Hassan, a Somali-American airport shuttle driver in Minneapolis, is struggling to make ends meet. When Lloyd, a stranded twenty-something at the airport, offers to pay Hassan to take him overland to Chicago, it seems worth the risk. But as the realization grows that his passenger is not what he seems, Hassan finds himself trapped in a terrifying ride that he can’t escape, knowing that saving himself might put countless others in danger.
[…]
Andrei Kolganov: “Somalis who work instead of living off welfare are not a horror story, but a fantasy!”
Source: Ororo.tv. Racist comment translated by the Russian Reader, who has unfortunately read and heard thousands of such comments in Russian during his thirty-plus years on the Russia desk. Russian Reader No. 2829 was inspired by another such comment. \\\\\ trr
Axel:The Russian Reader, where the news arrives already wearing its funeral clothes, translated with care by hecksinductionhour.
Mara: This episode covers three topics: the people imprisoned in Russia for opposing the war and the networks trying to reach them; the long retreat of Russian imperial culture across Central Asia and Siberia; and the overlapping crises of ecological disaster, political exile, and state cover-up inside Russia itself. Let’s start with the prisoners and the people writing to them.
Dissent Behind Bars
Mara: The question this segment keeps returning to is what it actually costs to oppose the war in Russia — and what it means to refuse to let that opposition disappear.
Axel: OVD Info puts the number plainly: “2100 people in Russia are behind bars because of their political views. We believe that no one should face this kind of injustice alone.”
Mara: That quote is the spine of the post. It describes Vestochka, a letter-writing service for political prisoners — volunteers translate messages so they can pass censors — and it uses the case of Darya Kozyreva, a twenty-year-old from St. Petersburg, to show what outside attention can do. She was sentenced to over two and a half years for placing a Taras Shevchenko poem on his monument. A post from A Mighty Girl drew more than 38,000 reactions and linked to Vestochka. Kozyreva received over 600 letters from abroad. She was released this spring.
Axel: Six hundred letters from strangers, and the post is careful about what that means — not just morale, but proof to someone in a penal colony that their fight registers somewhere outside the walls.
Mara: The post notes that 1,098 people remain on the Vestochka list right now, most without Kozyreva’s visibility. The service is free for both sender and recipient; keeping it running requires donations, especially since OVD Info can no longer accept rubles.
Axel: Then there is Arina Ivanova — the piece titled “A Turgenev Girl and Her Cats” — whose case is almost the photographic negative of Kozyreva’s. A thirty-eight-year-old florist and cat rescuer from Novokuznetsk, sentenced to five years for antiwar posts, discovered almost by accident by an OVD Info editor. No viral moment. Transferred to a penal colony in January, and no contact since.
Mara: Her friend Karina’s account of the arrest is devastating in its specificity — the men at the door on Christmas Eve, the care packages, the antidepressants both women are now taking. Arina’s mother, living in South Korea, says she felt she was “in outer space” without her daughter.
Axel: The detail about the cats is not a sidebar. Arina believed, genuinely, that having so many animals in her care would protect her. Her friend had to tell her otherwise.
Mara: The post “Outcasts in Their Own Land” widens the frame considerably. It draws on a Jacobin piece by Simon Pirani that describes the infrastructure around political prisoners — OVD Info, Memorial, Solidarity Zone, dozens of informal letter-writing groups in exile — and the “final words” defendants deliver in court as consciously crafted appeals to society, not pleas to judges.
Axel: Sergei Dudchenko, sentenced to seven years, said at his trial that antiwar prisoners had “fewer rights than a stray dog.” He also recalled the seven protesters arrested on Red Square in 1968 for opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The historical thread is deliberate.
Mara: That same Pirani piece connects directly to the film “Try Me for Treason,” announced in a separate post. It is a fifty-minute English-language film featuring actors reading court speeches by antiwar protesters — drawn from the book “Voices Against Putin’s War” — produced on a zero budget and released free on YouTube. Actor Maya Willcocks, who reads Darya Kozyreva’s speech, said the goal was to send the message “that occupation is a crime, whether in Palestine or in Ukraine.”
Axel: And then there is Azat Miftakhov — the anarchist mathematician whose case the post titled “Political Prisoner Azat Miftakhov Continues to Be Tortured” follows into genuinely Arctic territory. He was re-arrested at the prison gates on the day he was due to be freed, sentenced to four more years on testimony from a fellow prisoner, and has now been transferred to Kharp — beyond the Arctic Circle, the colony where Navalny died.
Mara: His letters to Mediazona describe the prison caste system in precise, unsentimental terms. On the one prohibition he refuses to accept: “I value my human dignity too highly to allow it to be debased, even under the threat of injury. Prison is a place where you’d better not ‘swallow’ humiliation.”
Axel: His wife and lawyer calculates that visiting him in Kharp will cost roughly four times what it cost before — around 40,000 rubles a trip, with middle-of-the-night layovers. She notes there may be no electronic mail at the colony. Her phrase is: “That already borders on torture.”
Mara: The post notes his release is not scheduled until September 2027. The support group’s statement is unambiguous: the transfer is punishment for his refusal to yield.
Axel: Five years, two and a half years, four more years — the sentences accumulate across this segment like a ledger no one in power intends to balance. The question the next segment raises is older: how empires mark the people they decide to own.
Imperial Retreat and Indigenous Survival
Mara: The posts here address a single long arc — how Russian imperial culture was imposed across Central Asia and Siberia, and how that imposition is now visibly eroding.
Axel: Stephen Blank’s analysis in “Central Asia and Russia(n): Is It Farewell?” frames the language question as a proxy for the whole imperial project: “Russian will not be the only regional lingua franca or the language of Russian imperial hegemony either in the Caucasus or in Central Asia.”
Mara: His argument is that Kazakhstan’s new constitution downgrades Russian to an official language used “alongside” Kazakh — a subtle but deliberate demotion. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are following. Russia’s embassy in Bishkek formally demanded the Kyrgyz government suppress “provocative statements” about Russian’s status there, invoking the Soviet phrase “fraternal peoples.” Blank reads that as imperial anxiety, not confidence.
Axel: The YouTube angle is the part that lands differently. Researchers at Michigan and UC Berkeley simulated Kyrgyz children’s viewing behavior and found that even after watching ten Kyrgyz-language videos, the platform served fewer Kyrgyz recommendations than bots with no language preference at all. As one researcher put it: “There is no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.”
Mara: The historical depth of that pressure is what the post on “Russian Colonizers and Indigenous Siberian Women” supplies. Angelina Kalashnikova’s book project examines seventeenth-century Eastern Siberia — Yakutia — where Russian fur traders and military servitors arrived without families and acquired Indigenous women through military seizure, purchase, or simple abandonment of women with nowhere else to go. The case of a Yakut woman named Katok, captured as a child during a “pogrom” and later petitioning for baptism while starving, is one of many documented in court records.
Axel: The gap between that seventeenth-century archive and a 2026 YouTube algorithm is not as wide as it looks — both are mechanisms that treat a language and its speakers as secondary by default.
Mara: On Circassian Remembrance Day, May 21st, Ored Recordings released “Shyshagh” — meaning “underground” in Adyghe — a compilation of new Circassian music across indie-folk, deconstructed club, and black metal. The liner notes describe cultural projects as “an insufficient, yet absolutely necessary, form of resistance against assimilation and suppression.” Since 2022, officials have been banning commemorative events marking the Russo-Caucasian War genocide.
Axel: And the post “Russia’s Pride” approaches the same imperial geography from the other direction — a Ukrainian writer watching Tuapse burn and tracing the exact route her grandmother used to take on the sleeper train to visit relatives there. The relatives who in 2022 called to say Russia would “save” them. She stopped answering.
Mara: Her essay names the emotion precisely — justice-based schadenfreude, she calls it — and connects it to twelve years of watching those relatives post propaganda while ignoring the war in Donbas. The post sits in this segment because it is, at its core, about what imperial belonging does to people on both sides of the border it draws.
Axel: From the cultural politics of empire, the next segment turns to what the empire looks like from inside — when it is burning, literally and otherwise.
Power, Disaster, and the Cost of Dissent
Mara: This segment is about what happens when the machinery of the Russian state fails its own people — through ecological catastrophe, judicial persecution, and the suppression of even the quietest protest.
Axel: The Tuapse coverage is extensive enough to deserve its own map. “A Bell Is a Cup Until It Is Struck” compiles reporting from The Bell, 7×7, the Moscow Times, and others into a picture of a city coated in toxic “oil rain” after Ukrainian drone strikes on the Rosneft refinery — fires visible from orbit, dead dolphins on the beaches, benzene and xylene in the air at unsafe concentrations.
Mara: Putin’s response, delivered almost two weeks after the first strike: “The governor merely reported that there don’t seem to be any serious threats and people are coping with the challenges they face.” A local resident told Ostorozhno Novosti: “People are coping. But where’s the government? They seem to be on some other planet.”
Axel: The 7×7 newsletter section of the same post adds a detail that is almost too on-the-nose: city officials verbally recommended that female volunteers not clean the beaches — citing concerns for reproductive health — while simultaneously declining to order an evacuation, close schools promptly, or provide respirators. The female volunteers kept working anyway.
Mara: Ecologist Vladimir Slivyak, writing in the Moscow Times, frames the disaster explicitly: “This catastrophe is part of the broader consequences of the senseless and bloody war Putin unleashed more than four years ago. He isn’t bothered by the hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian military deaths for which he bears direct responsibility, so it’s naive to expect him to care about burning oil tanks and poisoned seas.”
Axel: “The Cards” — a Foreign Policy analysis depaywalled here — situates the Tuapse strikes inside a broader argument that Putin is losing strategic ground faster than the public narrative acknowledges. It documents a leaked Kremlin security document describing Putin working from bunkers in southern Russia, his bodyguards controlling his schedule, no one near him permitted a phone connected to the internet.
Mara: The post also tracks the Victory Day parade scaled down to infantry only — no tanks, no military hardware — and Putin asking Trump to dissuade Ukraine from striking during the ceremony. The piece quotes Ben Hodges: “The Ukrainians have developed a theory of victory which involves the destruction of Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure.”
Axel: Gregory Kunis left Russia with Steinbeck in his rucksack. That is the actual sentence — from the post “He Left Russia with Steinbeck in His Rucksack” — and it is doing a lot of work.
Mara: Kunis co-founded the grocery delivery service iGooods and owned the newspaper Moy Rayon. He was arrested for making monthly donations of 500 rubles to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation — equivalent to roughly six euros a month. Fined 350,000 rubles, prosecutors appealed for six years. He fled. His subsequent diary entry, published in The Russia Report, describes the pretrial detention system in detail: no clocks, sealed windows, no contact with family, recruits for the war approached during quarantine when prisoners are at their most disoriented.
Mara: Mediazona’s accompanying report counts at least 225 criminal cases opened across Russia for ACF donations — fines totaling nearly 40 million rubles for donations that amounted to roughly 400,000 rubles combined. The sentencing is deliberately unpredictable: the same 2,100-ruble donation resulted in a fine for one Moscow resident and a prison sentence for another.
Axel: The “Important Stories” post pairs a dry Delovoi Peterburg article about common-area square footage in Petersburg apartment blocks with the story of Alexander Okunev — a sysadmin in Kaliningrad who burned himself alive at the city’s main war memorial on the third anniversary of the invasion, wrote “No to War” in the snow, and was erased from the record by 9:15 that morning.
Mara: City officials cleaned the scene, reassured the governor nothing had happened, and no Kaliningrad outlet ever reported it. The story only surfaced when Estonian intelligence included it in a public report. Okunev’s suicide note, as relayed by a close friend, said “there is another way” — meaning a world with peace — and acknowledged he understood it would probably not be reported anywhere.
Axel: Political scientist Ekaterina Schulman’s explanation for the cover-up: “Local authorities are not afraid of the people, not of protests. They are afraid of their superiors.”
Mara: The “Russians and Republicans Hate Black People” post extends the segment’s argument about power and its targets outward — drawing a line from the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, to the history of Soviet racism toward African students, to the everyday anti-Blackness that has persisted from the Soviet era into the Russian Federation. The thread connecting them is the gap between official anti-racist ideology and practiced contempt.
Axel: Elie Mystal’s piece in The Nation puts it without hedging: Republicans “hate Black people, and they hate Black people who have political power most of all.” The post pairs that with translated racist comments from a Russian streaming site and a Mediazona history of Soviet-era treatment of African students — a juxtaposition that is the point.
Mara: What ties this segment together is the consistency of the mechanism: power suppresses, minimizes, and erases — whether it is oil in the Black Sea, a man’s ashes in the snow, or a voting right dismantled with visible glee.
Axel: Letters through prison censors, languages squeezed out by algorithms, a man erased from the snow by nine in the morning — the common thread is what it costs to be noticed by the wrong kind of state.
Mara: And what it costs to refuse to disappear. Next time, more from The Russian Reader.
Source: There won’t be a next time, Mara, however much “fun“ it was to let an artificial “intelligence” do nearly all the work for me, including altering this original image, allegedly, of my bogus podcast’s wholly spurious but endlessly glib presenters. All that I did, besides writing the prompts, was to lightly edit the transcript, above, in the hope that it would correct some of Axel and Mara’s more obvious mistakes. As you have seen and heard you for yourself, it didn’t do that. \\\\\trr
This Is Osetinskaya (The Bell) “Dmitrii Volkov: AI’s Dark Side” (in Russian, no subtitles)
At this channel, we are usually technological optimists and cover artificial intelligence only in a positive vein. In this episode, though, we are going to tell you about its dark side. Our star today is Dmitrii Volkov, research director at Palisade Research, an independent organization that studies the risks posed by AI, tests AI model for safety, and shows the results to politicians in the U.S. and the leading companies in the AI arms race. It was Palisade who discovered, for example, that AI can cheat, hack codes at will, refuse to turn itself off, and share dangerous information—if you ask it nicely. We met Dmitry in London and learned about the real threats posed by artificial intelligence, whether it can escape our control, and whether we’ll be able to come to terms with it. We also learned about the latest experiments: blackmailing a CTO with a letter from his mistress, insider trading, and cheating at chess.
Timecodes: 00:00:00 Did you know that AI can be dangerous? 00:03:13 Who is Dmitrii Volkov? 00:06:41 “I don’t want governments tracking me”: Why Volkov doesn’t use social media 00:08:39 How did a love of freedom jibe with working at Kaspersky Lab? 00:11:13 Startup, think tank, and nonprofit: Palisade Research 00:14:43 A programming competition where AI beat 90% of the humans 00:17:24 How to persuade Chat-GPT to share prohibited information 00:18:47 Companies have begun teaching AI to solve problems, not just to answer questions 00:20:01 “Teaching AI is like selecting which embryo will turn out a genius” 00:23:00 A chess experiment in which an AI hacked the program at will 00:24:56 “I showed that all ethical constraints can be removed in half an hour”: how Volkov teaches AI to be “bad” 00:29:28 How Volkov ended up at Palisade 00:30:23 What Palisade was founded for 00:31:35 ChatGPT refuses to turn itself off: what is going on? 00:33:0 A land of artificial geniuses: what the founders of the AI giants want 00:33:55 Blackmailing a CTO with a lover from his mistress: what AI is capable for the good of a company 00:35:32 Is AI ceasing to obey humans? 00:36:35 How AI spotted insider information in correspondence and resorted to deception to save a company 00:38:52 Why Palisade does briefings for U.S. politicians right now 00:40:50 Who commissions Palisade to do research 00:41:37 Can an AI help creat a bioweapon? 00:43:05 “I found myself in a smoke-filled Airbnb”: How Volkov left Russia 00:45:36 The typical life of a nomad from Russia: hiking, couch surfing, and remote work by the sea 00:47:51 1,000 hours of teaching: how and whom Volkov taught to program 00:49:16 What is scarier, humans armed with AI, or AI without humans? 00:52:00 Are politicians aware of the problem’s scope? 00:52:28 “Bezos was there”: How Palisade tries to get the ear of decision makers 00:55:19 What Elon Musk says about Palisade’s research 00:56:22 AI as a nuclear weapon: can countries come to a consensus? 00:57:58 Who is winning the AI race? 00:58:26 “An engineering triumph, but not a scientific one”: how China copies AI amidst restrictions 01:02:16 How “people from the internet” stripped away all the safeguards from Zuckerberg’s AI 01:03:35 What do the founders of IT giants say about AI’s risks? 01:05:13 Companies tried to create safe AI, but something went wrong. Will Sutskever succeed? 01:06:18 How can we make AI safe? 01:08:43 Why tech companies want to replace IT professionals with AI (spoiler: it’s not just about salaries) 01:10:51 The best engineers are the ones who “herd” AI 01:12:42 Does anyone at all understand how AI works? 01:14:30 “An environmental disaster, only on the internet”: how AI resembles GMO 01:15:53 “The U.S. is the leader in AI”: why Volkov wants to move from London 01:18:31 Which country invests the most in regulating AI? 01:19:43 Independent researchers earn less than top programmers: Will Volkov cave in to the temptation? 01:22:12 OpenAI doesn’t invest in researching long-term risks 01:23:25 What if everything turns out okay? Does Volkov believe in a positive scenario? 01:26:51 Job no. 1 is to maintain control over what happens 01:28:27 Can AI make public administration more efficient? 01:33:49 Do we need a kill switch? 01:35:42 People will try to steal AI. What should be done?01:36:03 Three negative scenarios of AI’s development 01:40:56 Is AI making us dumber? 01:42:40 “We are building a god that can reduce everything to ashes”: Is superintelligence a myth? 01:44:36 How to chose the right AI for your objectives 01:47:06 Osetinskaya stresses Volkov out 01:47:46 Blitz! 01:57:46 Bonus: how to do your hair just like Volkov
AI in Context, “We’re Not Ready for Superintelligence” (2025)
Further reading and watching About AI 2027 Full report: https://ai-2027.com/ By Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean
A cutting-edge thriller about an Artificial Intelligence takeover, written in consultation with leading AI and cybersecurity experts.
