Category: war and peace

Daily Beasts


“Let’s stand up for the truth.” A military recruiting billboard photographed earlier this summer in Kaluga, promising five million rubles (approx. 56,000 euros) for one year of “contract” (voluntary) military service, a one-time signing bonus of two and a half million rubles, and a monthly salary of 210,000 rubles for service in the “Special Military Operation zone.” Photo: Alexander Gronsky (Facebook). Thanks to Sergei Medvedev for the heads-up.

An American father who moved to Russia to avoid LGBTQ+ “indoctrination” for his kids is being sent to the front line in Ukraine, despite being assured he would serve in a non-combat role.

Derek Huffman, 46, feels he is being “thrown to the wolves” after being told that his job in the military would be as a correspondent or as a welder, his wife, DeAnna, said in a recorded plea for prayers, which has since been removed from her YouTube page.

Huffman has no prior military experience, DeAnna said, adding that his limited training was conducted in Russian. She suggested the language barrier has made her husband particularly unprepared for the horrors of combat.

“Unfortunately, when you’re taught in a different language, and you don’t understand the language, how are you really getting taught?” she pondered. “You’re not. So, unfortunately, he feels like he’s being thrown to the wolves right now, and he’s kind of having to lean on faith, and that’s what we’re all doing.”

Huffman joined the military in the hope of gaining Russian citizenship for his family through an expedited process. He also felt such service would allow him to “earn” the respect of his new countrymen, which is something he once said migrants in the United States refuse to do.

“The point of this act for me is to earn a place here in Russia,” he told Russian state media last month. “If I risk myself for our new country, no one will say that I am not a part of it. Unlike migrants in America who come there just like that, do not assimilate, and at the same time want free handouts.”

Undocumented migrants cannot join the U.S. military during peacetime. A program launched by former President George W. Bush allowed such immigrants to seek citizenship by serving in the military, but that pathway was shuttered during President Donald Trump’s first term.

DeAnna, 42, suggested her husband had been misled during the military recruiting process. She added that, after a month of service, her family had yet to receive any pay.

“When he signed up and had all of that done, he was told he would not be training for two weeks and going straight to the front lines,” she said. “But it seems as though he is getting one more week of training, closer to the front lines, and then they are going to put him on the front lines.”

Huffman moved his family to a village outside Moscow in spring. It was launched by American blogger Tim Kirby—who has lived in Russia for two decades—in 2023 to attract Americans seeking to escape the “liberal gender norm.” That project has been a flop, with United24Media reporting that only two families, including the Huffmans, have moved in.

Huffman, a native Texan, brought his wife, three daughters, and their family Husky, “Baby,” with him to Russia. The couple also have three sons from prior marriages who opted to remain in the United States.

Huffman’s admiration for Russia runs deep. The Russian state-operated news agency RIA Novosti reported last month that the couple honeymooned in Moscow.

“The city charmed us with its rich history, vibrant culture, and welcoming atmosphere,” DeAnna told the outlet. “Before that, we figured out whether moving to Russia would fit our family’s needs and values. However, it wasn’t until we saw Moscow in person that we truly felt a connection.”

DeAnna said that she was not surprised that her husband wanted to volunteer for the Russian military, even as it is in its third year of a bloody war with Ukraine. Ukrainian officials estimated this week that more than 1 million Russian soldiers have died in the conflict, which continues to rage on despite President Trump’s demands for peace.

”It didn’t come as a surprise to me,” she said of his joining the military. “He always spoke so highly of the country, its president, and its people, and he has a strong passion for doing the right thing.”

Source: Josh Fiallo, “Anti-Woke Dad Who Fled With Family to Russia Sent to War Zone,” Daily Beast, 20 July 2025

“I got upset when the doctor told me I had diabetes,” said Yurii. “Because uneaten sweets are waiting for me at home, and we’ve already bought lemonade for New Year’s.”

Yurii is 16 years old, and every day he starts with a long-acting insulin injection. Later throughout the day, ten minutes before each meal, he measures his blood sugar levels, calculates the amount of carbohydrates he will get from food, and injects the appropriate dose of insulin.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that changes your life forever and can be triggered by infections or, as it is in Yurii’s case, by severe stress – especially after what happened to his brother.

Chronic stress has been rising among Ukrainians since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, as Moscow continues to shell the country daily. The continuous sleepless nights and the fear of being hit by a drone or missile are affecting both the mental and physical health of the people in Ukraine.

In June 2025, Russians increased the number of drones and missiles launched at Ukraine increased by 60 percent, according to Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In addition, June saw the highest number of civilian deaths since April 2022 as a result of military actions: 232 people.

The invisible effects are compounding: Ukrainian children have begun to experience health conditions that could affect the rest of their lives.

Statistics show a rise in the number of patients with type 1 diabetes in the frontline Kharkiv region, and the number of people diagnosed with diabetes in general is also on the rise across the country.

Before the invasion, Yurii lived with his parents in the central Ukrainian city of Cherkasy. They tried to get out of town every weekend — whether that meant going fishing or mushroom-picking in the forest.

“Children need to breathe fresh air,” Olena, Yurii’s mother, told The Counteroffensive with a nostalgic smile on her face.

She begins the conversation by saying, “I am the mother of two wonderful sons.”

Yurii has a brother, Volodymyr, also known as Vova, who is 10 years older and who looked after Yurii from an early age.

“We walked all over Cherkasy together, went to parks, squares, the Dnipro River, and he treated me to McDonald’s. Vova [a nickname for Volodymyr] always told me, ‘When you grow up, we’ll go out with girls together. ’ And Vova loved everything related to the army,” said Yurii.

When Olena talks about her eldest son, her voice begins to tremble.

Vova died on May 3, 2022, while defending Mariupol at Azovstal, a strategic steel factory that was besieged by Russian forces for almost three months, a famous last stand.

He died after his car rolled onto an enemy mine.

The family only learned about his death six months later.

“One day, Vova’s commander called me, introduced himself, and asked how I was doing. I replied, ‘Do you know where my son is? Wasn’t he in captivity with you?’ He told me that Vova had died on May 3 and asked, ‘Didn’t you know?’ It felt like half my heart had been cut out of my chest at that moment,” remembered Olena.

Volodymyr was only buried in February 2023. After the tragedy, Olena began to have health problems: she constantly felt weak, and eventually doctors had to remove her thyroid gland so that she could get better.

In the fall of 2023, months after Volodymyr’s funeral, the family went to the Carpathians for a break. During the trip, Olena noticed that Yurii, then 14 years old, was drinking more water than usual and had lost a significant amount of weight. Despite being naturally thin and 1.74 meters tall (5 feet 9 inches), he weighed just 45 kilograms (99.2 pounds).

“Yurii took his brother’s death very hard. It wasn’t that he cried a lot, but as if something inside him had burned out,” said Olena.

Yurii and Olena returned to Cherkasy and went to see the doctors. While Olena had developed a problem with her thyroid, everything seemed normal in Yurii.

But when the doctor routinely tested Yurii’s blood sugar levels, they found he had developed type 1 diabetes.

“It felt like I was beaten to death with feet, after all the horror we had already gone through,” said Olena.

Many autoimmune diseases of the endocrine system occur in childhood or young adulthood, as these are periods of active growth and hormonal changes, said Natalia Pogadaeva, head of the endocrinology department at Okhmatdyt, Ukraine’s largest pediatric hospital, which was hit by a missile strike last year.

Genetics plays a significant role in the onset of diabetes, as in other autoimmune diseases. However, the trigger for their onset is usually stress, she added. The following six months after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the number of patients with diabetes and other immune diseases surged, she added.

Due to full-scale Russian invasion and the displacement of the Ukrainian population both within Ukraine and abroad, it is very difficult to determine the actual extent of the increase in diabetes, Pogadayeva says.

“Children who lived in Kyiv could have gone abroad and realized they were sick, or vice versa: a child moved from Kherson to Kyiv and is being treated in Kyiv, not where they lived,” she added.

Still, some statistics hint at the broader toll. For example, 398 patients with type 1 diabetes under the age of 18 were registered in the first 9 months of 2023 in the Kharkiv region, a frontline region in the northeast of Ukraine. During the same period in 2024, the number had already increased to 501 patients – a more than 25 percent increase.

According to the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, 531,200 people were diagnosed with different types of diabetes in 2023, the first full year of the full-scale invasion. In 2022, the number was 489,934 – an 8 percent increase.

Many of the children who went to Okhmatdyt to get treated had either survived Russia’s occupation, had experienced the aggression firsthand, or had evacuated from Mariupol or Bakhmut, Pogadaeva said.

“At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, among other things, logistics were also greatly changed,” said Pogadaeva, the head of the endocrinology department at Okhmatdyt.

Children who already had diabetes had a hard time accessing insulin and the supplies needed to measure their blood sugar. As a result, they had to be hospitalized.

Diabetes can have severe complications if not taken care of properly. Uncontrolled blood sugar can damage blood vessels, which are present in every organ of the body. If affected, the kidneys, the limbs, and the eyes are the first to suffer. In the long run, it can lead to kidney failure, loss of sensitivity, loss of vision, and even to the amputation of limbs.

Pogadaeva explains that our bodies have a stress hormone called cortisol, which can be released during periods of prolonged stress, such as experiencing daily shelling, night-time air raid alarms, and lack of sleep — all situations Ukrainian children have been experiencing for the past three years.

The release of cortisol leads to uncontrolled fluctuations in blood sugar levels, she added.

Yurii will start college this year. Olena fears that having to prepare for exams will add to the stress of the war. She said that while at her house, they have adapted to a diet appropriate for the disease.

Yet Yurii’s blood sugar levels are still fluctuating.

They relocated to a village near the regional centre to be closer to nature. There, Yurii has his workshop and chickens, for which he recently built a drinking trough.

The family fondly remembers his older brother, Volodymyr, who was posthumously awarded the Order for Courage, a state award given by the President of Ukraine for heroism shown in emergencies.

“It’s hard to say that anything in our lives has changed significantly because of the illness. Now it’s just a way of our life.

My husband is only sometimes dissatisfied, saying, ‘I don’t want porridge, I don’t want salads. When will we have varenyky [Ukrainian dumplings]?’ But that’s it, if the child can’t have it, then no one can,” Olena said.

Source: Tanya Novakivska, “Surge of childhood diabetes due to wartime stress,” The Counteroffensive, 20 July 2025

A BBC Russian investigation can reveal that at least 240 Russian eighteen-year-olds have been killed fighting in Ukraine in the past two years. Many joined up straight from school taking advantage of new rules allowing them to bypass military service and go straight into the regular army as contract soldiers. Some of those on our list were killed within weeks. BBC Russian has been speaking to bereaved families to find out why school leavers whose lives are only just beginning, are signing up to die in Putin’s brutal war.

On 7 May 2025, pupils at School No. 110 in Chelyabinsk took part in a ceremony to mark the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

Dressed in tunics and khaki-coloured shorts, the older children paraded into the school hall waving Russian and Soviet flags. The younger ones followed behind – little girls in knee-high socks and boys in smart shirts. The children were also carrying pictures of former pupils who had gone on to fight in the full-scale war in Ukraine.

One of the pictures was of Aleskandr Petlinsky who joined up two weeks after his eighteenth birthday, and was killed just twenty days later. His mother Elena, and his aunt, Ekaterina stood side by side in the hall, tearfully watching the ceremony.

After a minute’s silence to honour the dead, Ekaterina took to the stage to speak about her nephew.

Sasha, as she called him was a determined and passionate boy who dreamed of a career in medicine and had got a place at the Chelyabinsk Medical College.

“But Sasha had another dream,” Ekaterina added after a pause. “When the special military operation began, Sasha was fifteen. And he dreamed of going to the front.”

She was referring to the full-scale war in Ukraine, which Russia launched in February 2022.

Sasha Petlinksy is one of at least 240 eighteen-year olds killed in Ukraine over the past two years, according to open source information compiled and confirmed by BBC Russian.

How did someone so young and barely out of school end up dead on the frontline, and what does his story tell us about the choices facing young people in Russia today?

Red lines and rule changes

Since the first months of the war in Ukraine, the involvement of very young people in combat has been a subject of debate in Russia.

At first, the focus was on army conscripts.

Vladimir Putin has pledged several times that no young men called up to do their obligatory military service at the age of eighteen would be sent to fight in Ukraine. However, in March 2022, just four days after Putin promised no conscripts were involved in the ‘special military operation’ the Defence Ministry admitted that some had indeed been sent into the combat zone.

The BBC has confirmed the names of at least 81 conscripts killed in Ukraine during the first year of the full-scale war. The Ukrainian authorities claim to have captured “hundreds” more.

The army is no longer sending conscripts to fight in Ukraine, but there are other ways that very young people are being drawn into the conflict.

When Ukrainian troops occupied parts of Russia’s Kursk Region in August 2024, conscripts guarding the border were among the first to come under fire.

But according to data gathered by the BBC the way most eighteen-year-olds end up on the battlefield is by signing up as contract soldiers.

In the spring of 2022, the Russian authorities changed the law in order to actively encourage men of fighting age to join up. And since 2023 regional authorities have been offering big cash payments to new recruits.

Initially young men who wanted to take advantage of the new rules had to have at least three months’ conscript service under their belts. However, in April 2023 this restriction was quietly dropped, despite protests from some MPs, and now any young man who has reached the age of eighteen and finished school can sign up to join the army.

MP Nina Ostanina, who is head of the Duma Committee on Family, Women, and Children, warned that the changes would have dire consequences for vulnerable school leavers.

“Children just out of the classroom who want to earn money today by signing a contract will simply be unprotected,” she said.

“Contract service — a worthy future”

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Russian teachers have been required by law to hold classes dedicated to the ‘special military operation’. And as the war has ground on, it’s become normal for soldiers returning from the front to visit schools and talk about their experiences.

Children are taught how to make camouflage nets and trench candles, and even nursery school pupils are encouraged to send letters and drawings to soldiers on the frontline.

Since eighteen-year olds were allowed to sign contracts to join the army, many Russian independent media outlets have reported that schools are increasing efforts to promote contract service.

