The cinematography department of the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) posted an ad on its VKontakte page about “a special group” being recruited for director [and cinematographer] Mikhail Agranovich’s class. Prospective students are offered free tuition starting in the 2027 academic year, provided they sign a one-year contract with the [Russian] Defense Ministry for service in UAV (drone) units.
The students are also promised free dormitory accommodation, combat veteran status (along with associated benefits), and “expanded technical and financial resources for student film projects.” Contract service will be equated to conscription service, the ad states.
“If you dream of studying at the world’s first film school, the renowned VGIK, now’s your chance. Places in the group are limited,” the ad reads.
Previously, the Higher School of Economics announced free tuition for students serving in unmanned systems units and the BARS (“Leopard”) reservist detachments in Moscow.
Russian universities and colleges have launched a widespread pressure and propaganda campaign aimed at steering students toward the war in Ukraine. Valery Falkov, minister of science and higher education, demanded that two percent of students be sent to the army. Students are promised “guaranteed discharge” upon the expiration of their contracts.
However, Artyom Klyga, head of the legal department at the Movement of Conscientious Objectors (DSO), found that this was a ruse. In reality, students recruited for military service are deployed wherever the command decides and discharged only when the command deems appropriate.
A screenshot of an in-house article on HSE’s website touting its rankings.
Higher School of Economics confirms it is offering students a standard military contract instead of regular one-year conscription, says human rights activist
Vladimir Krotov, head of the department at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) responsible for student military registration, stated in response to an inquiry that those who voluntarily enlisted in the army would be subject to the Defense Ministry’s standard terms. This was reported by Artyom Klyga, a lawyer with the Movement of Conscientious Objectors (DSO).
Earlier, the publication T-Invariant released a letter sent to university staff. The document stated that students facing expulsion were being offered an alternative: a one-year contract with the Defense Ministry. The terms cited included guaranteed discharge after one year and service in unmanned systems units. However, Krotov’s response indicates that those who agreed to enlist would be deployed wherever the command decided and discharged whenever the command deemed appropriate. Only the provision regarding financial compensation is accurate, Klyga notes.
The HSE regularly appears on lists of Russia’s most prestigious universities. The letter to staff noted that they are now required to submit weekly reports on the number of military service notifications sent to students.
Laura Loomer (left) is an American far-right conspiracist and influencer from Arizona who has suddenly (supposedly) seen the light on Ukraine after actually visiting the country that has endured an unprovoked Russian invasion for the last four and a half years. Lily Lynch (right) is a leftyish American foreign affairs writer from California who, apparently, does not need to see a place with her own eyes to give her readers the all-knowing lowdown on what’s happening there. Whose account of the Ukraine-Russia war rings truer to you?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech at NATO’s Defence Industry Forum in Ankara earlier this month was a hymn to drone warfare. Drones, the Ukrainian president proclaimed, had heralded ‘revolutionary changes in the very nature of war’ – as significant as the machine gun in the First World War, or as the modern tank in the Second. ‘Disruptive’ drone tech had allowed Ukraine to increase dramatically the number of Russian casualties, intercept Russia’s Shahed UAVs and hit targets as far away as Siberia. Recent attacks had succeeded in blackening the skies over Moscow and striking oil refineries 2,700 km away in Omsk. The country had transformed itself into a ‘drone superpower’, in the words of the Atlantic Council. Before 2022, there were just seven domestic drone manufacturers – today, there are over 500. And now, as restrictions on drone exports are being lifted, Ukraine will soon be selling them to the world.
The man most responsible for putting drones at the centre of Ukraine’s war effort has been the telegenic 35-year-old, now former Defence Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. This much-hyped tech wunderkind has acquired a following among both patriotic liberals at home and Atlanticists in the West. He has helped promote Ukraine as a kind of ‘start-up nation’ – a high-tech defence industrial powerhouse forged in war. When barely in his thirties, he was appointed Minister of Digital Transformation, where he was responsible for the ‘state in a smartphone’ initiative – which moved government services onto a USAID-funded app called Diiya. Though beloved by the liberal NGO set, Palantir-backed Fedorov has also learned to speak MAGA’s language; in January, he announced his ministry’s objective to kill 50,000 Russians per month, explaining it would ‘make the cost of war for Russia one it cannot sustain, thereby forcing peace through strength’.
In the weeks leading up to the NATO summit, Western media reports alleged that Ukraine had turned the tide in its favour. Russia was in trouble. The narrative was reminiscent of the ‘spring counteroffensive’ of 2023, much hyped in Western media – a supposedly transformational Ukrainian battlefield push that never quite materialized and cost tens of thousands of lives. In Ankara, the latest reversal of fortune was attributed to Ukraine’s drone tech capabilities, its thriving defence industry and its innovative young leadership, who apparently ran the country less like a post-Soviet state and more like a Silicon Valley start-up.
Just one week later, however, this optimistic story began to fall apart. Zelenskyy abruptly dismissed Fedorov, a move that left many feeling furious and betrayed. Fedorov’s loyalists responded by excoriating Zelenskyy on social media and assembling in Kiev, Lviv and Odessa, holding signs bearing messages like ‘Hands off Fedorov’ and ‘Stop Sabotaging Victory’. Ukraine’s supporters in the West did not hide their opposition to the decision either. ‘Firing Fedorov, one of the smartest, most competent and innovative ministers in all of Europe, is one of the dumbest things Zelenskyy has done’, Estonia’s former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves wrote on X. A consensus formed among the Atlanticist commentariat: Zelenskyy had sided with his sclerotic ‘Soviet’ generals – particularly Russian-born commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi – against an energetic young reformer. After several days of virulent backlash, Zelenskyy responded by dismissing Syrskyi too.
The decision to remove Fedorov forced a simmering Ukrainian political crisis into the public eye. In Ankara, NATO officials were intent on depicting Russia – and only Russia – as the country in dire political and economic straits. At one briefing, I listened to a senior NATO official speak of possible tensions within the Russian political elite. These days, he said, they look outside their windows and see oil refineries in flames from Ukrainian drone attacks. This, he asserted, must be having a psychological effect, and resentment towards Putin was likely mounting. A fracture could be coming any day now. The Russian economy, meanwhile, was ‘in the worst state it’s been in for decades’. He recited a litany of grim statistics: the federal deficit was now 2.3 times what it was during the same period last year, the economy was now 70 per cent security-related expenditures, which came at the expense of the regular economy and would be ‘very hard to reverse’. And despite rising oil prices due to the war on Iran, Russia would still have to cut non-military spending by 10 per cent this year.
Russia was also reportedly performing poorly on the battlefield and any progress it was making came at an enormous cost. According to the NATO official’s estimates, there had been between 1.3 and 1.5 million Russian casualties in the war, and between 30,000 and 35,000 Russians were now being killed each month. The military was now ‘increasingly relying on convicts, indebted citizens and foreigners’ to fill its ranks. Russia’s territorial gains had also been ‘far less steady’ in recent months: its forces were now purportedly advancing at just 3.79 sq km per day, down from a reported 16 sq km last year. Another morbid statistic touted at the summit was the alleged average life expectancy of a Russian soldier: thanks to Ukraine’s drones, I was told, the average Russian recruit only lived between 20 and 30 minutes at the front.
Listening to all this, I thought about what I’d heard [sic] about life in Russia. I was certainly aware of the mounting wartime pain. I knew there were now petrol shortages in parts of the country, though these are partly seasonal, and that this has meant long waits outside stations. Whereas the war had previously been experienced by most Russians as a distant conflict – only seen on social media or television – the drone attacks on Russian oil refineries had brought the war home. But the idea that this would inevitably provoke a major anti-government backlash didn’t quite follow. Videos have even surfaced on Russian social media showing people drinking and dancing as they waited in long queues for petrol. As one commentator put it, ‘coronavirus divided us, but petrol shortages brought us together’. The domestic problems were all very real and getting worse, but Russians appeared to be weathering them, at least for now. Prophesies of the Russian economy’s imminent collapse had been issued for years, but had all come to nothing.
Polls from inside Russia also hint at a more stable situation than that depicted at the NATO summit. Russia experts always caution readers to be sceptical of polls from inside the country, but even so, the results suggest that at least some of the graver prognostications might be exaggerated. According to a survey by the independent Levada Center, Putin’s popularity is indeed in decline, but as of May, as many as 79 per cent of Russians polled still said they approved of his performance. Only 15 per cent said they disapproved. In the same survey, 74 per cent of Russians said they supported their country’s actions in Ukraine. (Still, some 60 per cent of Russians reported that they favoured peace negotiations to end the war, and only 30 per cent said they wanted to continue fighting it.) Even adjusting for a degree of wartime self-censorship, these numbers do not exactly hint at a coming cataclysm.
But the question that most nagged at me throughout the summit was: what about Ukraine? The assessment of Russia’s position in the war included a host of criteria: a survey of the situation on the homefront, elite political fractures, the economy, the demography of its soldiers. Yet Ukraine’s position was portrayed according to a single hopeful indicator, its success in drone warfare.
According to a recent Gallup poll (one that was largely buried in the Western press), Ukrainians are even less enthusiastic about fighting this war than Russians are. Less than one in four adults (24 per cent) say Ukraine should keep fighting until it wins the war, while 66 per cent say Ukraine should seek to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible. And while NATO officials were eager to tout staggering casualty figures for Russia in Ankara, there was naturally far less said about Ukraine’s dead – unless they could be presented in terms of a favourable ‘kill ratio’ with Russia. According to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (which receives funding from the US government, Lockheed Martin and NATO among others) the Ukrainian military has suffered between 125,000 and 150,000 fatalities. However, some believe the actual number is higher.
As NATO officials look for cracks in the Kremlin matrix, there are plenty to worry about in Ukraine. In addition to the rupture between Fedorov and the military brass, a ‘spectacular’ corruption scandal has implicated members of Zelenskyy’s inner circle, part of which involves corruption in drone procurement. Meanwhile, the ‘stable stagnation’ of the Ukrainian economy also rests on relatively fragile foundations – continued support from Western partners. Often missing from Western wartime reporting is the brutal economic reality of everyday life in Ukraine: the number of Ukrainians living below subsistence levels has increased dramatically in wartime; while Russians have been inconvenienced in this conflict, most haven’t faced the same material devastation.
The Ukrainian armed forces may be an even worse state than their Russian adversaries. A transition to a corps-based command structure last year may have aligned Ukraine with NATO standards, but no amount of restructuring can change the fundamentals. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is now 45. Mobilization remains a persistent problem. One of the reasons cited for Fedorov’s dismissal was his failure to fix this (ever the tech solutionist, Fedorov had reportedly pushed for a ‘digitalization’ of mobilization). The brutal practice of ‘busification’ – whereby military age men are snatched off the street – continues to inspire loathing. Reports regularly surface of forcibly conscripted men being beaten or killed. Unsurprisingly, Ukraine is suffering a desertion crisis. Though the exact figures were classified last year, in January, Fedorov said that 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers had gone AWOL.
The Russian armed forces may be filled with convicts and debtors, but they still haven’t had to resort to conscription[sic], while the Ukrainian side is partially composed of men who are middle-aged and don’t want to fight. Ukraine also increasingly relies on foreign fighters; while Russia has recruited hapless Africans to serve as cannon fodder, Ukraine now employs thousands of recruits from Colombia, Brazil and various European countries, designated as ‘volunteers’ to get around anti-mercenary laws. And there remains the fundamental problem of massive asymmetry: Russia still has Ukraine outmanned. Ukraine has attempted to make up for this difference with drones, but this has only succeeded in slowing the pace of Russian advances.