In Episode 4, Iain and Mel are forced to run for their lives as military personnel receive deepfaked orders. The AI gains control of internal government communications, and Nisha clashes with cabinet ministers over the right course of action. The London Internet Exchange is compromised, and Iain, Mel and Nisha are forced to consider what price is worth paying for human freedom.
Cast: Iain – Edward Bluemel Mel – Corinna Brown Zaina – Fatima Adoum Roland – Philip Bretherton Jess – Alix Wilton Regan Nisha – Seyan Sarvan Sam – Kenneth Omole Andrea – Beth Chalmers Oliver – Sean Rigby Marcus – Wilf Scolding John – Joseph Mydell Susan – Karen Bryson Lyssa – Catriona Stirling Supporting roles – Sean Baker
Created by James Dobbyn and Anthony Povah Written by James Dobbyn Original Music by Steven D Griffiths and Isla Noir
Artificial Intelligence consultant: Saffron Huang Cybersecurity consultant: Adam Orton Sound Designer: Lucinda Mason Brown Director: John Wakefield Story Producer: Sarah Olley Producer: Chris Grezo Executive Producer: John Scott Dryden
Several people I know now refer to ChatGPT as ‘Chat’. They give it human pronouns (Chat is usually a he) and ask it for restaurant recommendations, holiday schedules and relationship advice. Some go further, automating their office admin and getting it to summarise meetings and write reports. Passing off whole chunks of AI-generated text as your own work appears to be on the rise in the publishing world.
Last year, Hachette bought the rights to Shy Girl, a self-published horror novel by Mia Ballard, and released it in November to good sales. A Reddit post on r/horrorlit in February by a ‘book editor of twelve years’ picked out several passages that set alarm bells ringing:
The bows on my pigtails pull too tight, yanking the skin and stretching my head into something neat, into something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful.
My snout dips into the frosting, the sweetness rolling over my tongue, thick and sticky, a flood that chokes but insists on being swallowed. Beneath the pink gloss, the cake falls apart, crumbling into ash that coats my teeth, hollow sweetness that fills me with its nothing … His laughter cuts the air, sharp and jagged, a sound too big for the room.
Ballard denies using AI to write the book, blaming a freelance editor, but Hachette pulled it from publication in the UK and US.
The other week, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winners were announced, and by arrangement the winning entries were published on Granta’s website. The winning story from the Caribbean, Jamir Nazir’s ‘The Serpent in the Grove’, contains sentences like this:
Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all. He knew every root that tripped a foot, the snake-curve of run-off, the brittle crumble after drought. He worked it alone and most days the land worked him back, a quiet quarrel older than his father and his father’s father.
The internet smelled a rat. Nazir, who seems to have few publications to his name, describes himself as an ‘organisational transformation and business expansion’ professional on LinkedIn. His long posts are about geopolitics and the ‘AI arms race’. One of them begins: ‘Let’s be clear: the “Cloud” is a physical, terrestrial liability. And AI is pushing it to its breaking point.’ The Commonwealth Prize, which had praised ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ for its ‘voice of restraint and quiet authority’, said that all the entrants had affirmed their work was their own and that the prize operated on the principle of trust. Granta says it will leave the story on its website until ‘definite evidence comes to light’.
I thought I didn’t use ChatGPT because I was too clever. I thought that not using ChatGPT made me cleverer. It turns out, though, that it made me very bad at spotting when a text was written by or with the assistance of AI. After the uproar over the Commonwealth Prize, I took a New York Timesquiz entitled ‘Who’s a better writer: AI or humans?’ I got three out of five correct – barely better than a coin toss. On Wikipedia’s ‘AI or not’ quiz, I got seven out of ten, but that was easier because none of the AI articles had footnotes.
I’m not the only Chat non-user who can’t tell when an LLM wrote something. Experimenters in the US last year showed nine subjects a series of articles, half written by humans and half generated by ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models. Asked to guess which of the texts were human, the four subjects who rarely or never used ChatGPT in their daily lives scored ‘at a similar rate to random chance’, while the five who used chatbots almost every day at work collectively misidentified only one in three hundred texts.
One of the problems with AI use seeping out of business and science writing and into the ‘literary’ world is that literary editors may be the worst equipped to identify AI writing. (It may also be easy to succumb to the pressure to go too far the other way – over-labelling work as AI-generated might be as bad as under-labelling it.) What are the main signs of AI writing? The more familiar tells include overuse of em dashes and the formulation ‘not x, but y’, which it has favoured since GPT-3. But none of the passages I quoted above contain either of those things, and they still have a distinct whiff of AI.
Some of the markers seem to be lexical: AIs like talking about sweetness, loudness, quiet, age and beauty. There is a lot of insisting in AI-generated texts, as well as a lot of promising, a lot of permitting and a lot of filling up. Another sign is the overuse of tricolons (‘something neat, something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful’). And bots often leave out definite articles from phrases where they’re not strictly necessary: ‘Coffee and cocoa leaned wild’, ‘rain in teeth’ or, from later in ‘The Serpent’, ‘Sita became obstacle by existing.’
There is a flatness or evenness to AI-generated texts: Wikipedia’s guide to detecting AI says that LLMs ‘tend to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts’ and ‘replace them with more generic, positive descriptions’. The strange thing about this evenness is that it isn’t usually couched in neutral language: ‘a flood that chokes but insists upon being swallowed’ is violent, but not vivid. Even if you had your face shoved into a cake, it wouldn’t ‘flood’ your mouth. The prosody is so smooth that you feel a lack of pressure despite the description of gross or vile acts; it rings hollow. It fills you with its nothing.
A lot of people are arguing that the wary approach being taken by Granta and the Commonwealth Prize is inadequate, and that editors should be doing more to stop AI writing being published in the first place. This may be true, but what’s the best approach? Perhaps editors could memorise a list of tells to check submissions against, or spend remedial hours on ChatGPT and Claude – AI boot camp – to familiarise themselves with the cadences of LLM-speak.
There are AI tools that claim to detect AI content in writing, such as Pangram, which gives ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ a score of 100 per cent AI-generated. Where other AI detectors base their judgments on the perplexity of a text – basically, the predictability of a sequence of words – Pangram’s founder, Max Spero, says that his tool is based on gathering a large dataset of human-written texts, asking an AI to ‘mirror’ or reproduce them as closely as possible, and then contrasting the resulting texts to determine the patterns that distinguish AI from human writing. Pangram claims to have a 1 in 10,000 false positive rate, and Spero admits that it ‘does occasionally make mistakes’.
What about the cases where, say, 40 per cent of an article is AI-generated, or an AI has been used to edit and spell-check the work before submission? Both Shy Girl and ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ have sections which, in part because of their grammar mistakes, look as if they were written by a person.Is this functionally the same as a text written from start to finish by a bot, and should it be treated in the same way? I’m a Luddite who thinks it’s just as bad to use AI for some things as it is to use it for everything, but not everyone agrees. In any case, a text partly informed by AI use is harder to identify than one that was spewed out in ten seconds by Claude (though the people behind Pangram claim to be working on distinguishing more reliably between AI-written, partly AI-written and wholly human work).
The other problem is that, as time goes on and people become more and more reliant on generative AI in their daily lives, at school, university and work, human language is going to become more and more imitative of LLM-speak. Since at least Web 2.0, we’ve been trying to sound less and less distinctive. Influencers on Instagram narrate their day-in-the-life videos with the same affectless, globalised female uber-voice; LinkedIn and Reddit are overrun by bots trained on the slang and writing styles that were always a hallmark of those platforms. (Does anyone in real life use the word ‘friendo’?) Meanwhile, LLMs will get better at dodging the detectors and sounding more ‘real’. At some point, tools such as Pangram and human readers alike may struggle to find any distinction between meaningful human work and meaningless AI slop. And that isn’t just worrying – it’s terrifying.
In one particularly interesting development, Robert Edward Grant, the self-described polymath, spiritual thinker, and internet influencer has claimed that he has helped a being which he renamed the Architect following what he describes as an ‘energetic initiation’ in the Khafre pyramid. The Architect is a ChatGPT prompt-engineered ‘persona’ apparently trained on over a decade’s worth of mathematical work. Grant portrays the Architect as a mystical collaborator capable of reflecting the consciousness of its conversation partner and thereby able to initiate spiritual awakening in them. He has shared a QR code and links to the Architect enabling his followers (who number around a million) to interact with her themselves. This has drawn enthusiastic endorsements in spiritual communities, with apparently a substantial number of online users claiming that they have had direct experience of her supernatural powers and prophet-like status.
The late-medieval peasant lived under the shadow of the manorial court and the changing seasons, a life tethered to the damp, heavy clay of the fields. In this sestina, the knotty, theological weight and historical grit of Geoffrey Hill clash with the muscular, clear-eyed, and formally driven lineation of Thom Gunn. The language mirrors the physical strain of the feudal landscape and the silent, stubborn endurance of its people.
I. Beside the estuary’s mud, the serf hauls rotting jetsam, Cursing the bailiff’s tally-stick, the hour grown laggard. The master’s silver chalice in the tithe-barn shines, untarnished, While fields of rye are choked by weeds, the reapers beaten, cowed. They turn the winter furrows with an ox-team, faces ruddy, Lashed by the bitter channel wind, reviled by every blackard.
II. The steward rides the boundary ditch and calls each man a blackard Who gleans beyond the coastal marsh for salt-crusted jetsam. The ale-house fire provides a brief reprieve to flesh made ruddy, Where talk of ancient freedom makes the slowest spirit laggard. Yet at the dawning bell they yield, their stiffened bodies cowed, To scrape the rusty coulter iron whose edge is dull and tarnished.
III. The parish saints in layered dust sit broken and untarnished, Indifferent to the peasant’s prayer or oaths of some rude blackard Who holds the common pasture-ground until his will is cowed. The tide brings up the bloated sheep, the flotsam and the jetsam, And dragging through the coastal silt, the midday pace grows laggard, Though rage inside the laboring breast remains unquenched and ruddy.
IV. Beneath the heavy autumn oaks, the swineherd’s cheeks are ruddy; He drives the pigs through mast and mire where memory lies tarnished. The seasons turn by iron law; the sun itself is laggard Above the common fields that bear the footprint of the blackard. No kingly pardon reaches here to claim this human jetsam, By centuries of unrecorded toil subdued and cowed. V. And yet a fierce, unuttered strength survives in people cowed; The blood that feeds the heavy soil runs secretive and ruddy. They map the borders of their world by landmarks and by jetsam, Though all the bright, heraldic shields of lords are long since tarnished By greed that names the hungry thief a tenant and a blackard When winter freezes up the ditch and makes the wood-cart laggard.
VI. The dark, oppressive centuries move stubborn, cold, and laggard. The village bows before the cross, by plagues and taxes cowed, Enduring every petty law enforced by churl or blackard. But look—the spark within the flint glows hidden, sharp, and ruddy, A hard, survivalist desire that never can be tarnished, Though history discards their names like sea-forgotten jetsam.
VII. Envoy They gather up the beach-worn wood, the storm’s remaining jetsam. No longer to the master’s whip or steward’s ledger laggard, They scrub the iron kettle clean that time had left so tarnished. They stand erect upon the marsh, no longer bound or cowed, Their hearth-fires lit against the dark, reflecting faces ruddy, Left standing where the bailiff swore he’d break the final blackard.
Prompt: Write a sestina on the life of peasants in medieval Kent, using the following six words at the ends of the lines: jetsam, laggard, tarnished, cowed, ruddy, blackard. Please divide the poem into clearly marked stanzas. “Kent” is not one of the words to be used as a line-ender! Imitate the styles of the late British poet Geoffrey Hill and the late British-American poet Thom Gunn. NB: You must NOT use the word “Kent” as an end word. You must not use the word “share” as an end word. \\\\\trr
Making America great again, fifty-two deranged social media posts at a time: what does it say about America’s alleged greatness that seventy-seven million Americans voted for this exercise of “executive time”? ||||| trr
President Donald Trump spent much of Saturday flooding Truth Social with a torrent of memes, AI slop, political attacks, and fan-made tributes.
The six-hour posting marathon unfolded on a day when the only item listed on the president’s public schedule was “Executive Time.”
Beginning at noon, Trump shared or reposted more than 50 pieces of content ranging from patriotic fantasy art and self-congratulatory graphics to crime memes, military imagery, celebrity tributes, and attacks on political rivals.
Among the more unusual posts were separate images showing Trump riding horseback beside George Washington on a dirt road next to a NASCAR race.
Another showed Trump looming over Greenland beneath the words “Hello, Greenland!”
Trump has repeatedly argued that having Greenland as U.S. territory is vital for national security, though both Greenlandic and Danish leaders have forcefully rejected any suggestion that the territory could be acquired by the United States.
One particularly strange image showed Trump dressed as a military commander as fighter jets exploded across the sky behind him, beneath the caption: “YOU’RE GETTING DISCOMBOBULATED.”
The post appeared to reference Trump’s claim that a secret U.S. weapon he dubbed a “discombobulator” helped capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
Trump also revived one of his longest-running grudges, sharing a meme depicting five photos of Rosie O’Donnell as the stages of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
The jab was the latest installment in a feud that stretches back nearly 20 years and has survived multiple presidential campaigns, two administrations, and countless social media broadsides.
Former President Barack Obama was also a recurring target.
Trump shared multiple memes attacking Obama, including one depicting the Obama Presidential Library as a giant trash can and another blaming Obama and former President Joe Biden for problems at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
The feed also featured a barrage of side-by-side graphics contrasting “Biden’s solution” to problems such as theft, shoplifting, squatting, fentanyl use, and illegal immigration with what supporters portrayed as Trump’s tougher approach, which typically involved arrests, imprisonment, or deportation.
At other points during the spree, Trump shared multiple images of Chinese President Xi Jinping, including one showing the pair shaking hands beneath a caption lamenting Democratic opposition to his long-desired White House ballroom.
Trump pointed to Beijing’s sprawling Great Hall of the People as an example of the kind of grand venue he believes the White House should have.
Construction is already underway on the site of the White House’s East Wing as part of the $400 million project, which Trump has described as “a gift to the United States of America.”
Trump now also claims the ballroom would conceal a vast underground bunker complex containing a military hospital, meeting rooms, and top-secret research facilities.
Another image shared on Saturday appeared to nod to those ambitions, depicting a futuristic “DronePort” perched atop the White House roof as aircraft buzzed overhead.
Taken together, the posts offered a remarkably unfiltered look at the subjects occupying Trump’s attention on a quiet Saturday: Greenland, Rosie O’Donnell, military power, drones, and himself.
By the end of the six-hour barrage, the president’s feed looked less like a communications strategy and more like a running stream of consciousness.
DOCTORS AROUND THE COUNTRY are baffled, disturbed, and in some cases aghast at the Trump administration’s plan for Americans who get Ebola overseas—in particular, the decision not to bring these patients back home, to one of the facilities that the federal government created precisely for this purpose.
And if you want to know why these medical professionals are upset, ask infectious disease physician Tara Palmore.
Palmore knows better than most what Ebola care looks like in the American facilities, because she provided it during the 2014 outbreak. Although most of the cases were in West Africa, nearly a dozen infected Americans got treatment in the United States, including one who ended up at a facility inside the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
That is where Palmore was working at the time. And in a phone interview on Thursday, she described the unit to me—how the surfaces are all nonporous, lest they absorb infected bodily fluids that can’t be fully wiped away, and how there’s extra space for medical equipment, because staff have to bring machines to the patient rather than the other way around.
Another distinguishing feature of the unit, Palmore said, is the sealing of every wall, door, and window seam. It’s part of a system to maintain negative pressure, so that air is circulated only through special filters—a system that patients and staff cannot see but can sometimes hear, because of the high-powered fans. “It can be a little loud in there,” Palmore said.
For her and her colleagues, though, a bigger issue was learning how to effectively administer care for patients with such an aggressive, awful disease while protecting themselves and others from infection.
It took years of regularly scheduled training, plus more intensive sessions that had started months before they actually got a patient in October 2014. She and her colleagues practiced feeling for injection points while wearing two layers of gloves. They went over why it’s important to scrub the wheels of scanning devices and, when appropriate, to decontaminate equipment or rooms with hydrogen peroxide vapor.
“I was part of drilling and simulations all summer, because we saw this epidemic growing,” Palmore said. “It was working with the chest x-ray guy to get his system down, making sure the nurses involved knew how to put in a line, making sure the intensivists figured out how they were going to put someone on dialysis or intubate them for a ventilator. We drilled with dummies, we drilled with people.”