There are many examples from across the country.

In Perm, schoolchildren were given leaflets with a photo of a middle-aged man in military uniform hugging his wife and young son, and the slogan: “Contract service — a worthy future!”

In the Khanty-Mansisk Autonomous Region, posters appeared on school noticeboards urging everyone to “Stand shoulder to shoulder for the Motherland”.

In Krasnoyarsk a poster with the slogan “Call now” was put up on a classroom board.

At the start of the new school year on 1 September 2024, a new subject was brought into the curriculum.

In a throwback to the Soviet era, senior students are once again being taught how to use Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades as part of a course called “The Basics of Safety and Homeland Defence”.

In many regions, military recruiters now attend careers lessons in schools and technical colleges, telling young people how to sign up as contract soldiers after they graduate.

In April 2024, Konstantin Dizendorf, head of the Taseyevsky District in the Krasnoyarsk Region, visited a local technical college to talk to the children about their futures. He singled out one particular student for praise. Eighteen-year-old Aleksandr Vinshu had already announced that he wanted to join the army. Vinshu was held up as local hero and allowed to take his final exams early in order to sign up as soon as possible. Seven months later in November 2024 news came that Vinshu had been killed.

Counting Russia’s young war dead

As part of our ongoing project using open sources to count Russia’s war dead, BBC Russian has looked at casualty figures from April 2023, when the law changed allowing school leavers to skip conscription and sign up to join the army.

We have identified and confirmed the names of 240 eighteen-year-old contract soldiers killed in Ukraine between April 2023 and May 2025.

All were enlisted as contract servicemen and judging from published obituaries, most joined the armed forces voluntarily. However, twenty-one were very recent school leavers who signed contracts while they were doing their military service. Families of some of these young men allege they were pressured to join up by senior officers.

Our data shows that the regions with the highest number of deaths among eighteen-year-olds are all in Siberia or the Russian Far East: We confirmed eleven deaths in Novosibirsk Region, another eleven in Zabaykalsky Region, and ten more in the Altai and Primorsky regions, respectively.

The BBC’s figures are based on open-source information and because not every death is publicly reported, the real losses among eighteen-year-old contract soldiers are likely to be higher.

However, it’s important to note that these losses, devastating as they are for the families concerned, are still dwarfed by the casualty figures for older men signing contracts to join the army.

From the open source data gathered by the BBC since the start of the full-scale invasion we have identified the names of 486 individuals aged 18–20 years who have been killed in Ukraine fighting as contract soldiers. This compares to 3,703 deaths of men aged 48–50.

While older soldiers may face higher fatality rates due to being in poorer physical shape, the stark imbalance likely also reflects a lower willingness among younger men to enlist, even when substantial financial incentives are offered.

This aligns with аn opinion poll conducted by the independent Levada Centre in May 2025, which showed thirty-five per cent of 18–24 year olds supported the war in Ukraine, compared to forty-two per cent of 40–54 year olds, and fifty-four per cent of those aged over fifty-five.

Taken together, these figures suggest that as a whole younger Russians are more reluctant to participate in the conflict and less ideologically aligned with its objectives. However, as the young men featured in this story show, some are still either susceptible to propaganda narratives or to pressure from the authorities.

Shining eyes

According to his friends, Aleksandr Petlinsky was a gentle young man who liked to help others. He loved drawing and was always ready to do sketches of favourite cartoon characters for his friends. He was also an active member of a local youth organisation, collecting books for local libraries, going on visits to local museums, and organising a meeting with a nurse who had worked on the frontline in Ukraine.

Everyone we spoke to told us Aleksandr dreamed of becoming a doctor, but no-one seemed to know why he also dreamed of joining the army and going to fight in Ukraine.

Was his romanticizing of the war a result of the patriotic education he’d been subjected to at school? Did he really understand that he would be involved in killing soldiers of a neighbouring country? Had he given any serious thought to all the peaceful civilian lives being destroyed in the war?

On 31 January 2025, Aleksandr turned eighteen. The first thing he did was to apply to take a year out of college so that he could sign a contract with the Defence Ministry.

“When he submitted the request I asked him what his mother would say,” the college secretary later told local journalists. “He said – what’s it got to do with my mum? It’s my choice. His eyes were shining.”

Just three weeks later Aleksandr had already signed a contract and joined his training unit. Just before he set off, he met up with his friend Anastasia.

The two former classmates sat on a bench talking about drawings. Aleksandr drew a torch with a flame on Anastasia’s wrist as a farewell gift.

It was the last time she would ever see him.

Handcuffed and beaten

The story of how eighteen-year-old Vitaly Ivanov from Irkutsk region in Siberia ended up in the army could not have been more different.

He was born and raised in Tayturka, a small working-class settlement two hours from Irkutsk, with a population of just 5,000 people.

In high school, he and his friend Misha, had worked part-time at a local boiler house and helped dig potatoes in gardens. In the summer, he earned money by taking inflatable bouncy castles round neighbouring villages.

During that time, he met a young woman who we’ll call Alina. They began dating, and Vitaly often visited her. He helped her too—digging potatoes at her dacha and fixing things around the house.

“He used to tell me that I was under his wing, under his protection,” Alina says. But sometimes, when they argued, Vitaly would threaten to leave and sign up for the army. “It was like, I’ll go and I’ll be fine,” Alina remembers.

When he turned sixteen, Vasily left school and got a place as a trainee mechanic in a local college. But he soon dropped out. When he turned eighteen he planned to do his compulsory military service and then go to Kazan to work shifts road building, his friend Misha told the BBC.

But in November 2024 everything changed. There was a robbery at a local shop and when the police looked at the CCTV they decided that one of the perpetrators looked like Vitaly.

Vitaly’s mother Anna told the BBC he was known to the police because the previous year he had been arrested after getting into a fight with someone she says was a local drug dealer. He was charged and sentenced to community service.

Vitaly was summoned to the police station and held there for several hours. When he was finally released he sent his girlfriend a Telegram video message, which she shared with the BBC. In it, Vitaly is crying as tells his girlfriend he was handcuffed and beaten up by the police. “Those devils were so horrible,” he says between sobs. “I was just so fucking shocked.”

Vitaly told his mother and his girlfriend that the police wanted him to confess to the robbery. His mother thinks it was the police who told him to sign a contract to join the army. “It’s understandable, he was scared, he was just eighteen,” she says. “They handcuffed him and beat him for two hours.”

Straight out of the police station Vitaly met Misha and told him he had decided to sign up to join the army. Misha was shocked: “I said, what do you want to do that for?” Come to Kazan with me to do the road building, You’ll be much better off.”

Misha told the BBC another friend also had tried to dissuade him but Vitaly deleted all their messages and cut off contact.

The day before leaving home, Vitaly called his mother, who had left for work.

“Mum, I’m leaving soon.”

“For Kazan? Okay, off you go.”

“No Mum you don’t get it. I’m going to the special military operation.”

Anna says she “cried all night”. “He was so secretive about it all. He didn’t tell me anything. Never complained. And did everything behind my back,” she says.

Alina remembers that during their last meeting Vitaly seemed completely calm. He bid her a restrained goodbye to her and told her not to cry. Then he calmly went home, packed his things, and left for the train station.

On the advice of a friend who had already been to the front, he decided to sign up in Samara Region instead of Irkutsk.

In the autumn of 2024, Samara Region that was offering some of the highest sign-up bonus payments in the country. Vitaly would have received about four million roubles in regional and federal bonus payments — that’s the equivalent of around fifty thousand US dollars, an almost imaginable sum for an eighteen-year-old village boy with little education and even less prospects.

A first and last mission

By their very different routes, and both just turned eighteen, Vitaly and Aleksandr arrived at the front at about the same time — in February 2025.

Alina recalls that while Vitaly was still in training, they stayed in constant contact. “He wrote that he regretted it. That he was having trouble sleeping,” she says.

“Mum, I’ve realized this is no joke,” his mother Anna remembers him telling her. After just two weeks training, Vitaly was assigned to a role in military reconnaissance.

“Son, did you learn anything in training?” Alina asked him.

The answer was not reassuring.

“Mum, to become a real recon soldier, you have to study for three years!” he replied. “I’ve only learned just a little bit.”

The last time Anna heard from Vitaly was on 5 February. He wrote that he was being sent on a combat mission.

“It was his first and last mission,” Anna says.

On 4 March, officials from the military enlistment office called Anna and told her that her son had been killed in action on 11 February 2025. He had served just one week at the frontline.

His body was brought back to Tayturka in a zinc coffin. Several dozen people came to pay their respects and then the coffin was taken to the local cemetery.

Officials from the city administration gave speeches at the funeral.

“They said he gave his life for our homeland, that he was brave and went off to fight. The usual stuff,” says Misha. “But everyone was asking why he did it, and saying it was pointless to go to war at such a young age. Many people still couldn’t believe it – including me.”

Vitaly’s family and friends did not comment on the fact that his participation in the war could have led to the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers or civilians.

Deeply upset

A month after Vitaly’s death, on 9 March, Aleksandr Petlinsky was also killed.

His friends from the local youth movement posted a memorial message online noting that he had “died in the line of military duty during the Special Military Operation”.

“How could he have even been there if he had only just turned eighteen a month before???” someone wrote in the comments underneath.

Aleksandr’s funeral took place in the memorial hall of the Russian Railways hospital in Chelyabinsk. “Everyone cried a lot,” his aunt told the school event. “You could hear the sobbing in the room.”

Officials gave speeches, but Aleksandr’s friends “preferred to stay silent” as one of them told the BBC.

Anastasia says they were all deeply upset by the fact that he had lived less than two months after turning eighteen and had spent just a couple of weeks at war before being killed.

Aleksandr’s mother, Elena, told the BBC: “As a citizen of the Russian Federation, I am proud of my son. But as a mother — I can’t cope with this loss.” She declined to say more.

The BBC was only able to reach Vitaly’s mother, Anna, on the second or third attempt — in the first minutes of the call, she was sobbing and unable to speak. She said keeps replaying her last goodbye with her son in her mind. “It still feels like it happened yesterday.”

Anastasia, Aleksandr’s friend, says that for her, the fact that eighteen-year-olds are signing contracts to join the army is now a very “painful subject”.

“They’re young and naïve, and there’s so much they don’t understand,” she says. “They just don’t grasp the full responsibility of what they’re doing.”

Vitaly’s friend Misha thinks the same. He spoke to the BBC from Kazan where he’s now working on the road-building project he and Vitaly were planning to do together. Asked whether he might decide to sign a contract to join up himself he said: “I don’t even want to think about it.”

“No one’s interested and no one cares”

Although the deaths of Aleksandr and Vitaly have deeply affected their friends and family, the fact that eighteen-year-olds are signing up and getting killed in Ukraine does not so far seem to have had wider resonance in Russian society.

The family of another very young man who joined up from school and was killed very soon after did try to campaign to stop high school graduates being sent to the frontline.

Daniil Chistyakov from Smolensk, was less than two months past his eighteenth birthday when he was killed. Like Aleksandr and Vitaly he had just arrived at the front. His family only found out he was joining the army on the day he signed up.

“I wrote to many agencies, trying to reach someone, to get the law repealed that allows eighteen-year-olds to sign contracts,” one of his relatives told the BBC. “But no one was interested or cared.”

Vitaly’s mother Anna has tried and failed to get the authorities to investigate the police officers who detained her son and who she believes are responsible for his sudden decision to sign up.

In her efforts to “get justice”, she also wrote a long letter about her son’s case to the state TV Channel One talk show Men and Women in Moscow. The letter was sent by recorded mail but no-one from the show ever came to pick it up from the post office.

Source: Anastasia Platonova and Olga Ivshina, “From the classroom to the frontline — the 18-year-old Russians fighting and dying in Ukraine,” BBC News Russian, 17 July 2025. I have lightly copy-edited the original text to make it more readable. ||| TRR

“A volunteer legal observer says she was left bruised after being detained by ICE,” KPBS Public Media

Earlier this week—in a story that reads as a perfect encapsulation of abuses by Trump’s immigration enforcement—masked ICE agents roughed up and detained a 71-year-old U.S. citizen volunteering as a legal observer to monitor them at a federal courthouse in San Diego.

Grandmother Barbara Stone says she was documenting the detention of asylum-seekers with the group “Detention Resistance” at San Diego’s immigration court when she was baselessly accused of pushing an officer. Multiple masked agents then pursued Stone, grabbed and handcuffed her (leaving bruises), confiscated her phone and purse, and detained her for over eight hours, she says.

Once Stone was released, ICE returned her bag but kept possession of her phone. Why? Stone says an ICE agent compared the situation to “a drug bust where they keep a drug dealer’s phone because I had used it in the crime.”

But the only “crime” of which Stone says she’s guilty is documenting immigration enforcement. If this is true, the episode would track with other apparent attempts by ICE agents to avoid accountability of late, for instance, by wearing masks so they can conduct raids and arrests anonymously.

In a statement to a local outlet, ICE accused Stone of assaulting an officer, citing “a 700% increase in assaults” against its agents over the last year (a statistic the agency uses to justify agents concealing their identities, as well).

That 700 percent increase, it should be noted, is a somewhat misleading way to say there have been 79 alleged assaults against ICE agents this year, compared to 10 in the same timeframe last year. Meanwhile, ICE interactions have become dramatically more frequent and aggressive.

ICE’s numbers unfortunately deserve further scrutiny, as the agency has been defining “assault” quite loosely. In another high-profile arrest of a U.S. citizen, for example, ICE last month detained New York City Comptroller Brad Lander for assault—an accusation not unlike when a schoolyard bully accuses his victim of getting in the way of his fist, as Washington Post columnist Philip Bump put it.

One might add, to this list of questionable ICE allegations, its new claims about Stone.

Source: Robert McCoy, “Why Did ICE Agents Arrest and Detain a 71-Year-Old U.S. Citizen?” The New Republic, 11 July 2025. Thanks to Tom Digby for the heads-up.

