuing terrorism against its civilian population is taking its toll. On Wednesday night, Russia launched one of its heaviest assault waves yet: 574 drones and 40 missiles, with targets located as far away from the frontlines as Lviv and Transcarpathia. Most were intercepted by Ukrainian defenses, but one person was killed and over a dozen wounded.
Was this a deliberate middle finger to Trump over his supposed peace effort? It sure looks like it, especially considering the bombing of an American factory in the Transcarpathian city of Mukachevo—the premises of Flex Ltd., a manufacturer of civilian electronic goods. At the very least, it shows that Russia is not de-escalating. Likewise, it’s unclear whether the incursion of a Russian drone that crashed and burned in a rural area in eastern Poland during the overnight attack on Ukraine was a deliberate provocation, as the Polish government charged. But it certainly doesn’t tell us that Putin wants peace.
He can still be forced into it, however. A scenario in which Ukraine drives Russian troops and occupation forces out of its territory is as impossible as one in which Russia makes major territorial gains in Ukraine; but there may come a point, perhaps soon, when the war’s economic and political burdens for the Putin regime become too heavy. Even with rigged elections and a thoroughly owned population, Putin still cannot afford too much discontent among the Russian middle class—or among the elites. There is a reason he has not undertaken another round of mobilization since 2022. But right now, recruitment is dropping, soldiers recovering from wounds or suffering from serious physical and mental health problems are being forced into combat, and mobilization may be the only way to keep the war going. The war will end when Putin starts to see its costs as too high and the chances of achieving his aims, stated and unstated, as too low.
U.S. policy could be instrumental in making that happen. But for that, the Trump administration would have to commit to a firm and consistent pro-Ukraine policy. For starters, the president’s promises of “very severe consequences” if Putin stands in the way of peace should mean something more than memes and empty talk. (And the vice president shouldn’t keep fawning about the “soft-spoken” Kremlin dictator who “looks out for the interests, as he sees it, of Russia.” Sorry, JD, but you sound like a jackass.)
Yet here we are, with Putin doing everything to sabotage any meaningful peace talks but put up an “I ♥ WAR” neon sign on the Kremlin walls—and what is Trump’s response? Another deadline: this time, he says, we’ll know whether a deal can be made “within two weeks”—famously, Trump’s “placeholder” unit of time. No doubt they’re quaking in their boots in the Kremlin.
The Trump administration has quietly rescinded long-standing guidance that directed schools to accommodate students who are learning English, alarming advocates who fear that schools will stop offering assistance if the federal government quits enforcing the laws that require it.
The rescission, confirmed by the Education Department on Tuesday, is one of several moves by the administration to scale back support for approximately 5 million schoolchildren not fluent in English, many of them born in the United States. It is also among the first steps in a broader push by the Trump administration to remove multilingual services from federal agencies across the board, an effort the Justice Department has ramped up in recent weeks.
The moves are an acceleration of President Donald Trump’s March 1 order declaring English the country’s “official language,” and they come as the administration is broadly targeting immigrants through its deportation campaign and other policy changes. The Justice Department sent a memorandum to all federal agencies last month directing them to follow Trump’s executive order, including by rescinding guidance related to rules about English-language learners.
Since March, the Education Department has also laid off nearly all workers in its Office of English Language Acquisition and has asked Congress to terminate funding for the federal program that helps pay for educating English-language learners. Last week, education advocates noticed that the guidance document related to English learning had a new label indicating it was rescinded and remains online “for historical purposes only.”
On Tuesday, Education Department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said that the guidance for teaching English learners, which was originally set forth in 2015, was rescinded because it “is not in line with Administration policy.” A Justice Department spokesman responded to questions by sending a link to the July memorandum and said he had no comment when asked whether the guidance would be replaced.
For decades, the federal government has held that failing to provide resources for people not proficient in English constitutes discrimination based on national original under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
In rescinding the guidance, the Trump administration is signaling that it may stop enforcing the law under that long-standing interpretation. The Education and Justice departments have been responsible for enforcing the law.
In the July memorandum, Attorney General Pam Bondi cited case law that says treating people, including students, who aren’t proficient in English differently does not on its face amount to discrimination based on national origin.