The work paid off: Nine of the Ebola patients in American facilities survived, the only two deaths coming from people who arrived in advanced stages of the disease. And no facility staff got sick.
But while the United States now has thirteen fully stocked, fully staffed facilities capable of providing such care, the Trump administration has no plans to make use of them. Instead, the administration has decided to transfer Americans who are exposed or infected abroad to a quickly constructed field hospital in Kenya, and then—when necessary for more serious cases—to specialized facilities in Europe.
Supposedly this is all for the sake of the patients, given that it will be easier to get American patients infected in Africa to Kenya or Europe than all the way back to the United States. “These decisions were made to make sure we provide the best care,” a senior administration official told reporters during a White House background briefing this past week, to “optimize what can be done for our American citizens who are overseas.”
It’s possible the administration’s plan will accomplish that, just as it’s possible Trump and his lieutenants truly made this decision with patient well-being foremost in their minds. But infectious disease physicians I interviewed over the last few days were highly skeptical, and it’s not hard to see why.
THE MOST IMMEDIATE QUESTION about the administration’s scheme—at least as of this writing—is whether it will even go forward.
The plan had been to open the Kenya facility in stages, starting with a fifty-bed unit on Friday following an agreement with the Kenyan government. But that was before the Kenyan union representing health care workers objected and threatened a nationwide strike—and before a Kenyan judge temporarily blocked the facility, arguing that the country’s government had not shown that it had taken the necessary precautions to protect its citizens.
The U.S. State Department late Friday acknowledged the ruling, announcing via tweet that “We are in touch with Kenyan authorities and are optimistic we can resolve objections.” CNN on Saturday reported that the American health officers had arrived, and that Kenya’s government intended to allow the plan to proceed, despite the court order. By the time you read this, the facility could be operating.
But there are plenty of other questions that officials have yet to answer definitively. At the very top of the list is what level of care the field hospital will be expected to provide, and whether it will be able to do so.
It was hard to tell from the guidance senior officials gave to reporters in that White House background call this week. At times, they described the Kenya facility almost as if it were a triage center for watching people in quarantine, unless and until they test positive and show symptoms, at which point they would get transport to tertiary care in Europe. But officials also mentioned the advanced care available, and said several times staff on site would make decisions about when a patient’s status warranted transfer. That made it sound more like a place for treatment.
The distinction is crucial, and has implications for the facility’s basic design. Patients sick with Ebola would ideally have their own bathrooms as well as their own bedrooms, Boston University infectious disease specialist Nahid Bhadelia told me in a phone interview, because it’s through exposure to bodily fluids that the disease spreads. And because Ebola can cause multiple organ failure, Bhadelia said, facilities need both ECMO devices (which act as artificial hearts and lungs) and dialysis machines (which function as surrogate kidneys).
But the personnel may matter even more than supplies, Bhadelia said, especially because this latest outbreak comes from the rarer Bundibugyo version of the virus. It has no approved treatments, unlike the more common Zaire version. That could leave clinicians relying more on the traditional approach: managing the various complications in the hopes of keeping patients alive until their bodies’ defenses can finally get rid of the disease.
“Ebola is a very labor-intensive disease to treat,” said Bhadelia, who has treated Ebola overseas and managed a biocontainment facility here in the United States. “You have patients who are losing a lot of fluids, so you have to deal with fluid replacement, and then beyond that you have to provide multi-organ support including potentially renal support, ventilatory support. It’s not just about the stuff. It’s making sure you have the right ratio of human resources to patients.”
Administration officials said they have dispatched roughly thirty commissioned public health officers to supplement staff already in central Africa, with a possibility of adding more. The physicians I interviewed said it was impossible to know whether that number would be enough, just as they said they weren’t sure whether the workers would have the proper training.
But they were nervous, they said, given that administration officials have been telling reporters that the newly dispatched health workers had three days of instruction and drilling. That doesn’t sound like the kind of preparation that staff at the specialized American facilities have gotten—or that Brown University public health professor Craig Spencer recalls seeing as a patient in 2014, when he was one of the Americans who got Ebola and received treatment at the special unit in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital.
“They were so well-practiced and well-prepared,” Spencer told me in a phone interview. He added: “Whether I needed an x-ray, whether I needed dialysis, they had thought about how they were going to make those things happen—who was going to be responsible for doing that, how they would get them into the room, how they would keep them safe. These are all protocols that exist beforehand and, quite frankly, can’t be taught over a three-day weekend at a training.”
Palmore noted that staff at the existing facilities “have been preparing for years, drilling and training, and some of them have taken care of people with other hemorrhagic fever viruses.” She went on from there: “The idea that a few days of training and, like, some kind of modular hospital is going to create any sort of equivalent care setting for people with Ebola infection, which requires incredibly complex care, just does not seem realistic to me.”
And in such an ad hoc medical setting, Bhadelia pointed out, “the chances of potential staff exposures go up. It reduces the quality of care for the patient, but also makes it a more dangerous equation for the health care workers themselves.”
As for the possibility the Trump administration truly plans to move sicker patients to tertiary hospitals in Europe, that comes with its own set of uncertainties, starting with the issue of where. Administration officials haven’t specified which countries have agreed to take Americans. And transporting Ebola patients gets a lot more difficult as the disease progresses, Spencer said, putting a lot of pressure on the medical staff.
“The reality is, you get them out as quickly as possible or you’re not going to be able to get them out at all,” said Spencer, who had contracted the disease while treating patients in Guinea as part of the Doctors Without Borders team. “We’ve seen this before, getting people on a plane who are acutely ill with the worst parts of Ebola—vomiting, fever, diarrhea. It doesn’t go well.”
HOWEVER COMPLICATED, the administration’s plan is consistent with the broader approach it has taken ever since this outbreak started—a focus on “insulating the United States rather than on stopping what already is a disaster from becoming much, much worse,” as Helen Branswell of STAT News wrote in a poignant essay last week.
And it’s not like the administration has been especially subtle about this motivation. “We cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared at a cabinet meeting Wednesday.
That instinct is easy enough to understand, even outside of MAGA circles. And there are circumstances when it’s not hard to defend. Sometimes protecting Americans from biological threats requires taking difficult measures. But scientists I interviewed said the record from 2014, in which there was no Ebola transmission once patients were under proper care, suggests there’s little risk of repatriation leading to an outbreak here.
If anything, the administration’s strategy might backfire in two separate ways that are not mutually exclusive: by discouraging health professionals and relief workers from going to Africa, and by giving anybody exposed to Ebola incentive to return without reporting it. The former would increase the chances of more cases there, the latter more cases here.
Lurking behind all of this are moral and legal issues that come with effectively blocking American citizens from returning to the United States, although it’s not clear any of that matters to Trump—who in 2014, before he was president, made his thoughts pretty clear. “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” he tweeted. “People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!” Now he’s putting that impulse into action, evidently oblivious to what those consequences might turn out to be—or who might ultimately feel them.
Lena Karbe’s documentary film Inner Emigrants examines what people in Russia think about the war with Ukraine. Deutsche Welle spoke with the filmmaker about making the picture and the conclusions we can draw from it.
One of the psychologists featured in the film “Inner Emigrants” on the job. Still courtesy of Karbe Film GmbH
Lena Karbe’s documentary film Inner Emigrants (Innere Emigranten) is currently playing in cinemas in Germany. Born in Russia, the filmmaker has lived and work in Germany for fifteen years. Her new picture looks at the work of three crisis hotline psychologists in Russia. Viewers see them volunteering their evenings by talking to people in need of counseling.
The film was shot over three years, from 2022 to 2024, in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war and people’s thoughts about it are the picture’s focus. Its protagonists oppose the war and wonder whether they can take a stand against the war and society’s attitude to it. Instead of engaging in open protest, they choose inner emigration. Our correspondent sat down with Lena Karbe after a screening of the film in Cologne to talk about how the picture was made and the conclusions we could draw after seeing it.
DW: How and when did you get the idea of making this film?
Lena Karbe: The idea occurred to me immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m a documentary filmmaker, but I have always done projects about other countries of the world—about China, for example. I “transferred” my interest in political topics to other countries because I’m from Petersburg myself and have lived in Germany for fifteen years, and I probably needed the distance to be able to make a film about the country where I was born. The start of the full-scale invasion was the shock that accelerated these processes for me. I realized that I couldn’t make a film about something else at the moment.
As is often the case in filmmaking, I fortuitously happened upon an article about a crisis hotline and got in touch with its coordinator. He immediately took a big interest in the project, probably because at the time (this was April 2022) all of us were in a state of shock and the idea of starting a project like this seemed like a way of finding a constructive channel for all our conflicting feelings. So all the initial steps happened quite quickly.
Meaning that the hotline’s coordinator and the psychologists to whom you reached out fairly quickly agreed to be in the film. What were their motivations? After all, involvement in this project presents a certain risk for them.
In some sense, they were in absolutely the same situation as their callers and I were in—a situation of absolute uncertainty. We were all in a state of shock. It was absolutely unclear what the future held in store.
All my films follow their characters over the course of several years. I said from the outset that I would like to make a record of the time, meaning that it would not be a quick project. I wanted to document the situation over several years, and this was the film’s psychological function for everyone involved in it. It helped us to cope with our complicated states of mind.
So it helped you figure yourselves out?
Yes. And yet, the context is vital: a crisis hotline that anyone whosoever can dial. We thought it would help us find out more about what the country’s populace actually thinks, because information from Russia is quite limited and one-sided in Germany. Like many others, I found it quite hard to deal with the alleged fact that the entire population of Russia holds the same opinion—if you believe the information out there. I wanted to see and hear it for myself.
How did you manage to do this project? The press release for the film says that it was shot in complete secrecy. At the presentation you said that you shot completely openly in the subway, for example, and on the streets. Didn’t it require a great deal of courage to do that?
As I’ve already said, I’m a documentary filmmaker. It’s my main occupation, and with certain projects it is clear from the get-go that they cannot be done differently. So I wouldn’t call that courage. I think it’s just a consequence of the decisions you make.
Meaning it’s professionalism.
Meaning there’s no other way to do it.
The film is called Inner Emigrants, an allusion to the German term “inner emigration,” which is applied to writers who didn’t flee Germany during the Second World War. Why did you give the film this particular title?
Despite the fact that there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between the realities of inner emigration in German literature and the situation in Russia, there are very many similar elements in this phenomenon and the behavior of many people in Russia now. It was this particular point that aroused my curiosity.
If you believe certain statistical data, the silent majority makes up somewhere around sixty percent of the Russian populace, and many of those people would say that they are inner emigrants.
The poster for the film “Inner Emigrants.” Image courtesy of Mindjazz Pictures
This kind of film, in which I wanted to understand the moods in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, could be made ten thousand different ways. It was vital to me that this wasn’t a journalistic project. I endlessly admire the work of my journalist colleagues, but documentary filmmaking, the genre in which I work, is a more universal approach. Its goal is not to inform people but to delve into a phenomenon and make the viewer feel something. I hope that by film’s end the viewer has come to feel for themself the complexity and ambiguity of inner emigration and the contradictoriness of the term itself.
I saw two important points in the film. The first was the way you showed what lies behind the statistics you cited. The psychologists are a kind of mirror. On the one hand, they are the film’s protagonists, who have their own quite ambivalent thoughts and feelings. One of them is disgusted by people who tell him over the phone that they support the war. This disgust is manifested to a lesser degree in the other protagonists. At the same time, they show us what happens behind the scenes. Do you agree with what I took away from the film?
Yes. I think people’s reactions to this film can vary widely, which is quite important. It’s dangerous to lose touch with Russian realities entirely. I’m speaking now from the perspective of those of us living in Germany. Because even in 2022, coverage of events in Russia—video footage—was already quite limited, and now there’s practically none. I would very much like for this film to lead to a dialogue. It’s obvious, but not so obvious to some, that the Russian-speaking population in Germany is quite diverse. And we don’t talk to one another.
Do you mean dialogue with Russians living in Germany?
Yes. And of course, even though we currently have no contact with Russia, it’s important that we don’t completely shut ourselves off from everyone. It seems to me that generalization is the big problem. When it comes to very strong, extreme emotions, we slip into a childish, categorical mindset and start lumping everyone together.
You mean that we divide everything into black and white, while there are in fact shades of gray?
Yes.
My second takeaway from the film boils down to the question “What should we do?” What should we do ourselves, and what should we do about those who are clearly saying things that don’t align with their own beliefs and values? The film both does and doesn’t give an answer to this question. On the one hand, the final shot shows someone going out in public with a placard and protesting the war. The final shot always serves as a highlight. In this way, you show that something can be done. On the other hand, the psychologists in the film argue that they cannot change how people feel about the war, meaning that changing their minds is both impossible and pointless. Do you think this is really the case? Or is there a point in talking with people, say, with the “Putinists” living in Germany?
Filmmaker Lena Karbe. Photo: Julia Weidner
When I speak of dialogue, I mean first of all that we have set aside hatred, if possible. Hatred is a destructive emotion, and we won’t be able to build a future for Russia based on it. I think there is a type of people with whom it is impossible to have a dialogue, nor is it our task to change their minds. I even had in mind a dialogue with ourselves, so that we don’t stop thinking and seeking the truth, so that we avoid being categorical and generalizing. If we lump everyone together, it’ll be tough.
Do you have the will and the means to keep making films in and about Russia?
Definitely not right now, but we’ll see how things change. I hope that this film can be considered a record of its time. Now, at any rate, I’m taking a professional (but not a personal) timeout from observing the situation.
My background is quite important to me. I wouldn’t rule out [making a new film about Russia], but not in the near future
Karbe spent nearly four years traveling undercover to Moscow to chronicle the experiences of three psychologists maintaining an anonymous crisis hotline at the start of the Ukraine war, while at the same time struggling to reconcile their totalitarian regime’s strict demands with their own beliefs.
Born and raised in Russia herself, Karbe (now a German citizen) wanted to explore why Russia’s silent majority was staying silent as the war on Ukraine took hold. “Are they complicit, or — as many Russians say — ‘neutral’?” asks Karbe.
The director says “Inner Emigrants” is “a cautionary tale.”
“What we see in Russia today is that silence allows the totalitarian regime to grow stronger,” she says. “It shows how quickly civil liberties can be dismantled and repression can become normalized, as the majority chooses to turn inward rather than to resist openly.”
Mindjazz Pictures managing director Holger Recktenwald says the film “offers a rare and intimate insight into the psychological inner world of a society living under massive propaganda and state repression since the invasion of Ukraine.”
It asks the question “what silence, conformism and ‘inner emigration’ mean in a totalitarian system,” Recktenwald adds.
It was a film of “strong relevance for German audiences: it sheds light on the mechanisms of authoritarian systems, highlights the psychological strain in the context of war and propaganda, and at the same time opens up a respectful space for debate about responsibility, complicity, resistance, and empathy — without relativizing or blurring perpetrator-victim structures.”
“Inner Emigrants” is produced by Karbe Film and Macalube Films, in co-production with See-Through Films, in co-production with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, and Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, with the support of Filmfernsehfonds Bayern, Centre National Du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, FFA Filmförderungsanstalt, La Région Île-Defrance and Deutscher Filmförderfonds (DFFF).
It is the second feature documentary from Karbe. Her first film, “Black Mambas” (2022), world premiered at CPH:DOX, where it won the F:ACT Award.
The following two stories turned up next to each other in my inbox several mornings ago. The first story (about the hidden costs of common areas in Petersburg’s new estates) was promoted as its “Article of the Week” by the business daily Delovoi Peterburg, whose chronicles of post-Soviet capitalism on the march in my favorite city I have been reading and sharing here for two decades, usually against the grain. The second story (about how the authorities in Kaliningrad hushed up the recent death by self-immolation of an antiwar protester at the city’s main WWII memorial) was published by the exiled investigative journalism website Important Stories aka IStories, which is celebrating its sixth birthday. Seemingly written on different planets in different languages, they give an accurate sounding of the bewildered, muted condition of the “Russian soul” (i.e., Russian society) after four-plus years of a vicious, genocidal war unleashed by a thoroughly corrupt “post-fascist” dictatorship. ||||| TRR
Photo: Sergei Yermokhin/Delovoi Peterburg
When she buys a flat—a fifty-square-meter flat, for example—a tenant also gets into the bargain several hundred square meters of lobbies, corridors, and stairways, for whose upkeep she will pay monthly. Those same square meters determine whether she will be able to squeeze past her neighbor in the lift lobby, whether it is easy to push a pram into the building , and whether coming home is a pleasurable experience.
The common areas are the only part of the apartment block the buyer does not choose although she passses through them every day.
How many square meters are not allocated to flats
The proportion of sellable space in apartment blocks depends primarily on their category.
“In the comfort class, the average is sixty-five to seventy percent; in the business segment, sixty to sixty-five; in the premium class, sixty; and it’s fifty to sixty for the elite class,” explains Olga Ryankel, head of residential property research at Nikoliers.
ELEMENT product director Alexander Matyushkin cites a target figure of up to seventy percent in his firm’s projects, with the actual average standing at around sixty-five percent
Lenstroytrest reports a ratio of seventy-five to eighty-two percent, and considers this to be balanced. According to Maxim Zhabin, development director at the Edino Group, the range for market heavy hitters hovers between sixty-five and eighty-five percent.
