Armogedon Dasha

If one starts from the premise that the United States was engaged in a peace process, then what we saw Americans do yesterday makes no sense. The same goes if we begin from the assumption that present American leadership is concerned about peace generally, or cares about American interests as such. But it is not hard to see another logic in which yesterday’s outrages do come into focus.

It would go like this: It has been the policy of Musk-Trump from the beginning to build an alliance with Russia. The notion that there should be a peace process regarding Ukraine was simply a pretext to begin relations with Russia. That would be consistent with all of the publicly available facts. Blaming Ukraine for the failure of a process that never existed then becomes the pretext to extend the American relationship with Russia. The Trump administration, in other words, ukrainewashed a rapprochement with Russia that was always its main goal. It climbed over the backs of a bloodied but hopeful people to reach the man that ordered their suffering. Yelling at the Ukrainian president was most likely the theatrical climax to a Putinist maneuver that was in the works all along.

This, of course, might also seem illogical, and at an even higher level. The current American alliance system is based upon eighty years of trust and a network of reliable relationships, including friendships. Supporting Russia against Ukraine is an element of trading those alliances for an alliance with Russia. The main way that Russia engages the United States is through constant attempts to destabilize American society, for example through unceasing cyberwar. (It is telling that yesterday the news also broke that the United States has lowered its guard against Russian cyber attacks.) Russian television is full of fantasies of the destruction of the United States. Why would one turn friends into rivals and pretend that a rival is a friend? The economies of American’s present allies are at least twenty times larger than the Russian economy. And Russian trade was never very important to the United States. Why would one fight trade wars with the prosperous friends in exchange for access to an essentially irrelevant market? The answer might be that the alliance with Russia is preferred for reasons that have nothing to do with American interests.

In the White House yesterday, those who wished to be seen as strong tried to intimidate those they regarded as weak. Human courage in defense of freedom was demeaned in the service of a Russian fascist regime. American state power was shifted from the defense of the victim to the support of the aggressor. All of this took place in a climate of unreason, in which actual people and their experiences were cast aside, in favor of a world in which he who attacks is always right. Knowledge of war was replaced by internet tropes, internalized to the point that they feel like knowledge, a feeling that has to be reinforced by yelling at those who have actually lived a life beyond social media. A friendship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, a masculine bond of insecurity arising from things that never happened, became more important than the lives of Ukrainians or the stature of America.

There was a logic to what happened yesterday, but it was the logic of throwing away all reason, yielding to all impulse, betraying all decency, and embracing the worst in oneself on order to bring out the worst in the world. Perhaps Musk, Trump, and Vance will personally feel better amidst American decline, Russian violence, and global chaos. Perhaps they will find it profitable. This is not much consolation for the rest of us.

Excerpted from: Timothy Snyder, “The War Trump Chooses,” Thinking about…, 1 March 2025

Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s comment on Zelensky’s voyage to Washington, D.C. (March 1, 2025)

Leader of the neo-Nazi regime Zelensky’s visit to Washington D.C. on February 28 is an epic political and diplomatic failure of the Kiev regime.

The Russian Side has repeatedly made it clear at all levels that Zelensky is a corrupt individual who lost his grip on reality and is unable to reach and honour agreements.

The Kiev regime refused to continue talks on a political and diplomatic settlement in the spring of 2022, using lies and fake claims to justify continued hostilities and keep receiving Western military and financial aid.

With his outrageously rude behaviour during his stay in Washington, Zelensky re-affirmed his status of the most dangerous threat to the international community as an irresponsible figure that can stir up a big war. It must be clear to everyone that this kind of attacks coming from a terrorist leader are quite unambiguous.

This cynical individual will stoop to anything in pursuit of his goals and is obsessed with preserving the power he has usurped. That is why he:

has destroyed the opposition,

built a totalitarian state,

ruthlessly sending millions of his fellow citizens to death.

Under the increasingly deteriorating political situation, this figure is unable to show a sense of responsibility and is therefore obsessed with continuing the war and rejects peace, which means death to him.

Unprecedented in history of international politics and diplomacy, a dressing down given to Zelensky by the US president in the White House is also indicative of the political weakness and extreme moral degradation of the European leaders who continue to support the maniac head of the Nazi regime who has lost touch with reality.

As before, we continue to operate on the premise that a truly just and durable peace is not possible unless the root causes of the Ukraine crisis are completely eliminated.

The main ones among them include:

the West breaking its promises not to expand NATO and the alliance’s absorption of Europe’s entire geopolitical space all the way up to Russia’s borders,

the Kiev regime’s systematic elimination of everything about Russia, including language, culture, and church, just like the German Nazis did in the past.

The demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine, as well as recognition of existing realities on the ground remain Russia’s unchanged objectives.

The sooner Kiev and the European capitals come to realise this, the closer to a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis we will be.