Other guidance related to language access for people using services across the federal government is also being suspended, according to the memo, and the Justice Department will create new guidance by mid-January to “help agencies prioritize English while explaining precisely when and how multilingual assistance remains necessary.” The aim of the effort, Bondi said in a statement published alongside the memo, is to “promote assimilation over division.”
The consequences for school districts were not immediately clear, but advocates worry that rescinding the 2015 guidance could open the door for weaker instruction for English learners and upend decades of direction from the federal government to provide English-language services to students who need them.
“The Department of Education and the Department of Justice are walking away from 55 years of legal understanding and enforcement. I don’t think we can understate how important that is,” said Michael Pillera, an attorney who worked at the Office for Civil Rights for 10 years and now directs the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.
Without pressure from the federal government to comply with the law, it is possible that some school districts will drop services, Pillera said, particularly as many districts struggle with financial pressures.
“It’s going to ripple quickly,” he predicted. “Schools were doing this because the Office for Civil Rights told them they had to.”
Many districts will probably not change their services, but rescinding the guidance opens the door, said Leslie Villegas, an education policy analyst at New America, a think tank. Advocates may watch for changes in districts that previously had compliance problems or those that had open cases with the Office for Civil Rights related to English-language instruction, she noted.
“The rescission of this guidance may create the mentality that no one’s watching,” Villegas said.
In recent months, the Justice Department notified at least three school districts — in Boston; Newark; and Worcester, Massachusetts — that the government was releasing them from government monitoring that had been in place to ensure they offered services to English-language learners.
Officials in Worcester said they expected the action even before Trump took office. But in Boston, some parent advocates questioned why the monitoring had ended, the Boston Globe reported.
Supporters of immigration restrictions argued that relieving pressure on schools to provide these services might be helpful, especially given the costs to districts.
“If you devote all these resources to these kids coming in [to school] completely unprepared, inevitably it will diminish the quality of education others are getting,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Todd DuBois, communications director for U.S. English, a group that advocates for English as the official and common language, said some education is needed to help “bridge the gap” for students who do not speak English, but the group is concerned that multilingualism “gets in the way of teaching English literacy earlier in life.”
The requirement to serve English-language learners in school is based on two federal statutes. The first is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on national origin, among other traits. Alandmark 1974 Supreme Court case, Lau v. Nichols, interpreted this law to include a mandate for English-language services in schools.
The second federal law at issue is the 1974 Equal Educational Opportunities Act, which requires public schools to provide for students who do not speak English. A 1981 case decided in federal appeals court, Castañeda v. Pickard, laid out a test to determine whether schools were properly providing services to English learners in school.
In 2015, the Justice and Education departments published their 40-page guidance document, explaining how schools can properly comply with these laws and avoid potential federal investigations and penalties.
“For a teacher, it was kind of like the Bible,” said Montserrat Garibay, who headed the Office of English Language Acquisition under the Biden administration. “If, in fact, we want our students to learn English, this needs to be in place.”
In her memorandum, Bondi said that in addition to cutting back on multilingual services the administration deems “nonessential,” federal agencies would be tasked with boosting English education and assimilation.
“Instead of providing this office with more capacity and more resources to do exactly what the executive order says — to make sure that everybody speaks English — they are doing the total opposite,” Garibay said.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports immigration enforcement measures, suggested the federal government should not direct how school districts offer services. But he also said that teaching children English is consistent with efforts to make sure people living in the United States speak English.
“I’m all for English-language education. We probably need to do even more of that,” he said. “If you’re going to let people in who don’t speak English, then you want them to be acquiring English as soon as possible.”
In case you missed it, we recently added a new T-shirt to our online store to help the charitable organization East SOS, continuing our commitment to support important Ukrainian initiatives through your purchases.
After Russia demanded that Ukraine cede five of its regions as a condition for a ceasefire, we designed a shirt to show solidarity with Ukraine — all 603,628 square kilometers of it.
In June, we introduced the “603,628 km²” T-shirt and are donating the profits to the Ukrainian charity East SOS. Thanks to readers like you, we’ve already raised more than $5,000 to help them rebuild homes in war-torn eastern Ukraine.
We’ll collect donations until Aug. 10, so you have six days left to grab your shirt and support the cause.
We also want to give you a closer look at East SOS. The organization provides comprehensive assistance to Ukrainians in front-line regions and internally displaced persons (IDPs) that were forced to flee the war. The charity was launched in 2015, focusing on providing essential supplies and humanitarian aid for those living in the front-line areas.