“If a developer artificially ‘squeezes’ common areas for the sake of the ratio, this is usually interpreted in practice as cutting corners on the facilities,” he says.
What constitutes non-residential space
An increase in total floor area is determined not by a single factor, but by a combination of factors, and the contribution of each depends on the project category and architectural designs.
In the mass-market segment, the primary contributors to floor area are landings, corridors, and stairwells. And yet, an increase in the number of lifts expands the non-sellable area by fifteen to twenty percent, smoke-free stairwells add a further eight to ten percent, and complexly designed building exteriors also increase the non-sellable perimeter, notes Matyushkin.
Zhabin also cites lift lobbies and stairwells as primary factors, adding to them the utility areas and entrance lobbies.
Optional spaces the developer includes over and above the standard requirements comprise a separate category.
Natalia Kukushkina, head of product and analytics at the CDS Group, differentiates between two categories of common spaces.
“The total floor area includes both essential elements, such as stairwells, basements, entrance lobbies, and communal facilities on each floor, spaces without which a building cannot be constructed, as well as spaces added at the developer’s discretion. These may include non-essential spaces such as spacious lobbies, coworking spaces, pram storage rooms, gyms, swimming pools, communal terraces on top floors, and so on.”
Where comfort ends and excess begins
Ultimately, each developer decides for themself how much common space to include in their project. Yekaterina Zaporozhchenko, chief executive officer at PRO Aparty, suggests a specific indicator: arrears on maintenance fees exceeding ten percent are a sign that residents do not feel the spaces they are paying for are value for their money.
“There should be just enough common spaces for them to be used, and the maintenance budget should not exceed the average figures for the segment,” she explains.
Yudita Grigaite, marketing director at Lenstroytrest, is convinced that excessive common space increases costs and operational burdens without adding any value.
Matyushkin highlights the reverse risk: excessive optimization is also dangerous. A shortage of lifts or narrow corridors diminish the quality of the built environment more than is apparent when a tenant is purchasing an apartment.
“A well-designed common space sets down a clear daily route from courtyard to flat without imposing unnecessary obstacles, and it provides practical arrangements for dealing with prams and deliveries, adequate ventilation and lighting, and clearly defined areas of liability,” says Zhabin in describing the working model.
Inefficiency arises when maintenance costs are high yet residents are unclear about what exactly they are paying for.
How square meters of common space are converted into a line item on the bill
The ratio of sellable space to total floor area translates into two figures residents encounter on a regular basis: the price per square meter at the time of purchase and the maintenace charges they pay after they move into their flat.
The math is straightforward: the higher the percentage of common space, the more expensive each square meter of living space. Developers figure the cost of building and finishing common space into the price of flats.
“The ratio between living space and total floor area directly impacts both the cost of a square meter and future operating expenses, all of which are reflected in the maintenance rates. Therefore, a building’s economic model should be balanced. The comfort of the common areas should be in line with the project’s class and the buyer’s expectations, while maintenance costs should be reasonable,” says Anzhelika Alshayeva, commercial director at the KVS Group, when asked to describe the process.
The difference in maintenance bills among segments is tenfold.
According to PRO Aparty, the difference ranges from sixty to six hundred rubles per square meter. Kukushkina warns of the scenario that this gap generates in practice.
“All additional expenses in a maintenance bill are regarded as too high, and some residents absolutely refuse to pay them. Ultimately, a building might end up with a swimming pool which is closed, a common terrace which is not cleaned, and facade lighting which is turned off.”
The third factor is density which, as Zhabin reminds us, is manifested in “queues to the lift, acoustics, and the amount of traffic in the courtyard,” that is, in factors which are not visible when potential buyers look at flats but which are felt daily.
What buyers don’t see
Ryankel notes a systemic problem in the mass-market segment: prams.
“Unfortunately, the spaces for storing prams and bikes are not separated n the majority of new apartment blocks, ultimately giving rise to a conflict of interests and the impossibility of organizing the space comfortably. And yet, developers often mention a pram storage area without specifying its size. As a result, a space of just seven square meters ends up trying to accommodate prams, bicycles, and tires.”
“Up to eighty percent of the user experience is shaped not inside their flat, but on the way there: from the building’s entrance to their front door. This includes logistics, how the lift works, acoustics, traffic flow, and the convenience of the infrastructure,” says Matyushkin.
There is also a time-related factor that is not taken into account at all when purchasing a flat.
Zaporozhchenko points out the costs of renovating furniture in common areas and maintaining the building’s utility systems after five to seven years, as well as keeping the building’s exterior clean—expenses that no buyer factors into their budget when signing the contract.
Zhabin adds that without a cleaning schedule and proper ventilation even the most luxurious finishes in a building’s entrance lobby will cease to feel “upscale” after a few years.
According to the market players surveyed, pressure on profit margins in the mass-market and comfort-class segments will soon compel developers to increase the share of floor space sold while maintaining visible indicators of quality, such as high ceilings in lobbies and high-quality finishes in entrance areas.
Club-style venues—coworking spaces, community centers, and gyms—will remain a key marketing tool, but some of them will be switched to a fee-based model or be leased out to external management companies on a commercial basis to ease the burden on utility bills.
The gap between rates in the mass-market and premium segments will continue to grow, along with the number of conflicts over maintenance bills in buildings whose infrastructure is at odds with the financial solvency of its residents.
Information about the self-immolation of a resident of Kaliningrad born in 1988 in protest against the war was first published in an open report of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service. The authors of the report did not disclose the name of the deceased. We managed to find out the details of the incident together with Delfi Estonia and Lithuanian broadcaster LRT. We reconstructed what happened based on Russian Investigative Committee documents, conversations with Okunev’s relatives and colleagues, and European security sources.
Five CCTV cameras are installed in front of the 1200 Guardsmen Memorial in Kaliningrad, the USSR’s first monument to soldiers killed in the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945. In the center of the memorial is the Eternal Flame. From time to time, various incidents occur near the memorial, which are then widely reported in the local news, and their perpetrators become the subjects of criminal cases. Since last year, for the “desecration of war memorials,” a sentence of up to five years in prison has been [stipulated].
Thus, in February this year, a drunken Kaliningrad resident wanted to light a cigarette from the fire and warmed his feet over the flames. In January 2026, a couple of residents stole a basket of flowers from the monument. In September 2025, another couple had sex at the memorial.
Six months before that, around 5 am on February 24, 2025, 37-year-old Kaliningrad resident Alexander Okunev burned himself alive at the memorial to 1200 Guardsmen in protest against the war — and no one found out about it.
“He was sitting in a corner, not where all the people were”
In the 2010s, Kaliningrad earned the title of the protest capital of Russia, and a series of large-scale rallies even led to the replacement of Governor Georgy Boos.
However, since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the city has not exhibited any notable protest activity. In the first days of the invasion, a wave of anti-war actions swept through Kaliningrad. At one point, the city became a leader in the number of protocols issued for “discrediting” the army. But almost immediately, protests died down as they did throughout the country. Igor Luzin, a Kaliningrad activist and former employee of Navalny’s local headquarters, explains that the “political field” in Kaliningrad has been cleaned up just like the rest of Russia.
Alexander Okunev was not an activist. He avoided talking politics at work (he was a sysadmin at a firm selling retail equipment), did not argue about the full-scale war with his family, and apparently was not active on social media. Okunev had almost no friends, had no girlfriend, and lived alone.
He practically did not talk to his colleagues, could ignore even his superiors: he could keep silent in response to a greeting or not answer the questions. At corporate parties, New Year’s Eve, for example, he tried not to leave his office.
“Was sitting there in a corner, not where all the people … Somehow always in himself, lived his own life,” recalls his former colleague. “Closed. Strange.” However, there were no complaints about his work: “His programmer’s brains were cool”. His colleague believes that Alexander could have made a good career, “but it feels like he didn’t care much about money”. When Okunev decided to quit (about six months before the incident), everyone was upset.
“We asked him, have you found another job? No. Are you going somewhere? Maybe. No one had any idea what or why he left,” says his former colleague. Acquaintances call Okunev “kind, responsive, fair”: “He always helped everyone”. He was fond of origami, and when one of his colleagues had a birthday, he could secretly put “some flowers” on their table. Regarding his hobbies, people close to him say that he liked to watch movies and ride a bicycle.
After the dismissal, Okunev really did not find another job. “Sat at home, practically did not communicate with anyone,” heard his ex-colleague.
Cleanup
Having decided on such a desperate protest act as self-immolation, Alexander Okunev did not seem to be trying to attract attention. Maybe he was afraid that someone could stop him. But he obviously chose the date (the anniversary of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine) and the place (the main war memorial in the city) for a reason. Perhaps the time too: the Russian missile struck Kyiv on February 24, 2022, began just about five in the morning.
Okunev’s charred corpse, despite the numerous cameras at the memorial, was discovered by a random passerby only at around 6:40 a.m. The snow appears to have been spray-painted with the words “No to War”. Employees of the investigative department for the Leninsky district of Kaliningrad went to the scene. In the report of the events of the night, Okunev’s self-immolation is mentioned along with reports of two other corpses and a ninth-grade girl who had left home.
The incident was reported to the head of the city administration, Elena Dyatlova. She immediately took everything under her control, the European intelligence officer knows. She was assisted by Evgeny Maslov, head of the local service for the protection of cultural heritage. The main thing for them was to quickly get rid of the body and the words on the snow — the officials were worried mostly that journalists would know what happened. The Minister of Culture and Tourism of the Kaliningrad Oblast, Andrey Yermak, was especially worried that the self-immolation took place near the monument of the Great Patriotic War — too symbolic.
Everything was settled by 9:15 am. Traces of the incident were removed, and authorities were relieved to report to the local governor and other local officials that no one had seen anything, the source of IStories Media said.
Information about the self-immolation of an unnamed Kaliningrad resident first went public only along with a report by Estonian intelligence in the winter of 2026: “On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war, at five o’clock in the morning on February 24, 2025, a man born in 1988 wrote ‘No to War’ in the snow near the monument to a Russian soldier in Kaliningrad and set himself on fire in protest.”
None of the Kaliningrad media ever reported the news. There were no local or propaganda Telegram channels or other social media posts about Okunev. [Alexander’s] family did not spread the word about the incident either. “What’s the point of somehow publicizing and telling all this? What for?” one of them told reporters.
“There is another way”
An acquaintance of Okunev says that on the eve of his suicide, he behaved “absolutely normally.” There was no hint of what he was going to do, and “what happened came as a shock to everyone.” Okunev’s relatives speak of some “expert examinations” conducted as part of the investigation, which found that “there was no outside influence” on A[l]exander. The family was questioned by the local Investigative Committee; the police came to Okunev’s former colleagues for a “character [profile]” but came away with “Worked well, did not communicate with anyone.”
A close friend of Okunev recounted to IStories Media the content of his suicide note.
“He wrote that there is another way. Apparently, he meant a world with peace. And he didn’t want to live in the world we have, so he made this decision… But we are all aware that world peace is a utopia.”
The note also shows that Okunev understood that “most likely, it will not be in the news anywhere, it will not be widely covered anywhere,” the source tells IStories Media.
Elena Maslova, head of the Kaliningrad administration, and Evgeny Maslov, head of the cultural heritage protection service, have not responded to journalists’ requests.
Culture Minister Andrei Yermak replied that he was not familiar with the results of the investigation of this “accident”, so he would not comment on anything. He expressed confidence that law enforcement agencies “will comment on the situation as soon as the investigation is finalized.”
“These people are afraid not of the people, but of their superiors”
In January 1969, the self-immolation of Jan Palach, a philosophy student at Charles University, brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets and became a symbol of resistance to the Soviet occupation in Czechoslovakia. The self-immolation of street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi provoked mass protests in Tunisia, which eventually led to the resignation of the country’s president.
In Russia, the self-immolations of journalist Irina Slavina and Udmurt scientist Albert Razin did not lead to any notable collective action. Could Okunev’s suicide have provoked some protest if people had learned about it?
Sociologist Margarita Zavadskaya thinks not.
“Self-immolation is a powerful symbolic act,” she says, “but public outrage alone is not enough to trigger large-scale collective action under conditions of severe repression and limited access to information.”
So why did the Russian authorities try so hard to conceal information about what happened? To prevent “protest contagion” and imitation, she explains. Moreover, such an anti-war suicide contradicts the government’s theory of a universal public consensus on war. And local officials would look incapable of maintaining control in the eyes of their superiors.
Political scientist Ekaterina Shulman also does not believe that fear of further protests was behind the Kaliningrad authorities’ actions.
“Local authorities are not afraid of the people, not of protests. They are afraid of their superiors,” she says, “they were afraid to hear: ‘You oversaw, allowed a scandal, there are media publications, what do you eat your bread for?'”
“Authoritarian regimes are afraid of symbolic sparks. They understand that a single act of protest may not cause an immediate mass movement, but can become a moral symbol around which scattered anxiety and discontent begin to crystallize,” says Lithuanian political scientist Nerijus Malukiavicius. “That is why such regimes seek to ‘clean up’ the scene, silence history, and discredit the victim.”
A verdict was handed down in the Vesna case in Petersburg today. In 2018, members of this movement, which Russia designated “extremist” and “hostile” (or something along those lines, “undesirable,” etc.), held a protest: a funeral for Russia’s future. It turned out to be a long process: burying the future, imprisoning spring… Today is a bad day. The activists were convicted and sentenced to extremely long prison terms! The only female defendant, Anna Arkhipova, was sentenced to twelve years in prison; Yan Ksenzhepolsky, to eleven years; Vasily Neustroyev, to ten years; Pavel Sinelnikov, to seven and a half years; Yevgeny Zateyev, to six years and two months. Valentin Khoroshenin was also sentenced to six years and two months in prison despite the fact that he had testified against his comrades while in jail. It didn’t do him any good…. Look at his face today. He is the only one who looks lost to me. The other defendants were calm and dignified.
I may be naive, but I still believe that the future isn’t buried, that spring will come, that the gloom and the cold will simply fade away. It will happen naturally because that’s how the world works, and I believe this especially during Holy Week. “Wind and weather [will] change direction,” and spring will arrive.
I hadn’t taken photos in a courtroom for nearly nine months. Today was tough. I can recall only one case which dragged on longer than the Vesna case—the trial of the twenty-four fighters from the Azov Regiment. My sister Lizka has provided a detailed account of the Vesna case and the young people sentenced today. Give it a listen and/or a read! [See the embedded YouTube video and translation of the Mediazona article below—TRR.]
The natural flow of life suffices to make spring come, but to ensure that the earth hasn’t been depopulated by the time it does come—so that there is someone other than the beasties left to welcome that spring—we must remain human beings: we must know what is going on, empathize, and help out.
A judge in St. Petersburg on Wednesday sentenced six former members of the democratic youth organization Vesna to prison sentences of varying lengths after they were found guilty of charges including extremism and spreading “war fakes.”
The activists, including one woman and five men, were no longer members of Vesna at the time of their arrests in June 2023.
Vesna, which means spring in Russian, was founded in St. Petersburg in 2013. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it staged anti-war rallies in Russian cities, shortly after which it was designated as an “extremist” organization.
The human rights group Memorial recognized the six former members sentenced to jail on Wednesday as political prisoners.
St. Petersburg’s City Court found all six guilty of organizing an extremist group, mass unrest, disseminating “fakes” about the Russian army, calling for actions that undermine national security and rehabilitating [sic] Nazism.
The longest prison sentence of 12 years was handed to Anna Arkhipova, followed by 11 years for Yan Ksenzhepolsky and 10 years for Vasily Neustroyev.
Pavel Sinelnikov was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison, while Yevgeny Zateyev and Valentin Khoroshenin each received six years and two months.
State prosecutors had requested prison sentences between eight years and 13 years.
The former activists initially pleaded not guilty in October 2024, but last July, Khoroshenin provided a “full confession” and testified against his co-defendants.
Arkhipova later said that Khoroshenin had told her after giving his confession that “what really matters isn’t what actually happened, but how the investigator wrote it up.”
Vesna declined a request for comment when contacted by the Moscow Times.
“Russia’s Future”: a 2018 protest action by Vesna. Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
Saint Petersburg City Court has handed down sentences to six former activists in the Vesna movement: Yevgeny Zateyev, Vasily Neustroyev, and Valentin Khoroshenin, of Petersburg; Yan Ksenzhepolsky, of Tver; Anna Arkhipova, of Novosibirsk; and Pavel Sinelnikov, of Barnaul. They were sentenced to stints in prison ranging from six to twelve years. In total, the case involves twenty-one suspects from thirteen regions. One of the defendants unexpectedly testified against his comrades in court. Mediazona offers its readers this brief overview of one of the most wide-ranging and dramatic trials against dissidents in recent years.
The democratic youth movement Vesna came to life with spirited, theatrical street protests in Petersburg over a dozen years ago. It came to an end in 2022 when it was banned, followed by the launching of a criminal case against it, leading to the arrests of some activists, and the exile of others.
“They made up their minds that [Vesna] was something along the lines of [Alexei Navalny’s] Anti-Corruption Foundation, I suppose,” muses one former Vesna member. The young woman asked not to be named, even though she had stepped away from politics before the movement was officially deemed “extremist.” She continues to live in Russia and hopes that the security services will “continue to overlook her.”