Living Their Best Lives

Sergei Podgorkov, A Cafe on Vasillievsky Island (St. Petersburg). Source: Facebook

[…]

Living their best life

And here, the reader will stop for a second and most likely ask the question — but what about Russians, don’t they want the war to stop?

And the answer is most likely no.

Recently, I fell into a rabbit hole, watching videos posted by ordinary Russians on Instagram. It all started when on Twitter (X), people began discussing a post by a Russian blogger who wrote that Moscow is beautiful, sprinkling it with hate speech.

The blogger, who clearly was working with the local government to promote Moscow, basically said that the Russian capital is the best city in the world because it’s clean, everyone is happy, and there are no homeless people and “LGBTQ+ propaganda.”

Displaying a rainbow flag is a criminal offense in Russia.

I went to his page and looked at the videos he was posting. And then some more videos from people living in Moscow.

For a person living in Kyiv, bombarded on a nearly daily basis, this was a very interesting dive. Watching those videos, you would never think that their country is at war.

Moscow has experienced a few waves of transformation since 2022.

Before the start of the all-out war, Moscow was thought to be the most liberal Russian city. The Russian capital harbored people with higher education and better income. Opposition activists were living their lives in Moscow cafes. Late opposition leader Alexei Navalny even once ran in the city’s mayoral election and gained a substantial number of votes.

As soon as the all-out war started, there were even some protests in Moscow, and some members of the local art and culture scene, those who traveled abroad and saw the world, were not supportive of their country’s slide into totalitarianism.

Still, Moscow was far away from the war. Cafes were still packed and people’s day to day, if they weren’t in active opposition, only changed insignificantly.

In late 2022, this changed. When Russia faced one military defeat after another, the local government was instructed to make the war felt in Moscow.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, who at first deliberately distanced himself from the war effort, was now traveling to the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, and banners depicting Russian soldiers appeared on the city’s streets.

The 2022 Russian forced mobilization campaign saw police grab people from Moscow’s streets and send them to fight in Ukraine.

Hundreds of thousands of Russians, most of them from major cities such as Moscow, left the country. Some of them for good.

Soon after that, Moscow changed once again. Since late 2023, Russia has been on the offensive. Those who were against the war or actively opposed it are no longer in the country. The Kremlin also has enough troops and hardware to continue the fight indefinitely. It doesn’t need to rely on forced mobilization — instead, it uses high wages to lure volunteers.

It doesn’t need to shove the war in the face of Moscow residents, especially those who do not care. The government is now deliberately shielding the residents of its most important metropolis from the hardships that a war can bring.

Bars, cafes, concerts, new metro stations, international football stars visiting the city, and playing friendlies with the local players who are banned from international competitions. People are living their best lives, while their compatriots, friends or even relatives are murdering civilians in Ukraine.

Watching the videos from 2025 Moscow is a surreal experience. I can’t stop thinking that it must be similar to what life was like in Berlin in 1941 for those who didn’t care about the atrocities their country was committing.

Source: Oleksiy Sorokin, WTF is wrong with Russia? newsletter (Kyiv Independent), 17 July 2025. This post is dedicated to Nan Kim, who has supported this website with a monthly donation for the last two years. I would like to apologize to her for posting so infrequently in the past few months. The work-at-home jobs which over the last eighteen years also afforded me the time and space to produce this website have dried up or disappeared altogether (along with all other donations to this website), so I have had to take work that keeps me away from home most of the day nearly every day. This extreme slowdown in producing this blog is not necessarily a bad thing for me personally. Among other things, it keeps me from asking the question Oleksiy Sorokin asks at the top of this entry: don’t Russians want the war to stop? \\\ TRR

All of Ukraine Belongs to Ukraine

Prescott Avenue, Monterey, California, 23 June 2025. Photo by the Russian Reader

In this week’s bulletin: Risks in Ukraine’s citizenship law/ Trade union house grab/ Life under occupation/ Stop Seapeak campaign/ War & dependent state formation in Ukraine/ More evidence of Russia’s indoctrination of small children/ Massive increase in Russian attacks on civilians

News from the territories occupied by Russia:  

Political prisoner Rustam Sheikhaliev turns 46, his sixth birthday behind bars (Crimea Platform, 22 June)

Banned from home for 40 years: deportations are Russia’s latest move to ‘cleanse’ Ukraine (The Guardian, June 21st)

7-year-olds in occupied Ukraine taught how to become part of Russia’s war machine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 20th)

Crimean sentenced to 17 years ‘for planning to blow up a Russian military helicopter’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 20th)

Russian threat to co-founder of Crimea Human Rights Group (Crimea Human Rights Group, 19 June)

Russian court ignores abduction and torture, increasing huge sentence against Ukrainian for trying to rescue his mother (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 19th)

Russia sentences 19-year-old Ukrainian to 8 years for ‘spying for Ukraine’ as a young boy  (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 19th)

New legislation formalizes Russia’s brutal isolation of Crimean Tatar and other Ukrainian political prisoners (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 17th)

How Putin rules in occupied Ukraine (Workers Liberty, June 16th)

Life Under Occupation (Alter Pravo, May 2025)

Life Under Occupation (Alter Pravo, April 2025)

News from the front:

Sumy defences stabilised: weekly war report (The Insider, 21 June)

News from Ukraine:

Speeches in the Verkhovna Rada: Expropriation of the trade union house (European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine, 20 June)

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko: The President’s Rival (Meduza, 17 June)

UN monitors report massive increase in Russian attacks on civilians throughout Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 16th)

Over 1,900 tonnes of harmful substances released into air over Kyiv and oblast in two days of Russian attacks (Ukrainska Pravda, June 16th)

Ukraine bracing for ‘painful’ reduction in US military aid after Hegseth announces cuts (Kyiv Independent, June 11th)

War-related news from Russia:

St Petersburg Economic Forum: an economic reality check (Meduza, 20 June)

Russian anti-war volunteer sentenced to 22 years (Novaya Gazeta Europe, 20 June)

How a network for selling sex with teenagers to the rich and powerful was built in Russia (iStories, 19 June)

Court claims show Russian casualties: The wave of the missing (Mediazona, 5 June) 

Analysis and comment:

Migration Policy of Ukraine: Legal Regulation and European Integration (Opora, June 20th)

Risks in Ukraine’s draft law on multiple citizenship (Crimea Human Rights Group, 17 June)

Position of human rights defenders: the draft law on multiple citizenship creates threats for residents of the occupied territories (Zmina, June 17th)

Volodymyr Artiukh and Taras Fedirko: War and dependent state formation in Ukraine (Berghahn Journals, 2025)

Housing Needs and Prospects for Social Housing in the Kalush Hromada (Cedos, June 19th)

Research of human rights abuses:

ZMINA highlights the need for accountability at Central and Eastern Europe Security Forum in Warsaw (Zmina, June 17th)

ZMINA joined the development of the Roadmap for the investigation of crimes against humanity committed by Russian forces in Ukraine (Zmina, June 16th)

International solidarity:

Australia sanctions on Russian “shadow fleet” (Crimea Platform, 17 June)

Russian fossil fuel exports: Stop Seapeak campaign (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Scotland, 16 June)

Upcoming event:

Thursday, June 26th, from 7:30 to 9:00 PM GMT, online. Report back from solidarity visits to Ukraine. Speakers: Mike Kearney (NEU Ukraine Solidarity Network); Rui Palma (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Steering Committee). Register for Zoom link.

==

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 151 (23 June 2025)

If you are one of the few who still believe that the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is interested in peace, please watch a few of the video clips from his performance at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week.

Vladimir Putin at the 2025 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. With English subtitles. Source: Michael Rossi

And then you will know the truth.

Here is Vladimir Putin summed up in 6 lies, all delivered within 48 hours last week.

LIE 1: “All of Ukraine belongs to Russia.”

FACT: Just go read international law, please. It really is that simple. Or ask the Ukrainians. End of discussion.

Putin’s words, the laughing and applause in the audience, the admiring smile of the ‘interviewer’ — three and a half years into the invasion — everything screams ‘red flag, attacking dictator!’ Not least because Putin’s words this week are simply a continuation of his ‘history thesis’ published in the Summer of 2021, six months before he invaded Ukraine; claiming that Russians and Ukrainians are one, and should live together within one state. Russia.

As we now know, in February 2022, Putin went on to show his ‘love’ for Ukrainians in a rather abusive way: something a la ‘you agree with me, my dear brothers and sisters, that we are one – or I will invade, murder, torture, rape and kill you, and then you will realize that we are one.’

This is, as they say in Russian, a man who is going ‘va-bank’ – for broke (‘ва-банк’).

LIE 2: Putin says that he wants to end the war as soon as possible.

“Believe me, we also want to end the war, and as soon as possible. And better – peacefully, if we could agree,” Putin said in St Petersburg.

FACT: This one is simple. The Russian dictator has broken no less than 26 ceasefires since he first invaded Ukraine in 2014. That’s every single one that has ever been agreed in 11 years.

In St. Petersburg, Putin was asked directly about the large-scale Russian offensive towards the city of Sumy in North-Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine says that Russia has amassed 60,000 troops less than 30 km from the city and all through May and June, village after village north of the city has fallen to the Russian army, edging still closer to Sumy itself.

“We have no objective to take Sumy,” Putin answered, “but in principle I do not rule it out…” Does that sound to you like a man who is keen on ending the war?

As it happens, last week marked 100 days since Ukraine accepted Trump’s proposal of an unconditional ceasefire. Putin still has not. 100 days. Instead, the Russian dictator has used those 100 days to increase the bombardment of residential areas in Ukrainian cities, often sending 4-500 drones with bombs per night. Most nights that kills 6 or 8 people, but every so often, like this past Tuesday in Kyiv, the human toll is even bigger: a drone and bomb onslaught in the early hours of Tuesday, 30 people died in their beds and 170 were injured.

That is all you need to know about Putin wanting to end the war. Or not.

LIE 3: Putin says that the Russian strikes are not on residential areas but on defense industry targets.

“The strikes were not on residential areas but precision strikes on military-industrial facilities,” Putin explained this week about the bombing of Kyiv that killed 30 people and injured 170. He has repeated such ‘explanations’ dozens and dozens of times after other horrific terror bombings.

FACT: All you need to do is watch the video.

You do not need to be a military expert to see that the Russian drone/bomb goes straight into a residential block of flats, not a military-industrial facility.

You do need to be an idiot to believe that this is not on purpose. In fact, the only person I have heard explaining such attacks as not being on purpose is — you guessed it — the U.S. President. On Easter Sunday, Russia bombed the central market square in the town of Sumy, in north-eastern Ukraine — using cluster ammunition and hitting church-goers and people on their way to celebrate Easter with their families. As a result, 31 people died. But Donald Trump explained that he had been informed that Russia had simply made a “a mistake”.

All independent experts agree that over the past months, Russia has increasingly targeted playgrounds, market squares, hospitals and residential neighborhoods. Hell, all you need to do is watch the videos being published every single morning of killed and injured Ukrainians being carried out from the rubble in their pajamas and nightgowns.

Trump’s own envoy to Ukraine, retired general Keith Kellogg tweeted is in no doubt.

LIE 4: Putin says that he is ready to meet Zelensky

“We are ready to meet… I am ready to meet with everyone, including Zelensky,” Putin said in St. Petersburg.

FACT: Putin has several times shied away from meeting the Ukrainian President, most recently in Istanbul in May where Zelensky challenged Putin to a face-to-face meeting: “There is no point in prolonging the killings. And I will be waiting for Putin in Türkiye on Thursday. Personally.”

But Putin decided not to meet his much younger counterpart — who has lots of hair, no belly, no botox, dynamic, and great international press and sympathy.

LIE 5: Putin questions Zelensky’s legitimacy

“Why am I saying this?” Putin wondered aloud in St. Petersburg. “We don’t care who is negotiating, even if it’s the current head of the regime. I’m ready to meet – but only if it’s the final stage. The signature must come from a legitimate government. Otherwise, the next government will just throw it all in the trash.”

FACT: Where does one start on this one? A brutal, corrupt dictator who has been in power in Russia since 1999, and during that period has killed all signs of democracy, free expression and media, not to say most of his political opponents … accuses a popularly-elected president (Zelensky got 73% of the vote in 2019) of being illegitimate. Because he postponed elections that were supposed to have taken place in 2024, but couldn’t – because said dictator had invaded his country.

In other words, Putin will negotiate with Zelensky, he claims, but then retain the right afterwards to negate the agreement as illegitimate.

Alternatively, Putin wants to force elections in Ukraine — which would lead to instability. Of course. That is exactly why Putin wants elections. The logistics and security challenges would be insurmountable: This is a country and population in the middle of the most traumatic period in its history, with one-third of the population (12–14 million people) having been forced to flee their homes, 20% of their country occupied and hundreds of thousands of people killed and injured. Imagine running a political campaign and elections under such circumstances. Forced upon them by their invading neighbor and the country the Ukrainians thought was their main ally.

There is nothing surprising in an old KGB-hand like Putin trying this one, he has nothing to lose. The surprising thing is that Trump and several members of his administration agree with the Russian dictator that Zelensky is illegitimate and must hold elections before a peace deal can be signed. Why, oh why would you say something like that, Donald, if you really wanted to see peace in Ukraine?

LIE 6: Putin calls the Ukrainian revolution 2014 “a coup”

FACT: Sorry, Vova, I was there on the square in 2013–14, pretty much every single day for several months. There is no polite way of saying this – you are full of shit. Не пизди, Вова!

This was a true, popular uprising, involving millions of Ukrainians all over the country. The proof is in the pudding: 11 years later, it is easy to find Ukrainians who were on the Maidan during those months who today are disappointed with the outcome of the revolution. Too many of the old fat cats stayed in power, the fight against corruption has been too slow. But none of these people – millions – who saw what happened, who actually participated, call it “a coup”.

They were there. They did it. They know.

The fact is that today, 11 years after Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time, and three years and four months after he invaded Ukraine for the second time, it is difficult to find anybody who believes in his lies. Unless they are paid by the Kremlin.