One project East SOS is currently raising money for is to repair houses in eastern Ukraine that have been damaged by Russia — this is the project that the Kyiv Independent will support. So far, East SOS has helped repair nearly 1,500 homes in Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts, with another 300 households waiting for assistance. The charity works to repair private homes, prioritizing requests from elderly people living alone or individuals with disabilities — essentially those who are unable to carry out the work themselves.
East SOS employees restoring houses, damaged by Russian attacks.
The East SOS team steps in immediately after a house is damaged, fixing roofs and windows, preventing further damage from rain or snow. After an emergency response, the team returns in order to restore homes severely damaged by the Russian attacks.
It costs around $1,500 for East SOS to repair one house — thanks to your help, we have already raised funds to cover the repair of about three houses.
Thank you for your support. If you have any questions regarding the T-shirt, please feel free to contact us store@kyivindependent.com.
Best,
The Kyiv Independent team
Source: Kyiv Independent newsletter, 4 August 2025. I ordered one of these new t-shirts today (as a gift to myself for my upcoming birthday), and would urge you to buy one too. ||| TRR
News from Ukraine Bulletin No. 157 (3 August 2025)
In this week’s bulletin: Russia’s mistreatment and disappearance of prisoners; politically motivated persecution in the occupied territories.
News from the territories occupied by Russia:
Solidarity in grief: KVPU calls for support after deadly Russian attacks (KVPU August1st)
Melitopol journalist Iryna Levchenko abducted in 2023 ‘found’ imprisoned in Russian-occupied Donetsk (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group August 1st)
How the controversial Law No. 4555-IX undermines anti-corruption and reintegration — Alena Lunova on the JustTalk Context podcast (Zmina July 25th)
War-related news from Russia:
Recruiting for units with anti-authoritarians (Solidarity Collectives August 1st)
Denys Matsola: Updates from capitivity (Solidarity Collectives August 1st)
Ukrainian political prisoner vanishes after being abducted by FSB instead of released from Russian prison (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group July 31st)
Yulia Moskovskaya, Terrorist (Russian Reader, July 29th)
Do not legitimise the occupation: Mexican and Brazilian museums urged to refrain from collaborating with institutions in occupied territories (Crimea Human Rights Group July 30th)
Side event at the Helsinki+50 conference: “Crimea: 11 years of occupation – restoring justice, restoring OSCE commitments” (Crimea Human Rights Group July 30th)
Important Note: We will not be publishing a bulletin next week. The next bulletin, no. 158, will appear in two week’s time on 17 August 2025.
Twenty-two-year-old Yulia Moskovskaya (née Joban) was detained in Petersburg in mid-June. She is suspected of attempting to carry out a terrorist attack against a drone design company employee. She failed to plant an explosive device [sic], according to the press service of the Petersburg municipal courts.
Moskovskaya was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center. Investigators say that she “espouses a pro-Ukrainian ideology and is hostile to the current Russian government,” and claim that the young woman tried to “impact decision-making” by means of a terrorist attack. Criminal terrorist cases are opened every month, but usually they do not involve harm to specific people. In 2024, seventy-five people, including ten women, were convicted in Russia for carrying out terrorist attacks.
Bumaga has learned that Moskovskaya is not speaking with her family, and that a female friend of her has become her spokesperson. We chatted with this young woman about how the suspect behaved before her arrest, how she got into debt, and when she moved to Petersburg.
The detainee’s family: “Yulia changed her surname: she didn’t want anything to remind her of her kin”
Yulia and I are quite close friends. Her lawyer informed me of her arrest. I was shocked when he contacted me. At first I thought it was some kind of prank. I still can’t believe it has really happened.
I have known Yulia since 2017. We are from different cities and met online in a fan group for our favorite singer. At first, we were pen pals, but then we took our relationship offline and saw each other in person many times.
Yulia wasn’t in touch with many people, so she must have given the lawyer my contact info. She didn’t have many friends. Yulia didn’t speak with her relatives. She has a mother and a younger brother [who live in Moscow], as well as her grandparents, who live in some other city.
Yulia has always had bad relations with her mother. Her mother had a live-in boyfriend who always treated Yulia badly and beat her. Her mother took the boyfriend’s side and didn’t stand up for her daughter.