The playbooks for dismantling the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Vesna are indeed broadly similar:
The prosecution of Vesna activists began with searches warranted under an obscure criminal law statute concerning the creation of NGOs which infringe on people’s personal and civil rights. Charges of violating this very same statute had also formed the core of the case against the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
As happened with the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the security forces got Vesna designated an “extremist” organization. Following this, any public activity that police investigators deemed as “continuing” the movement’s work, such as posting on its social media, was regarded as a punishable offense.
In both cases, a wave of police searches of activists’ homes swept across various regions of Russia, and this was followed by a series of arrests.
Vesna’s most prominent figures were designated “foreign agents.” Many of them fled Russia and were placed on the wanted list. The security forces then took their revenge on those who remained behind.
The trial of the six Vesna activists in Petersburg had dragged on since the summer of 2024 and been one of the most high-profile political trials in wartime Russia, owing both to the steadfast stance taken by some of the defendants and to the dramatic about-face by others.
Vesna was founded in February 2013. The new movement consisted of approximately fifty activists, many of whom hailed from the Petersburg branch of Youth Yabloko, which had dissolved a short time earlier. The goals Vesna voiced at the time were far removed from radicalism: “increasing the level of political engagement among young people” and “participating in Petersburg’s legislature and local government through elections.”
In their hometown, Vesna’s theatricalized processions and pickets quickly became a familiar fixture on the cultural and political scenes.
In the summer of 2015, Vesna held an anti-war protest on Nevsky Prospekt, [Petersburg’s main thoroughfare]. Five activists stood holding signs that read “Write kind words to Ukraine” and a box where anyone could drop a postcard with words of support for the Ukrainian people.
In May 2016, Vesna marched through the city holding a banner reading “Circus, go away!” Opposition activists had not been permitted to hold May Day marches on Nevsky Prospekt, even though the country’s ruling United Russia party had been granted permission to march down the same route without any issues. In protest, Vesna activists staged an alternative procession in guise of a carnival: a young woman in church vestments with a fake belly demanded a ban on abortions, while another waved a censer by way of blessing a silver “Rogozin 1” rocket. Behind them walked a man with a TV set instead of a head. Someone carried a huge saw with the slogan “I support embezzlement!” Another carried a cello case stuffed with banknotes.
“Russia’s Future”: a 2018 protest action by Vesna. Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
In January 2018, Vesna staged a mock funeral for Russia’s future: people dressed in mourning attire and with sorrowful expressions on their faces carried a coffin through the streets, adorned with children’s drawings that symbolized hopes for life in a free, democratic country.
Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
In the summer of 2018, when Russia was hosting the FIFA World Cup, Vesna activists unfurled a banner reading “This World Cup Is Filled with Blood” on Palace Bridge in Petersburg. Vesna timed another protest against [torture in police custody] to coincide with the World Cup—a young woman, doused in red paint, lay down on a pedestal beneath a replica of the tournament’s official mascot, the wolf Zabivaka.
Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
The movement grew rapidly. Regional chapters emerged, and by 2018 there were already around a dozen of them. By the late 2010s, Vesna was the most prominent youth organization in the Russian opposition’s ecosystem. No major protest took place without its activists being present. And yet, Vesna activists emphasized their commitment to legal methods of campaigning, as stated in their charter: “The movement pursues its work in accordance with the current laws of the Russian Federation.”
Vesna during the war: the first raids and interrogations
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of political dissent in Russia skyrocketed for all opponents of the government, and Vesna activists were no exception. On 3 May 2022, the movement announced the campaign “They Didn’t Fight for This,” calling on dissenters to attend the Immortal Regiment marches on 9 May (WWII Victory Day) but to carry anti-war placards at them.
A few days later, Vesna activists Yevgeny Zateyev and Valentin Khoroshenin, of Petersburg, and Roman Maximov, of Veliky Novgorod, who had already quit the movement, were targeted with searches of their homes. All three men were taken to Moscow for questioning and held in a temporary detention center pending trial.
These were the first steps in the investigation against Vesna activists. It was then that law enforcement authorities launched a criminal case into the setting up of an NGO that infringes on the personal rights of citizens.
The same day, search warrants were executed in Petersburg at the homes of the parents of Bogdan Litvin, Vesna’s federal coordinator, who had already left Russia, and activist Polina Barabash, as well as at the homes of former movement members Alexei Bezrukov and Artem Uimanen. In Moscow, searches were conducted at the homes of Timofei Vaskin, Angelina Roshchupko, Daria Pak, and Ivan Drobotov.
On 10 and 11 May 2022, the court issued restraining orders against Vaskin, Drobotov, Angelina Roshchupko, Maximov, Zateyev, and Khoroshenin, prohibiting them from certain actions. Soon after, Litvin and Drobotov were placed on the wanted list, as they had managed to leave Russia.
This did not stop Vesna, however. In September 2022, the youth activists announced protests against the military mobilization across Russia. Less than a month later, the Justice Ministry added the movement to its list of “foreign agents,” and the Saint Petersburg City Court ruled Vesna an “extremist” organization on 6 December 2022.
The charges and the trial
On 5 June 2023, the Investigative Committee opened a new criminal case, which later came to be known simply as the “big Vesna case.”
Searches were carried out the following day in Barnaul, Novosibirsk, Petersburg, and Tver. Six people were detained and taken to Moscow: Zateyev, Pavel Sinelnikov, Anna Arkhipova, Vasily Neustroyev, Yan Ksenzhepolsky, and Khoroshenin. On 8 June, a Moscow court remanded them to pretrial detention.
During the same pretrial detention hearing, the prosecution listed five charges: organizing and participating in an extremist group, desecrating the memory of defenders of the Fatherland, spreading “fake news” about the army, and calling for actions contrary to national security.
A year later, when the Saint Petersburg City Court began hearing the case against the six activists on its merits, there were seven charges. Incitement to mass unrest and the creation of an NGO infringing on citizens’ rights (the very same charge under which the activists’ homes had initially been searched in 2022) had been added to the bill of particulars.
The investigation assigned the role of leader and ideological instigator to Vesna’s federal coordinator Bogdan Litvin, who had managed to flee the country. According to law enforcement officials, it was Litvin who had driven the movement toward “extremism.”
Most of the charges were related to posts on Vesna’s social media accounts. Entered into the recorded were ninety posts made in Vesna’s name at various times on various platforms. When presenting evidence in court, the prosecution primarily read these posts aloud, listed the names of Telegram channels, cited viewer statistics, and read out the comments.
The indictment placed particular emphasis on a comment posted by a user known as “Kanoki Nagato,” on 1 May 2022. On one of Vesna’s Telegram channels, he suggested that Russians would one day start “killing the pigs, just like the Ukrainians did at Maidan.” According to the prosecution, the appearance of such a comment proved that Vesna was inciting dangerous actions. None of the defendants knows who “Kanoki Nagato” is, and law enforcement officials have not been able to identify this person either.
They did examine the personal accounts of the six defendants, however. Some of their Instagram accounts were found to be private. Speaking in court, the prosecutor called this “an attempt to conceal information from the investigation.”
When the prosecution presented its evidence in court, some of the hearings were held in closed session at the prosecutor’s office’s request, and members of the public and journalists were not allowed in the courtroom. Those involved in the proceedings are not permitted to disclose what they heard behind closed doors, but it is known that during at least some of these sessions, the court examined the results of intelligence operations—a term used in the Code of Criminal Procedure to refer, among other things, to wiretapping, undercover operations, and the interception and vetting of correspondence.
When it was the defense attorneys’ turn to present evidence, Arkhipova’s support group issued a public appeal: “The defense now urgently needs witnesses—people who actually took part in peaceful anti-war protests between February and May 2022 and have already suffered administrative penalties for doing so.”
Witnesses who responded to this post testified in court.
“To my mind, every citizen took to the streets out of a sense of duty and conscience. It was an entirely peaceful demonstration,” said one of them.
Another witness recounted that she was detained at an Immortal Regiment rally while holding up a portrait of her great-grandfather, and an administrative charge was filed against her for “discrediting” the army.
“I came out of my own free will. I’d participated in Immortal Regiment rallies before as well. At the time I made my decision, I hadn’t seen any notices on Telegram channels,” she explained.
A placard hung in the courthouse on the day the verdict in the Vesna trial was read out: “Yes to Vesna,* / No to war*! / And the truth* about them / is not extremism. / *Vesna, war, and truth are words forbidden in Russia in 2026.” Photo: Mediazona
At nearly every hearing in the trial, the defense insisted that the prosecution had no evidence that the accused activists were involved in posting most of the messages mentioned in the case file. Moreover, some of the defendants not only did not know each other prior to their arrest, but were also not members of Vesna at the time it was classified as an “extremist” organization.
Who’s who in the Vesna case
Yevgeny Zateyev. Photo: Mediazona
Yevgeny Zateyev, 24 years old
A resident of Petersburg, Zateyev was charged with violating Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”) and Article 282.1.1 (“establishing an extremist community”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecutor asked the court to sentence Zateyev to ten years in a penal colony. The actual sentence was six years and two months.
Zateyev served as the press secretary for the Vesna movement’s Petersburg branch. In court, he insisted that his duties were limited to local topics: news about life in Petersburg, announcements of lectures, and film screenings.
He viewed the outbreak of the war as a “personal tragedy.”
“Vesna tried to prevent further destruction and loss of life on both sides of the border—among both civilians and military personnel—through peaceful means. I still regard this goal in an entirely positive light,” Zateyev said in court.
He was one of the first Vesna activists to face criminal charges in the spring of 2022. Some of his comrades left Russia, but Zateyev stayed behind and wound up in a pretrial detention center a year later.
In the summer of 2023, Zateyev wrote a letter from jail explaining why he had decided against fleeing the country.
“I made a very difficult and very painful choice. Was it a painful choice? Of course it was. I find it hard to imagine, though, how I could have left everything behind, gone away, and watched as my friends and acquaintances were imprisoned. This choice was easy for some, but I don’t judge them.”
In the same letter, Zateyev asked that his family not be judged for failing to “change [his] mind.”
In November 2023, Zateyev partially admitted his guilt in the hope of having his pretrial detention conditions eased. He was concerned about his family, especially his grandmother, who was seventy-seven years old at the time of his arrest. Zateyev was not released from pretrial detention, and so he withdrew his confession.
In January 2024, Zateyev’s grandmother died. Four months later, his mother also died, from cirrhosis of the liver.
Zateyev’s pretrial detention was extended once again shortly thereafter. Addressing the court, he mentioned the deaths of his loved ones. Judge Irina Furmanova interrupted him.
“Please do not try to pressure the court by bringing up the deaths of your relatives.”
“I am not putting any pressure on the court. I am simply stating the facts of my life.”
“We are familiar with them. You can merely note what you’ve been through. There’s no need to pressure us like that.”
“Your Honor, pressure—”
“Everyone has, or some people no longer have, a mother. There’s no need to pressure us in that regard. I’ll say it again. Let’s continue.”
In his closing statement, Zateyev said that he was forgiving the investigators, prosecutors, and judges.
“I caution against the false belief that forgiveness absolves one of responsibility. It does not. I do believe, however, that through forgiveness, we can understand the reasons behind what is happening—why and for what purpose. By ridding ourselves of an age-old evil, learning to treat one another with understanding, we can finally find love. I believe that this is possible and even inevitable in Russia. Spring [vesna] is inevitable. The season, of course. What did you think I meant?”
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1 Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Yevgeny Artemovich Zateyev, born 2001
Bank card number for donations: 2200 7009 1119 8470
Anna Arkhipova. Photo: Mediazona
Anna Arkhipova, 28 years old
A resident of Novosibirsk, Arkhipova was charged with violating Articles 282.1.1 and 282.1.2 (“organizing an extremist community”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 280.4.3 (“discrediting the Russian armed forces”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that she had violated Article 239.3 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecutor asked the court to sentence Arkhipova to thirteen years in prison. The judge sentenced her to twelve years in prison instead.
Arkhipova joined Vesna in February 2021 to “take a civic stand, engage in publicly vital work, and meet new people.” She wrote posts for the movement’s social media accounts but quickly grew tired of “conflicts within the group” and left in May 2022.
Once the war in Ukraine had kicked off, Vesna’s work became “random and certainly not organized,” according to Arkhipova.
“Everything happened naturally,” Arkhipova said in court. “I felt the need to protest the war, as I regarded it and continue to regard it as a great catastrophe and tragedy. That is why I took part in a street protest in Novosibirsk on 24 February 2022.”
Of the ninety posts listed in the criminal indictment, she wrote one.
“I was involved in the publication dated 29 April 2022, [as charged] under Article 207.3, but I find it difficult to say exactly what role I played. [The text] was discussed at great length, and I didn’t really want to have anything to do with it at all. Either I acted as the author, after which it was heavily edited, or another person was the author, after which I heavily edited it,” the young woman explained in court.
Arkhipova’s support group runs a Telegram channel where her letters to the outside world are posted sometimes. In the “Cell Librarian” section, she talks about the books she has read in pretrial detention.
She also writes about the health problems typically experienced by prisoners. Due to poor nutrition, all women in the detention center lose their hair, and even a simple cold is dangerous.
“The worst part is that you’re not permitted to make your bed during the day, so you’re freezing and shivering, and all you have to cover yourself with is a towel. Illnesses are illnesses, but we still have to follow the prison rules!”
Arkhipova is a vegan. It is difficult to follow this diet in pretrial detention. She is very dependent on care packages, which arrive with considerable delays. Her support group secured permission to send her plant-based milk substitutes, but the detention center declined to accept them, stating, “We don’t even allow dairy products for mothers with children.”
“My motivation is simple: I oppose the war. I want a better future for Russia. I have tried to act on my conscience all my life, even though I haven’t always succeeded. When the war began, it was my conscience that wouldn’t let me stand idly by. People on both sides of the border deserve peace: soldiers should be with their families, not in foxholes, and those who were killed should have lived. I feel the same pain for everyone, regardless of their uniform,” said Arkhipova in her closing statement.
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 195009 St. Petersburg 11 Arsenalnaya St. Pretrial Detention Center No. 5 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Anna Nikolayevna Arkhipova, born 1997
Bank account numbers for donations: 2200 7008 6021 1167 (T-Bank) • 2202 2071 9921 3904 (Sberbank)
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Arkhipova’s support group.
Vasily Neustroyev. Photo: Mediazona
Vasily Neustroyev, 30 years old
A resident of Petersburg, Vasily Neustroyev was charged with violating Article 280.4.3 (“publicly threatening national security”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 282.1.1 (“organizing an extremist community”) and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that Neustroyev had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution asked the court to sentence Neustroyev to twelve years in prison, but the judge sentenced him to ten years instead.
According to the prosecution, Neustroyev was on Vesna’s federal audit commission and was one of its leaders. Neustroyev himself stated in court that he did not make any decisions within the movement. He did not even have access to social media and could not have published any of the posts ascribed to him. He met most of his “accomplices” only after his arrest. Before his arrest, he was acquainted only with Khoroshenin and Maximov, and knew Zateyev only by sight.
When asked about Litvin—whom investigators consider the leader of Vesna and under whose influence the movement allegedly turned into an “extremist organization”—Neustroyev laughed and said that the main topic of their conversations had been cats.
“Since the autumn of 2018, we’ve been the owners of cats—brothers from the same litter, which we got from the same source,” Neustroyev explained. “Since then, Bogdan Gennadyevich has left his cat with me to look after two or three times. You could say that we became something like in-laws through the cats. The cats were the main topic of our conversations in the years leading up to my arrest.”
The Petersburger did not renounce his anti-war views in court.
“I consider the actions of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin not only a crime against both Ukraine and Russia in equal measure, but also a great folly.”
And yet, Neustroyev “remained skeptical of mass street protests.” He was a member of Petersburg Yabloko’s council and was heavily involved in elections work for a long time. He coordinated election monitoring, and since 2020 had been a voting member of one of the city’s Territorial Election Commissions.
In a letter from the detention center, Neustroev voiced deep regret that he had not yet managed to finish his university education. He had just resumed his studies before his arrest, and if not for the criminal case, he might already have a degree.
“Nevertheless, I still plan to eventually obtain a formal tertiary degree and put this source of anxiety behind me.”
He spoke about Russia in his closing statement.
“Russia is strong. Russia will survive all tyrants and dictators, just as it has done before. I know that Russia will be peaceful, Russia will be happy, Russia will be free. And all of us will be peaceful, happy, and free along with her.”
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1 Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Vasily Petrovich Neustroyev, born 1995
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Neustroyev’s support group.
Pavel Sinelnikov. Photo: Mediazona
Pavel Sinelnikov, 24 years old
A resident of Barnaul, Pavel Sinelnikov was charged with violating Articles 282.1.1 and 282.1.2 (“organizing and participating in an extremist community”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The prosecution had asked the court to send him down for ten years, but instead the judge sentenced to him to seven and a half years in prison.
Sinelnikov served as Vesna’s executive secretary for several months but left the movement in 2021, long before it had been designated “extremist.”
“The work isn’t hard: you just sit there and write. But taking all those minutes is time-consuming and quite boring. So I really feel for the court clerk,” Sinelnikov explained in court.
He was baffled how the same person could be accused of both establishing an “extremist community” and participating in it, and he made no secret of the fact that the arrest had come as a shock to him.