Source: Michael Andersen, “Only a fool would believe that Putin wants peace,” Two Grumpy Old Men on Ukraine, 23 June 2025

Ukrainian officials have reacted with outrage to comments made by Vladimir Putin on Friday in which he told delegates to the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that “all of Ukraine is ours”.

Addressing the annual showcase for Russia’s economic development in St. Petersburg, Putin threatened a Russian nuclear response should Kyiv deploy a so-called “dirty bomb” — despite admitting that there was no evidence it was considering doing so — and portrayed the ongoing invasion of Ukraine as a defensive necessity.

Bluntly denying Ukraine’s sovereignty, Putin repeated the long-standing Kremlin narrative that Ukrainians and Russians were “one people,” a claim that has been repeatedly rejected both by Ukraine and the international community.

Putin went on to confirm that Russian forces were carving out a 10–15 kilometre buffer zone inside Ukraine’s Sumy region, following a seven-month-long incursion into Russia’s neighbouring Kursk region by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Though he denied that Russia planned to occupy the city of Sumy itself, Putin added pointedly that he didn’t “rule it out”.

Raising the spectre of nuclear escalation, Putin warned of a devastating Russian response should Ukraine deploy a so-called “dirty bomb”, which combines conventional explosives with radioactive material, despite the fact that Ukraine is not known to possess such a device — a fact Putin himself acknowledged.

Such an attack “would be a colossal mistake on the part of those we call neo-Nazis in today’s Ukraine,” he said, adding that it “might be their last mistake”.

“Our nuclear doctrine states that we always respond to threats in kind. Therefore, our retaliation would be extremely harsh — and most likely catastrophic for both the neo-Nazi regime and Ukraine itself,” Putin continued.

Responding to the comments in his nightly address to the nation on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that they proved Putin had no intention of negotiating a ceasefire and that “Russia wants to continue the war,” adding that Ukrainian forces were successfully repelling Russian attacks in the Sumy region

Other Ukrainian officials also condemned Putin’s remarks, with Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha describing his statement as “deranged” and saying that the Russian leader had shown “complete disdain for US peace efforts.”

“While the United States and the rest of the world have called for an immediate end to the killing, Russia’s top war criminal discusses plans to seize more Ukrainian territory and kill more Ukrainians,” Sybiha wrote on X.

Despite Russia’s continuing international isolation, Putin also claimed that the country’s economy remained strong, noting that GDP had grown by more than 4% annually over the past two years, poverty had dropped to 7.2%, and that unemployment had fallen to a historic low of 2.3%.

Source: Emilia Kurilova, “Outrage in Kyiv as Putin tells St. Petersburg International Economic Forum ‘all of Ukraine is ours,’” Novaya Gazeta Europe, 21 June 2025

Andrei Trofimov: “Try Me for Treason”

Convicted Russian anti-war activist Andrei Trofimov. Photo: Mr. Trofimov’s Vkontakte page, via Mediazona

In 2023, Andrey Trofimov, an anti-war activist from Tver, was sentenced to ten years in a maximum security penal colony on several charges [to wit, disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army, calling for “extremism,” and attempting to join the Free Russia Legion]. In his closing statement at trial, he called Vladimir Putin a “dickhead” [khuilo] and “heartily endorsed” Ukraine’s attacks on the Crimean Bridge and the Kremlin. This statement was the grounds for the second criminal case against Trofimov, this time on charges of “condoning terrorism” and “defaming the army.”

Today [6 May 2025], Judge Vadim Krasnov of the Second Western District Military Court lengthened Trofimov’s sentence to thirteen years. Prosecutor Andrei Lopata had petitioned the judge to impose a longer sentence of fifteen years.

Before the verdict in his first trial was read out, Trofimov had petitioned the court to impose the maximum penalty. Now he has suggested that he be charged with the more serious offense of high treason, claiming that he has been involved in the information war on the Ukrainian side.

Below, Mediazona has published a slightly abridged version of Trofimov’s statement during oral arguments at the [second] trial.

* * * * *

Your honor, the factual circumstances of my actions, which the investigation has categorized as crimes, are correctly stated in the indictment and have been fully investigated during the court hearing.

In my statement I would like to dwell on the reasons for these actions, on my goals, to review in detail, charge by charge, my response to the allegations—that is, to explain my motives for not pleading guilty. And, in my conclusion, I would like to petition the court as to what to do with me next.

I was living quietly at the dacha with my cats and was a bother to no one. My life changed drastically on 24 February 2022. The reason for both the first criminal case and the current criminal case [against me] was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I will further explain why I regarded this event in this way.

I am in prison for what I have said, after all. I took no action in either the first case or the second. But this has been my way of being involved in the events, because it was physically impossible for me to leave the country, and I had no desire to stay silent in this situation. I mean, it is my life.

Why have I done this? I must respond to your remarks yesterday to the effect that my statements, including in court, could harm my own interests. Your honor, I have no interest in a shorter sentence. I am already imprisoned.

What is the purpose of what I am doing? Writ large, it is a matter of self-preservation. It is just that I understand the instinct of self-preservation not as the preservation of the body per se, of its physical health, because I am not my body alone. I want to preserve my conscience in this difficult situation, my ability to tell black from white, and lies from truth, and, quite importantly, my ability to say out loud what I believe to be true.

This thing of mine did not start in 2022. I have always tried to live this way. It is just that my desire to preserve this ability in such situations—meaning, the ability to tell the truth, to maintain my conscience— is what causes such actions.

What actions have we observed? We have witnessed concrete evidence of crimes with which I have not been charged, evidence of the violation of Article 278 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code—that is, the forcible seizure or the forcible retention of power. I am referring to Vladimir Putin, who has held the highest official post in the Russian Federation for exactly a quarter of a century. During this entire time, the Constitution of the Russian Federation has contained the principle of succession of power, set out in the guise of the two-term rule [for Russian presidents]. We have witnessed a direct violation of this rule—that is, the forcible retention of power.

In what has occurred since 24 February, we see concrete evidence of a violation of Criminal Code Article 353—that is, the planning, preparation, unleashing, and waging of a war of aggression.

What have I done in this situation? Publicly, in the mode of a solo picket (just a protracteed one), I have demonstrated the Russian state’s insanity. Look, the prosecution is asking for fifteen years in total—the sentence given for murder, but even for murder, sentences are often shorter. And yet my deeds harmed no one nor caused any damage.

I am not just talking about the period covered by these criminal cases. I have never laid a finger on anyone, never stolen a penny, in my entire life. Nevertheless, [the prosecutor wants to send me down for] fifteen years. I believe that this is a demonstration of the state’s insanity. The state happily displays this quality using me as an example.

What have I done in response? I have shown fortitude. This is vital, because I hope that what I have been doing is seen by Ukrainians. Look at this: they arrested him. He was convicted and given a dozen years of maximum security. Judge the effect in terms of the second case. Did you do a good job of convincing me [of the error of my ways]? That is, have I stopped doing what I was doing? Has my voice become less audible? No, it has not.

We have witnessed the same thing on the military front. For four years running, the Russian state has been spilling blood in a neighboring country. Ukraine has not surrendered and will not surrender.

Among the things that I have not exactly been charged with, but which have been repeated in the indictments and in the evidence presented at trial is my insulting Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin by using the foul word “dickhead.” What have I done? It is called desacralization.

Because the sacredness of supreme power is one of the foundations of the Golden Horde method of governance. When I publicly, repeatedly, and daily, at the first trial, at the second trial, in the pretrial detention center, perform this trick, I am desacralizing Vladimir Putin. This is important, because this regime will end all the same, and I very much want to hasten its end. I hate this man. And what the prosecution says about the “motive of political hatred” is the sacred truth. I can confirm that.

The audience I am addressing by these actions is not in Russia, because Russian society is dead and it is useless to try and talk to it. Ukraine is my audience.

As for the charges against me, I do not plead guilty to either count of violating Criminal Code Article 205.2. At issue is one and the same text, simply posted on the internet and spoken aloud in the pretrial detention center. Because I do not consider the incidents which I chose to include in my closing statement at trial to be “terrorist acts.” I chose them on purpose.

What is at issue are the two attacks on the Crimean Bridge. The Crimean Bridge is a vital transport artery which supplies the Russian federal armed forces in Crimea. An attack on a military installation is an instance of armed hostilities. The attack was carried out by the armed forces of Ukraine.

Why was it categorized as a “terrorist attack”? I know perfectly well why. This was done in order, first, to use it in Russian propaganda to dehumanize the enemy. In other words, the Russian Federation is at war not with the armed forces of Ukraine, which are stipulated under Ukrainian law and are doing their constitutional duty, but with terrorist gangs of “Banderites” and “Ukronazis.” To support this agenda, decisions are made to launch criminal proceedings on charges of “terrorism” over instances of armed conflict.

As for the second incident I mentioned, the attack on the Kremlin on 3 May 2023, what do we know? The communique from the Investigative Committee, which the prosecutor quoted yesterday, states outright that the attack was carried out against the residence of the President of the Russian Federation, who is the commander-in-chief of the Russian federal armed forces. Moreover, the Ukrainians also hit the building of the Senate, which is in the section of the Kremlin closed to tourists and where one of Putin’s offices is actually located. Excuse me, but this was not a terrorist attack. It was a Ukrainian combat operation, and a failed one at that.

I must say loudly and out loud that I do not condone or support terrorism, and that I have never condoned terrorism, nor do I intend to condone terrorism. I have a categorically negative attitude to the ideology and practice of terrorism.

Let us move on to [the charges under] Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code. This article is brand-new: it was adopted after the start of what we call the “special operation.”

This is a pure example of persecution for telling the truth. Because a situation has arisen where it has been necessary to shut the mouths of the war’s opponents, but it is impossible to charge them with violating, say, my beloved Criminal Code Article 207.3. How can you charge a person with “disseminating fake news” if they simply voice their attitude to current events? This is how Article 280.3 and the notion of “defamation” emerged, which is quite poorly conceptualized legally.

I have been told that my phrase “Ukraine is a victim of aggression on the part of the country of Russia” defames the Russian federal armed forces. What do we have? We have the UN General Assembly’s 2014 resolution saying that Russia “annexed” Ukraine. Those are not my words. This is a General Assembly resolution: there is no veto power there [as there is on the UN Security Council], so it was passed by a decent majority [of member states]. This is the position of international law.

Similarly, we have a March 2022 UN General Assembly resolution, in which the events of February 24 are labeled an “aggression.” And we have a UN General Assembly resolution on Russia’s incorporation of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson which labels these actions “annexation.”

I should note that the statements of, say, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Masha Zakharova are not a source of international law. Statements by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov are not a source of international law. UN General Assembly resolutions are, on the contrary, a source of international law, and so my assessments are based on international legal documents.

But my phrase about “Putin’s scumbags” is also part of the “defamation” charge against me, of course. First, from your viewpoint, “Putin’s” cannot be defamatory, because as you see it, Putin is good. As for the second word [in the phrase], yes, this is my personal opinion, and it does not apply solely to Russian servicemen who carry out unlawful orders. Yes, there are also people in the Russian armed forces who do not carry out unlawful orders, but they are not the only ones fighting there.

Excuse me for characterizing in this way people who murder the soldiers of a neighboring country for money. This is my personal judgment, and it is based on [their] actions.

I will summarize this part of my statement. The Russian federal constitution contains Article 29, [which guarantees] the right to free speech, including the right to gather and disseminate information. This is what I have actually been doing. That is, I have not overstepped Article 29 of the Constitution by a single millimeter. But at the same time I certainly have violated these two current articles of the Criminal Code.

How can this be the case? It can be the cacse because the articles under which I have been charged are unconstitutional. If Russia had a real Constitutional Court, these articles would have ceased to exist long ago.

I cannot fail to mention my report to Prosecutor Zhuk, which was not part of the charges against me, but nevertheless we heard witnesses talk about it yesterday. It does not contain the text of [my] closing statement [at the first trial]. It makes no mention of terrorism or any violent acts at all. I did not say a word about the armed forces either.

The point is that this second case is the result of my statement to the prosecutor’s commission. Because the case file contains two resolutions by FSB investigator Lieutenant Colonel Sergey Vyacheslavovich Yerofeev to dismiss the case—that is, by the investigator in my [first] case, with whom I have a very good level of mutual understanding and who understands exactly what I have been doing and what I have been trying to achieve. He tried to dismiss this case twice.

In the final part of my statement, I turn to the correct characterization of my actions. I am involved in the war on the Ukrainian side. It just that this involvement takes place without weapons, because war is such an extraordinarily multidimensional event. Apart from the fighting in the steppes of Donbas, in the Black Sea, and in the skies above Ukraine, it is fiercely fought in the information space by state entities, by Russian bodies. On the Ukrainian side, for example, interesting entities are also involved.

I am an information warrior. In what sense? On 9 October 2022, I wrote and sent an email to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky asking him to grant me Ukrainian citizenship. I am entitled to it because of my ancestry. All my grandparents hailed from Ukraine. Ukrainian law says that I have the right to [Ukrainian] citizenship.

I was able to enter a screenshot from Kasparov.ru into the record and have it examined in court. What does it confirm? The fact that, apart from publishing my closing statement at trial, Kasparov.ru has published me on a regular basis. What does this confirm? That what I am being tried for now was, in fact, just an instance of my work, which I have not ceased.

I will also mention, of course, Novaya Gazeta, whose website also published my letters. And my latest achievement in this wise is that I have been officially designated a political prisoner, because that is what I call myself at the pretrial detention center, and that is how I sign my petitions to this honorable court. But it was still a kind of self-designation as it were.

On 14 April of this year, the Council on Political Prisoners of the Memorial International Human Rights Defense Center published a decision [designating me a political prisoner]. As part of my work, I have used the criminal cases [against me], the first and the second case, as publicity opportunities.

The information war is a real thing. I am involved in it, and I am trying to prove this now. Informationally, I support Ukraine and the armed forces of Ukraine. In fact, I have defected to the enemy side in an armed conflict involving the Russian Federation. This is the essence of the crime defined in Article 275 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code—high treason.