The image of a Ukraine filled with patriotic liberals eager to fight a high-tech war until total Russian collapse is a fiction. In reality, the majority of both Russians and Ukrainians want negotiations to end the war now. Only a minority want to continue fighting until their side’s most maximalist aims are met. Absent the propaganda of a youth-driven drone tech revolution in war, Ukraine looks in a remarkably similar situation to Russia: two countries hurtling toward demographic oblivion, in a conflict directed by a profiteering political elite and fought in part by the unwilling, the coerced, the foreign and the old. At the NATO summit, however, the alliance continued to promote its PR-manufactured image of Ukraine, through selective statistics and polite obfuscation.
Laura Loomer became infamous for spreading conspiracy theories online. Now, as she travels across Ukraine to see the damage inflicted by Russia in its years-long war, she wants to admit that she fell for some falsehoods of her own.
A close ally of President Donald Trump, Loomer has completely reversed her longtime criticism of Ukraine and is urging fellow conservatives to be wary of Moscow’s propaganda, which she blames for duping large swaths of the American right.
“You don’t need to listen to a podcaster and let them influence your opinion about a country. You can look at those facts yourself,” she told the Associated Press in Kyiv shortly after returning from a trip close to the front line in Ukraine’s east. The interview was supposed to take place in Loomer’s hotel, but it had to be moved to the building’s underground bomb shelter as the city faced another ballistic missile attack.
Loomer has remained influential with Trump despite not having an official role, and she said they spoke over the phone after she sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She also said that she expects to meet with Trump after returning from her trip.
Loomer’s turnaround on Ukraine has been welcomed by the country’s leaders, whose relationships with Trump have been strained at times. But it has also stirred confusion, surprise and suspicion in the United States. She continues to insist that Ukraine is not paying for her travels.
As Trump and Zelenskyy prepare to meet on Tuesday in Washington, Loomer said it’s clear that her trip has already made a difference, refocusing attention on the war as Congress debates new sanctions intended to punish Russia.
“It’s looking good for Ukraine, right?” she said. “Going into this meeting next week at the Oval Office is looking pretty good.”
Loomer says she was ‘bamboozled’ to oppose Ukraine
Loomer had spent years minimizing the war and amplifying Russian propaganda until she made a dramatic reversal this week.
“I’ve come to realize I was bamboozled by Russian propaganda and I came to believe a lot of untrue things about Ukraine. I used to think that this was a country full of Nazis,” Loomer told Zelenskyy as she interviewed him for her show on Rumble, an online video platform.
Loomer blamed her indoctrination on getting banned by American social media platforms, leading her to try Telegram, where Russian media is widely shared.
“The Russians,” she added, “are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And I was very angry,” she said, recounting her feelings about the 2020 election, which she falsely maintains was stolen from Trump despite all evidence to the contrary.
She said her change in perspective had been gradual as she started to see podcasters like Tucker Carlson “turn on President Trump” while having their rhetoric amplified by Russian sources.
Loomer, who casts herself as an independent journalist, told the AP she believed her reversal was already changing minds within Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
“Oh, 100%,” she said. “I’ve received messages all day from different people and media and politics and people just who follow me online who said, ’Wow, I didn’t realize how much we’ve been lied to.’ ‘Wow you really opened my eyes.’”
Loomer was welcomed with open arms
Ukrainian officials seemed to recognize the opportunity of winning over an ardent Trump ally with a large online following. In addition to her interview with Zelenskyy, Loomer had audiences with top Ukrainian officials and the country’s chief rabbi.
“It takes courage to come to Ukraine and not be deterred by Russian propaganda or air raid sirens,” Zelenskyy’s office wrote on social media.
“Laura is very powerful and she’s a very authoritative in the U.S., so I hope that everything she has seen by her own eyes will help her to spread the truth when she is back at the U.S.,” Tetyana Berezhna, the deputy prime minister and Ukrainian minister of culture told the AP. “I do really hope and I believe that her visit will have a huge impact on relations with the U.S. administration.”
While some have tried to downplay Loomer’s influence with the president, he has often followed her advice. She occasionally traveled with him during the 2024 campaign, and last year he purged his National Security Council staff after she raised concerns about their loyalty in an Oval Office meeting.
Trump appears to be tracking Loomer’s trip, sharing video of her conversation with Zelenskyy on social media.
“Very good!!!” he wrote on Thursday evening.
The conspiracist denounces conspiracy theories
Loomer has a long history of spreading conspiracy theories. She once shared a video that called 9/11 an “inside job” and amplified a lie about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats in Ohio, which Trump went on to repeat during a presidential debate with Kamala Harris.
Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged.
But in the interview, she bemoaned how influential podcasters can spread misinformation.
“They have been able to warp people’s minds to the point where people aren’t even capable of analyzing a subject with common sense anymore because they want to depend on these personalities to give them the opinion that they think they should have,” she said, calling the situation “a major national security threat.”
She said she thinks that “information war” has “the potential to be more destructive than any kinetic war that our country may ever face” and called on the Trump administration to take the threat of Russian propaganda, foreign interference and influence operations more seriously.
“I think that some of our leaders are being influenced by propaganda,” she said.
The White House has routinely downplayed the role of Moscow’s influence, especially because Trump has long chaffed at investigations showing that Russia worked to boost his 2016 candidacy.
Loomer has said repeatedly that Ukraine did not finance her trip and insisted she had traveled in her own capacity.
“I can guarantee you I wasn’t paid by anybody. I certainly wasn’t paid by the government of Ukraine to come here,” she said.
“If it’s fake, why did I risk my life? I’m in a bomb shelter right now. I barely slept this week,” she said.
Tokayev reads Putin the riot act in Omsk, 25 July 2026. Source: Vesti (Telegram)
Kazakhstani President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed “freezing” the war in Ukraine during talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, 25 July 2026, in Omsk. TASS published an excerpt featuring Tokayev’s statement and Putin’s reaction.
Tokayev made the remarks during a meeting with Putin at the Forum on Interregional Cooperation between the two countries, which took place 24–25 July. The President of Kazakhstan stated that at present, “no one knows how to resolve the situation, because each side has its own position.” At the same time, he suggested that “perhaps this conflict should already be frozen and we should return to the Istanbul Formula 2.0, since significant results were achieved there.”
According to Tokayev, in connection with the war in Ukraine, he has been “receiving many signals” from Europe and the U.S., about which he had previously informed Putin. And yet, the President of Kazakhstan added that his country refuses to act as a mediator in achieving peace between Russia and Ukraine.
Tokayev: The nature of this conflict is not entirely clear to many people
Tokayev emphasized that the war in Ukraine is an “interstate conflict” and “not some sort of civil war.”
“We have always treated the Ukrainian people, their culture, and their language with respect, and we believe that the nature of this conflict is not entirely clear to many, including us,” the Kazakhstani president noted. He added that “all of this must be stopped,” since the war in Ukraine “plays into the hands” of the opponents of both Moscow and Kyiv.
At the same time, Tokayev noted that Putin had shown “the utmost diplomatic flexibility” during his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Anchorage in August 2025.
Briefly commenting on the Kazakhstani president’s remarks about the war, Putin for his part promised him that he would “definitely provide detailed information” within the day about what was happening on the “Ukrainian front.”
Vladimir Putin ventured out in public for the first time in months and walked smack dab into an ambush during a televised meeting that went off the rails.
Fresh off a tightly controlled publicity stunt in Irkutsk on Friday—where the Russian leader, flanked by bodyguards, made a show of inspecting aircraft—Putin sat down with Kazakhstan’s president in the Russian city of Omsk on Saturday.
The 73-year-old Russian president could barely conceal his nervous grimace as Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev used the meeting, which was supposed to be about Russia-Kazakh cooperation, to throw Putin under the bus.
“I will not hide that I am receiving many signals—which I have already informed you about by phone—from Europe and the United States regarding the current state of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia,” Tokayev told Putin as a slew of Kremlin-controlled TV outlets filmed the confrontation.
He went on to call BS on the Kremlin’s narrative of the war, saying, “The nature of this conflict is not entirely clear” and seems utterly pointless. Putin, meanwhile, appeared to tense up and stared down at his lap as Tokayev spoke, seemingly caught off guard.
“This all needs to stop,” Tokayev said, urging Putin to “freeze” the war and return to negotiations. He twisted the knife by adding that despite “proposals and appeals,” Kazakhstan “categorically refuses” to act as a mediator in helping to end the war, since “Russia is a great country” and can “manage on its own.”
At the end of Tokayev’s three-minute speech, Putin nervously thanked the Kazakh president and promised to give him a “detailed briefing” on the Ukraine war, before the broadcast abruptly ended.
The tense exchange came a day after Putin flew to Irkutsk, Siberia, for an unannounced visit to the Irkutsk Aviation Plant, his first trip to one of Russia’s regions for domestic issues in more than eight months. He has drastically reduced travel to Russia’s regions and avoided public appearances in recent months, purportedly out of fear of being assassinated. Instead, amid relentless Ukrainian drone strikes and growing public outrage over economic woes, Putin has largely retreated into fortified underground bunkers, where he is said to have at times remained for weeks.
Footage shared by the Kremlin showed him flanked by bodyguards as he inspected the Yak-130M combat jet trainer and an MC-21 passenger jet, which has been plagued by repeated production delays.
The plant had apparently been cleared out for his visit, and Irkutsk locals fumed on social media about the entire city coming to a standstill to make way for what was widely seen as a PR stunt.
“Burn in hell,” one resident commented in response to Putin’s visit on a local website, according to the independent outlet People of Baikal.
“Will we need to bow when the tsar passes through?” another quipped.
“How scared he is of his own people,” a third person noted, only to be reminded, “Well, every other person is ready to kill him.”
Enemy drones attacked Wildberries warehouses in Leningrad Region in the early hours of 24 July, reported Alexander Drozdenko, head of Russia’s 47th region.
Governor Alexander Beglov reported that, in Petersburg, “civilian infrastructure on Moscow Highway was targeted.”
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed it had downed 571 Ukrainian Armed Forces drones over Russia’s regions overnight.
Delovoi Peterburg reports below what we know about the latest series of attacks on warehouses in the Petersburg metro area.
Repelling the drone attack in Leningrad Region: Fire in Novosaratovka
Three people were injured and hospitalized in stable condition, Drozdenko said.
“A drone strike caused a fire at Wildberries warehouses in the village of Novosaratovka* in the Vsevolozhsk District,” the governor explained.
In addition, a warehouse belonging to the Severnaya poultry farm in the village of Sinyavino, Kirovsk District, Leningrad Region, sustained damage. No one was injured. Debris from the drone fell onto the grounds of the old hospital, according to Andrei Voropayev, head of the Sverdlov Settlement.
“They’re not letting anyone in there, including us. We don’t know what was there. Just warehouses and more warehouses. Definitely no chemicals. When it was shot down over the Neva, one drone fell on the old hospital in the village. There are only bare walls there, no people, and the firefighters have left,” Voropaev told 47news.
A drone alert was issued in Region 47 at 01:43 Moscow Time on 24 July 2. Drozdenko reported that fifty drones had been shot down over the region. The regional governor lifted the drone threat alert at 06:17 Moscow Time.
