Anyone who blames the US Foreign Service and its 755 staffers, most of them Russian nationals, who even as I write this are either being removed from their posts and sent back to the States, or (the vast majority) summarily fired without cause from their jobs at the US embassy in Moscow and the US consulates in Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Vladivostok, for the earth-crushing “visa crisis” now “unfairly affecting ordinary Russians,” should actually try and figure out what is going on and who is to blame for the so-called crisis before writing yet another wildly misinformed Facebook or Telegram post about how it’s all the fault of Donald Trump, the State Department, and the obtuse staffers in the visa departments at the US embassy and consulates in Russia.

Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, is to blame for the “crisis,” because it was he who ordered the summary dismissal or removal of 755 embassy and consulate personnel by September 1, 2017.

He knew quite well his order would, among other things, make it difficult for the US embassies and consulates to process visa requests at the pace required by all those “ordinary Russians” and to do this in the big cities where they either live or live near.

But I have seen hardly any mention of Putin’s role in the affair, especially in the tumultuous fountain of collective wisdom known as Facebook, where yet another festival of free-floating anti-Americanism has erupted.

President Putin, if he actually read Facebook, would be pleased to see what some of his countrymen have been writing, because he would be witnessing the wild flowering of the anti-Americanism he has been carefully planting in place of communism as the country’s ruling ideology over the last eighteen years.

I admit he has been going about it in a way that sometimes suggested he was, instead, “fostering better relations” with the US, but nobody who has actually been following the vicissitudes of his regime and his actual moves and key policy statements would have been fooled by that transparent ruse.

But enough of Putin. He’s a super villain and can thus be excused for doing mean, hurtful things to hundreds of people he has never met. That’s his job.

What about his virtual countrymen, who for the last several days have been writing lots of mean, hurtful, and stupid things about hundreds of people, most of whom they have never met, most of them on the verge of losing jobs some of them have held for one or two decades (the Russians) or being uprooted again and sent to another posting after getting settled in Russia (the actual US diplomats)?

What have they done to deserve your wrath?

Nothing.

Which means, at least, that the minimum of solidarity you could have shown them as they go through something that will cause many of them and their family members a great deal of anguish, to put it mildly, was to think harder for a few minutes, find out what was really going on, and figure out who was really to blame for the problem, instead of once again taking an absolutely useless but “emotionally satisfying” punch at the Great Satan, as if you were taking your cues from Putin himself or the late Ayatollah Khomeini, Allah bless his soul.

I realize what I’ve written will be nearly inscrutable to people who have reacted this way. They just want their visas—and they want them now.

So I’ll leave it at this. Now matter how many times you may have been to the US and how much time you’ve spent there, you’ve demonstrated to me you’re not exactly friends of my country.

At the same time, you’ve shown you feel no solidarity for your own real countrymen, who are losing their jobs because a whimsical tyrant and his clique of friends have decided to rule Russia for as long as they can or until they drain it dry, whichever comes first.

Is the US State Department and its Russian national employees to blame for that state of affairs, too?

No.

So, at very least, you also have a very odd, contemptuous attitude toward your own countrymen and your own country.

Hence your signal inability to blame the man who actually caused the “crisis” for causing it.

Not to mention he scares you to death, so it’s always wiser to blame someone else for his regime’s excesses. It’s a lot safer to verbally roast the State Department, Kirill Serebrennikov, Kirill Serebrennikov’s accountant, and so on, for the “stupid mistakes” they made.

Anyone smarter than they are wouldn’t have done the stupid things they did, and we know you’re all much smarter than the State Department, Kirill Serebrennikov, his accountant, and all the other, now nearly countless victims of the eighteen-year-old Putinist tyranny. TRR

Photo by the Russian Reader