I ask the court to send my criminal case back to the prosecutor, as the factual circumstances indicate that there are grounds for charging me with a more serious crime. Try me for treason: I betrayed your deranged state.

* * * * *

Address for letters:

Trofimov Andrei Nikolayevich (born 1966)
141 ul. Bagzhanova, FKU SIZO-1 UFSIN po Tverskoi oblasti
Tver,  Tver Oblast 127081 Russian Federation

You can send letters to Mr. Trofimov and other Russian political prisoners via ZT, F-Pismo, and PrisonMail.online. (The last of these services accepts payments made with non-Russian bank cards.)

Source: “‘Try me for treason: I betrayed your deranged state’: a statement by 58-year-old Andrei Trofimov in a military court,” Mediazona, 6 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Shopsh: Circassian Vocal Tradition of Zhiu

As the sun rises on 21 May, marking the Day of Remembrance for the Circassian Genocide, we invite you to listen beyond the silence that often surrounds the wounds of colonialism. In the following article, Bulat Khalilov, co-founder of Ored Recordings – a label dedicated to traditional and post-traditional music from the North Caucasus – reflects on a paradox within Circassian music today: how a culture with rich vocal traditions has, in a sense, sidelined its most distinctive feature, the polyphonic vocal technique of zhiu?

In conjunction with today’s commemorations, Ored Recordings is releasing a compilation, Shopsh: Circassian Vocal Tradition of Zhiu, which highlights the vocal tradition of zhiu as both a form of remembrance and a possibility.

21 May is the Day of Remembrance for Circassians – or, more directly, the Day of the Circassian Genocide.

In 1864, the Russian Empire marked this day as the official end of the Russo-Caucasian War, which had begun over a century earlier in 1763. What Russia celebrated as victory, most Circassians – and many other peoples of the North Caucasus – remember as loss: a brutal war for independence that ended in exile, devastation and what many now call genocide.

That view isn’t fringe. It’s shared by most Circassian historians and civil society voices. To date, only Georgia and Ukraine have officially recognised this as genocide. But across the Circassian diaspora – from Türkiye and Syria to Jordan, the EU and the US – 21 May is marked with acts of remembrance. And yes, those memories echo back home, too – in Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia.

However, most Circassians in the North Caucasus are suspicious of these gestures, considering them to be opportunistic and insincere. Their refusal to embrace recognition from other states usually stems from a desire to avoid becoming a pawn in a larger geopolitical game.

Officially, the Russian state doesn’t like to talk about any of this. The war itself is treated as taboo, its memory reframed as a tool of Western propaganda or a threat to national unity. And yet, every year, people still gather. From moderates to patriots, from Nalchik to Cherkessk to Maykop, Circassians take to the streets – sometimes quietly, sometimes defiantly.

At Ored Recordings, we return to this trauma again and again – not to dwell, but to listen. To ask how this wound still shapes the way we live, create and imagine. Every year on 21 May, we release a concept album. One year, it’s heroic songs from the war. Another, it’s diaspora voices from Türkiye. Or wartime songs of the 20th century. Each time, we try to trace how our people processed a colonial wound through music, or indeed failed to do so.

This year, we chose to focus on traditional vocal techniques in Circassian music. At first glance, this may seem unrelated. But in truth, every serious conversation about the state of Circassian culture circles back – if not to 1864 itself, then certainly to the long shadow it cast.

This release is a compilation of mostly unpublished recordings. Think of it as a teaser – a warm-up – for future albums. In those upcoming releases, we’ll dive deeper into each performer’s story and the recording context.

НокIуэ жи! A prelude of sorts

This essay – and this release – emerged from a simple question: what’s really going on in Circassian music today?

A big part of the tradition is group singing. Usually it’s men (sometimes women, sometimes mixed groups), gathering to sing. The lead voice carries the main melody, while the others hold a choral drone or a call-and-response. This choral technique is called zhiu or yezhiu.

Like in many cultures, group singing wasn’t just about music – it was a way to be together, to make a space for cultural and social connection.

Most Circassians today learned about this from the elders. From people who sang at weddings and late-night gatherings. Or from those who, as kids, would secretly listen to adults sing into the night. But our main source are still the archives – dusty tapes recorded by Soviet folklorists. Interestingly, the folklorists’ archives have ended up becoming tradition-bearers in their own right.

Academic work on Circassian vocal music – papers, dissertations, theoretical frameworks – has had almost no impact on today’s performers. Music theory and actual practice in Adyghe communities have mostly run on parallel tracks, rarely intersecting.

But the sound itself – those dusty Soviet-era recordings collected by ethnomusicologists – found a way through. Once digitised, they slipped into public circulation (sometimes semi-legally) and became a strange kind of bridge: not from scholar to scholar, but from singer to singer, across generations.

Those old recordings remind us that the song and its lyrics are guardians of language, poetic style and cultural memory. And yezhiu? That’s the secret ingredient. The thing that gives it punch. Soviet musicologists put it nicely: yezhiu helps the song “reach the hearts of the people”.

There’s even a sharp old proverb: “Ежьур уэрэдым и щIопщ” – yezhiu is the whip for the song. It keeps the rhythm. Holds the structure together. Gives the song its shape.

And yet – despite this deep knowledge and respect for vocal technique – modern Circassian music mostly revolves around instruments. Not voices.

So we asked ourselves: how did a whole new wave of Circassian music appear – something unthinkable even ten years ago – and why does almost all of it seem to avoid yezhiu, the central tool of our tradition?

[The essay continues at 3/4 online magazine.]

Sources: Bulat Khalilov, “Shopsh: Circassian Vocal Tradition of Zhiu,” 3/4, 19 May 2025; and Ored Recordings (Bandcamp). Thanks to Heikki Hirvonen for providing a link to an essay on the Circassian genocide. Please go to the Ored Recordings page on Bandcamp to download this and other releases and make a generous donation to them as you do so. ||||| TRR

Victory Day 2025

Sergei Podgorkov, Outside the Obukhov Factory (St. Petersburg), 9 May 2025

Source: Sergei Podgorkov (Facebook), 9 May 2025

On Friday, May ninth, Treptow Park was perhaps the most heavily guarded place in Berlin. Hundreds of police officers kept the peace at Germany’s most famous memorial to Soviet soldiers on the day Russia marked the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet tradition. Because Russia has employed symbols of that earlier war in its current war against Ukraine, visitors were banned from displaying or wearing Soviet and Russian flags, military uniforms, and St George’s ribbons at the Berlin memorial this year. An exception was made for veterans and diplomats.

Soviet May ninth traditions and German pacifists

At about half past ten in the morning, a wreath was laid at the monument to the Soviet soldier by Russia’s ambassador to Germany, Sergei Nechayev. The day before, when Germany remembered the Wehrmacht’s surrender and the end of the war, Nechayev and the Belarusian ambassador were not invited to the memorial event at the Bundestag. In his speech, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier thanked the Allies for liberating his country and recalled the Red Army’s sacrifices, but harshly criticized Russian attempts to justify the war in Ukraine in terms of the fight against the Nazis in the Second World War.

The flood of people in Treptow Park seemed endless: hundreds were there at any one time, and thousands came and went over the course of the day. Many brought scarlet carnations, while some bore wreaths. Russian and German were heard. Most of the visitors were elderly—immigrants from the former USSR living in Germany and Germans. There were also many leftist and ultra-leftist German political activists brandishing placards opposing NATO and calling for “peace with Russia.”

German ultra-leftists rally for “peace with Russia” and Germany’s exit from NATO, 9 May 2025.
Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle

Against this backdrop, the scene resembled a mixture of a traditional Russian May ninth celebration and a political protest by German pacifists, many of whom had clearly lived most of their lives in the GDR.

“I was a policeman in the GDR,” said a man in his sixties who held a placard that read “Thank you” in Russian. The policemen asked him to doff his Soviet cap, which sported a red star and a St. George’s ribbon.

“All people want peace, so the politicians should don their own military uniforms and crawl into the trenches,’ the man said.

Soviet wartime songs sounded from loudspeakers and were played live. One man, aged forty-five, climbed atop a mound to get a better view, but a policeman asked him to get off the lawn, explaining, “This is a grave.” The man cursed in Russian but climbed off the mound.

Another man played played “Arise, Great Country” on his clarinet. When he began quietly playing the melody of the Soviet and Russian national anthem, the police literally took him aside, after which he returned to the group of people who had gathered. They were outraged at the restrictions that had been adopted. From time to time, someone chanted “Russia, Russia!” and many other people would join in.

An ex-East German police office (holding a sign that says “Thanks!” in Russian): “All people want peace.”
Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle

Bikers in Treptow Park

Your correspondent saw men and a woman in leather jackets who looked like bikers from the Russian motorcycle gang Night Wolves. They were in small groups and were escorted by a large number of police officers. They posed for pictures in front of the wreaths and left. They could have been someone from a local “support group.” The Berlin press had written that only a small group of bikers made the trip to Berlin to visit the Soviet memorials this year. No incidents had been reported as this article went to press.

Treptow Park, 9 May 2025. The crimson and gold banners at the back of the crowd are inscribed with the names of the various “fronts” in the Red Army’s campaign against the Wehrmacht. Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle

For the first half of the day, at least, things seemed relatively calm. Your correspondent had the impression that most people had come to Treptow Park not for political reasons, but to commemorate the war. And yet the atmosphere was tense. To the right and left of the monument to the Soviet warrior stood a dozen and a half activists holding placards and the flags of Ukraine and NATO.

Activists with placards and Ukrainian flags at the monument to Soviet soldiers in Treptow Park, 9 May 2025.
Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle

They said they wanted to draw attention to the Ukrainian Red Army soldiers who had perished in the Second World War, as well as to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

“I am here to prevent this event from being turned into a Russian propaganda stunt,” said a woman, aged thirty-five. According to her, insults had been hurled at her and the pro-Ukrainian activists.

“Some people regard our presence here as a provocation,” said the woman. “We are not here to change anyone’s mind, but to make Ukraine visible.”

One of their posters read: “Russia has usurped the memory of May eighth and ninth. But it was not Russia who liberated us from the yoke of National Socialism eighty years ago in Berlin. It was the Red Army, in whose ranks many Ukrainians served.”

The poster tells the story of Ukrainian soldier Fyodor Karpenko, who left his name on the walls of the destroyed Reichstag building in May 1945.

Source: Roman Goncharenko, “May Ninth in Berlin’s Treptow Park: A War of Words,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 9 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Since the Maidan uprising and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Kremlin propaganda has consistently portrayed Ukrainian leaders as Nazis or fascists. Russia also accused the Ukrainian authorities of “genocide” of the population of Donbass. On 24 February 2022, while announcing the full-scale invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine was presented as the primary goal of the war, which is itself portrayed merely as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War: a conflict embedded in a cyclical conception of time in which Russia, eternally under threat from a Western enemy, fights for its very survival — on Ukrainian soil.

On the ground, there is no evidence to support Moscow’s accusations: nobody has ever documented a “genocide” against ethnic Russians or Russian speakers, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere. As for the Ukrainian far-right, its political influence remains minimal: in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the main ultra-nationalist parties, running together on a joint list, received just over 2% of the vote, well below the threshold required to enter Parliament. In short, the image of a “Nazi regime” in Kyiv is based on a glaring mismatch between rhetoric and reality.

So why do the Russian authorities repeatedly invoke references to the Second World War — or, in Russian parlance, the “Great Patriotic War” — when speaking about Ukraine? Understanding this memory dynamic is essential to grasp the power of a rhetoric that, despite lacking any factual basis, continues to shape the official Russian worldview.

The Soviet and Russian insistence on using the term “Great Patriotic War” to refer exclusively to the period from 1941 to 1945 erases the twenty-one months that preceded Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR. Between the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, and Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, Moscow and Berlin were de facto allies: they engaged in extensive economic cooperation, diplomatic coordination, jointly invaded and partitioned Poland in September 1939, and the Soviet Union proceeded to annex the Baltic countries and wage war against Finland. By reducing the war to the period 1941–1945, the USSR and Russia could deny any responsibility in the outbreak of the Second World War and present itself solely as the victim of Nazi aggression and the primary liberator of Europe.

The Great Patriotic War — and especially the victory in 1945 — became the founding event of Soviet history and the cornerstone of collective memory. Yet this memory, often portrayed as monolithic and universally shared, is anything but uniform. A Ukrainian from the west, who endured two successive occupations between 1939 and 1944, remembers a war very different from that of an eastern Ukrainian, whose experience was shaped primarily by Nazi destruction. The memory of a Russian bears little resemblance to that of a Crimean Tatar, who was deported along with his entire community and denied the right of return for decades. As for Soviet Jews, whose families and communities were annihilated in the Holocaust, they were long forced to remain silent — official narratives left no room for the specificity of their suffering.

The collective experience of the war and the official discourse surrounding it deeply reshaped the Soviet population’s understanding of “fascism” and “antifascism.” Rather than referring to a specific political doctrine of the inter-war period, the term “fascism” had become a catch-all label for the ultimate enemy. Trotsky or the British Conservatives could just as easily be branded as “fascists,” as well as domestic and international opponents after 1945 — including even the Chinese Communists. The word “Nazi” itself was rarely used. In everyday life, calling someone a “fascist” served more as the gravest possible insult rather than as a statement of ideological substance.

Under Vladimir Putin, the cult of the Great Patriotic War has been revived. Following the pro-democracy protests of 2011 and Putin’s bid for a third presidential term in 2012, the regime instituted a deliberate policy of historical narrative construction, aimed at grounding its legitimacy in a vision of the nation as under siege. The glorification of the 1945 victory also allowed the regime to purge collective memory of its specifically socialist elements: by retaining only the narrative of national triumph, the Soviet period could be seamlessly integrated into a continuous national history without any revolutionary rupture. At the same time, the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin as a legitimate victor served to validate autocracy. The mass repressions and genocidal policies that claimed millions of lives were reframed as a tragic but necessary step: they had made the USSR a global superpower, capable of defending civilization against the “brown plague.”