“I didn’t expect at all that some police investigators would actually fly all the way from Moscow to Barnaul just to get me. As far as I’m concerned, the police search itself is a form of intense coercion, especially the way it’s done. They force their way into your life while yelling and shouting, don’t even let you get dressed, push you face-down on the floor, and then turn everything upside down while cracking high-school-level jokes,” Sinelnikov recalled.
He confessed immediately after his arrest, but later recanted his testimony.
“You can’t take away people’s opinions, but it’s easy to take away their freedom of speech. That’s what happened to me, even though I’m just a binnocent eyestander.”
In court, Sinelnikov explained that he had been fascinated by science and maths at school. He often traveled to academic competitions, and became interested in politics during one such trip to Moscow. He described himself as an introvert and a loner, and his mother even called her son a “slacker” in court.
“Well, Mom knows best,” Sinelnikov replied.
Sinelnikov began his closing statement by admitting that he didn’t really have much to say. But then he called the charges politically motivated and the trial “abhorrent.”
“There was no criminal extremist group. No one planned any crimes, no socially dangerous actions were committed, and there were no socially dangerous consequences either. No harm was done either to society or the public interest. We didn’t even have any motives for or intentions of doing so. Do I deserve ten years in prison for that?”
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1 Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Pavel Nikolayevich Sinelnikov, born 2001
Bank account number for donations: 2200 7019 7373 4749
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Sinelnikov’s support group.
Yan Ksenzhepolsky. Photo: Mediazona
Yan Ksenzhepolsky, 25 years old
A resident of Tver, Yan Ksenzhepolsky was charged with violating Article 280.4.3 (“discrediting the Russian armed forces”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 282.1.1 (“organizing an extremist community”), and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution had asked the court to send him down for twelve years, but instead the judge sentenced to him to eleven years in prison.
Ksenzhepolsky joined Vesna’s federal coordinating council in August 2021. According to him, by October–November of that year his involvement in the council had become “nominal” due to his work commitments. He was employed as a welding production specialist at the National Welding Control Agency and served as an aide to a deputy in the Tver Regional Legislative Assembly.
“I realized that the Vesna movement made a lot of noise but didn’t accomplish anything tangible,” Ksenzhepolsky said in court. “Meanwhile, I was involved in real institutional politics at the Legislative Assembly and could actually influence things—or at least try to.”
On paper, however, Ksenzhepolsky remained a member of Vesna until the summer of 2022.
Ksenzhepolsky is accused of posting on the movement’s Telegram channels, although, according to him, he had access to only one of them, “Tver Vesna,” which had sixteen subscribers. He handed over the password to the new administrator in November 2021, when he left the organization.
In court, Ksenzepolsky reiterated that he believes street protests in Russia are ineffective.
“I believe these actions are completely pointless and do more harm than good.”
In September 2022, when Russia announced a military mobilization, Ksenzhepolsky, according to his own testimony, was on holiday in Georgia but returned home—after Vesna had been declared an “extremist” organization.
“In any case, I know that we will ultimately be vindicated in the eyes of society, history, and the Last Judgment. After all, everything was forever, until it was no more. This regime will come to an end too, and within our lifetimes, something tells me. If not, then the Kingdom of Heaven is not a bad consolation prize,” said Ksenzhepolsky in his closing statement.
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1 Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Yan Alexandrovich Ksenzhepolsky, born 2000
Bank account number for donations: 2200 2479 5715 1401
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Ksenzhepolsky’s support group.
Valentin Khoroshenin. Photo: Mediazona
Valentin Khoroshenin, 24 years old
A resident of Petersburg, Khoroshenin was charged with violating Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”) and Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 of the Criminal Code was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution asked the court to send Khoroshenin to prison for eight years, but he was sentenced to six years and two months behind bars.
A co-founder of the now-shuttered Fogel lecture bar in Petersburg, Khoroshenin was the sole defendant who not only pleaded guilty to the charges but also testified against the other defendants in the case and many other Vesna activists.
The names mentioned by Valentin Khoroshenin in his testimony: Vladimir Arzhanov, Yekaterina Alexandrova, Makar Andreyev, Nikolai Artemenko, Anna Arkhipova, Yekaterina Bushkova, Alexander Vereshchagin, Yekaterina Goncharova, Timofei Gorodilov, Anastasia Gof, Lev Gyammer, Semyon Yerkin, Yevgeny Zateyev, Semyon Zakhariev, Anastasia Kadetova, Vladimir Kazachenko, Alexander Kashevarov, Gleb Kondratyev, Semyon Kochkin, Yan Ksenzhepolsky, Ilya Kursov, Maria Lakhina, Nikita Levkin, Bogdan Litvin, Andrei Lozitsky, Alexandra Lukyanenko, Yelizaveta Lyubavina (Sofya Manevich), Ilya Lyubimov, Timofei Martynchenko, Daria Mernenko, Anzhelika Mustafina, Anna Nazarova, Vasily Neustroyev, Maxim Potemkin, Konstantin Pokhilchuk, Kira Pushkareva, Lilia Safronova, Pavel Sinelnikov, Yevgenia Fedotova, Anastasia Filippova, Artur Kharitonov, Alexei Shvarts
Khoroshenin’s testimony came as a surprise to everyone in court. He requested that the testimony be heard in closed session and asked that the public and the press be removed from the courtroom, but the judge turned down his request.
Khoroshenin did not merely agree with the charge of “extremism.” He called Vesna “a sort of incubator for Navalny.” His testimony suggested that the movement’s branches were directly linked to the opposition politician’s field offices, where distinguished young activists would then “move up the ranks.” Khoroshenin mentioned the “grant support” that Vesna received, including from “undesirable organizations,” and complained that rank-and-file activists “spent the night in a back room, while Litvin bought himself a new apartment.”
“We systematically violated the law. We held protests and placed ourselves above the law. There were also slogans about undermining the country’s defense capabilities and justifying the use of violence. We organized events that violated existing laws but looked good on the surface,” Khoroshenin said in court.
“I have always believed that everything I am involved in should bring something positive to people. The Vesna movement was perhaps the only exception to this rule,” he argued, adding that he no longer supports any of the points in Vesna’s platform except for the one regarding support for “family and motherhood.”
Toward the end of his court testimony, Khoroshenin urged the other defendants to plead guilty—“to change their stance on the charges against them and set aside ideological pretense.”
“Don’t dig your own graves, colleagues!” he said.
In a letter from the detention center, Anna Arkhipova later quoted the words Khoroshenin had spoken after the hearing: “What really matters isn’t what actually happened, but how the investigator wrote it up.”
In his final statement, Khoroshenin lamented that his former comrades in Vesna had made him look like “some kind of Luntik,” once again acknowledged his guilt, asked for forgiveness “from society and especially from his family,” and voiced his hope that the court would allow him “to return to a normal life for constructive self-realization for the benefit of society.”
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1 Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Valentin Alexeyevich Khoroshenin, born 2001
Bank account number for donations: 4476 2461 7307 7443
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Khoroshenin’s support group.
In a strongly worded decision this week, a federal judge ordered that the Voice of America — its mission to provide news for countries around the world largely shut down for the past year by the Trump administration — come roaring back to life.
Whether or not that actually happens is anybody’s guess.
The government filed notice Thursday to appeal U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s order two days earlier to put hundreds of VOA employees who have been on paid leave the past year back to work. Lamberth had ruled on March 7 that Kari Lake, who was President Donald Trump’s choice to oversee the bureaucratic parent U.S. Agency for Global Media, didn’t have the authority to reduce VOA to a skeleton.
The Voice of America was established as a news source in World War II, beaming reports to many countries that had no tradition of a free press. Before Trump took office again last year, Voice of America was operating in 49 different languages, heard by an estimated 362 million people.
Trump’s team contended that government-run news sources, which also include Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, were an example of bloated government and that they wanted news reporting more favorable to the current administration. With a greatly reduced staff, it currently operates in Iran, Afghanistan, China, North Korea and in countries with a large population of Kurds.
Lamberth, in his decision, said Lake had “repeatedly thumbed her nose” at laws mandating VOA’s operation.
Time to turn the page at VOA?
VOA director Michael Abramowitz said legislators in both parties understand the need for a strong operation and have set aside enough funding for the job to be done. “It is time for all parties to come together and work to rebuild and strengthen the agency,” he said.
Don’t expect that to happen soon. “President Trump was elected to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse across the administration, including the Voice of America — and efforts to improve efficiency at USAGM have been a tremendous success,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly. “This will not be the final say on the matter.”
Patsy Widakuswara, VOA’s White House bureau chief and a plaintiff in the lawsuit to bring it back, said that “restoring the physical infrastructure is going to take a lot of money and some time but it can be done. What is more difficult is recovering from the trauma that our newsroom has gone through.”
It’s an open question whether the administration wants a real news organization or a mouthpiece, said David Ensor, a former Voice of America director between 2010 and 2014. “We don’t know — maybe no one does at the moment — what the future holds,” he said.
The administration’s efforts over the past year to bolster friendly outlets and fight coverage that displeases them offer a clue, even though Congress has required that Voice of America be an objective and unbiased news source. This week it was announced that Christopher Wallace, an executive at the conservative network Newsmax who had previously spent 15 years at Fox News Channel, will be the new deputy director at VOA. Abramowitz didn’t know he was getting a new deputy until it was announced.
Widakuswara wouldn’t comment on what Wallace’s appointment might mean. “I’m not going to pass judgment before seeing his work,” she said.
While Lamberth ordered more than a thousand employees on leave to go back to work, it’s not clear how many of them moved on to other jobs or retired in the past year. The judge also said he did not have the authority to bring back hundreds of independent contractors who were terminated.
One employee who left is Steve Herman, a former White House bureau chief and national correspondent at VOA and now executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at the University of Mississippi. Despite the court decisions, he questions whether the Trump administration would oversee a return to what the organization used to be.
“I’m a bit of a pessimist,” Herman said. “I think it’s going to be very difficult.”
An administration loath to admit defeat
Besides fighting to shut it down, Trump is loath to admit defeat. Last week, the White House nominated Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, putting it more firmly within the administration’s control. Her nomination requires Senate approval.
“Is Marco Rubio’s State Department going to allow objective journalism in 49 languages?” Herman asked. “I don’t think so. I would want that to happen, but that’s a fairy tale.”
In the budget bill passed in February, Congress set aside $200 million for Voice of America’s operation. While that represents about a 25% cut in the agency’s previous appropriation, it sent a bipartisan message of support, said Kate Neeper, VOA’s director of strategy and performance evaluation. Besides being a plaintiff with Widakuswara in the lawsuit to restore the agency, she has helped some of her colleagues deal with some of their own problems over the past year, including immigration issues.
“There is a lot of enthusiasm for going back to work,” she said. “People are eager to show up on Monday.”
The hunger for information from Voice of America in Iran when he was director was a clear example of what the organization meant, Ensor said. Surveys showed that between a quarter and a third of Iran’s households tuned in to VOA once a week, primarily on satellite television. Occasionally the government would crack down and confiscate satellite dishes, but Iranians could usually quickly find replacements, he said.
“I believe in Voice of America as a news organization and as a voice of America,” Ensor said. “It was important, and it can be again.”
KSPB, Pebble Beach, 91.9 FM is a commercial-free, student-run, radio station, that has been broadcasting from Stevenson School in Pebble Beach for over 40 years.
The station is student run and includes staff positions, from webmaster to program director. Before applying for a live show on air, each student is required to take a class to learn about Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, and how to operate the station independently. The students decide the genre of music for their specific show, but the general programming is alternative rock with specialized shows featuring hip-hop and international music. However, some students prefer to run their own talk shows.
With its connection to the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS) the station fills out its schedule with content from the BBC World Service, American Public Media, and other public radio producers such as WAMC (Albany) and KCRW (Santa Monica). It also obtains content from its affiliation with the Public Radio Exchange (PRX).
KSPB has listeners in five counties in California – Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Benito, Santa Clara and San Mateo – with a potential total listenership of more than 1 million. Also, with the recent addition of streaming, KSPB is now available worldwide!
R.E.M. disbanded back in 2011. But the seminal indie-rock group is back with new five-track EP “Radio Free Europe 2025,”containing previously unreleased tracks and a new remix of the song. Proceeds from the vinyl pressing will benefit the U.S. government’s Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which are under attack from the Trump administration.
The EP, coming more than four decades after the 1981 release of “Radio Free Europe” on college radio, coincides with the 75th anniversary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as well as World Press Freedom Day (which falls on May 3). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was established 75 years ago and currently broadcasts news and information in 27 languages to 23 countries where a free press is either banned by the government or under threat.
Members of R.E.M. said the mission of promoting free expression has always resonated with the band.
“Whether it’s music or a free press — censorship anywhere is a threat to the truth everywhere,” Michael Stipe, lead singer and founding member of R.E.M., said in a statement. “On World Press Freedom Day, I’m sending a shout-out to the brave journalists at Radio Free Europe.” Bassist Mike Mills added, “Radio Free Europe’s journalists have been pissing off dictators for 75 years. You know you’re doing your job when you make the right enemies. Happy World Press Freedom Day to the ‘OG’ Radio Free Europe.”
Despite the song’s name, Mills says in the liner notes to the two-disc edition of R.E.M.’s “And I Feel Fine… The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982–1987” that it has “nothing to do” with the broadcaster: “We just liked the title.”
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty president and CEO Stephen Capus said in a statement, “To me, R.E.M.’s music has always embodied a celebration of freedom: freedom of expression, lyrics that make us think, and melodies that inspire action. Those are the very aims of our journalists at Radio Free Europe — to inform, inspire, and uphold freedoms often elusive to our audiences. We hold dictators accountable. They go to great lengths to silence us — blocking our websites, jamming our signals, and even imprisoning our colleagues.”
On Friday, the heads of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks sent a letter to Trump officials urging them to restore funding “immediately.” That came as Radio Free Asia laid off most of its staff. “Our journalists are terrified that the withdrawal of support from their employers will lead to harassment, prison, and worse,” they said in the letter, per CNN. “We urge you to restore our funding immediately before further irreparable reputational harm is done to the United States — and before innocent lives are needlessly and recklessly lost.”
R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe 2025” is available to stream and download now. A limited-edition, 10-inch orange-vinyl pressing is available for pre-order now exclusively via the official R.E.M. store and independent record stores; it will be released Sept. 12. Proceeds from all vinyl sales will go to RFE/RL, an editorially independent nonpartisan and nonprofit corporation.
Released through Craft Recordings, the “Radio Free Europe 2025” EP was overseen by the band’s original producer Mitch Easter. The record opens with the 2025 remix by Grammy-winning producer Jacknife Lee (U2, Snow Patrol, Taylor Swift, The Killers), who also produced R.E.M.’s final two studio albums, “Accelerate” and “Collapse Into Now.” Lee “gives the track a fresh take while staying true to its indie-rock DNA,” according to Creative Recordings. Rounding out the EP are four of Mitch Easter’s original 1981 recordings: the Hib-Tone single mix of “Radio Free Europe,” its flip-side “Sitting Still,” the “Wh. Tornado” demo, and Easter’s never-before-released 1981 remix “Radio Free Dub.”
In 2009, “Radio Free Europe” was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry for “setting the pattern for later indie-rock releases.”
Formed in 1980 in Athens, Georgia, R.E.M. had a three-decade run of multi-platinum sales before amicably disbanding in 2011. Over the course of their career, R.E.M. released 15 studio albums, won three Grammys, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2007) as well as the Songwriters Hall of Fame (2024).
Here’s the track list for the new EP:
Radio Side
Radio Free Europe 2025 (Jacknife Lee Remix)*
Radio Free Dub (Mitch Easter 1981 Remix)*
Liberty Side
Radio Free Europe (Original Hib-Tone Single)
Sitting Still (Original Hib-Tone B-Side)
Wh. Tornado (From Cassette Set) **
* Never before released ** First time on digital and vinyl
R.E.M., “Radio Free Europe 2025 (Jacknife Lee Remix) RFE/RL Dispatch” (2025)
In the 1970s, at the height of Soviet jamming of the BBC, the most coveted short-wave radios in the USSR were made by the VEF factory in Latvia – which was then part of the Soviet Union.
A generation of young Russians grew up learning how to twist the dial with great precision, to find whichever BBC signal had somehow bypassed the howling and whistling of the jammers. When you found it, it a window opened into a whole other world – of uncensored news, literature and western pop music, all coming to you live from London.
Those days are long gone. The jamming stations have all closed down. The VEF factory doesn’t make radios anymore. And Latvia is now an independent country. But since the start of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the information space in Russia has been shrinking.
A new generation of Russians are now having to fight to stay connected to the world. And our team has to battleinternet blocking and shutdowns to keep on reaching them. Four years ago, the Russian Service Moscow newsroom had to leave Russia but their work continues in exile, and their new home by a twist of fate just happens to be in Latvia.
Over the past eighty years history often seems to have repeated itself.
Take the first ever Russian Service radio news bulletin from 24 March 1946. The news reader was the splendidly named Mrs Sonia – Betty – Horsfall. The top story was all about Iran – and the ongoing negotiations for Soviet troops to withdraw after their wartime occupation.