“The drone threat in the Leningrad Region has been lifted. Fifty-nine enemy UAVs have been shot down. I thank the anti-aircraft forces for their effective performance,” said Drozdenko.
The Investigative Committee reported that a criminal case had been opened regarding a terrorist act (per Article 205 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code) in connection with “an attack by Ukrainian armed groups on civilian targets in the Leningrad Region.” No further details of the attack were provided in the statement.
Attack on Petersburg: Shushary and Utkina Zavod
The company’s warehouses in Petersburg were also targeted. According to the RWB (Wildberries | Russ) press office, operations at two logistics complexes have been temporarily suspended.
“Operations at the company’s logistics complexes in Shushary and Utkina Zavod (both in Petersburg) have been temporarily suspended. Updates on the resumption of operations will follow,” the press office stated.
The company clarified that there had been no casualties at Wildberries facilities in Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.
Some of the warehouse space and merchandise was salvaged, and a swift evacuation was carried out at the warehouses, such that there were no casualties, Tatyana Kim later reported.
“Dear partners, up-to-date information on the situation is being published on the seller’s website. All our efforts are now focused on redistributing goods across warehouses to ensure more efficient inventory turnover and the economic stability of our partners,” the Wildberries founder wrote on her social media channel.
Eyewitnesses reported that Pyaterochka’s warehouses in Utkina Zavod may also have been hit, but X5 (the discount grocery store chain’s operator) denied this.
“The reports are false. The facility was not damaged and will continue to operate as usual,” X5 told DP.
Governor Beglov reported that efforts are underway to address the aftermath of the attack on a civilian infrastructure facility on Moscow Highway.
“The emergency response headquarters, which I personally head, has been coordinating the work of the municipal services and interagency cooperation,” the governor wrote on Max.
Drivers and eyewitnesses have reported that traffic on Moscow Highway has come to a standstill. The City Transportation Committee announced that, due to the impassability of Moscow Highway, bus lines 179, 192, 196, 197, and 388 have been temporarily rerouted.
“Bus routes Nos. 179, 192, 196, 197, and 388 are running via Danube Boulevard and Sofia Street, then continuing along their regular routes (in both directions). We recommend that residents of Slavyanka take suburban commuter trains. Trains are running every ten minutes,” the transportation committee announced.
Eyewitnesses report major traffic jams in the south and southeast of the city, on the Ring Road and on Sofia Street.
“A massive traffic jam has formed on Sofia Street heading toward the city: it starts past the intersection with Ust-Izhorsk Highway. There is also a major traffic jam on the inner ring road between Murmansk Highway and Moscow Highway; it is caused by the closure of the city-bound exit to Moscow Highway due to roadwork,” reported the city’s Megapolis channel on Telegram.
A live map of the traffic jams in question, in Petersburg’s far south. Image courtesty of Delovoi Peterburg
Residents of a building on Aleksa Dundić Street in the Frunze District were evacuated on the afternoon of 24 July, according to 78.ru. Residents of stairwells 8 through 19 were asked to leave their flats and go outside.
Pulkovo Airport imposed flight restrictions starting at 1:46 a.m. and resumed flight operations at 6:00 a.m. Moscow Time after the drone threat was lifted.
As of that time, over fifty flights had been delayed by two hours or more, and fourteen were waiting at alternate airports. By 8:20 a.m., Pulkovo had handled approximately thirty flights, both arriving and departing. Two flights arrived in Petersburg from alternate airports, according to the VVSS (Northern Capital’s Air Gateway) press service.
“All services are working to fulfill the daily flight plan per the revised schedule,” airport officials said.
UPDATE: As of 9:15 a.m., approximately sixty flights had been dispatched to their destination airports, and seven aircraft had arrived in Petersburg from alternate airports.
During the drone threat, restrictions on mobile communication were in effect in the metropolitan area, with the peak number of complaints occurring overnight.
A chart showing numbers of complaints about loss of mobile phone coverage in the Petersburg area during the 24 July 2026 drone attack. Image courtesy of Delovoi Peterburg
The damage from the attacks on Wildberries warehouses in the Leningrad Region and Petersburg could reach 76 billion rubles [approx. 861 million euros], according to preliminary estimates done for DP by Sergei Semko, lead analyst at Data Insight, conducted preliminary calculations for DP.
Attacks on Warehouses: A Timeline
In recent days, Wildberries warehouses have been targeted by enemy drones. Just yesterday, two logistics complexes sustained damage in Voronezh.
The first attacks on Wildberries warehouses in Russia took place on 18 July. The strikes targeted the company’s facilities in the Tambov and Moscow regions. At least eight people were killed, and more than sixty civilians were injured. Several of the injured were in critical condition.
On the night of 21–22 July, drones attacked large Wildberries warehouses in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk, Stavropol Territory. A local state of emergency was declared in Nevinnomyssk. The head of the Krasnodar Territory reported one fatality resulting from an attack on the oil depot in Armavir and provided an update on the condition of those injured at the warehouses in Krasnodar. The Investigative Committee classified the attacks as acts of terrorism. A criminal case has been opened under Article 205 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code.
DP has reported that the drone strikes on Wildberries warehouses have created problems not only for that particular and the sellers collaborating with it. In fact, a new reality has dawned for the entire Russian e-commerce and logistics market. Everyone will have to restructure their internal procedures and come up with new solutions.
* Here are some snapshots I took of Novosaratovka during a Sunday Cafe expedition there in December 2015:
Russian businesses have been feeling the effects of the war in Ukraine through tax increases, rising costs caused by fuel shortages, and supply chains disrupted by sanctions. Now, there is another risk to contend with: Ukrainian drone strikes on their facilities.
As Ukraine wages a campaign to bring the conflict home to ordinary Russians, it has opened a new front aimed at the online marketplace Wildberries, a pillar of the country’s retail economy and a potent symbol of modern life in Russia.
In recent days, Ukraine has hit five warehouses belonging to Wildberries, a Russian analogue to Amazon, as well as storage sites for other large retailers. Eight people were killed in attacks on Saturday and one person on Wednesday, the Russian authorities said. The strikes on Saturday alone were reported to have wiped out between 6 and 9 percent of the storage capacity of Wildberries.
Ukraine’s long-range strikes on Russian economic targets, including a months-long campaign of attacks on oil processing facilities, are intended to pressure President Vladimir V. Putin to end the war, in part by hampering his ability to finance it. The oil strikes have caused fuel shortages that have led to lines at gas stations, and they could affect the coming harvest season.
Mr. Putin has signaled no intention of backing away from his objectives in the conflict, and the economy, while weakened by the war, is not on the verge of collapse. Still, analysts said that if the attacks on Russia’s business infrastructure continued, the ripple effects could pose severe economic challenges on top of a range of other war-related strains, reducing tax collections and adding to inflation.
Ukraine has targeted Wildberries warehouses in five regions across Russia, including a reported strike early Thursday in the Voronezh region, south of Moscow. A fire at a warehouse in Elektrostal, a city in the Moscow region, took three days to extinguish.
The day after the initial strikes, Russia unleashed the largest missile attack on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, since the war started in 2022, firing at least 35 ballistic and hypersonic cruise missiles.
Ukraine has said that its strikes are in retaliation for Russian attacks on its postal delivery hubs and other civilian infrastructure, a yearslong campaign by Moscow that has been far more devastating than Kyiv’s strikes against Russia. A Russian attack last week on a postal terminal in the northeastern city of Kharkiv left three people dead and 20 injured.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has also said that Wildberries facilities are a legitimate target because the company sells goods to the Russian military. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, has denied the accusation.
Wildberries has a policy of not selling military-grade weapons, but it does sell goods used by soldiers, like commercial drones that can be jury-rigged with explosives, as well as fiber-optic cables, tactical clothing and other so-called dual-use items.
The Wildberries attacks have been calamitous for small Russian entrepreneurs who sell goods through the site, the country’s largest online marketplace.
One of them, Timur, woke up on Saturday morning to news that he had lost clothing and shoes worth about $25,000 as a result of the attacks on the Wildberries warehouses in Elektrostal and in Kotovsk, in the Tambov region, southeast of Moscow.
Timur, who was nervous about speaking with foreign journalists when reached by telephone and asked that his last name be withheld to avoid reprisals, said that his main concern was the uncertainty that he and other Russian entrepreneurs now faced.
He said on Tuesday that it was unclear what would happen next “because most likely they are not the only warehouses that will be attacked.”
Hours later, two more Wildberries warehouses that contained his apparel, in the southern Stavropol and Krasnodar regions, were hit by drones. His losses doubled.
Timur said he had been building his business for five years, “and it can just collapse in a week,” he said, a precarity that Ukrainians have been living with for nearly four and a half years.
He warned of the effects on the Russian economy, saying that continued strikes could cause the Wildberries business model to collapse, raising prices and bringing about shortages.
Alexander Kolyandr, director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm, echoed that view.
“The company itself and all the sellers will likely pay less in taxes than last year, and given the size, it might be pretty substantial, especially at a time when the Russian budget is experiencing a widening deficit,” Mr. Kolyandr said.
Additionally, the cost of protecting, rebuilding and insuring the warehouses will be passed on to consumers, he said, contributing to already high levels of inflation.
The attacks on Saturday in the Moscow and Tambov regions destroyed goods worth almost as much as Wildberries’ entire profit last year, according to expert estimates reported by Kommersant, a Russian newspaper, and by Forbes Russia.
The company’s chief executive, Tatyana Kim, promised financial compensation of about $25,000 to families of the workers who were killed and half of that amount to the injured.
At the beginning of the month, Wildberries and another large online marketplace, Ozon, changed their terms and conditions to stipulate that the companies had no legal obligation to compensate for losses caused by drone attacks.
On Wednesday, however, Ms. Kim announced payouts to small-scale sellers who were “most vulnerable.” She did not disclose the amounts.
Many sellers on Wildberries financed their products with loans, including Timur, who told of interest rates as high as 35 percent. Some vendors risk having their bank accounts frozen as soon as next week if they are unable to make tax payments due in the coming days, according to the business newspaper Vedomosti.
A civilian facility like a warehouse can become a lawful military target if it is being used, or is being prepared to be used, for military purposes, said Michael Schmitt, who teaches international law at the University of Reading in England and is a former legal adviser to the U.S. military.
Combatants, he said, must take into account exactly what kind of materials are inside, have a high degree of certainty about the site’s future military use and make efforts to mitigate harm to civilians.
Maria Snegovaya, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Russia’s economic slowdown, related in part to Ukraine’s long-range strikes, had coincided with declining levels of support for the war.
But some in Russia said that the increased drumbeat of attacks could rally Russians around their leader.
“The adversary started doing the job of our propaganda, which is to explain to the nation that a real war is underway, and no one can just lie low,” a Russian military blogger, Roman Saponkov, wrote on Telegram. “At first they switched off fuel at the petrol station, now they took on Wildberries warehouses. Next, it will be beer factories and nail salons.”
FBI Director Kash Patel is planning to visit Russia later this year, likely in mid-October, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the situation.
It would be an unusual and sensitive trip for an FBI chief to one of America’s top adversaries. The plans come as Washington and Moscow continue to be at odds over the war in Ukraine, with U.S. lawmakers demanding the imposition of heavy new sanctions on Russia.