The Kremlin has multiplied its legal instruments to enforce this narrative. Since 2020, the Russian Constitution mandates “respect for the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland” and prohibits “diminishing the importance of the heroism” of the Soviet people. In April 2021, Putin signed a law increasing penalties for “insults” or “false claims” about the Second World War and its veterans. In December 2019, Putin himself gathered some leaders of post-Soviet states around a pile of archival documents that he said proved historical truths long ignored in the West — selectively quoting them to justify, in retrospect, the USSR’s annexation of Poland and the Baltic states. In this way, Putin has weaponized history, which has become inseparable from national interest. To challenge his interpretation is tantamount to treason.

Every year on May 9, Russians march in the Immortal Regiment carrying portraits of relatives who fought between 1941 and 1945. Increasingly, the faces of those who fought — or died — in the war against Ukraine are added to these ranks, as though both wars were part of a single, endless struggle. Past and present warfare are merged, and the victory of 1945 becomes the lens through which all events — past, present, and future — are interpreted in a continuous historical timeline. This symbolic fusion also explains the surreal images of Russian occupation forces who, in recent weeks, have placed propaganda banners in destroyed Ukrainian cities. An uninhabitable Bakhmut was transformed into a stage for celebrating the 80th anniversary of Russia’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War.” 

The cult of victory is not only a central element of the Putinist imaginary — it functions as an operating system for both domestic governance and external aggression, with all of Russia’s actions on the international stage framed as part of an eternal war against fascism. A telling example of this is the installation of a giant screen on the Estonian border, broadcasting Victory Day celebrations in a loop — an attempt to remind Estonians, as well as Latvians and Lithuanians, that the Soviet victory represents an unassailable moral superiority. In the Russian collective imagination, the word “fascism” has lost all connection with a specific political ideology and now refers only to an abstract, absolute threat: the desire to destroy Russia. It has become synonymous with “enemy” or “Russophobe,” always denoting the Other, never a historically defined movement. This separation between word and meaning allows the regime to simultaneously glorify the antifascist victory and openly promote xenophobic, homophobic, or ultraconservative rhetoric, without any perceived contradiction.

The word “denazification,” used by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, to justify the invasion, initially puzzled many Russians, most of whom were unfamiliar with the term in this context. Shortly afterwards, the state news agency RIA Novosti published an article by Timofey Sergeytsev — “What Russia Should Do with Ukraine” — aimed at clarifying its meaning: “denazification” was described as a “total cleansing,” targeting not only alleged Nazi leaders but also “the popular masses who are passive Nazis,” deemed guilty of having supported the “Nazi government.” According to Sergeytsev, modern Ukraine is able to hide its Nazism behind aspirations for “independence” and “European development.” To destroy this Nazism, he argues, is to “de-Europeanise” Ukraine. In this logic, denazification becomes synonymous with eliminating all Western influence from Ukraine and dismantling the country’s existence as a nation-state and a distinct society. Incubated on official state platforms, this narrative reveals the true scope of “denazification”: a large-scale project aimed at erasing any trace of Ukrainian singularity, a blueprint for the genocide.

The article recently published on the official website of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), entitled “Eurofascism, Today as 80 Years Ago, Is a Common Enemy of Moscow and Washington,” strikingly illustrates the expansion of the “denazification” discourse far beyond Ukraine. The accompanying image depicts a grotesque hybrid monster: its body is shaped like a black swastika with the EU’s circle of stars in the centre, while its head is a caricature of Ursula von der Leyen. The creature, with its blood-stained claws outstretched, is caught between two bayonets — one American, the other Russian/Soviet. This grotesque image is not merely a provocation: it reflects a narrative deeply entrenched in Russian state propaganda, where “Eurofascism” becomes an operational concept encompassing all European societies.

“Eurofascism, Today as 80 Years Ago, Is a Common Enemy of Moscow and Washington.” Screenshot courtesy of Meduza

The 2022 tipping point revealed these discourses for what they truly are: the ideological foundation of a large-scale invasion, long prepared within the informational sphere. Today, part of European society — particularly elements of the pacifist left — is falling into the same trap: underestimating or ignoring the ongoing propaganda dynamic. But the machine is already in motion. The language of fascism is being broadened daily to include new designated enemies, and the ideological war is shifting: it is no longer stopping at Ukraine — it is now targeting all of Europe. In the face of this brutal reconfiguration of the official Russian narrative, complacency or passivity have themselves become forms of strategic blindness.

Source: Hanna Perekhoda, “From Kyiv to Brussels: The Great Patriotic War as Putin’s Propaganda,” in “Victory Day: Three Interventions from the Left,” Posle, 7 May 2025. Ms. Perekhoda is a Ukrainian historian, researcher, and activist.

Russia’s consolidated military registration registry website, Reestrpovestok.rf, is fully operational. On Friday, 9 May 2025, the human rights project Get Lost, which helps Russians avoid conscription into the army, reported that the notifications that it was operating in test mode had disappeared from the website, and the online resource appeared to have been fully launched.

Upon arrival on the website, users can log in to their personal accounts, check summonses, and obtain copies of records. Earlier, the website indicated that it was functioning in beta mode only in three regions—Sakhalin, Ryazan, and the Republic of Mari El. This notification has now disappeared.

“So far no one who has received a summons through this site or faced automatic restrictions has contacted us,” the human rights activists added. The registry’s launch has not been officially announced.

Recipients of summonses to face restrictions if they fail to report to military recruitment center

The law establishing a consolidated registry of persons subject to conscription and introducing electronic summonses was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in April 2023. The text of the document, in particular, states that conscripts who do not report to a military enlistment office within twenty days of receiving a summons may be prohibited from registering as an individual entrepreneur, registering vehicles and real estate, driving a vehicle, and getting a bank loan. In addition, they will not be able to leave Russia until they report to a military enlistment office.

A screenshot of the military enlistment summons website, outlining the penalties imposed on Russians who fail to respond.

The full-fledged launch of the electronic summonses registry was planned for last autumn, but was subsequently postponed.

The registry contains data on all Russian nationals who are already registered and are subject to military registration, as well as those who are not yet registered but are obliged to do so. Lawyers stress that the law and the decree apply to the delivery of any summonses, both for compulsory service and to clarify military registration status, and as part of the wartime mobilization, which Putin has not yet signed a decree to end.

This data will be collected from military enlistment offices. The decree digitizing their databases was signed by Putin back in November 2022. As Defense Ministry officials told the Federation Council, various databases are used for this purpose, including those of the Interior Ministry, the Federal Tax Service, civil registries, and pension funds.

Source: Daniil Sotnikov, “Electronic summonses registry fully operational in Russia,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 9 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

“The Squadron Did Not Notice the Fallen Fighter”

Silly little fly was burning on a candle
Burning the small fry, smoke that is so tender
Little star has fallen into the puddle by the steps
The squadron did not notice the fallen fighter

The dead one did not live, the sick’s not kicked the bucket
The seer was not blind, the sleeper is still tucked in
Merry beating brave hearts (in Morse code would tell)
The squadron did not notice the fallen fighter

No-one was more dear, no-one was more pretty
No-one was more pained, no-one was more happy
There was no beginning and there was no end
The squadron did not notice the fallen fighter

— Eric Boros, “The Squadron,” from Secondhand Guitar, released February 3, 2014 • Music and words: Yegor Letov • Translation by Szarapow

Source: Vialka (Bandcamp). Thanks to Szarapow for the heads-up.

For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard from her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.

Military officials responded to her repeated questions about his whereabouts by saying he was on active duty and therefore incommunicado. Then, late last November, two days after they again made that assertion, she learned that he had gone missing on Nov. 1 — from a Telegram channel that helps military families.

“We lost your son,” Aleksandr Sokolov, the officer in Rafael’s unit in charge of family liaison, told her when she traveled to its headquarters in western Russia.

“Lost him how?” she says she responded, alarmed and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Rafael had failed to check in by radio, a search had proved impossible. “How do we search for him?” she says the officer told her.

Variations on that grim scenario have been repeated countless times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Ministry of Defense lacks any formal, organized effort to track down legions of missing soldiers, according to bereaved families, private organizations that try to assist them and military analysts. Relatives, stuck in limbo, fend for themselves with scant government information.

The ministry itself declined to comment for this article. Mr. Sokolov, the liaison officer, said in a text message: “You do realize that I can’t comment on anything.”

Even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement, the hunt for missing soldiers is expected to endure for years, if not decades.

[…]

Source: Neil MacFarquhar and Milena Mazaeva, “Message From the Russian Military: ‘We Lost Your Son,’” New York Times, 3 May 2025

Last year was the deadliest for Russian forces since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine: at least 45,287 people were killed.

This is almost three times more than in the first year of the invasion and significantly exceeds the losses of 2023, when the longest and deadliest battle of the war was taking place in Bakhmut.

At the start of the war, losses happened in waves during battles for key locations, but 2024 saw a month-on-month increase in the death toll as the front line slowly edged forward, enabling us to estimate that Russia lost at least 27 lives for every square kilometre of Ukrainian territory captured.

The BBC Russian Service, in collaboration with independent media outlet Mediazona and a team of volunteers, has processed open source data from Russian cemeteries, military memorials and obituaries.

So far, we have identified the names of 106,745 Russian soldiers killed during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The true number is clearly much higher. Military experts estimate our number may cover between 45% and 65% of deaths, which would mean 164,223 to 237,211 people [have been killed].

20 February 2024 was the deadliest day for Russian forces that year.

Among the casualties were Aldar Bairov, Igor Babych and Okhunjon Rustamov, who were with the 36th Motorised Rifle Brigade when four Ukrainian long-range HIMARS missiles hit a training ground near the city of Volnovakha in occupied Donetsk.

They had been ordered to line up for a medal ceremony. Sixty-five servicemen were killed, including their commander Col Musaev. Dozens more were wounded.

Bairov, 22 and from Buryatia in eastern Siberia, had studied to be a food sanitation specialist but was drafted for mandatory military service and then signed a contract to become a professional soldier.

In February 2022 he went to fight in Ukraine and was part of the battle for Borodyanka during his brigade’s advance towards Kyiv in March 2022. The town was almost completely destroyed. Ukrainian sources say Russian soldiers were involved in the execution of civilians.

Aldar Bairov (left), Okhunjon Rustamov (C) and Igor Babych were all killed in a strike on 20 February last year

Okhunjon Rustamov, 31 and from Chita in Siberia, had worked as a welder after serving a mandatory term in special forces. He was mobilised during a partial draft in October 2022.

Unlike Rustamov, Igor Babych, 32, had volunteered to go to war. He had worked with adults and children diagnosed with cerebral palsy, helping them with physical therapy until April 2023.

In total, 201 Russian soldiers died on that day, according to our data.

A few hours after the strike on the training ground, then-Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu met Vladimir Putin to bring him news of military success from the front line.

There was no mention of the training ground attack, nor was there any word from the Ministry of Defence in its daily reports.

A relative of Okhunjon Rustamov said she had already buried three close family members over the course of the war. “In December 2022, my husband died. On 10 February 2024, my godfather. And on 20 February my half-brother. From one funeral to the next.”

In our analysis, we prioritised exact dates of death for soldiers. If that wasn’t available, we used the date of the funeral or the date the death was reported.

In the first two years of the war, 2022 and 2023, Russian losses followed a wave-like pattern: heavy fighting with high casualties alternated with periods of relative calm.

In 2023, for example, most casualties occurred between January and March, when Russian forces attempted to capture the cities of Vuhledar and Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast.

In the first year of the full-scale invasion, according to our calculations, Russia lost at least 17,890 soldiers. This number does not include losses from Russia’s two proxy forces in occupied eastern Ukraine.

In 2023, the number rose to 37,633.

In 2024, there was no period showing a significant fall in casualties. Bloody battles for Avdiivka and Robotyne were followed by intensified assaults towards Pokrovsk and Toretsk.

In August 2024, Russian conscripts were killed when Ukrainian forces stormed over the border into the Kursk region. From August 6 to 13 alone, an estimated 1,226 Russian soldiers died.

However, the heaviest overall losses occurred during a slow Russian advance in the east between September and November 2024, according to leading US military analyst Michael Kofman.

“Tactics emphasised repeated attacks with dispersed assault groups, using small infantry fire teams, which increased overall casualties relative to terrain gained,” he explained.

After almost two years of intense fighting, Russian forces seized the logistical hub of Vuhledar in Donetsk on 1 October 2024.

According to estimates by the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW), from September to November 2024, Russian forces captured 2,356 square kilometres of Ukraine.

Even then, Ukrainian forces at the front did not collapse.

The cost of this advance was at least 11,678 Russian military deaths.

Actual losses figures are likely higher. We have only accounted for soldiers and officers whose names appeared in publicly available obituaries and whose dates of death or funeral fell within this period.

Overall in 2024, according to ISW, Russia captured 4,168 square kilometres of land.

If we assume that our figure of 45,287 confirmed deaths in 2024 is about 40% of the full number, then the total number would be closer to 112,000 fatalities last year.

This means that for each square kilometre captured, 27 Russian soldiers were killed, and this does not include the wounded.

How losses are changing recruitment

Russia has found ways of replenishing its depleted forces.

“Russian recruitment also increased in the second half of 2024 and exceeded Russian casualties, allowing Moscow to generate additional formations,” says Michael Kofman.

One-time payments to soldiers signing new contracts were increased in three Russian regions. Combat salaries for volunteer soldiers are five to seven times higher than the average wage in most regions.

We also class as volunteers those who signed up to avoid criminal prosecution, which was allowed by law in 2024.

Volunteers have become the fastest-growing category of casualties in our calculations, making up a quarter of those we have identified.

In 2023-2024, thousands of volunteers who signed contracts with the Ministry of Defence were sent to the front lines only 10–14 days later. Such minimal training will have dramatically reduced their chances of survival, experts say.

One Russian republic, Bashkortostan, has seen the highest numbers of casualties, with 4,836 confirmed deaths. Most were from rural areas and 38% had gone to fight with no military experience.

The one-time payment for signing a Russian army contract in Ufa is 34 times the region’s average salary of 67,575 rubles (£600).