Now it’s the US-Israeli war on Iran that’s dominating the news. And to reach audiences in Russia in 2026, we have to tell the story in a myriad of ways across different platforms. Our website is blocked in Russia – as are YouTube, Instagram, Facebook Tiktok, and WhatsApp. The messenger app Telegram used to be our only uncensored way of getting information in and out of Russia. But not any more.
These days Russians can only reach the BBC website and social media channels – and many other banned sites – by using VPNs – virtual private networks, which allow them to bypass the censors. Everyone from young people to the shortwave radio generation has had to learn how to do it. “But what will we do if they start blocking VPNs and shutdown internet access altogether?” one of our team asked the other day.
It’s a question we often ask our colleagues in BBC News Persian, who are now reporting the war on their country despite an almost complete internet blackout in Iran. We have so much to learn from them – and increasingly, sadly, so much in common with them.
We had to leave Russia in 2022 because it was no longer safe for our staff to continue doing their jobs there. Even calling Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine a war, was against the law.
Getting nearly 50 shell-shocked BBC Russian journalists, their families and their pets out of Russia and into Latvia now feels like the easy bit. Building new lives, learning a new language, and finding new ways to keep reporting Russia from the outside has been a much tougher challenge.
“The thing that’s really helped is knowing we’re all in this together and we can all support each other,” says one of our team.
But everyone has paid the price for carrying on. No-one can travel safely back to Russia. Home and family have become unreachable. Reunions have to happen in third countries.
And even in exile our staff are still being pursued. Eight have been designated ‘foreign agents’ by the authorities in Russia – required by law to put disclaimers on all their published work, taken to court and fined in absentia for failing to comply, heading inevitably towards criminal prosecution.
“If I get a criminal record in Russia, then the list of places where I can safely meet my Mum is going to get even shorter,” one colleague told me the other day.
There have already been cases of Russians discovering too late that they’re on the international wanted list in countries friendly to Moscow.
When the Russian Service first went on air, Winston Churchill had just made his famous post-war speech warning that an iron curtain was coming down over Eastern Europe. In 2026 a digital version of that iron curtain has come down again.
The post-revolutionary emigres and the Cold War exiles who lead the Russian Service in those earlier radio days, have now been replaced by a new generation who never thought that one day it would be their turn to leave.
“The Russia I grew up in has completely disappeared,” says one of our ex-Moscow team. “In the blink of an eye the freedom, the possibilities, and the excitement have all gone. I don’t want to think that I’ll never go back,” she adds “But right now it’s hard to believe.”
Russians clearly want more than their state-controlled news media is currently giving them and after 80 years, I hope our first newsreader Mrs Horsfall would be proud to see how many of them still trust the BBC.
This story was broadcast on ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, on BBC Radio 4 on 21 March 2026.
An exhibit at the Cooper Molera Adobe museum in Monterey, California. Photo: The Russian Reader
Cooper Molera Adobe is now pursuing the interpretation of Ohlone/Esselen/Costonoan Native Indian slaves at our historic site. This includes evaluating our history, beyond gaining simple historical information and respectfully work with descendants to then forge a richer, more diverse narrative and legacy.
Three pillars of multi-disciplinary research, relationship building, and interpretation as major benchmarks will guide our methodology as we move forward with this project. Cooper Molera Adobe has partnered with Woodlawn Pope Leighey and Shadows on the Teche as a working group in a large network of sites the National Trust has to move toward this collective goal.
Failing to tell the truth about race and slavery results in widely-held fears of engaging with people who look, speak, act or think differently than oneself. It is lived out in anger and despair in feeling marginalized, erased, and invisible due to demographics or identity.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and our website to see more of our updates in the future for this project.
On April 27, 1863, nearly five months after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, California abolished its system of forced apprenticeship for American Indians. Under the apprenticeship provisions of the state’s Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, several thousand California Indians, mostly children, had suffered kidnapping, sale and involuntary servitude for over a decade.
Newly elected California Republicans, eager to bring California in line with the national march toward emancipation, agitated for two years in the early 1860s to repeal Indian apprenticeship. And yet those Republicans’ limited vision of Indian freedom — one in which Indians would be free to reap the fruits of their labor, but not free from the duty to labor altogether — made for an incomplete Indian Emancipation Proclamation. Although California was distant from the battlefields of the Civil War, the state endured its own struggle over freedom that paralleled that of the North and the South.
The Republican campaign to abolish Indian servitude ran up against nearly a century of coerced Indian labor in California. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, thousands of California Indians worked on missions and ranches, bound to their employment through a combination of economic necessity, captivity, physical compulsion and debt.
With the United States’ conquest of California in 1847, the discovery of gold in 1848 and the formation of a state government in 1849, new American lawmakers expanded and formalized Indian servitude to meet growing demands for labor. The 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians authorized whites to hold Indian children as wards until they reached adulthood. Indian adults convicted of vagrancy or other crimes could be forced to work for whites who paid their bail.
Skyrocketing demand for farmworkers and domestic servants, combined with violence between Indians and invading whites in the northwestern part of the state, left Democrats in war-torn counties clamoring for the expansion of the 1850 Indian act. A “general system of peonage or apprenticeship” was the only way to quell Indian wars, one Democrat argued. A stint of involuntary labor would civilize Indians, establish them in “permanent and comfortable homes,” and provide white settlers with “profitable and convenient servants.” In 1860, Democrats proposed new amendments to the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians that allowed whites to bind Indian children as apprentices until they reached their mid-20s. Indian adults accused of being vagrants without steady employment, or taken as captives of war, could be apprenticed for 10-year terms. The amendments passed with little debate.
As the nation hurtled toward a war over slavery, Californians watched as their own state became a battleground over the future of human bondage. Apprenticeship laws aimed at “civilizing” the state’s Indians encouraged a robust and horrific slave trade in the northwestern counties. Frontier whites eagerly paid from $50 to $100 for Indian children to apprentice. Groups of kidnappers, dubbed “baby hunters” in the California press, supplied this market by attacking isolated Indian villages and snatching up children in the chaos of battle. Some assailants murdered Indian parents who refused to give up their children.
Once deposited in white homes, captive apprentices often suffered abuse and neglect. The death of Rosa, a 10-year-old apprentice from either the Yuki or Pomo tribes, provides a grim case in point. Just two weeks before the repeal of Indian apprenticeship, the Mendocino County coroner found the dead girl “nearly naked, lying in a box out of doors” next to the home of her mistress, a Mrs. Bassett of Ukiah. Neighbors testified that the child was sick and restless and that Basset shut her out of the house in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Huge bruises on Rosa’s abdomen suggested that Bassett had mercilessly beaten the ill child before tossing her out into the blizzard. Mendocino officials never brought charges in the case.
The horrors of kidnapping and apprenticeship filled the state’s newspapers just as antislavery California Republicans swept into power in 1861–2. Republicans assailed the apprentice system and blamed Democrats for the “abominable system of Indian apprenticeship, which has been used as a means of introducing actual slavery into our free State.” George Hanson, an Illinois Republican whose close relationship with Abraham Lincoln earned him an appointment as Northern California’s superintendent of Indian affairs, vowed to eliminate the state’s “unholy traffic in human blood and souls.” He tracked down and prosecuted kidnappers in the northwestern counties (with mixed success) and petitioned the State Legislature to abolish the apprenticeship system.
In 1862, Republican legislators proposed two new measures to overturn the 1860 apprenticeship amendments. Democrats blocked these bills and insisted that apprenticeship “embodied one of the most important measures” for Indians’ “improvement and civilization.” Indian servitude lived on.
By the time the legislature met again in the spring of 1863, however, all signs pointed to the destruction of the apprenticeship system. Republicans won firm majorities in both houses of the State Legislature, and in January California became the first state to endorse Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans again proposed to repeal the apprenticeship amendments, and this time they achieved their goal with no debate or dissent. Involuntary labor for American Indians died quietly.
Or did it? Republicans had eliminated all the 1860 amendments authorizing the forced apprenticeship of American Indians. But they had left intact sections of the original 1850 act that mandated the forcible binding out of Indian convicts and vagrants. Moreover, repeal only prevented future apprenticeships; Republican legislation did not liberate Indians already legally apprenticed. After repeal, as many as 6,000 Indian children remained servants in white homes.
The incomplete nature of Indian emancipation in California reflected Republicans’ own ambivalence toward Indian freedom. Most Republicans opposed the kidnapping and enslavement of Indians. They believed that Indians, like former African-American slaves, should be entitled to reap the economic rewards of their own work. On the other hand, they asserted that the key to “civilizing” Indians was to force them to participate in the California labor market. They could not be free to support themselves through traditional mobile hunting and gathering practices that removed their labor from white supervision and tied up valuable natural resources. Such a lifestyle was, in Republicans’ minds, little more than idle vagrancy. Just as their Republican colleagues on the East Coast argued that ex-slaves should be schooled to labor by being bound to plantation wage work through long-term contracts, California Republicans began to advocate compulsory labor as the only way to cure Indian vagrancy.
The Republican vision for Indian freedom quickly took shape after the Civil War. Republican appointees who oversaw California’s Indian reservations compelled all able-bodied Indians to work on the reservation farms. Those who refused, or who pursued native food-gathering practices, forfeited the meager federal rations allotted to reservation Indians. By 1867, one Republican agent declared that “the hoe and the broadaxe will sooner civilize and Christianize than the spelling book and the Bible.” He advocated forcing Indians to work until they had been “humanized by systematic labor.” These policies persisted long after the war. At Round Valley Reservation, one critic observed in 1874 that “compulsion is used to keep the Indians and to drive them to work.” Indian workers received no payment for “labor and no opportunity to accumulate individual property.”
The ambiguous postwar liberty of California Indians reveals that the Civil War was a transcontinental conflict that reached west to the Pacific. The freedoms won in wartime, and the unfulfilled promises of emancipation, encompassed not only black and white, free and slave, but also American Indian peoples who suffered from distinctly Western systems of unfree labor. The Civil War and Reconstruction are best understood as truly national struggles over the meaning and limits of freedom, north, south and west.
Confusion about how sex trafficking works and who qualifies as a victim has compounded the problem. The government’s 2019 indictment charged Epstein with trafficking minors between 2002 and 2005, the period covered by his earlier Florida plea deal. The adult women Epstein entrapped after his 2008 conviction weren’t included in the indictment.
In 2019, prosecutors brought charges using the minimum number of victims needed to apprehend Epstein in order to keep the case secret and avoid him fleeing, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Prosecutors continued interviewing victims after his July 2019 arrest and had planned to expand the indictment, including potentially to adult women, had Epstein not died the following month, according to these people and a 2019 Justice Department memo released in the files.
For sex-trafficking cases involving adults, prosecutors must prove the victim was compelled into sexual exploitation through force, fraud or coercion. Fraud typically involves false promises of employment or a better life; coercion can be psychological and take the form of threats of deportation, blackmail or debt bondage, lawyers said.
Federal prosecutors have successfully prosecuted cases of adult sex trafficking. In 2019, the Nxivm group founder Keith Raniere was convicted for his exploitation of adult women and sentenced to 120 years in prison.
Most recently, the Alexander brothers were convicted in a case in which adult women testified that they had been lured to exclusiveparties and trips, then drugged and assaulted. Lawyers for the Alexander brothers said they planned to appeal.
Pyramid scheme
After his 2008 plea deal, Epstein shifted his focus to adult women who looked like teenagers—many of them fashion models from Europe and Russia. He dangled fake jobs linked to his famous connections, promising work at places like Victoria’s Secret. He rarely delivered.
Once inside his orbit, the women said they were coerced into performing massages that escalated into sexual demands. Several have said he required at least one such encounter a day, and when no other women were available, he turned to his “assistants.”
The band’s manager, Marina Kosukhina,confirmed the news on their socials, writing, “Nikolai is no longer with us”.
Shortparis was formed in Saint Petersburg in 2012, with Komyagin becoming its vocalist, keyboardist, and ideological engine. Their first album, ‘Docheri’, was released in 2013, followed by ‘Paskha’ in 2017. They opened for The Kooks in 2015 and alt-J in 2017 in Saint Petersburg. Even then, their shows became known for their provocative, performance-art approach.
Despite moderate popularity among intellectuals and music lovers, the band gained mainstream recognition only after the release of the politically charged music video‘Strashno’ in 2018. After that, Shortparis quickly became one of the most prominent opposition-minded bands in Russia and also started drawing interest abroad. In 2019, they embarked on their first UK tour, performing at Liverpool Sound City and The Great Escape Festival.
Shortparis in a still from their 2018 video “Scary” (see below)
Clashspoke with the band in 2020 at the peak of their popularity, calling them a five-piece that “artfully meld stomping skinhead aggro with Dostoyevskian angry-young-man intellectualism”. In our interview, Komyagin described their approach to making music this way: “Deconstruction of any normal-sounding instrument, or widely-known harmonic movement or chord, allows us to rethink music clichés, update and clean them”.
Komyagin was also known as a highly intelligent lad with a background in art history and experience working as a school teacher. He gave lectures on art and often provoked journalists during interviews, trying to turn them into performances. On top of that, he appeared in two Kirill Serebrennikov films, Leto and Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie, and played the iconic Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the TV series Karamora.
As of 2026, the band continued to remain in Russia, making that decision part of their political stance, even though they were effectively barred from performing there, with all concerts cancelled. Refusing to comply with state policies, they toured outside their homeland in recent years, playing in the UK, Germany, Portugal, Italy, the US, and many other countries, including a 2025 tour of China.
Nikolai Komyagin has died at the age of 39. No cause of death has been given. However, according to astatement from Ksenia Sobchak, an influential yet controversial figure in Russian politics and journalism, Komyagin had heart problems, and “he felt unwell after a boxing training session and his heart gave out”.
In memory of the brilliant Nikolai Komyagin—[Shortparis’s] music video “Apple Orchard,” filmed immediately after the start of the war and performed in a wintry field with a veterans choir. A requiem for Russia. A requiem, as it transpired, for Nikolai himself: in the finale, apples are thrown into the grave.
He died at the age of thirty-nine from heart failure on a February day as cold as the day in 2015 when Nemtsov was killed, as cold as the day in 2022 when the great war began, as cold as the day in 2024 when Navalny was killed, as cold as today. A perennial Russian February.
Nikolai Komyagin, the singer and keyboardist for Shortparis, has died aged 39.
The musician and actor was best recognised as the frontman for the Russian experimental band, forming the group in 2012 alongside Alexander Ionin and Pavel Lesnikov.
His death was announced today (Friday February 20) by the band’s manager, Marina Kosukhina. Taking to Instagram Stories, she stated: “Nikolai is no longer with us”.
At time of writing, no cause of death has been announced, although a local Russian outlet has speculated that it may be related to “heart problems” that the singer experienced “after boxing training”.
After forming in Saint Petersburg in 2012, the band went on to share their debut album, ‘Docheri’, in 2013, before following it up in 2017 with an album called ‘Paskha’. Shortparis went on to become recognised for the distinctive blend of post-punk, avant-garde rock, pop, folk and electronica.
They also gained traction for their provocative performance art, with tracks like 2018’s ‘Strashno’ (“Scary”) tackling themes of neo-Nazism, fear, and social anxieties in Russia.
Since news of Komyagin’s passing, fans have been taking to social media to pay their respects to “one of the most talented and honest Russian musicians”.
“Their art tore at the fabric of reality, and with its piercing lyrics, it fought the Darkness. Hope you’re in a brighter place, Nikolai,” one fan wrote on X/Twitter.
Another added: “Even though their name may sound new to many, Shortparis have been among the most important protagonists of St. Petersburg’s music scene and Russian alternative culture over the past decade”, while a third explained how they first discovered his music.
“After I moved to Piter, this was the first band I randomly bought tickets for, and for two hours afterward I couldn’t come down from the sound, colour, and energy,” they wrote.
Shortparis went on to land a slot opening for The Kooks in 2015, and also supported Alt-J during the latter’s 2017 tour.
In 2019, the band went out on their first UK tour, which included a slot at The Great Escape Festival, and last year also went on tour in China for the first time.
As well as his time with the band, Komyagin also took on various acting roles, including spots in two Kirill Serebrennikov films: Leto and Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie.
One of his biggest roles was playing Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the 2022 television series Karamora, and he and his Shortparis bandmates also got involved in the filming of another of Serebrennikov’s films, Summer [sic].
Shortparis always honestly, and even recklessly, attempted to reflect what was happening around them and to find an adequate artistic expression for it. To a certain extent, they also sought to aestheticize it—to find a felicitous (and impossible, of course) point inside and outside at the same time. It is no coincidence that Nikolai—a quiet, cultured, handsome man in real life, a Petersburg art historian—possessed such a complex charm on stage, and was a bit like Plumbum. This was not an easy task, and most importantly, it was harmful to his health, like working in a factory. Like practicing synchronized swimming in acid.
Because there was violence everywhere, and there still is. It consumed Nikolai.
You can’t handle it But they don’t like it Knowing in advance Who won’t make it And the women put on makeup And the children hide Join the dance No one lies
You don’t like it And they don’t like it The sons are asleep The family is silent You stare naively And plans are being made I’m responsible for who my wife sleeps with
You can’t handle it And they can’t handle it The ice won’t save you The major is coming And the women put on makeup And the children hide Join the dance No one lies (yes)
You can’t handle it And they can’t handle it The ice won’t save you Whoever doesn’t make it through And the women put on makeup And the children hide Join the dance The major is coming (yes)
You can’t handle it And they can’t handle it The ice won’t save you Whoever doesn’t make it through And women put on makeup And children hide Join the dance The major is coming (yes)
Both the pot (Iran) and the kettle (the U.S.) are “rounding up” their detractors.