Patel has a history of involvement in controversial Russia-related matters dating to President Donald Trump’s first term, including trying to cast doubt on investigations into whether Trump colluded with Russia to help him win the 2016 election — an episode he now calls the “Russiagate hoax.” Patel also is developing a track record of taking eye-catching trips in his role atop the FBI, drawing scrutiny from Congress.
According to the U.S. official familiar with the travel plans, Patel is scheduled to visit Russia on Oct. 14-15, first stopping in Moscow and then St. Petersburg. His host is likely to be the FSB, the Russian security service that is heir to the Soviet-era KGB, the official said.
The person familiar with the situation confirmed that Patel is planning to visit Russia in the fall, including stops in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Both people were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive travel plans.
It’s not clear if Patel will meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin or any of his senior political aides. Also unclear is what is on his agenda for discussion.
As with any such plans by U.S. officials, they are tentative and subject to change.
Spokespeople for the White House referred a request for comment to the FBI. Spokespeople for the FBI and the Department of Justice did not respond to similar requests.
Though it has been years since an FBI director visited Moscow, other top intelligence officials have made the trip. In a 2018 letter, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo said the open lines of dialogue were valuable, particularly in areas of mutual interest like combating terrorism.
“We vigorously defend America in these encounters and pull no punches,” Pompeo said at the time.
Robert Mueller was the last FBI director known to have visited Russia, in 2013. Mueller was later appointed as a special counsel to investigate ties between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and Russia, as well as broader Russian efforts to interfere in U.S. elections.
U.S. intelligence officials have concluded for years that Moscow has been behind efforts to sow discord and interfere in U.S. elections, findings supported by documents Trump declassified last week ahead of a speech intended to bolster support for his long-shot effort to overhaul U.S. voting laws. The Kremlin has also been suspected to be behind major cybersecurity breaches of government agencies and private sector companies.
Patel rose to prominence as a result of the central role he played as a staffer to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 and 2018, when the panel — led by then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Although Republicans on the panel concluded that Russia mounted an influence operation to “undermine the U.S. liberal democratic order,” they rejected the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia aspired to help Trump win the 2016 election. Late in Trump’s first term, Patel served on the National Security Council, where in 2020 he traveled secretly to meet with Syrian government officials in a bid to secure the release of two American hostages.
Patel spent the years between Trump’s terms amplifying doubts about the Russia probe’s origins and even writing children’s books that mock Democrats who spearheaded the investigation. He also faced questions about a $25,000 payment for his involvement in producing a film financed by a Kremlin-linked film company.
Patel’s past travel and spending decisions have blurred the lines between recreation and official business, prompting scrutiny across Capitol Hill and at times angering the White House.
The FBI director attended the gold medal men’s hockey final at the Winter Olympics in Italy, a trip he said was needed to extradite a Chinese hacker; went snorkeling last summer near a battleship sunk during the Japanese surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor; and has been accused of using a government jet to see his girlfriend, a country music singer, perform.
Earlier this month, the top Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees launched a bicameral probe into Patel’s potential misuse of taxpayer-funded resources.
News of the trip also comes amid acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s effort to win Senate confirmation and could prompt new questions from lawmakers about the Justice Department’s decision-making.
After the Kremlin launched a full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022, senior Biden administration officials steered clear of visiting Russia, although the U.S. kept open its embassy in Moscow.
Trump has sought to ease tensions with Putin. During his second term, his special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have visited Russia multiple times, including meeting with Putin, to discuss ending the Ukraine war.
U.S. lawmakers, on a bipartisan basis, remain wary of Russia. Some members of Congress are currently urging Trump to support a bill that uses steep new penalties, including tariffs, to punish Russian entities. Trump has recently said he wants the bill to also include sanctions on Iran.
Rodney Mims Cook, Jr., chairman of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, old Atlantan, chum of King Charles, and unapologetic Russophile, recently gathered fifty guests inside a replica Roman triumphal arch, in downtown Atlanta, for an intimate performance by Mikhail Simonyan, a Russian violinist and a Deputy Minister of Culture. An hour before the show, Simonyan, who lives in Siberia, wandered into Cook’s office atop Millennium Gate Museum—the anomalous arch’s name. He walked by framed photographs of Cook with heads of state, looking for something to eat. “Is there any steaks around here?” he asked.
Cook, a ruddy-faced seventy-year-old, whose reading glasses teetered on the tip of his nose, directed Simonyan, whom he called “one of the greatest talents in the world,” to the first floor. Cook built the arch two decades ago, when resurrecting classical architecture in America was an eccentric idea. Now it’s an official plan. Empowered by his friend Donald Trump (“I had shrimp with him on his desk a few weeks ago,” Cook dropped), he’s focussing on the nation’s capital: more arches and monuments, huger facilities. It was Cook’s commission that green-lighted the plan for a ninety-thousand-square-foot White House ballroom that one prominent architecture critic described, in the Times, as a “huge, dumb box.”
“The White House has been insufficient since the Harrison Presidency,” Cook declared later, during a cocktail reception on his arch’s first floor. Among the attendees was a chronicler of Georgia’s waterfalls, two longtime members of Little Richard’s band, a retired Russian N.H.L. player, and a contingent from Atlanta’s country-club set. Cook went on, “Trump is fixing it, and I’m helping.” He added, “I assure you, you can paint things gold left and right, but you can also tone that down later. As long as the proportions are right—which they are—this man is going to leave us a legacy of such astonishing beauty!”
Another thing Cook considers beautiful is classical Russian architecture. He built a large turreted dacha in North Atlanta, “in the Russian wooden vernacular,” he said. In June, he showed photographs of the place at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a gathering known as Putin’s Davos, which he said he’d attended as, “essentially, the Minister of Culture for the United States.” During a Senate hearing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he was “unaware” of an American delegation at the forum; none had attended in nearly a decade. Cook, however, insisted that “State pushed me to go. It was entirely designed around me.” His mission, he indicated, was soft diplomacy. He recalled a State Department official telling him,“Many guys in your position would say, ‘This is quite dangerous.’ ” The actor Steven Seagal, who has had Russian citizenship for ten years, attended, as did the far-right podcaster Candace Owens, although their seats weren’t as good as Cook’s. “My six State Department dudes had me first row direct center,” he said. He added, “I requested and received Coca-Cola—not sold there currently.” (Coca-Cola suspended business dealings with Russia in 2022, but the soda is imported through other countries.)
At a filmed Q. & A., Cook rose to address Putin. “I appreciate all of the hospitality that has been afforded to me on my return to St. Petersburg,” he said. “I love this city, and I think you’re aware of that.”
“Hooray, I also love St. Petersburg,” Putin, looking amused, responded, through a translator.
The State Department, Cook recalled, “was shocked but pleased” by his polite dialogue with the Russian leader, and also with the hockey puck he’d put on President Trump’s desk as a gesture of good will from Putin. (Cook obtained the puck himself, though he would not say from where.) Simonyan’s visit, Cook said, was a thank-you from Russia.
The violinist still hadn’t got any steak when he began to perform in the ersatz arch. He opened with Brahms, followed by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and ended with a tune generally credited to an eighteenth-century British Army surgeon intent on mocking Colonial Americans. Members of the audience laughed as they began to recognize the strains of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
“I wanted ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ ” a lone dissenter said later.
Cook was misty-eyed at the music. Back in his office, he told an intern to order pizzas. As he waited for dinner, Simonyan sat on a couch with Little Richard’s bandmates Shawn (Swift) Johnson and James (Big J) Nelson, who both kept their sunglasses on. They’d come to pitch Cook on building a statue of the deceased rock-and-roll legend, in Macon, Georgia. “Anything monument-related, he’s the guy,” Johnson said.
As Cook made the rounds, pouring glasses of wine, Simonyan pitched Johnson and Nelson an idea of his own. “You know what we need?” he said. “A big peace concert at the residence of the American Ambassador. Then some stadiums in Siberia.”
“I’ve never been to Russia,” Nelson said. “We’ll bring the whole band. It’ll be like Live Aid.” They considered who else might join them.
“Steven Seagal can play guitar,” Simonyan said. “He’s actually pretty good.”
Chairman of the United States Commission of Fine Arts Rodney Mims Cook Jr. and the abbot of the monastery, Hegumen Varlaam. Photo: TASS
The President of the United States gifted an Orthodox icon to the Trinity-Sergius Hermitage in response to Vladimir Putin’s diplomatic gesture in Anchorage.
On June 2, 2026, the Chairman of the USA Commission of Fine Arts Rodney Mims Cook Jr., at the personal initiative of Donald Trump, presented a copy of the miraculous Sitka Icon of the Mother of God to the abbot of the Holy Trinity Sergius Coastal Hermitage, Hegumen Varlaam. This is reported by TASS.
Rodney Mims Cook Jr. said that this act was a response to Vladimir Putin’s visit to Anchorage in 2025. At that time, the head of state presented as a gift to the Orthodox community of Alaska an icon of Saint Herman, an early Russian missionary widely considered the patron saint of Orthodoxy in America. “I was deeply moved by President Putin’s visit to Alaska,” Cook Jr. shared details. “President Trump suggested that I ‘return’ this gesture here.”
The Sitka Icon of the Mother of God is permanently located at St. Michael’s Cathedral in the city of Sitka, USA, and is considered miraculous. Now a copy of this unique shrine has found its home in the Holy Trinity Sergius Coastal Hermitage. The American official admitted that his visit to Saint Petersburg and participation in the presentation of the icon became a very personal event for him.
Leo Hare, a pious Christian from Texas, recently joined the long list of foreigners who have been mugged by Russian reality over the decades. In 2023, disillusioned by his homeland’s perceived decadence (such as tolerance for gay people), he decided to move his family to President Vladimir Putin’s empire—a society that allegedly embodied solid Christian belief and traditional family values. The Russian government granted him asylum.
How shocking, then, when Leo was swindled out of $66,000 by a Russian contact he trusted, leaving his family homeless. He also said that he became “increasingly concerned about the state of Russia’s economy and restrictions on access to information.” Now he is predictably rueful: “I believed in the propaganda,” he told an interviewer.
I feel sorry for Leo’s family. I feel a bit less sorry for the editors of the Economist, who recently fell for yet another Russia scam. The renowned British magazine (or “newspaper,” as it quaintly persists in calling itself) devoted a substantial portion of its coveted real estate to touting the claims of a heavily sanctioned Russian billionaire named Andrey Melnichenko, depicting him as a prominent voice of reform. Yet the fawning 7,000-word profile by the magazine’s Moscow correspondent and the accompanying 3,000-word essay by Melnichenko himself failed to deliver the goods.
The essay, which was notably vague about specific demands for internal change but expansive in demands for recognition of Russia’s great-power status, said nothing that Putin himself could not have said. It contained no acknowledgment of the mind-boggling destruction and the myriad crimes against humanity committed by the Russians during their illegal invasion of Ukraine, whose sovereignty appeared to interest the author little. He inveighed against the unfair rules allegedly imposed on Russia by the heartless West, never mentioning that the Kremlin itself is a party to numerous international and bilateral agreements that it has violated over the years, including several that recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders. Nor did his essay address the immense economic, social, and demographic damage that Putin’s war has inflicted upon Russians themselves.
As many Ukrainian readers were quick to point out, it’s highly unlikely that an oligarch of this stature would have dared to publish such a document in a Western publication without the tacit acceptance of the Kremlin. Indeed, Putin must be thrilled. The Economist has boosted the case for Russia’s global rehabilitation far more effectively than the Kremlin’s friends on the American or European far right could have done.