Calculating deaths from open source data will always be incomplete.

This is because the bodies of a significant number of soldiers killed in the past months may still be on the battlefield and retrieving them presents a risk to serving soldiers.

The true death toll for Russian forces increases significantly if you include those who fought against Ukraine as part of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

An assessment of obituaries and reports of searches for fighters who have lost contact suggests between 21,000 and 23,500 people may have been killed by September 2024.

That would bring the total number of fatalities to 185,000 to 260,700 military personnel.

CLARIFICATION 5 May 2025: This story has been updated to make it clear that the figure of 27 losses per sq km is based on an estimated number of deaths last year of about 112,000.

Source: Olga Ivshina, “How Russia took record losses in Ukraine in 2024,” BBC News Russian, 4 May 2025. This article was also published on Substack on 6 May 2025.

Yegor Letov, “The Squadron Did Not the Fallen Fighter” (1990)

Source: YouTube

Глупый мотылёк 
Догорал на свечке
Жаркий уголёк
Дымные колечки
Звёздочка упала в лужу у крыльца…
Отряд не заметил потери бойца

Мёртвый не воскрес
Хворый не загнулся
Зрячий не ослеп
Спящий не проснулся
Весело стучали храбрые сердца…
Отряд не заметил потери бойца

Не было родней
Не было красивей
Не было больней
Не было счастливей
Не было начала, не было конца…
Отряд не заметил потери бойца

Source: Grazhdanskaya Oborona Official Website

Free People of Voronezh

Alexander Zheltukhin

On 22 April 2025, Voronezh police raided the homes of activists believed by Center “E” [Russia’s “anti-extremism” police] to be connected to the Telegram channel Free People of Voronezh. The searches also involved severe beatings and threats, and some of the activists were forced to record videos supporting Putin and the war in Ukraine. Almost all the activists had previously been prosecuted on political charges, but now they feel so intimidated that they are afraid to file a torture complaint against the police.

A 38-minute video was posted on the Free People of Voronezh channel on 16 April 2025. The video itself was viewed by less than three hundred people. In the video, four activists—Grigory Severin, Nadezhda Belova, Yuri Avsenyev, and Alexander Zheltukhin—discuss the news before jogging along an embankment of the Voronezh River. The genre is the “coffee klatch”: using the news as a springboard, the friends talk about the problem of alcoholism, apathy in society, increasing drug use, and the overall sense of doom and gloom.

Activists of the Telegram channel Free People of Voronezh:
Grigory Severin, Alexander Zheltukhin, Yuri Avsenyev, and Nadezhda Belova

Nadezhda Belova sums up the video’s content at the very beginning.

“To cut it short, everything is bad, but it will get worse. To put it in a nutshell, the situation in this place is at the terminal stage,” she says.

She argues that Russia is inevitably moving in the direction “North Korea”—toward a mothballed, rotten dictatorship, because Russians “somehow still support it and want to live in it.” Belova has reason to be pessimistic: even before the war, the state had charged her with “condoning terrorism” for comments she had made on social media in the wake of Mikhail Zhlobitsky‘s [suicide] bombing of the Arkhangelsk FSB. in 2020, a military court sentenced Belova to pay a fine of 400,000 rubles. She was on Rosfinmonitoring’s list of “terrorists and extremists” for several years, and her family had to leave their home village and rent a flat in Voronezh, as their fellow villagers did not support Belova in her fight against the unjust charges.

The video posted on the Telegram channel Free People of Voronezh on 16 April 2025

“Again, the whole of Voronezh is covered with drug adverts. The law enforcement agencies run protection for [the illegal drug trade], and if they didn’t run protection for it, there wouldn’t be these adverts. At my neighborhood Pyaterka [convenience store], right at the entrance, there is a graffito painted in color on the doorstep: ‘Buying a stash is like going out for bread,'” says Alexander Zheltukhin. In previous years, Zheltukhin was fined for picketing against Belova’s persecution and arrested for protesting in support of Navalny. “And if it was not protected, I would argue, by the selfsame FSB, who probably take a percentage from it—”

“Watch out! You are discrediting the FSB,” Belova says, interrupting him. “I don’t agree! It cannot be!”

Caveats and omissions run through the entire conversation. The activists know that any free speech is potentially dangerous in today’s Russia, and they try to cover their bases whenever possible. (Spoiler: it didn’t work).

“They say it’s impossible not to confess”

A few days later, on 22 April, police raided the homes of all four people involved in the run, as well as those of other Voronezh activists. Searches were done at eight locations, allegedly connected with Free People of Voronezh. In most cases, the law enforcers acted extremely harshly. They used handcuffs and stun guns, beat people, intimidated the activists and their families, and emotionally abused them.

A photo posted by Nadezhda Belova

All the members of Belova’s family were shot with a stun gun. Belova later posted photos of her own bruises and the bloody marks on the bodies of her husband and son on Facebook. The police confiscated all their electronic devices and turned upside down their rented flat, which the landlady demanded that the Belovs vacate immediately after the search. The police threatened to send the son, a university student, to the war, and after the search, a policeman recorded a repentant video featuring Belova.

“Off camera, the [policeman beating Belova’s husband] says, ‘Do you support the [special military operation]?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ He says, ‘Do you support Putin?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ It’s light fare, but disgusting, especially when I saw a stun gun pressed against my son’s leg,” Belova told Okno.

The police recorded similar video “confessions” by several other people [caught up in the raids].

After the searches, Zheltukhin ended up in hospital with five broken ribs and several damaged vertebrae. He told OVD Info that he had tried to escape from the “punitive operation” and fell from the roof of a village house: “I broke my ribs when I fell, apparently, and they hit me [on those ribs]: it hurts a lot.” The police put a bag over his head and shocked him with a stun gun. His friends later photographed Zheltukin at hospital: his face was covered with bruises.

Fyodor Orlov, 36, was also beaten; after the experience, he says that he “did it all to himself.” He inflicted all the bruises and abrasions on himself, blindfolded himself with a scarf and sat like that for two hours, and fell into a briar bush on his own; there are photos of his back, entirely covered with flecks of blood. “Then someone—that is, I—drew a sex organ on my bald head just for fun,” he told OVD Info. The law enforcers also threatened to cut off one of his fingers, leaving behind telltale scratches.

Fyodor Orlov’s finger

“It was quite rough. As rough as possible, to the point that they say that now they understand why people confess to crimes they did not commit. Because, they say, it’s impossible not to confess. Orlov has several hundred stun gun marks [on his body]. Several hundred! They drove him into the woods. He thought they were taking him there to kill him,’” says Pavel Sychev, 38.

Sychev is a Voronezh activist and political consultant. He knows the administrators of the Free People of Voronezh channel from his past work as an activist: they crossed paths at pickets, but do not keep in close contact. Sychev’s home was also searched on 22 April, but there was no violence.

“[The police] search my home, as a rule, without breaking the law, and they never use force against me or my family. They have been coming to my home every year since 2022. These are just routine searches. I have always been searched as a witness in criminal cases to which I don’t even have an indirect connection,” says Sychev. “There is a federal case [for example, the case against Grigory Melkonyants and other activists of the Golos movement—Okno], and they do a series of searches all over the country, and they come and search my house for good measure.”

“Evil loves silence”

It is unlikely that the new series of searches was occasioned by the latest video posted on the Telegram channel. Our sources suggest, rather, that the reason for the raids was that Free People of Voronezh constantly writes and speaks about people convicted on charges of high treason and terrorism (for sabotaging railroad switch boxes, cell towers, etc.). The channel admins treat these people as anti-war resisters. For law enforcers, on the contrary, they are criminals convicted of violent crimes.

The formal pretext for the series of searches on 22 April was the criminal case, on charges of repeated discrediting of the army, brought against Grigory Severin. As follows from the indictment, while serving his sentence in a penal colony [he had been sentenced to two and half years in prison for “publicly calling for extremism”; he served his time and was released last autumn—Okno], Severin discredited the Russian armed forces. After the search, he was detained and placed under arrest.

Sychev believes that this criminal case was “canned.”

“You see, in Russia we have the practice of ‘desk drawer cases.’ Meaning you already have a criminal case against you: the entire case file is ready in advance, and it is lying in a desk drawer, waiting for its day to come. In the case of Severin, his first case was also ‘in a desk drawer.’ When he was arrested, it transpired that the entire case file had been readied a year earlier.”

It is not known what prompted the police to pull the case file from the drawer right now. But the fact that Severin faces prosecution does not surprise Sychev in itself.

“Everyone who knows Grigory, even in passing, realizes that he is a man who will not stay quiet. If anyone asks him directly how he feels about this or that situation, he will answer directly, even if the answer risks criminal charges. He is a man who will always try to prove to everyone the viewpoint which he espouses and defends. As far as I know, the first ‘discrediting of the armed forces’ case against him came from his explaining his philosophy of life to traffic police officers who had pulled him over. The second charge came from telling his cellmates about his stance. This in the order of things for him: he does not keep silent; he speaks openly, directly. So it was a matter of time. When a person speaks openly about a very dangerous and sensitive topic—and in our country the ‘special military operation’ is a sensitive topic—there are many chances that sooner or later they will be prosecuted.”

On the same day, a criminal case was opened against 65-year-old activist Yury Avsenyev, another person involved in the run along the Voronezh River embankment. His home was also searched on 22 April, but he was released on his own recognizance. Avsenyev is suspected of “publicly calling for extremism.”

Yuri Avsenyev

The Voronezh activists who fell victim to the police brutality have not yet worked up the courage to file complaints, and they fear excessive publicity.

“They are really spooked,” says Pavel Sychev. “The information I have now is that they will not file torture complaints, but I don’t know, maybe someone will persuade them to do it. They are very much afraid that if they do it, the law enforcers won’t be reprimanded in any way, but will just come and take revenge on them. They are all convinced that they will be killed. I told them that evil loves silence, and if you don’t react now, there is a greater chance of a repeat than if you do. But they said it’s very easy to judge from the outside when you haven’t been tortured. ‘We are afraid that they might do something to us,’ [they say].”

Our sources note that such official lawlessness had not previously occurred in Voronezh. Usually, searches at the homes of political activists and arrests were carried out by the book, without violence. The only widely known case of official lawlessness ended in criminal charges against the police officers involved and monetary compensation for the victims. In May 2018, criminal investigators Sergei Kosyanenko and Oleg Sokolovsky tortured university students Maxim Grebenyuk and Sergei Troyansky, hoping to force them to confess that they had stolen a mobile phone. The students were held at Police Station No. 4 in Voronezh’s Comintern District for six hours in handcuffs and strangled with a plastic bag. They refused to incriminate themselves, and afterwards they documented their injuries and filed a torture complaint with the Investigative Committee. In 2021, Grebenyuk was awarded one million rubles, and Troyansky, 500,000 rubles, in compensation for their suffering.

The Voronezh police’s current brutality may be due to the proximity of the front, suggests a source who requested anonymity. The fact is that, since the start of the full-scale invasion, Voronezh law enforcers have regularly been seconded to the so-called new territories, the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

“There are quite big problems with the law in those ‘new territories.’ And the practices that are used there are inhuman, I think. When they come back here, to their native land, they simply do not reconfigure themselves,” says our source, who is not connected with the Free People of Voronezh Telegram channel. “They consider themselves above the law. They think that they are involved in a good cause, and they can torture bad people for the sake of the good cause. When a person has tried their hand at it once, when they realize that they can get away with it absolutely scot-free, then it is quite difficult to put the brakes on, and it will grow.”

Source: “‘Terminal stage’: Voronezh law enforcers brutally beat activists during searches,” Okno, 29 April 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Death as the Russian National Idea

Vladimir Putin speaking with a group of Russian war widows. English subtitles by Julia Khazagaeva

Death as the national idea. Look at the faces of these women who lost their men in the war against Ukraine. They glow with newfound meaning. “I am a mom of four children and, recently, a widow…. Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” ”I lost my brother in the SVO [special military operation], but my three sons are growing up to be future defenders. Thank you,” they say to the killer of their kin. The Russian existential vacuum has finally been filled. Life has a purpose that redeems existence’s meaninglessness. Losing your life in war confers valor and honor. Nothing in the old life, in peacetime, guaranteed it. A contract [to serve in the army] turns a man into a hero. He is no longer a bastard in the eyes of the women who matter to him.

So the million lives taken by the war do not particularly faze anyone [in Russia]. All the sacrifices and victims are worthwhile as long as they are converted into national pride in the minds of Russians. They won’t spare three million people or more if it comes to it. And it doesn’t matter who they kill, whether they are Ukrainians, Estonians, or Poles. War is a drug. As long as war is underway, the harsh comedown is postponed. This is bad news for the world, especially for those who imagine that it is Putin who is waging the war, while Russians themselves want peace.

P.S. I made English subtitles for the video. You can download it from my Telegram channel. Show it to everyone seeking to understand l’âme russe mystérieuse.

Source: Julia Khazagaeva (Facebook), 2 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Source: Nexta TV (X), 29 April 2025 (screenshot)

“Tatiana Sokolova will never hear her son call her ‘mom’ again. He heroically fell in the special military operation zone,” began a news broadcast in the Chelyabinsk region about International Women’s Day celebrations for the mothers of Russian soldiers.

This event, which saw flowers handed to soldiers’ mothers, was organized by the United Russia Women’s Movement, a group affiliated with the ruling party.

It was just one of many celebrations focusing on the mothers and wives of soldiers fighting in Ukraine — as well as the widows and families of those killed — ahead of International Women’s Day this year.

International Women’s Day is one of Russia’s most significant holidays, celebrating women’s contributions to society, science and the workforce. It has deep roots in Soviet history, when it was promoted as a symbol of gender equality. 

But since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials and state media have upheld a different ideal: being the wife or mother of a soldier. 

“With the militarization of society, the education system and the economy, and with the ‘ideal citizen’ — the male soldier — being placed at the center, authorities are actively promoting the image of the soldier’s wife as his counterpart,” gender researcher Sasha Talaver told the Moscow Times.