Source: Russian Foreign Ministry (Facebook), 1 March 2025

Rick Wilson: “And I truly believe that Donald Trump will very soon offer military aid to Russia. I believe this in my heart of hearts. I want every single one of you people who think, ‘Oh, this was such a brave moment of diplomacy,’ when Donald Trump starts offering Russia intelligence, and weapons, and support, and protection, I want you to tell me if you think you still live in the America you voted for.”

Source: The Lincoln Project, “Trump and Vance ATTACK Zelenskyy in Oval Office and Align U.S. with PUTIN,” YouTube, 28 February 2025. Thanks to Mark Teeter for encouraging me to re-watch this video and note its stark conclusion.

“Anti-Americanism”

There are eleven Russian words in this poster for the April 29 St. Petersburg Craft Event at Art Play SPb, and twenty-one English words. Photo by the Russian Reader

Oh, how they hate the United States!

My boon companion was just chatting with a neighbor lady, a woman who has lived in our building her whole life and makes the best salt pickles I have ever tasted.

As it happens, our neighbor is friendly with a member of our municipal district council.

If you follow the news from Russia closely, you would know that the beleaguered united opposition, led by Dmitry Gudkov, made significant inroads in Moscow’s municipal district councils during the last elections to these entities. One of the people thus elected, the young, well-known liberal politician Ilya Yashin, has now announced plans to challenge the incumbent, Sergei Sobyanin, during the next Moscow mayoral election.

In reality, municipal district councils are the lowest rung on the political totem poll in Russia. They have very little power and are perpetually too underfunded to do the work they are supposed to do.

However, since Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, is power hungry and paranoid, they try and stack the lowly municipal district councils with their own members.

God knows what could happen otherwise.

The municipal district council member with whom our neighbor is friendly is one such United Russia Party placeholder.

“And she’s a real louse,” my boon companion would add.

The councilwoman recently got back from a trip to the United States. It turns out her daughter and son-in-law have lived there for a long time. They have a big, beautiful house in Silicon Valley.

The councilwoman told all this to our neighbor lady, explaining how much she had enjoyed the trip and how much she liked the United States.

“Why did she have to tell ME this?” the neighbor lady asked my boon companion, “Why couldn’t she have told someone else?”

Remember this little story the next time you see Foreign Minister Lavrov or President Putin or the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations or Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova huffing and puffing and blowing America’s house down.

Everything they say is meant for domestic consumption only. They don’t really hate the United States. They just need a Big Enemy to occupy the minds of the Russian people, to distract them from their own more serious crimes and misdemeanors.

The con seems to be working so far. // TRR

Our humble municipal district newspaper, as published by our municipal district council. This is the one of two spots in our municipal where I know one can read it. Maybe there are more, but otherwise the newspaper is not distributed to the municipal districts’s residents, because the less they know about our municipal district’s business, the better, I guess. Photo by the Russian Reader

A Mass Grave for Journalists and Journalism?

"A dirty word!" Central District, Petersburg, July 18, 2016. Photo by the Russian Reader — “A dirty word!” Central District, Petersburg, July 18, 2016. Photo by the *Russian Reader*

Moscow. July 20. Interfax.Ru. Official Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has commented on the death of journalist Pavel Sheremet in Kiev.

“A car in which Pavel Sheremet was located has exploded in Kiev. [He was] a professional unafraid to speak his mind to power, to different regimes at different times. Ukraine (not the country, but the system) has become a mass grave for journalists and journalism,” she wrote on her Facebook page.

As if Russia itself weren’t a “mass grave for journalists and journalism.” It takes a lot of the wrong kind of chutzpah to lie and gangbang the truth like these blood monkeys do every single day of their lives.

And Ms. Zakharova’s unspoken implication that Russia, unlike Ukraine, is a “system” that encourages “telling truth to power” is really beyond perverse.

Let us take a tiny peak into the mass grave for journalists and journalism mighty Russia has dug over the past couple of decades.

In 2009, the International Federation of Journalists and the Russian Union of Journalist issued a report, entitled Partial Justice, “to gather evidence surrounding the 300 deaths and disappearances of journalists in Russia between 1993 and 2009.”

When it comes to media freedom more generally, Russia has also been going downhill on a trolley with no brakes over the past decade, and things are bound to get worse with the recent passage into law of the so-called Yarovaya package, which cracks down on individual privacy, privacy of correspondence and communication, freedom of speech, the right not to rat on one’s friends and acquaintances, the ability to speak one’s mind freely to power on social media, and lots of other things.

So what was Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova crowing about? She was actually celebrating Pavel Sheremet’s death by pretending to speak from a place where such violence against journalists and journalism is impossible and unthinkable. But we all know that is a bald-faced lie, and she knows it too.

Why couldn’t she just keep her mouth shut? Isn’t that what the Russian government wants its subjects to do from now until kingdom come anyway? Why can’t the powers that be here also practice some tactful silence now and then?