This is not entirely new. For centuries, Russian rulers have exploited the overactive imaginations of Westerners eager to project their own fantasies and desires on the empire to the east. The trend goes back at least as far as Voltaire, who conjured up an image of Russia as a tolerant civilization that he could contrast with the religious fanaticism of France. He praised Catherine the Great for imposing Enlightenment values on the barbaric peoples of the Eurasian interior, to the point that he even applauded some of her most brutal conquests. “If I were younger I would make myself Russian,” he once gushed—easy for him to say, since he never actually made it there. Catherine, who knew a PR bonanza when she saw it, was happy to subsidize his long-distance propaganda.
It’s easy, on some level, to understand the appeal. Russia has a rich cultural legacy (though foreign fans usually fail to spot the chauvinist sentiments that sometimes lie beneath). It is both part of Europe and decidedly non-European (three-quarters of its territory lies in Asia), a mixture that evokes mystery and exoticism. Indeed, an implicit racism sometimes seems to be in play: Many Russians “look European” (i.e., white), and Russian Orthodoxy is still recognizably Christian, prompting Westerners to make assumptions about the country that they would never dare to apply to other authoritarian societies in East Asia or the Middle East, whose political traditions are arguably far closer to Russia’s.
Whatever the reasons, Russophiles tend to see what they want to see and disregard the rest. The socialists who visited the Soviet Union—people like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Paul Robeson, and the rest—overlooked obvious signs of impoverishment and terror and acknowledged only the utopian trappings that their hosts put in front of them. Russia, wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1931, “is led by men of impressive ability and unprecedented freedom of thought”—three years after Russian dictator Joseph Stalin launched his first wave of show trials. Leading media are no less prone to this sort of factual and moral contortionism: In his reporting from Moscow, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty notoriouslydenied the disaster of forced collectivization and the resulting famines in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and southern Russia that took millions of lives.
In 1944, U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace visited Magadan, the city at the center of a huge web of concentration camps in the Soviet Far East, yet failed to notice anything out of the ordinary. His myopia derived not only from the usual socialist dogmas, but also an early enthusiasm for the woolly ideas of the Russian-born mystic Nicholas Roerich. This, too, is a characteristic pattern: Foreign enthusiasts frequently celebrate Russia as a place of deep and abiding spirituality—a stereotype that tends to overlook the Moscow Patriarchate’s long subordination to the state and resulting culture of authoritarianism and corruption.
MAGA Republicans now follow in the same tradition. When American right-winger Candace Owens traveled to Russia this spring, she gushed about the beauty of its churches, which she cited as evidence of Russia’s deep Christian piety—though she could have just as easily lavished praise on the beautiful cathedrals of Ukraine, which she regards with contempt. She was conspicuously silent when the Russians bombed the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, one of the holiest sites in the Orthodox world, a few days after her trip.
Nor did Owens seem to grasp that Putin’s Russia is also a country that persecutes Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses (which it sees as unwanted competition for state-supported Orthodoxy) even as it sponsors an aggressively Islamist regime in Chechnya. To some extent, modern-day fellow travelers like her are dupes of a regime that can draw on long memories of how to manipulate foreign sympathizers. In the United States, the Russian spy Maria Butina deftly catered to Republican notions that Putin’s traditional values must include the right to bear arms. (In fact, Russia has one of the world’s toughest gun-control regimes.) The Kremlin is happy to amplify friendly cranks like the neo-fascist Richard Spencer, who has touted Russia as the “sole white power in the world”—in flagrant ignorance of its ethnic diversity, including an enormous migrant population from Central Asia.
Tucker Carlson (of testicle-tanning fame) famously lavished praise on the shopping carts in a Moscow supermarket, which he claimed as evidence of Russia’s high level of civilization. This was revealing in ways that he clearly didn’t intend. Russia boosters rarely seem to travel beyond the boundaries of the big cities and have minimal contact with ordinary people. If they did, they might learn that Russians have to spend a far higher share of their incomes on food than Western Europeans, have extremely high rates of divorce, and are experiencing an epidemic of domestic violence, not least thanks to a law decriminalizing wife-beating that passed the Russian parliament a few years ago. Again and again, the fantasists of Russian power miss the country’s obvious signs of weakness, underdevelopment, corruption, and societal decay.
It would be wonderful if we could simply dismiss such voices as cranks. Unfortunately, though, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Owenses and the Carlsons have proved highly effective amplifiers of Russian narratives. In 2024, U.S. prosecutors indicted two Russian agents for funneling money to conservative influencers who circulated pro-Putin views on their social media platforms.
Yet right-wingers aren’t the only ones guilty of wishful thinking when it comes to Russia. In 2009, then-U.S. President Barack Obama and his foreign-policy team stumbled badly when they seized upon Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, as an imagined “moderate” and partner for reform. It became almost instantly apparent that the Americans had fallen for yet another Kremlin scam; Medvedev, far from being a free agent, was a temporary Putin puppet who had no interest in breaking with his patron’s policies. The eternal search for a reasonable Russian once again proved a mirage. (These days, Medvedev features as one of Moscow’s most rabid attack dogs on Ukraine.)
Indeed, the U.S. policy elite has long seemed to have a particular weakness for misreading Russia—from Cold War-era Sovietologists to U.S. President Donald Trump. As we’ve seen since the start of Putin’s war against Ukraine in 2014 and even more so since the full-scale invasion four-and-a-half years ago, there are plenty of military experts, academics, think-tankers, and journalists whose analyses have been warped by their overestimation of Russian capacities. In 2022, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley told then-President Joe Biden that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours. Arch-realist John Mearsheimer has persisted throughout the war in predicting Ukraine’s imminent demise—long after it should have been apparent that the Russian military, however superior to Kyiv’s in resources and manpower, has been crippled by corruption, mismanagement, and technological backwardness. In 2023, the Washington analyst Samuel Charap deemed the war “unwinnable” by Ukraine.
All of these experts have, one suspects, simply succumbed to the myth of Russian immensity, power, and strength—the same characteristics that have so long convinced Trump that Russia is the side to bet on. We should be grateful to the Ukrainians for showing the world why it is time for that myth to die.
There has been no contact with political prisoner Andrei Trofimov since April. He has not responded to letters and has not been brought out to meet with a lawyer. The situation was reported by journalist Vladimir [Raevskiy], who has been corresponding with Andrei.
‘We have tried every possible avenue, but we are told that “he does not want to maintain contact with anyone” — which is nonsense, he is one of the most outgoing people I know — and that “he already has a lawyer”, which is untrue. On one occasion, a lawyer we had hired even travelled to Petrozavodsk at our request, but Andrei Trofimov was not brought out to see him,’ Vladimir [Raevskiy] wrote.
In March, it emerged that Andrei Trofimov had arrived at Penal Colony No. 9 in Petrozavodsk, Karelia. There has been no information to suggest he has since been transferred to another facility.
Andrei Trofimov was sentenced to ten years in 2023. According to the court, he had sent the Freedom of Russia Legion a completed candidate application form, which it classified as preparation for participation in an unlawful armed formation under Part 1 of Article 30 and Part 2 of Article 208 of the Russian Criminal Code. He was also convicted of incitement to extremism under part 2 of Article 280, and of disseminating ‘military fakes’ under paragraph ‘e’, part 2 of Article 207.3, in connection with posts on social media.
During the trial, Andrei Trofimov held up placards reading ‘No to War’ and ‘Putin is a dickhead’, and shouted ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ The trial was then closed to the public. He delivered his closing statement in an empty courtroom, but managed to have it published outside.
‘Honourable court, everything the prosecution says I wrote online, I did indeed write. I did the right thing, I admit no guilt and I have no regrets. I publicly justify, strongly approve of and support the explosion on the Crimean Bridge in autumn 2022 and the Ukrainian drone strikes on the Kremlin and other targets in Moscow and the Moscow region in May 2023. Because Ukraine is a victim of Russian aggression and has the right to carry out retaliatory strikes against military targets in the aggressor state. And for myself, I demand the maximum sentence. Because I despise you. I will not walk the same ground as you or live in the same state as you. Since I cannot now go to Ukraine, lock me up in prison for ever. Victory will belong to those who are destroying Putin’s scum with weapons. Glory to Ukraine! Putin is a dickhead,’ Andrei Trofimov said.
The statement became the basis for a new criminal case — for justification of terrorism under Article 205.2 of the Russian Criminal Code. In 2025, his sentence was increased to thirteen years. Before the second verdict was handed down, he addressed the court:
‘Honourable court, Russia’s attack on Ukraine on 24 February 2022 was made possible because modern Russia is a victim of negative selection. A country of cowards, fools and dreary filth. There is no place for me here, because I am neither the first, nor the second, nor the third.’
In 2019, Mediazona published testimonies from people who had served time at Penal Colony No. 9 in Karelia, and from their relatives, describing systematic and severe torture at the facility, which had in some cases led to the deaths of prisoners. In October 2019, a video appeared on YouTube showing a prisoner being beaten; the description stated that the beating was being carried out by the governor of the colony, Ivan Savelyev, and his deputy, Ivan Kovalyov. Both officers were initially transferred to other facilities following the video’s publication, and in 2020 were detained on charges of abuse of authority. Savelyev was held in remand custody for just over two weeks; Kovalyov spent around seven months under house arrest. In 2023, both were sentenced to seven years in a penal colony; in 2025, the unserved portion of their sentences was commuted to compulsory labour.
In 2020, a witness in the case concerning the murder of Anna Politkovskaya died in Penal Colony No. 9 in Petrozavodsk. His sister is convinced that his death was a consequence of torture.
Smoke and flames rise from the roof of the Dormition Cathedral at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in the early hours of Monday, 15 June 2026, after a Russian strike on Kyiv. Image: Bishop Avraamij/Facebook)
On June 15, a Russian strike set Kyiv’s thousand-year-old monastery ablaze. The act was charged to a country, Russia, and to no one in particular. This is an attempt to reconstruct how such a decision gets made, and by whom.
My feed is on fire, and for once the metaphor is indecent, because the fire is literal. On the night of June 15, the roof of the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra burned against the dark while rescuers climbed toward it. The monastery was founded in 1051, at the dawn of monasticism in Kievan Rus’. The cathedral that burned is a reconstruction; the original was blown up in November 1941, after German troops took Kyiv, and whether the Nazis or the retreating Soviets set the charge has never been settled.
The human cost first. In a barrage of seventy missiles and more than six hundred drones, at least eleven people were killed across Ukraine and more than fifty wounded, Ukrainian officials said. In Kyiv, the dead numbered five and the wounded thirty-five, among them a pregnant woman and two children. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s emergency service said, a second missile struck a rescue site still crowded with the crews working the first, killing four of them for the crime of arriving. The evening before, a one-month-old girl had been among five people wounded when a drone hit the Kharkiv Art Museum.
And the buildings are their own kind of casualty list. The reposts come faster than anyone can read them. The Lavra. The Mystetsky Arsenal, the vaulted hall where the Book Arsenal festival had closed two weeks before. The Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studio, where a single strike destroyed what the culture minister called Ukraine’s oldest and largest costume archive: a hundred thousand costumes, three million items of clothing, the wardrobe of a national cinema turned to ash before morning. The House of Organ and Chamber Music in Dnipro. Karpenko-Kary, where Ukraine trains its filmmakers and its actors. A single day reached all of it.