“The portrayal of women in times of war and state crisis always emerges as a key point for political imagination,” Talaver said.

This Women’s Day, members of the United Russia party and pro-Kremlin activists have been delivering flowers, organizing literary events and visiting military families with gifts and food.

“We are proud of the women who raised the heroes of the special operation and the young men who have signed up as contract soldiers,” Senator Daria Lantratova, co-chair of the United Russia Women’s Movement, said this week. 

The movement this week launched the “Flowers for the Mothers of Heroes” campaign to deliver presents and flowers to soldiers’ relatives, which has spread to 40 regions.

A resident of the Murmansk region who lost her son in the war was given a meat grinder for March 8 by the United Russia party. Photo: social media

In perhaps the most shocking Women’s Day event, mothers of fallen soldiers were gifted meat grinders from local United Russia officials in the Murmansk region. 

The news sparked a wave of criticism, as the kitchen appliance has become a grim symbol of the Russian military’s high-casualty assaults in Ukraine.

After the story went viral in Russian and Ukrainian media, one mother of a deceased soldier recorded a video statement in which she said she had been planning to buy a meat grinder herself, but United Russia “gifted it to her just in time.” 

“I actually asked you for it,” the elderly woman said.

In Cheboksary, a city in the republic of Chuvashia, officials organized an event exclusively for the widows and mothers of fallen soldiers. 

“May grief soon turn into pride!” declared local deputy Yevgeny Kadyshev. The women were given bouquets and gift bags labeled “Happiness and Joy.”

Russian authorities, including the United Russia party, promote the image of a military wife or mother as the ideal of femininity, gender studies researcher Ella Rossman told the Moscow Times.

The United Russia Women’s Movement was founded in the months following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 “as a clear response to feminist anti-war activism,” Rossman said, referring to groups like Feminist Anti-War Resistance and movements of mobilized soldiers’ wives and mothers.

“Right now, the most visible female archetype in the public sphere is the woman waiting for her soldier to return from the front,” Rossman said. “But this is not the only image. There are completely opposing narratives, like that of military women themselves.”

Rossman pointed to an article in a pro-Kremlin tabloid about a woman from Rostov who signed a military contract and went to war.

“She is a mother who left her daughter to fight, has already lost a leg in combat and tells journalists that as soon as she recovers, she will go back to the battlefield,” Rossman said.

Local television stations have been covering Women’s Day events for soldiers’ mothers and wives, while also highlighting women assisting the war effort or fighting on the front lines.

After these official celebrations, politicians sometimes invite the women for tea. In Stavropol, a table was set for the mothers and wives of soldiers following a concert at a veterans’ hospital.

“Some of them are waiting for their sons to return home. Others, unfortunately, have lost their defenders who gave their lives for the Motherland,” Senator Daria Lantratova, representing occupied Luhansk, wrote on social media.

United Russia activists also delivered flowers to soldiers’ mothers in occupied Donetsk.

“Your son is a hero. We congratulate you on this holiday and wish you well. We hope this war will end and peace will come,” a United Russia Women’s Movement activist told an elderly woman. After hearing the word “hero,” the woman teared up. 

“Don’t cry,” the United Russia activist told the older woman as they parted.

Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine also sent video messages to military mothers and widows ahead of the holiday.

“Heroes are born in families. Women give birth to us. Women raise us in kindergartens and schools. The making of any hero is thanks to the great women in his life,” Leonid Lapin, a soldier who fought as a sniper platoon commander in Ukraine, said in a video message.

Putin meets with Olga Chebnyova, widow of ‘Hero of Russia’ Sergei Chebnyov. Photo: kremlin.ru

United Russia has even involved children with disabilities in the celebrations. In the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district, mothers from a center for parents of children with mental and physical disabilities — along with their children — made greeting cards for soldiers’ relatives.

“This is not just a good initiative. Seeing how children with special needs get involved, how their eyes light up, you realize we are on the right path,” said United Russia member Alexei Komarevtsev. 

In an interview with a local news channel, he described the craft project as “socialization” for children with disabilities. Some of the cards, he added, will be sent to the front lines, “because there are also girls serving there.”

In some regions, such as Tula, soldiers’ wives and mothers received a one-time payment of 10,000 rubles (about $100) for Women’s Day. Elsewhere, gifts included makeup sets or tickets to the philharmonic.

In the Moscow region, United Russia organized a makeup seminar for soldiers’ wives, saying such initiatives “help strengthen family values and improve quality of life in society.”

“War disrupts social norms and the way of life,” Rossman said. “But war also imposes constraints on the very possibility of a rigid binary between male and female roles, even though war seems to fit that binary perfectly.”

That is likely why the authorities have been working overtime to reinforce the Kremlin’s idea of “traditional” values since the start of the war, she said.

“Russian authorities are forced to declare and reinforce traditional values [because] many families that were once intact before the war have now lost their fathers,” Rossman said. “There are also military women — doctors, for example — and women who have voluntarily gone to war. Ignoring these women is impossible. They, too, are a target audience from a propaganda standpoint.”

As the war drags on and Russia’s battlefield losses mount, authorities are forced to balance different ideals of femininity in their propaganda messaging, Rossman said. 

“They are constantly having to create different female archetypes for different audiences,” she said.

Source: Angelina Trefilova, “Russian Authorities Glorify Military Wives and Mothers on Women’s Day,” Moscow Times, 7 March 2025

Solidarity with Ukraine (and Its Opposite)

Coeleen Kiebert, Ode to the Women of Ukraine, May They Return to Quilt Their Beauty Again Soon, 2021. Ceramic, indigo linen. Pajaro Valley Arts, Watsonville, California, 26 April 2025. Photo by the Russian Reader

News from Ukraine Bulletin 144 (28 April 2025)

In this week’s bulletin: Solidarity With Ukraine conference speeches, reports and draft declaration/ Mobilise to free abducted children/ More evidence of Russian torture, targeting of civilians, abduction of children/ Putin’s foreign mercenaries

News from the territories occupied by Russia:  

Donbas hostages savagely tortured for ‘confessions’ in 2019 sentenced in Russia to 24 years (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 25th)

Huge sentences and videoed ‘repentance’ in Russia’s mounting terror in occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 24th)

“Relatives said: people like you should be killed.” The story of a woman who survived torture and fled occupied Mariupol twice (Ukrainska Pravda, April 24th)

Crimean resident jailed for “discrediting the Russian army” is freed (Crimea Human Rights Group, 23 April)

Crimean Tatar Mejlis rejects any international recognition of Crimea as Russian, chairman says (Kyiv Independent, April 22nd)

Horrific sentences demanded against five Ukrainians abducted from Russian-occupied Melitopol (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 22nd)

The situation at the front:

The weekly war summary (The Insider, 26 April)

‘Wiping out neighborhood after neighborhood’ Russia pounds Ukraine’s Pokrovsk, forcing civilians to flee under fire. For many, it’s not the first time. (Meduza, April 21st)

News from Ukraine:

Russia returns body of abducted Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna with scars from torture (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 25th)

Nine people killed and 42 injured in Russian drone attack on bus in Marhanets, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast – photos (Ukrainska Pravda, April 23rd)

‘Please don’t use my name’ A report by journalist Shura Burtin on the growing war weariness among Ukrainians (Meduza, March 27th)

War-related news from Russia:

Russia’s deserters: “A raging meat grinder” (Meduza, 24 April)

Despite Putin’s denials, Russia’s military has welcomed foreign mercenaries from at least 48 nations — (iStories, April 23rd)

Darya Kozyreva gets real prison term for Taras Shevchenko poem and opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 22nd)

The Lost Army: War veterans could pose a problem for Putin’s Russia, just like they did for interwar Germany (The Insider, April 21st)

Olga Menshikh: “A Society Sick with Fear Cannot Be Happy” (Russian Reader, April 20th)

Analysis and comment:

What Trump’s plan might look like, in maps (Meduza, 24 April)

Russia’s selective ‘terrorism’ in war against Ukraine and in fraternizing with the Taliban (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 23rd)

In memory of Cooper Andrews, Finbarr Cafferkey and Dmitry Petrov (Solidarity Collectives, 19 April)

Research of war crimes and human rights abuses:

Meeting with Representatives of Ukrainian Roma in Brussels (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 25th)

Experts of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Commend Ukraine’s Presence Despite the Prevailing Circumstances, Raise Questions on the Treatment of Ukraine’s Indigenous Peoples and the Roma Population (UNHCR, April 24th)

A reliable tool in the hands of human rights defenders: how the KHPG database works (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 23rd)

International solidarity:

Mobilise to free the Ukrainian children abducted by Russia (Labour Hub, April 27th)

“My soul is in this project of ours” (Solidarity Zone, 24 April)

Building Global Solidarity with Ukraine (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, April 23rd)

Justice without borders: the ZMINA and TDC advocacy trip to Chile (Zmina, April 18th)

Free Denys Matsola and Vladyslav Iskra Zhuravlov (Solidarity Collectives, 16 April)

Solidarity With Ukraine conference in Brussels, 26-27 March. Contributions here, media coverage here, draft conference declaration here, with call for amendments

Upcoming events:

Wednesday 7 May, 3 – 5pm, War and Peace in Ukraine, Clerici Building G.21, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford.

Sunday 1 June, 1.0pm, Marble Arch, London, March for the children of Ukraine  

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: Ukraine Information Group

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A peace proposal by the Trump administration that includes recognizing Russian authority over Crimea shocked Ukrainian officials, who say they will not accept any formal surrender of the peninsula, even though they expect to concede the territory to the Kremlin, at least temporarily.

Giving up the land that was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 is also politically and legally impossible, according to experts. It would require a change to the Ukrainian constitution and a nationwide vote, and it could be considered treason. Lawmakers and the public are firmly opposed to the idea.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Oleksandr Merezkho, a lawmaker with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party. “We will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia.”

Unlike a territorial concession, a formal surrender would permanently relinquish Crimea and abandon the hope that Ukraine could regain it in the future.

The Ukrainian public largely understands that land must be ceded as part of any armistice because there is no way to retake it militarily. Polls indicate a rising percentage of the population accepts such a trade-off.

But much of the public messaging about land concessions has suggested that they are not necessarily permanent, as when Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko told the BBC recently that Ukraine may need to temporarily give up land as part of a peace deal.

Saying otherwise would effectively admit defeat — a deeply unpopular move, especially for Ukrainians living under Russian occupation who hope to be liberated and reunited with their families one day. It also would call into question the sacrifices made by tens of thousands of Ukrainian service members who have been killed or wounded.

U.S. President Donald Trump underscored the Crimea proposal in an interview published Friday in Time magazine: “Crimea will stay with Russia. Zelenskyy understands that, and everybody understands that it’s been with them for a long time.”

Asked by reporters on Sunday if Zelenskyy was ready to give up Crimea, Trump said, “Oh, I think so. Crimea was 12 years ago. That was President Obama that gave it up without a shot being fired.”

His comments offered the latest example of the U.S. leader pressuring Ukraine to make concessions to end the war while it remains under siege. Trump has also accused Zelenskyy of prolonging the war by resisting negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Crimea, a strategic peninsula along the Black Sea in southern Ukraine, was seized by Russia years before the full-scale invasion that began in 2022. The Russian takeover followed large protests that ousted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who had refused to sign an association agreement with the European Union.

In the lead-up to peace talks, Ukrainian officials told the Associated Press for months that they expect Crimea and other Ukrainian territory controlled by Russia to be among Kyiv’s concessions in the event of any deal. But Zelenskyy has said on multiple occasions that formally surrendering the land has always been a red line.

Elements of Trump’s peace proposal would see the U.S. formally recognizing Crimea as Russian and de facto accepting Moscow’s rule over occupied Ukrainian territories, according to a senior European official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic discussions.

Whether the U.S. formally recognizes Crimea as Russian is out of Zelenskyy’s hands. But many obstacles prevent the Ukrainian president from doing so, even under immense pressure. He cannot unilaterally sign any such proposal, and he could be reprimanded by future governments for even attempting it, experts said.

Ukraine began to accept that it would not regain its lost territories after the failure of the country’s 2023 summer counteroffensive. From then on, the Ukrainian military concentrated on defending the territory it still held.

In return for territorial concessions, Ukraine wants robust security guarantees that ideally would include NATO membership or concrete plans to arm and train its forces against any future Russian invasion with the pledged support of allies. One scenario envisions European boots on the ground, which Russia rejects.

Zelenskyy has said negotiations over occupied Ukrainian territory will be drawn out and will not likely occur until a ceasefire is in place. In late March, he told reporters after a call with Trump that the U.S. president “clearly understands that legally we will not recognize any territories.”

He said giving up territory would be “the most difficult question” and “a big challenge for us.”

Formal recognition of Crimea would also amount to political suicide for Zelenskyy. It could expose him to legal action in the future, said Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economics minister.

Signing a potentially unconstitutional document could be interpreted as high treason, Mylovanov said.

The Ukrainian government cannot act either. It has no constitutional means to accept a violation of its territorial integrity, and altering the territorial makeup of the country requires a nationwide referendum.

If Ukrainian lawmakers were even to entertain the idea of surrendering Crimea, it would trigger a long, drawn-out legal debate.

“That’s why Russia is pushing it, because they know it’s impossible to achieve,” Mylovanov said.

“Anything related to constitutional change gives so much policy and public communication space to Russia,” he added. “This is all they want.”

Soldiers on the front line say they will never stop fighting, no matter what the political leadership decides.

“We lost our best guys in this war,” said Oleksandr, a soldier in the Donetsk region, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used in line with military protocols. “We won’t stop until all Ukrainian lands are free.”

Source: Samya Kullab, “Shocked by US peace proposal, Ukrainians say they will not accept any formal surrender of Crimea,” Associated Press, 27 April 2025. The emphasis is mine — TRR.

Coeleen Kiebert, Ode to the Women of Ukraine, May They Return to Quilt Their Beauty Again Soon, 2021 (detail). Pajaro Valley Arts, Watsonville, California, 26 April 2025. Photo by the Russian Reader