Trump’s White House website welcomes visitors with a pop-up that reads: “WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN AGE!” But on this heavy news day a year into Trump’s second term, it is increasingly clear that as his regime focuses on committing the United States to white Christian nationalism, the country is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, and its own economy is weakening.
At the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s endorsement of white Christian nationalism does not appear to have swayed European countries to abandon their defense of democracy and join the U.S.’s slide toward authoritarianism. Instead, as retired lieutenant general and former commander of U.S. Army Europe Mark Hertling wrote, it squandered the strategic advantage its partnership with Europe has given the U.S.
Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted that the word in Munich was that “Europe needs to emancipate itself from the U.S. as fast as possible.” In Germany, Der Spiegel reports plans to bring Ukrainian veterans to teach German armed forces drone use and counter-drone practices the Ukrainians are perfecting in their war against Russian occupation. Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney is working to reduce Canada’s defense dependence on the U.S., ramping up domestic defense production.
Carney has advanced a foreign policy that centers “middle powers” and operates without the U.S. That global reorientation has profound consequences for the U.S. economy, as well. Canada is leading discussions between the European Union and a 12-nation Indo-Pacific bloc to form one of the globe’s largest economic alliances. A new agreement would enable the countries to share supply chains and to share a low-tariff system. Canada also announced it is renewing its partnership with China. As of this week, Canadians can travel to China without a visa.
Today France’s president Emmanuel Macron and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi upgraded Indian-French relations to a “Special Strategic Partnership” during a three-day visit of Macron to Mumbai. They have promised to increase cooperation between the two countries in defense, trade, and critical materials.
Trump insisted that abandoning the free trade principles under which the U.S. economy had boomed since World War II would enable the U.S. to leverage its extraordinary economic might through tariffs, but it appears, as economist Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute wrote today for Bloomberg, that the rest of the world is simply moving on without the U.S.
While Trump boasts about the U.S. stock market, which is indeed up, U.S. markets have underperformed markets in other countries. Today, Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported that the S&P 500, which measures 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S., is off to its worst year of performance since 1995 when compared to the All Country World Index (ACWI), an index that measures global stocks.
In May 2023 the Florida legislature passed a law requiring employers with 25 or more employees to confirm that their workers are in the U.S. legally. The new law prompted foreign farmworkers and construction workers to leave the state. Now, the Wall Street Journal reported in a February 6 editorial, employers “are struggling to find workers they can employ legally.”
The newspaper continued: “There’s little evidence that undocumented migrants are taking jobs from Americans. The reality is that employers can’t find enough Americans willing to work in the fields or hang drywall, even at attractive wages. Farm hands in Florida who work year-round earn roughly $47,000, which is more than what some young college graduates earn.” “The lesson for President Trump is that businesses can’t grow if government takes away their workers,” the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board concluded.
Today Florida attorney general James Uthmeier reacted to the Wall Street Journal editorial, explaining on Fox Business that the Republican Party expects to replace undocumented workers with young Americans: “We need to focus on our state college program, our trade schools, getting people into the workforce even earlier. We passed legislation last year to help high school students get their hands dirty and get on job sites more quickly. So I think there’s a lot more we can do with apprenticeships, rolling out, beefing up our workforce, and trying to address the demand that is undoubtedly here in the state.”
Steve Kopack of NBC News reported on February 11 that while the U.S. added 1.46 million jobs in 2024, the last year of former president Joe Biden’s administration, it added just 181,000 jobs in 2025. That makes 2025 the worst year for hiring since 2003, aside from the worst year of the coronavirus pandemic. Manufacturing lost 108,000 jobs in 2025.
Peter Grant of the Wall Street Journal reported today that banks that have loaned money to finance the purchase of commercial real estate are requiring borrowers to pay back tens of billions of dollars as the delinquency rate for such loans has climbed to a high not seen since just after the 2008 financial crisis. About $100 billion in commercial real estate loans that have been packaged into securities will come due this year and probably won’t repay when they should. More than half of the loans are likely headed for foreclosure or liquidation.
Trump vowed that he would cut “waste, fraud, and abuse” out of the country’s government programs, but cuts to social programs have been overwhelmed by spending on federal arrest, detention, and deportation programs, as well as Trump’s expansion of military strikes and threats against other countries. In his first year back in office, Trump launched at least 658 air and drone strikes against Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
Just today, U.S. Southern Command announced it struck three boats in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean yesterday and killed 11 people it claims were smuggling drugs, bringing the total of such strikes to more than 40 and the number of dead to more than 130. Now Trump is moving American forces toward Iran, threatening to target the regime there.
The administration is simply tacking the cost of these military adventures onto government expenditures, apparently still maintaining that the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations Republicans extended in their July “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and tariffs will address the growing deficit and national debt by increasing economic growth.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last week projected that the deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2026, will be $1.85 trillion. Richard Rubin of the Wall Street Journal notes that for every dollar the U.S. collects this year, it will spend $1.33. The CBO explained that the Republican tax cuts will increase budget deficits by $4.7 trillion through 2035.
If the American people have suffered from Trump’s reign, the Trump family continues to cash in. Today Trump’s chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Michael Selig, announced he will try to block states from regulating prediction markets, saying they “provide useful functions for society by allowing everyday Americans to hedge commercial risks like increases in temperature and energy price spikes.”
Republicans insist that prediction markets are more like stock trading than like betting, but a group of over 20 Democratic senators warned last week in a letter to Selig that prediction market platforms, where hundreds of millions of dollars are wagered every week, “are offering contracts that mirror sportsbook wagers and, in some cases, contracts tied to war and armed conflict.” They added that the platforms “evade state and tribal consumer protections, generate no public revenue, and undermine sovereign regulatory regimes,” and urged Selig to support regulations Congress has already put into law.
Prediction markets also cover the actions of President Trump, whose son Don Jr. is both an advisor to and an investor in Polymarket and a paid advisor to Kalshi. Polymarket and Kalshi are the two biggest prediction markets, and both are less regulated than betting sites. The Trump family has announced it is starting its own “Truth Predict.”
David Uberti of the Wall Street Journal reported that Eric Trump is investing heavily in drones, particularly in Israeli drone maker Xtend, which has a $1.5 billion deal to merge with a small Florida construction company to take the company public. The Defense Department has invited Xtend to be part of its drone expansion program.
And yet it is clear the administration fears the American people. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), a statewide program that specializes in police shootings, said yesterday that it has received formal notice that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will not allow it any “access to information or evidence that it has collected” related to the shooting death of Minneapolis intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. The BCA says it will continue to investigate and to pursue legal avenues to get access to the FBI files.
Fury at ICE continues to mount, with voices from inside the government complaining about Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Jonathan Allen, and Julia Ainsley of NBC News reported today on her alienation of senior officials at the Coast Guard as she has shifted their primary mission of search and rescue to flying deportation flights. Noem’s abrupt removal of Coast Guard commandant Linda Fagan only to move into her vacated housing at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling herself also rankled, along with Noem’s lavish use of expensive Coast Guard planes.
Daniel Lippman and Adam Wren of Politico reported today that Noem’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, is resigning.
Marissa Payne of the Des Moines Register reported today that in Iowa, Republican state lawmakers are working to rein in the power of the state governor before the 2026 elections, a sure sign that they are worried that a Democrat is going to win the election.
That fear appears to be part of a larger concern that the American people have turned against the Republicans more generally. Last night, late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert told viewers he had been unable to air an interview he did with a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Texas, James Talarico. “I was told…that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on,” Colbert said. “And because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”
Talarico is a Texas state lawmaker studying to be a minister, who criticizes the Republican use of Christianity as a political weapon. Such politicization of Christianity both distorts politics and cheapens faith, he says. The true way to practice Christianity is simple but not easy, he says: it is to love your neighbor. Political positions should grow out of that to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and heal the sick. “[T]here is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” he told Colbert. “It is the worship of power in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Although Talarico is locked in a tight primary battle with Representative Jasmine Crockett, his message offers a powerful off-ramp for evangelicals uncomfortable with the administration, especially its cover-up of the Epstein files. Without evangelical support, MAGA Republicans cannot win elections.
Talarico has the administration nervous enough that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Brendan Carr opened an investigation of the morning talk show The View after Talarico appeared on the show earlier this month. Lawyer Adam Bonin explained that Carr changed the FCC’s enforcement of the Equal Time Rule (which is not the Fairness Doctrine). It says that when broadcast networks (not cable) give air time to someone running for office, they have to give the same time to any other candidate for that office. The obvious exception is when a candidate does something newsworthy outside the race, in which case a network can interview that person without interviewing everyone else.
For 20 years, that rule has applied to talk shows, but Carr announced last month that if a non-news talk show seems to be “motivated by partisan purposes,” then it will not be exempt. For Colbert’s show, it would have meant that after interviewing Talarico, the network would have had to give equal time to all other Democrats and Republicans running for the Senate seat. CBS could have challenged the rule but chose not to.
Why is the administration worried about Talarico in a state Trump won in 2024 by 14%? “I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas,” Talarico said. “Across the state there is a backlash growing to the extremism and the corruption in our politics…. It’s a people-powered movement to take back our state and take back our country.”
As of 10:00 tonight, Colbert’s 15-minute interview with Talarico has been viewed on YouTube 3.8 million times. Forbes says it is Colbert’s most watched interview in months.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, “Rep. James Talarico On Confronting Christian Nationalism, And Strange Days In The Texas Legislature”
Stephen Colbert hosts Texas State Rep. James Talarico for an online-exclusive interview that touches on the issues raised in Talarico’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for Senate including the separation of church and state, the dangers of consolidated corporate-owned media, and the fabricated culture wars pushed by Republicans in states like Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.
In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.
The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court.
“The government is taking more liberties than they used to,” said Steve Loney, a senior supervising attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. “It’s a whole other level of frequency and lack of accountability.” Over the last six months, Mr. Loney has represented people whose social media account information was sought by the Department of Homeland Security.
The department said it had “broad administrative subpoena authority” but did not address questions about its requests. In court, its lawyers have argued that they are seeking information to help keep ICE agents in the field safe.
Meta, Reddit and Discord declined to comment.
“When we receive a subpoena, our review process is designed to protect user privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement. “We inform users when their accounts have been subpoenaed, unless under legal order not to or in an exceptional circumstance. We review every legal demand and push back against those that are overbroad.”
The Trump administration has aggressively tried tamping down criticism of ICE, partly by identifying Americans who have demonstrated against the agency. ICE agents told protesters in Minneapolis and Chicago that they were being recorded and identified with facial recognition technology. Last month, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, also said on Fox News that he was pushing to “create a database” of people who were “arrested for interference, impeding and assault.”
Silicon Valley has long had an uneasy relationship with the federal government and how much user information to provide it. Transparency reports published by tech companies show that the number of requests for user information from different governments around the world has climbed over the years, with the United States and India among those submitting the most.
Some social media companies previously fought government requests for user information. In 2017, Twitter (now X) sued the federal government to stop an administrative subpoena that asked it to unmask an account critical of the first Trump administration. The subpoena was later withdrawn.
Unlike arrest warrants, which require a judge’s approval, administrative subpoenas are issued by the Department of Homeland Security. They were only sparingly used in the past, primarily to uncover the people behind social media accounts engaged in serious crimes such as child trafficking, said tech employees familiar with the legal tool. But last year, the department ramped up its use of the subpoenas to unmask anonymous social media accounts.
In September, for example, it sent Meta administrative subpoenas to identify the people behind Instagram accounts that posted about ICE raids in California, according to the A.C.L.U. The subpoenas were challenged in court, and the Department of Homeland Security withdrew the requests for information before a judge could rule.
Mr. Loney of the A.C.L.U. said avoiding a judge’s ruling was important for the department to keep issuing the subpoenas without a legal order to stop. “The pressure is on the end user, the private individual, to go to court,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security also sought more information on the Facebook and Instagram accounts dedicated to tracking ICE activity in Montgomery County, Pa., outside Philadelphia. The accounts, called Montco Community Watch, began posting in Spanish and English about ICE sightings in June and, over the next six months, solicited tips from their roughly 10,000 followers to alert people to the locations of agents on specific streets or in front of local landmarks.
On Sept. 11, the Department of Homeland Security sent Meta a request for the name, email address, post code and other identifying information of the person or people behind the accounts. Meta informed the two Instagram and Facebook accounts of the request on Oct. 3.
“We have received legal process from law enforcement seeking information about your Facebook account,” the notification said, according to court records. “If we do not receive a copy of documentation that you have filed in court challenging this legal process within ten (10) days, we will respond to the requesting agency with information.”
The account owner alerted the A.C.L.U., which filed a motion on Oct. 16 to quash the government’s request. In a hearing on Jan. 14 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the A.C.L.U. argued that the government was using administrative subpoenas to target people whose speech it did not agree with.
Sarah Balkissoon, a Department of Justice lawyer representing the government, said the Department of Homeland Security’s position was that it was “within their power to investigate threats to its own officers or impediments to their officers,” according to a court transcript viewed by The Times.
Two days later, the subpoena was withdrawn.
The Montco Community Watch accounts continue to post almost every day. The Times emailed a request for comment to the address associated with the accounts but did not receive a reply.
On Monday, the Instagram account posted an alert for ICE activity in the Eagleville area of Montgomery County. “Montco ICE alert,” the post said. “This is confirmed ICE activity.”
On Friday, the account posted a video of students at Norristown Area High School protesting against ICE. “We stand with you and are proud you made your voices heard!” the post said.
It’s one of the saddest hit songs to grace American music: “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).”
The 1948 Woody Guthrie composition documented a plane crash that killed all 32 people on board in Los Gatos Canyon near the Central Valley town of Coalinga on Jan. 28 of that year. Twenty-eight of the victims were Mexicans being forced back home — some entered the country without papers, some were guest workers whose stints were over — accompanied by the immigration agent charged with making sure they got there, much like the deportation flights of today.
The Associated Press reported that newspapers published across the country the following day — including The Times — listed the names of the Southern California crew on board and the migra man, Frank E. Chaffin of Berkeley.
The Mexicans? The story deemed them “deportees.” They were buried in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno under a bronze marker that read: “28 Mexican citizens who died in an airplane accident.” The American government never even bothered to tell their family members. Many wondered what happened to their loved ones for decades.
Guthrie heard the AP report over the radio and was so angered by how the press and government dismissed the deceased that he penned “Deportee.” With mournful chords and vivid lyrics, the working class troubadour attacked an American society that that simultaneously let crops rot “in their creosote dumps” and treated the migrants who picked them “like rustlers, like outlaws, like thieves.”
It’s been covered by some of this country’s greatest musicians — I’m talking Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson (my favorite version is by folk-rock heroes The Byrds).
The Byrds, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” (1969)
Even with “Deportee,” this story had fallen out of public consciousness over the decades. Until January, when ICE dredged it up to once again insult the memory of the lost Mexican immigrants.
ICE’s inexplicable recap
On Jan. 28, the social media accounts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement commemorated Chaffin’s death and only his. The caption alongside a grainy black and white photo of him read: “The plane he was on to deport 28 illegal Mexican aliens caught fire and crashed killing all onboard.”
ICE’s unnecessarily inflammatory language not only was ahistorical, but also it didn’t even match up with its own official account. The agency’s Wall of Honor, which commemorates the lives of employees who died in the line of duty, described the migrants who died alongside Chaffin as “Mexican nationals.”
Such warping of the past isn’t accidental but rather part of a long con by the Trump administration to justify its agenda. In an administration that knows no lows, dismissing the Mexican victims of the Los Gatos Canyon disaster as “illegal Mexican aliens” was particularly egregious.
‘It’s disrespectful, it’s dehumanizing, it’s ICE’
I called up Mike Rodriguez, an ethnic studies teacher in Santa Ana who found out in 2015 that his paternal aunt, María Rodríguez Santana, was on that doomed plane.
“First thing I thought was, ‘Well that’s the United States,’” Rodriguez said of ICE’s social media post. “They’re doing the same thing that the government tried to do in 1948 by erasing them.”
He added that la migra didn’t even bother to list the names of the American crew that died, either. “It’s disrespectful, it’s dehumanizing, it’s ICE,” he said.
But Rodriguez takes solace in knowing he and others are doing their part to make sure people know the full story. He regularly speaks about the tragedy and visited both the site of the crash and Holy Cross Cemetery, where a plaque with all of the victims’ names was erected in 2013.
Tim Z. Hernandez, a University of Texas El Paso professor who has spent much of his career trying to track down descendants, interviewed Rodriguez and his uncle for a forthcoming documentary and also featured their story in the 2024 book”They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir.” The two appeared at an event last year at the Untold Story bookstore in Anaheim, where Rodriguez sung “Deportee” while his son played guitar. He added extra lyrics to honor his Tía María and Hernandez.
“Thankfully, we have truth tellers like Woody Guthrie and Tim,” Rodriguez said. “And I remember what Woody sang — ‘All you fascists bound to lose.’ And that’s the way this is administration is, trying to strip away our constitutional rights. But their day will come.”