The films made on those lots are what I study, so let me say plainly what burned. A studio’s wardrobe is the material memory of a national cinema, the actual cloth worn in the films through which a country learned to see itself: the embroidered shirts, the uniforms it had to wear on screen and then subvert, the furs and the partisan coats. A costume archive is the primary source by which a culture studies itself. You cannot reshoot the twentieth century. Some of the garments that burned were older than the younger states now debating how to respond.
Russia says none of this happened, or that something else did. The Defense Ministry called the night a strike with high-precision weapons against the defense-industrial complex, and denied hitting the Lavra at all: the cathedral, it claimed without evidence, was struck by a Ukrainian-operated Patriot interceptor. The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the reports “fakes”. By that account, the cathedral fire was a Ukrainian misfire, the dead rescuers were the fog of war, and the second strike on the Arsenal, launched while firefighters stood exposed at the Lavra, was a coincidence of timing.
Two things are happening at once, and they do not quite match. The grief is public and signed: thousands of people, in a dozen languages, share the same photograph and the same verdict. A Russian strike. Russian barbarism. The attribution is loud, and it is also the easiest one available. It names a culprit and, somehow, no person at all.
What is more, the argument about Russia usually collapses into sentiment. We have learned, rightly, to separate Vladimir Putin from the people we call “ordinary Russians,” many of whom, it is said, do not want this war. But this separation dissolves into the same anonymity that lets a cathedral burn with no hand on the match.
Drone studies calls the drone less a weapon than a chain, an act of violence dispersed across factories, suppliers, programmers, and launch crews until no single hand can be said to hold it, by design. The Shahed, the Iranian-designed drone behind most of that overnight barrage, pushes that logic to its industrial extreme. The burning of the Lavra happened in many places at once, and over many months. In July of last year, a Swiss plant made the microcontroller that would steer the drone. American and German firms, Texas Instruments and Infineon, made the chips that investigators keep pulling from the wreckage. Ukraine’s sanctions commissioner counts more than two million imported components in a single year. Trading offices in Hong Kong and free ports in the Emirates rerouted those parts around the sanctions meant to stop them. In Tatarstan, the Alabuga plant assembled the drone with schoolchildren recruited out of the ninth grade and women brought from Africa through a foreign outreach scheme. And before it ever left the ground, a crew set its route.
And there the trail goes cold. The closest anyone has come to naming the drone operators was for a different weapon entirely. In 2022, Bellingcat, The Insider, and Der Spiegel identified a unit of military engineers inside the General Staff’s Main Computation Centre who program the flight paths of Russia’s cruise missiles, the Kalibrs and the Kh-101s, plotting each trajectory by hand, far from any front. Most are young, many of them former software or game developers. Their commander was an avid coin collector; his phone records show him trading online about an hour before one such salvo hit Kyiv and killed dozens. When reporters reached the engineers, they denied everything, even when shown photographs of themselves in uniform. One said he was a plumber. One said she was a florist. One offered to explain how to butcher a pig. The metadata says these are the people who aim the missiles.
It is worth sitting with how little even that gave us. The Bellingcat investigation is now nearly four years old, and it named the people behind Russia’s cruise missiles, not its drones. The revelation was that a missile had not simply appeared over a city, the way weather appears. It had passed through offices, phones, maps, databases, commanders, and people who could be found, called, photographed, embarrassed, and named. But the war that followed, the Shahed war at industrial scale, has been harder to personify. As the drones multiplied into hundreds a night, the crews who prepare them, program them, and release them into the dark have remained mostly faceless.
The Russian drone operator has become one of the defining figures of the war. He is a technician of distance, converting coordinates, batteries, antennas, video feeds, maps, and orders into impact. Some work near the front, guiding FPV drones and reconnaissance quadcopters by hand. Others belong to more formal formations, including the elite Rubicon drone center, described by Radio Svoboda’s Russian-language investigation as a drone special-forces structure based in the Patriot Park complex, and by the Kyiv Independent as a central feature of Russia’s scaling drone war. But the long-range Shahed crews who send drones toward Ukrainian cities remain almost entirely unnamed. We can follow a microcontroller across three continents and still not put a name to the person who helped send it toward Kyiv. Component-tracing survives because it can be done at a distance. Naming people requires sources, time, physical danger, and the expensive human labor that has been gutted on both sides of the line: criminalized inside Russia, where reporters are exiled or imprisoned, and starved in the West, where the foreign desks that once did this work have been cut to the bone.
If everyone is responsible, it is tempting to conclude that no one is. That conclusion is what the system is built to produce. But responsibility accrues at every link, and it is uneven. It is heaviest where knowledge and choice are greatest, with the engineer who plots the path and the official who signs the order. It is lighter, though never absent, for the smuggled chip and for the schoolchild recruited into what was sold as a college and turned out to be a drone line. The Russia scholar Jade McGlynn, who has argued that this is Russia’s War and not only Putin’s, makes the necessary distinction: not collective guilt, which belongs to individuals tried for their own acts, but collective responsibility, held in different measure by everyone who takes part.
I have no verdict, only a refusal to let “Russia” be the last word. An engineer designed the chip. A broker moved it through Dubai. An official licensed the airframe. A commander signed the order. And a man with a name and a rank plotted the route into a thousand-year-old monastery. The last time it burned, in 1941, the question of whose hand lit it was left to die in the fog of another war. This time it does not have to. The ones who knew what they were doing are not the people we are asked to forgive in advance. So who burns the Lavra? People do, in different measures, with different degrees of knowledge and choice. Naming them scales the act back down from a country to a person and keeps the names where they belong: in the record, and one day, perhaps, in court.
When Sadyr Japarov took power in Kyrgyzstan in 2020, he was a young, energetic nationalist president determined to build his own authoritarian power vertical—the first leader to pull it off since Askar Akayev. For decades the country had been notoriously unstable: storming parliament was practically a standard feature of the political repertoire.
Japarov had already begun edging closer to Moscow before 2022, but Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine handed him a historic opportunity. Kyrgyzstan quickly became one of the Kremlin’s main cryptocurrency hubs for shadow trade. The scheme was orchestrated by Ilan Shor, the fugitive Moldovan oligarch notorious for the “billion-dollar theft” from Moldova’s banking system. At the same time, Moscow and Shor built a propaganda network in the country under the brand “Eurasia.”
Yet loyalty to Moscow has so far delivered Bishkek surprisingly few tangible dividends. Kyrgyz citizens working in Russia face the same harassment and discrimination as other Central Asian labor migrants. The only concrete assistance the Kremlin has provided is a few hundred school buses and plans to build nine Russian-language schools.
The War and “Our Own”
Which post-Soviet state drew markedly closer to Moscow after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine? Georgia immediately comes to mind—and for good reason. After years of rule by the “Georgian Dream” party, society proved unable to resist a corrupt system that had steered the country toward Moscow. Politicians warned citizens that any show of solidarity with Ukraine could turn Batumi into another Mariupol. Today Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze openly recounts how he was pressed to open a “second front” against Russia, even as the Georgian Border Police simultaneously denies entry to both anti-war Russians and residents of Crimea and Donbas carrying Russian passports.
But there is another mountainous nation that has followed a strikingly similar path. Once the most volatile and politically turbulent state in Central Asia—where pro-Russian and pro-Western media and NGOs coexisted—Kyrgyzstan has transformed into a textbook post-Soviet autocracy.
You can still enter Kyrgyzstan on a Russian internal passport, but if you are an opposition activist the authorities may simply hand you back. The human-rights project “Ark” advises its clients not to remain in the country even temporarily. This is not standard practice among Moscow’s formal allies: in Kazakhstan, the odds of avoiding deportation are noticeably better, and local activists are far more willing to assist Russians.
A telling case is that of a young Kyrgyz man named Samat. He held dual citizenship—his parents had obtained Russian passports while he kept his Kyrgyz one. After completing compulsory military service in 2019, he signed a contract with Russia’s Defence Ministry and failed to terminate it before the war began, despite trying. In March 2022 he managed to flee back to Bishkek. Smart cameras linked to the CIS wanted-persons database spotted him at the airport. He was arrested and taken to a pre-trial detention center in Bishkek. What happened to him next is unknown; no media outlet ever followed up.
Ironically, local residents who volunteered to fight for Russia—whether as regular contract soldiers or Wagner mercenaries—have also ended up behind bars. Outcomes vary. Askar Kubanychbek uulu was sentenced to ten years for mercenaryism but was released on a three-year probation period. He promptly returned to Russia and signed another Defence Ministry contract.
Such legal contradictions are common across Central Asia, but they have flourished most extravagantly in Kyrgyzstan thanks to pervasive corruption and a weak judiciary. Even so, Bishkek still maintains a certain distance from Moscow’s direct orders. In Tajikistan, for example, not a single citizen has been charged with mercenaryism for fighting in Ukraine; the prosecutor-general explained last year that anyone who accepts Russian citizenship must “observe the requirements and obligations of that state.”
Reliable data on Central Asians recruited into the Russian army come from the Ukrainian project “I Want to Live“: Uzbekistan (4,955), Tajikistan (3,489), Kazakhstan (2,420), Kyrgyzstan (1,474), and Turkmenistan (581). The relatively modest Kyrgyz figure reflects simple demography—a small country with a modest population. Yet by every other measure of loyalty, Kyrgyzstan now ranks among Moscow’s most reliable post-Soviet partners, second only to Belarus.
Just Don’t Irritate Them
In the first days after the invasion, every Eurasian state felt the ground shift. Even in Central Asia, where leaders usually comment on global affairs only in the vaguest terms, governments were forced to take a position.
Japarov, then in office for barely a year, chose the safest possible tone. “The situation is complex and has worsened in recent days,” he told parliament. “We are a small country with no influence to stop the conflict, so we must remain neutral. We are already seeing rising food and fuel prices and a stronger dollar. In these difficult times we need unity.”
He repeated the “small country” line in an April interview with the state news agency Kabar. That appears to be Bishkek’s genuine stance: no hidden agenda, no double game. Claims that Japarov “condemned Kyiv’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements” or “supported Russia’s decisive actions” should be left to the Kremlin’s press service.
Kyrgyzstan’s version of neutrality, however, has its own flavor. Compare it with neighboring Kazakhstan, where President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev consistently affirms international law and maintains contact with Volodymyr Zelensky. Even after the lavish welcome he gave Putin in Astana in May 2022—calling the Russian leader’s mission “fateful for the Russian people and the Russian state”—Kazakhstan’s position could still be described as neutrality, albeit with a clear northern tilt.
In Bishkek, neutrality is simpler: do nothing that might annoy those who can make life difficult. Above all, that means Moscow and Beijing. The Japarov government regards relations with those two capitals as the only ones that truly matter.
Kyrgyzstan cannot expect serious Western investment anytime soon, so it has little to lose by keeping its head down. Besides, Japarov built his political career in large part by confronting Western capital. One of his signature achievements was the nationalization of the Kumtor gold mine from Canada’s Centerra Gold. The mine passed fully under state control in 2022, though experts question how effectively the new owners are running it.
Japarov has continued tightening state oversight of foreign investment, limiting the list of deposits open to foreigners and drafting a new Mining Code. Curiously, he has proposed using British law to resolve disputes; a special International Dispute Resolution Centre based on UK rules opened in February 2025 in the Tamchy investment zone on Lake Issyk-Kul.