Yulia Moskovskaya. Source: social media
Yulia’s father died in 2020, and Yulia didn’t have a close relationship with him either. He drank heavily. He regularly brought his drinking buddies home and would get so drunk that he couldn’t stand up. Yulia often escaped to the neighbors when her father, out of his mind, tried to beat her. When we talked on the phone, I could hear her father getting into a fighting mood; he would be saying something to Yulia, and she would scream and run off. The neighbors would even call the police, but they could calm him down only for a while, and only once did take him to the slammer. Yulia essentially had no one to whom she could turn. In difficult situations, she would call the mental health hotline.
As an adult, Yulia changed her surname [from Joban to Moskovskaya]: according to her, she didn’t want anything to remind her of her kin. She sought treatment from psychologists. In the beginning, she had hope that they would help her, but then she just went to them to get things off her chest.
Debts and the move from Moscow to Petersburg: “Creative work was her only stable hobby”
Three times, Yulia enrolled in different [institutions of higher learning]. But she wouldn’t like something about them and would drop out. For a while, she was studying to be a designer. I don’t remember what her other two majors were.
A few years ago, Yulia moved for the first time from Moscow to Petersburg: she had always liked the city. You could say that she flitted between the two capitals.
Yulia originally had her own place to live. After his death, her father left his children an inheritance. Yulia and her brother sold her father’s flat in Moscow and split the money, so she was able to buy her own place in Petersburg. She lived there for a few months, but got bored and bought a flat in another neighborhood. After a while, she went back [to Moscow], buying a flat in the Moscow Region. Soon afterwards she sold her last home and went back to Petersburg, where she lived in a rented flat.
Yulia often changed jobs. The first place she worked was McDonald’s, before it left Russia. She stayed at that job for several years. After that she worked as a courier, then as a consultant in a store. Almost every month she would change jobs if she wasn’t satisfied with something. She didn’t regard any of her jobs as permanent. She said that she would soon leave [Russia] and that she only needed temporary, part-time work.
Yulia Moskovskaya. Source: social media
I know that Yulia had outstanding loans and that she didn’t have enough money to live on. She said that she had been sued by debt collectors. (In May 2025, a Moscow court ruled in favor of debt collectors trying to recover debts from Moskovskaya under a loan agreement — Bumaga.) She had spent the money on surgery [not covered under free public healthcare], and on braces.
Yeah, she’s not a very steady person. She gets bored with things quickly. Creative work was her only stable hobby. (On social media, Moskovskaya followed a lot of literature and Silver Age poetry groups — Bumaga.) She drew and wrote poems. Recently, she had been making her own jewelry and trying to sell it.
Moskovskaya’s views and her abandoned cat: “Before her arrest, she said she wanted to go to the war”
When the war broke out, Yulia immediately supported Ukraine. She said that she didn’t like the regime in Russia. She had a very firm stance. But I wouldn’t say she was always interested in politics. Before the war, I hadn’t noticed that she followed the news. I was surprised when she suddenly became politicized. Moreover, she has no Ukrainian relatives.
Before her arrest — since last summer — she had been saying that she wanted to go to the war. She mentioned that she had visited military enlistment offices and contacted people who could help her get to Ukraine, but everyone, according to her, had turned her down. I tried to warn her about the consequences: what if she died or something? She replied that she didn’t care, that this was her purpose in life and that such a death would be an act of heroism.
All last month, she kept saying that she would be leaving Petersburg for Ukraine and that some people would help her do this.
When Yulia was detained, I was allowed to speak with her for literally several seconds. The only thing she said was that I should go get her cat, which had been temporarily placed in a shelter.
Yulia Moskovskaya’s cat. Source: social media
I had imagined that Yulia would be hysterical, panicked. According to her lawyer, however, she is surprisingly calm.
The European University at St. Petersburg has purchased and dispatched a UAZ vehicle to the war in Ukraine “for transporting the wounded in the combat zone,” the university’s press service has reported.
It notes that the vehicle was sent to Military Unit No. 11076, which was formed from mobilized residents of St. Petersburg, the Leningrad, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk regions, and the Komi Republic.
The university’s press service posted a commendation to university rector Vadim Volkov from the unit’s commander, who praised Volkov for his “social activism” and support of the military “as it carries out missions in the special military operation zone in Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, the Zaporizhzhia region, and the Kherson region.”