Had Japarov’s background been different, he might have joined the conversation about rare-earth metals that Donald Trump loves so much. But at the first Central Asia-US summit in Washington, the Kyrgyz president was noticeably more restrained than his colleagues. While Tokayev told Trump he was “sent from above” and Uzbekistan’s Shavkat Mirziyoyev declared that only the American president could stop the war in Ukraine, Japarov spoke through a Kyrgyz-language interpreter and focused on the digital economy and artificial intelligence—both in the main session and in his brief one-on-one meeting with Trump.
Among the issues raised by Sadyr Japarov was hydropower—in particular, preparations for launching the Kambarata hydroelectric power station. Mining was conspicuously absent from his remarks. That is hardly surprising: Kyrgyzstan has virtually no remaining deposits attractive enough for the kind of large-scale joint ventures Donald Trump prefers.
The Authoritarian Turn
Kyrgyzstan’s growing distance from the West has allowed its new elites to extract maximum value from Russia while consolidating domestic power without apology. Japarov’s rise in 2020 marked the republic’s decisive shift to a rigid vertical of power and full-blown authoritarian rule. According to Freedom House, Kyrgyzstan was still rated “partly free” in 2019 with a score of 38 out of 100. It has since fallen to 25 points—firmly in the “not free” category.
During this period the country adopted a new constitution that dramatically expanded presidential authority, along with a law on non-commercial organizations that many describe as a local version of Russia’s foreign-agent legislation. The logic is identical: any NGO receiving foreign funding must register as a “foreign representative” and be placed on a public list. The registry went live in September 2024 but has grown slowly—starting with three organizations and now standing at just five. For now, NGOs apply for inclusion themselves. The law is also easily circumvented by re-registering as a limited-liability company (OOO), the Kyrgyz equivalent of an LLC.
A vivid illustration of Bishkek’s loyalty to Moscow came during Vladimir Putin’s visit to Bishkek in November 2025. The new presidential residence sits next to the Ukrainian embassy. To ensure that Putin, walking along the avenue to the main entrance, would not see the Ukrainian flag—and that Ukrainian diplomats would not see the leader of the aggressor state—authorities erected a massive screen directly in front of the embassy. It displayed the flags of Russia and Kyrgyzstan along with greetings to the Russian president.
The Kremlin’s Financial Hub
Kyrgyzstan’s self-proclaimed “neutrality” has turned the country into a convenient instrument for Moscow to evade Western sanctions, including in the military-technical sphere. Setting up a legal entity in Kyrgyzstan is straightforward—especially an LLC. Russian businesses no longer need local partners; they can simply incorporate their own company and route transactions through it. Corrupt customs procedures and notably liberal currency and cryptocurrency regulations only add to the appeal.
In 2022, Kyrgyz exports to Russia jumped 2.5 times to $920 million. The subsequent surge never materialized; trade volumes stabilized. By the end of 2025, exports had actually declined 13.4 percent. Analysts attribute the drop to a deliberate reduction in re-exports.
Western sanctions began hitting Kyrgyz firms in 2023, when the U.S. Treasury added Weitmann Handeln Allianz LLC—a supplier of computers to Russia—to its list. Other equipment exportersfollowed, but banks only came under fire in 2025.
The first and most prominent target was the state-owned Keremet Bank. According to the U.S. Treasury, it assisted Russia’s Promsvyazbank (PSB) with overseas operations. PSB is the financial backbone of the Russian military and defense industry; its chairman is Pyotr Fradkov, son of former prime minister and ex-SVR chief Mikhail Fradkov.
The same Treasury notice mentioned another notable name: Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor. After siphoning roughly a billion dollars from Moldova’s banking system, Shor relocated to Russia and threw himself into political projects. He has worked with PSB since at least 2024, using the bank to funnel money into Moldova ahead of elections. It was therefore no surprise that Keremet appeared in the same schemes.
Later, the Financial Times published an investigation into the ruble-pegged stablecoin A7A5, created by PSB specifically to circumvent sanctions. Trading in the coin took place on Grinex, an exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan. In April 2025 the exchange suffered a cyberattack that wiped out roughly a billion rubles’ worth of user funds. By then, its ties to both PSB and Shor were an open secret. Project head Oleg Ogienko had stated in February that up to 10 percent of Russia’s foreign-trade settlements flowed through the coin.
A parallel instrument with a similar name also exists: the payment agent A7, another PSB-linked project that allows businesses and individuals to transfer money abroad without SWIFT. Its CEO is likewise Ilan Shor.
After the U.S. sanctions, Britain and the European Union followed suit against Keremet. London also targeted two other Kyrgyz banks—Capital and the Eurasian Savings Bank—along with the state brokerage firm and a virtual-asset issuer. The same institutions (plus Tolubay) appeared in the EU’s 19th and 20th sanctions packages.
The most significant consequence of the EU’s 20th package for Kyrgyzstan was the introduction of sectoral restrictions: the bloc now prohibits exports of CNC machine tools and data-transmission equipment (switches and routers). This is the first such precedent and could have a noticeable deterrent effect on the willingness of regional states to provide Russia with technical assistance. While Kyrgyzstan itself has few high-tech industries, the restrictions could deliver a serious blow to neighboring Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
According to Moldovan outlets Rise Moldova and IPN, Shor has become deeply embedded in Kyrgyz elites; President Japarov himself has reportedly used aircraft from Shor’s companies. The Russian investigative outlet Proyekt claims that Roman Abramovich serves as Shor’s patron within Russian elite circles. It was with Abramovich’s backing, the outlet asserts, that Shor launched both the A7 project and the large-scale sanctions-evasion scheme built around cryptocurrency in Kyrgyzstan.
The Humanitarian Dimension
When asked about helping Russia circumvent sanctions, Kyrgyz officials usually respond with flat denials. Last year President Japarov reframed the issue in familiar terms—combating “foreign agents.”
“We suggested that Ambassador [of the United States] Vigeri invite independent auditing firms to examine Keremet and Capital banks, review the results together, and then make a decision,” he declared. “They refused… They simply claimed to have certain information. But we know perfectly well where it comes from. It comes from local NGOs and our internal adversaries who send them anonymous false reports.”
There was one notable exception. Speaking at SPIEF-2025, Temir Sariyev, chairman of Kyrgyzstan’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, openly acknowledged that “when the special military operation began, the first country that extended a hand without fear was the Kyrgyz Republic. Others followed later. This prompts Russia to regard the KR as its most reliable partner—in both business and politics. Reliability is a very rare and scarce commodity.” Sariyev did not spell out the nature of the assistance, but everyone in the room understood: he was referring to the provision of loopholes for gray imports and parallel financial transactions.
Such candor is driven by straightforward pragmatism. Bishkek had hoped that loyalty would bring tangible benefits for Kyrgyz labor migrants in Russia. Officials have repeatedly complained that EAEU membership has not delivered the expected advantages—particularly access to medical care and schooling for children.
The introduction of mandatory Russian-language testing made the situation worse for all children with foreign citizenship living in Russia. Kyrgyz representatives raised the issue without success. From next year onward, Russia is imposing even stricter rules on migrants, with an exemption granted only to citizens of Belarus. In all regions except Moscow and Moscow Oblast, the hiring of foreigners will be permitted solely through organized, targeted recruitment programs.
At the same time, Moscow announced in 2023 plans to build nine joint Russian-Kyrgyz schools in Kyrgyzstan with mixed teaching staffs. Three are promised for 2027. Any mention of the project reliably irritates Russian nationalists, yet the Kremlin uses the rapprochement with Bishkek to bolster its image among the Kyrgyz population as well.
It is in Kyrgyzstan—according to the limited polling available—that public solidarity with Moscow over Ukraine is highest. A 2024 Paper Lab survey found that 36 percent of respondents blamed Ukraine for the war, 14 percent blamed Russia, and 13 percent blamed the United States. These figures largely reflect media consumption patterns: Russian outlets dominate the foreign-media landscape. In 2024 Bishkek launched the pro-Russian television channel Nomad, which is linked to both Ilan Shor and RT and is headed by a former RT employee.
Another Shor project, the non-profit organization Eurasia, has also expanded significantly. In other post-Soviet states it has mainly organized propaganda tours for young people, flying selected students and schoolchildren to Moscow for lectures by pro-Kremlin speakers. In Kyrgyzstan, thanks to the authorities’ accommodating stance, the organization has been able to operate locally. Bishkek now boasts an Eurasia Park, a Russian-language support center, and a network of social stores under the same brand. In September 2024 the organization donated 50 school buses to rural districts.
The newest objective of ANO Eurasia in Kyrgyzstan is the creation of a unified educational space with Russia. The initiative, according to Kyrgyz officials, came from Bishkek rather than Moscow—and specifically from President Japarov. At SPIEF-2025, First Deputy Prime Minister Daniyar Amangeldiev stated: “Vladimir Vladimirovich supported the initiative of our president. I know that ANO Eurasia is already working on this issue; let us define our joint next steps.”
One practical outcome appears to have been the recent meeting of the Russian-Kyrgyz expert-consultative council on history, organized in Moscow by the Russian Military-Historical Society. Scholars from both countries discussed the content of school textbooks and clashed sharply over whether the period of Russian imperial rule in Central Asia should be described as the “colonization” of the Kyrgyz people. The Russian side, as expected, insisted on alternative wording—”administration” or “administrative measures”—that the Kyrgyz scholars found unacceptable. Academician Abylabek Asankanov remarked: “You are setting us an extremely difficult task—to abandon the word ‘colony.’ That is very hard to do.”
Such friction was predictable. Despite Bishkek’s calculations that closer ties with Moscow would solve financial problems and provide protection, nationalist and anti-imperial sentiments remain strong in Kyrgyzstan. They are also an important part of Sadyr Japarov’s own political brand. In April, for example, he promised to rename the remaining villages that still bear Russian names—only for his press service to disavow the statement the following day.
In seeking to consolidate personal power in a traditionally turbulent country, Japarov has bet on Moscow as a source of external legitimacy. While some of his efforts have been appreciated in the Kremlin, he should not count on serious long-term support. Years of experience have shown that the Kremlin never clings to any particular politician in Kyrgyzstan; it assumes the country is already firmly within Russia’s orbit. Yet by his actions Japarov is helping Moscow entrench itself still more deeply in the republic.
The combination of Russian propaganda among the population and the corrupt ties linking local officials and banks to Russian structures provides a sufficiently reliable guarantee that Kyrgyzstan will remain the most pro-Putin country in Central Asia for the foreseeable future. The price is secondary sanctions and the risk of falling behind in the development of genuinely competitive economic sectors.
Source: Roman Chernikov, “Putin’s Outpost in Central Asia,” Riddle Russia, 6 June 2026
In his 1986 novel Plakha, translated into English as The Scaffold, Chingiz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstan’s great writer, tells the story of Avdiy Kallistratov, an idealistic young man who joins a group of drug smugglers travelling to a remote corner of Central Asia. To Kyrgyzstan, to be precise, where large swathes of cannabis grow wild in the picturesque Issyk-Kul region.
Aitmatov describes in vivid detail the brutal process of harvesting and trafficking the drug by a criminal group. But how close is this depiction to reality?