“Military Unit No. 11076 expresses gratitude to the autonomous noncommercial higher education organization ‘European University at St. Petersburg’ in the person of Vadim Viktorovich Volkov for social activism and support rendered to the soldiers of our unit as they carry out missions in the special military operation zone in Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, Zaporizhzhia Region, and Kherson Region. Victory will be ours! Military Unit No. 11076’s commander, Colonel V. Zyatchin, May 2025.”
The European University is a private university founded in St. Petersburg in 1994. The university was funded by grants from American and European NGOs. In 2016, the university was stripped of its accreditation for a year after an audit undertaken by the Prosecutor’s Office and Rosobrnadzor [the Russian federal education watchdog], after which such audits became routine.
In 2023, the Russian authorities audited the European University “for extremism,” and the university was also fined over books in its library published by “undesirable” organizations. Rector Volkov reported in an interview with RBC on June 24 that the prosecutor’s office had audited ninety-eight programs at the university and twelve master’s theses, after which the university had amended the programs and made changes to its academic advising process based on the recommendations of the authorities.
In March 2024, the European University fired Ivan Kurilla, an Americanist who taught in its political science and sociology departments. Kurilla opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine and was among the signatories of an open letter against the war by Russian academics and science journalists.
Where are you from? And where are you now? Doing what?
I am from Aarhus, Denmark, and have lived in Kyiv for almost 20 years. I own a software company, Livatek, which works with clients in Northern Europe.
As a foreigner working and living in Ukraine for many years, what is the best and the worst thing about Ukraine?
The worst thing about Ukraine is that nothing is possible. The best about Ukraine is that everything in the end is possible.
How has the war changed your life? Has the war changed you personally?
With the start of the war, my brother Morten and I reactivated a Danish initiative called “Biler til Ukraine” – “Cars for Ukraine”—which had already helped a Ukrainian NGO bring SUVs to the front for medical evacuation during the war in Donbas. Within a week of the full-scale invasion in 2022, we were back in Ukraine with the first three cars.
Since then, we have scaled up tremendously and delivered more than 400 vehicles to the Ukrainian military for logistics and tactical purposes, including 75 buses for personnel transports. These days, we are managing more than one car per day. All in all, as a rough estimate, the value of these cars is somewhere close to $2 million. The money comes from absolutely average, normal Danes and private companies. I am often surprised by people’s generosity. They often donate their car and even drive it with us to Ukraine!
Growing a business has become more difficult with the war. With “Cars for Ukraine,” I have found another outlet for my professional energy to defend Ukraine. It has allowed me to work with some unique people in Denmark and Ukraine. Their strength and dedication inspire me.
What has surprised you most about Ukrainians these past couple of years? Good or bad?
I was not surprised to see the tenacity of the Ukrainians as they resisted Russia’s efforts to eradicate their culture. On the negative side—and here I am probably a bit naïve—I can still be disappointed by corruption. I know it is good news that corruption and the people who commit it are discovered and prosecuted, but I would prefer things to be nipped in the bud instead of cracked down afterward.
What are your plans?
I think I am like most Ukrainians in that “the future” does not exist anymore. We have a war to fight and win—after that, there is a future—and it is bright and open.
How do you see the war ending and Ukraine returning to a normal life?
Forces at play now do not point to a happy-end scenario for Ukraine. The dynamics need to change. Specifically, more political leaders of the West must do “a Macron” — to understand that Ukraine is fighting for every country of the liberal, Western world. (French President Emmanuel Macron underwent a radical change in his view on Russia’s war from dovish to hawkish and insisting on Russia’s defeat.) Because, honestly, for Ukraine to have a normal future, Russia not only needs to be beaten back to within its borders. It needs such an educational wacking that it will give up on its aggressive ways – and never again even consider attacking Ukraine or other states.
Tell us one thing people abroad do not know about Ukraine but they really should.
For too many centuries, Russian culture has defined itself as being unique, and outside rules and measures apply only to other countries. The mere existence of an independent Ukraine is a challenge to that myth. And, when Russia is attacking its neighbor, it is fighting its own demons and inferiority complexes.
You can learn more about the work of “Cars for Ukraine” (in Danish “Biler til Ukraine”) here.