This is a question I put to Gulzat Botoeva, Associate Professor of Criminology at Swansea University and an expert on illegal economies in Eurasia, including cannabis production in Kyrgyzstan. We discuss how the harvesting began, who benefits from it, and how local authorities respond to the phenomenon. Is there any incentive in Kyrgyzstan to legalise the crop?
Here is a list of Gulzat’s publications on the topic:
Botoeva, G. (2014). Hashish as cash in a post-Soviet Kyrgyz village. International Journal of Drug Policy, 25(6), 1227-1234.
Botoeva, G. (2019). Use of language in blurring the lines between legality and illegality. In Governance Beyond the Law: The Immoral, The Illegal, The Criminal (pp. 67-83). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Botoeva, G. (2021). Multiple narratives of il/legality and im/morality: The case of small-scale hashish harvesting in Kyrgyzstan. Theoretical Criminology, 25(2), 268-283.
This article focuses on the embeddedness of hashish production in the local economy of Toolu, a village in Kyrgyzstan. It explores how transformations in social relationships and the monetization of gift giving put constant pressure on families to find cash in a semi-subsistence agricultural economy. Although not produced on an industrial scale in the community, hashish is used as a cash crop in times of deficit. Based on a mixed-methods study combining ethnographic fieldwork with survey data, I show how the hashish economy is intertwined with different forms of reciprocal relationships based on gift-giving practices and the monetization of social relationships. In doing so, I illustrate how the hashish economy is embedded in local livelihoods and shapes emerging forms of economic morality in Kyrgyz society.
This documentary is an ethnobotanical and cultural exploration. It does not promote or facilitate the sale of cannabis or cannabis-related products. In Episode 3, the expedition moves deeper into Kyrgyzstan’s highlands as the Strain Hunters cross paths with one of Central Asia’s most iconic cultural gatherings — the world-famous Nomad Games. Set against the dramatic mountain landscape, the games offer a rare glimpse into the traditions, skills, and nomadic heritage that have shaped life in this region for centuries. Leaving the celebrations behind, the team continues their journey into increasingly remote terrain. As they explore valleys and high-altitude environments shaped by wind, cold, and time, the Strain Hunters encounter some of the most promising wild cannabis populations of the expedition — plants that show clear adaptation to their harsh surroundings. Through careful observation and documentation, the team identifies ancient landrace traits that reflect cannabis’ long history in Central Asia. These encounters represent a key moment in the journey, deepening our understanding of cannabis diversity and reinforcing the importance of preserving rare genetics before they disappear. This expedition is brought to you by Green House Seed Co. and GH Medical, continuing our mission to explore the planet, preserve rare genetics, and document cannabis culture worldwide.
BISHKEK — Kyrgyz cannabis is reputed to be among the most potent in the world, making it a lucrative cash crop for drug traffickers.
It appears ironic, then, that a homegrown addiction specialist in Bishkek wants marijuana to be legalized to reduce the number of Kyrgyz drug addicts, fight organized crime, and increase tax revenues.
Jenishbek Nazaraliev, a former presidential candidate who opened Bishkek’s first private narcology clinic in 1993, wants the Kyrgyz government to consider a pilot program for the legal production of cannabis near Lake Issyk-Kul.
Rivaling the potency of marijuana from Afghanistan, international experts say cannabis is already being harvested by about two-thirds of all the families in Kyrgyzstan’s Issyk-Kul and Chui regions.
Pot plants grow wild on thousands of hectares of land there. During the first eight months of 2013, up through the annual August harvest, Kyrgyz authorities say they destroyed more than 154 tons of cannabis in the Issyk-Kul region alone.
Nazaraliev says more effective regulation over the production and sale of marijuana is an issue that eventually must be tackled by the government.
He says the illegal drug market in Kyrgyzstan is now “fully controlled by the black economy.”
Nazaraliev also argues that the producers, sellers, and consumers of cannabis could be better controlled — and that the government would bolster its tax revenues — if pot were legalized.
But Kyrgyzstan’s State Drug Control Service disagrees. Authorities there say winning the battle against drug traffickers is the key to social stability and development in Kyrgyzstan.
And they argue that legalization won’t rein in organized criminal traffickers because Kyrgyz-grown cannabis is exported through a network that extends far beyond Kyrgyzstan’s borders — a smuggling route for illegal Afghan cannabis, opium, and heroin that passes through Kyrgyzstan on its way to Russia and the European Union.
Naked Harvest
RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service has spoken with villagers in the Tiup and Ak-Sui districts around Lake Issyk-Kul who are involved in the harvest and sale of Kyrgyz cannabis.
For centuries, cannabis has been harvested in Central Asia by horsemen who would ride naked through wild cannabis patches and then scrape the resin from their skin and the hair of their horses.
But most villagers around Lake Issyk-Kul now harvest the drug by rubbing cannabis plants between their palms to get a layer of black resin that they scrape off with a knife and package in matchboxes.
Local dealers buy the drugs from the harvesters and then sell them to bigger dealers who tour the area, forwarding their purchases abroad through international trafficking channels.
Kyrgyz villagers who harvest cannabis every August make no secret about paying bribes to police who turn a blind eye.
For their part, local police tell RFE/RL it would be impossible to eradicate a trade that is integral to the survival of so many people.
Former Kyrgyz Vice President and Prime Minister Feliks Kulov — who also headed the National Security Service — suggested during the 1990s that state-managed cannabis farms near Lake Issyk-Kul could help the authorities control drug production in the country.
But Kulov’s proposal was derailed by critics who cited the negative experiences of opium growers in Afghanistan.
Nazaraliev, the narcologist who wants the authorities to reconsider legalization, ran in Kyrgyzstan’s 2009 presidential election under the campaign slogan “Everything is Within your Reach.”
He is now asking the authorities in Bishkek to consider whether “progressive European countries” and U.S. state governments that decriminalize marijuana care more about the health and welfare of their citizens than Kyrgyzstan.
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.
Over four years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, some of the Russians imprisoned in its early days are still in jail. Even people with no previous political activism have been landed with long prison sentences in order to crush dissent.
Yevgeny Zateyev and Anna Arkhipova attend a court hearing in the case against the Vesna movement, one of the leading voices of antiwar protest in Russia. A court in St Petersburg sentenced six defendants in the case to prison terms of up to 12 years. (Andrei Bok/ SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Russia’s political prisoners are “outcasts in their own land,” Sergei Dudchenko, a biker tortured and framed by the security services, told his trial judges this month before being handed a seven-year prison sentence.
Those arrested for opposing the war in Ukraine had “fewer rights than a stray dog, and on top of that they bear the humiliating brand of ‘terrorist’ — and all this for their active civic stance.”
Dudchenko and his friend Nikolai Murnev, who received the same sentence, were arrested with others in October 2022 in Stavropol, in southern Russia.
While in detention on minor charges (petty hooliganism and drug possession), they were brutally tortured. A case was put together that they were preparing a “terrorist act” — setting fire to a military recruitment office. Another of the group died in pretrial detention, one fled the country, and one turned state’s witness.
The invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, “split life into before and after, it divided the world into black and white,” Dudchenko told the court.
Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Turkmens, Jews, and others had “paid an unimaginable price” to resist Nazism in World War II. How, decades later, could “so much hatred and anger” be directed against Ukraine?
Within days of the invasion, Dudchenko made a solo protest — a motorbike ride with the Ukrainian flag. In court, four years later, he said: “When I sped along, with the banner of the oppressed streaming behind me, past an astonished crowd of militarists, I felt the human in me come into bloom.”
Dudchenko is one of dozens of wartime protesters who have exercised one of the few constitutional rights that remains accessible: to say a “final word” before sentencing.
Some who exercise this right, like Dudchenko, are citizens whose antiwar protest was their first political action. Some, like the powerlifting champion Yulia Lemeshchenko, are Russians who joined the Ukrainian armed forces. She told her trial, in November of last year: “I am not a citizen of the country for which I decided to fight, but for me, Ukraine is home.”
Some are political activists, like Anna Arkhipova, one of six members of the Vesna protest network sentenced at a show trial in St Petersburg last month. “When the war began, it was my conscience that would not let me stand idly by,” she stated.
On Sunday May 17, Try Me For Treason: anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, an English-language film featuring readings of speeches, will be released on YouTube.
The title comes from a speech by Andrei Trofimov, who is serving ten years for pro-Ukrainian statements on social media — plus three for ending his “final word” to a closed court by saying: “Glory to Ukraine! Putin is a d–khead.”
At the second trial, before getting the three extra years, Trofimov scorned the charges of “discrediting the armed forces” and “justifying terrorism,” and invited prosecutors to charge him for deserting to Ukraine’s side. “Try me for treason. I betrayed your deranged state,” he told the judges.
The fifty-minute documentary was put together on a zero budget by a group of actors in Britain, to make the Russian antiwar movement more visible internationally.
Maya Willcocks, the actor-producer who reads a speech by Darya Kozyreva, said: “These are not well-known political leaders, they are people who have taken a stand against the state. I felt it was very important to have their words translated into English and out there for people to hear — to send the message that occupation is a crime, whether in Palestine or in Ukraine.”
Anthony Aldis, the videographer, said: “What I found compelling about these stories is that the beginning of any fightback is very often when people stand up against an apparently unassailable power.
“These people are not organized. It’s a raw push against something that they don’t believe they can beat, but they think they have to take a stand anyway, in solidarity with someone else who is being attacked and murdered.
“That idea is very important to us in the West, given what we face here in the UK, and in the USA, with the rise of the far right.”
As one of a small group of translators that helped prisoner support groups, I worked on the script, and on the book Voices Against Putin’s Warfrom which it derived.
Having traveled to Russia and Ukraine since Soviet times, I was struck by the political depth and heterogeneity of antiwar protest, even as it is constrained by state terror to individual acts of defiance. Those punished with long sentences range from pacifists who quote Leo Tolstoy to Soviet-era dissidents who ooze contempt for the judges, and Russians who go out of their way to justify Ukraine’s defensive military action.
It would be easy — and stupid — to dismiss the “final words” as atomized cries into a dark, authoritarian night. Rarely are they pleas to judges or government; more often, they are consciously crafted appeals to society.
The “last words” often try to situate those who say them historically. Sergei Dudchenko, born in 1987, said in court that “people like us will always keep emerging, to pick up the fallen banner of good and reason” . . . and recalled the seven protesters arrested on Red Square in 1968 for opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Noteworthy, too, is the infrastructure of support for political prisoners, comprising established human rights organizations such as Memorial: Support Political Prisoners, OVD-Info, and Mediazona; newly formed groups such as Fires of Freedom and Solidarity Zone, a website featuring “last words” going back to the 1950s; and Telegram groups caring for individual prisoners.
From California to the Caucasus, dozens of informal groups of Russians in exile gather and write letters to prisoners.
All these organizations support lawyers and activists in Russia who visit prisoners, send parcels, and support relatives — themselves now risky activities.
Bohdan Ziza, who features in our film, has family and friends who know where he is. (He is serving fifteen years for throwing blue and yellow paint, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, as well as a petrol bomb that was quickly extinguished by a security guard, at a municipal council’s office in Crimea.) So do many Crimean Tatar activists victimized by Russia’s racist, Islamophobic crackdown in the peninsula in 2017–19.
But hundreds, possibly thousands of Ukrainians are at unknown locations in Russia’s twenty-first-century gulag.
The Ukrainian government today counts ninety thousand people as “missing”: many are soldiers, imprisoned or killed, but at least sixteen thousand are civilians, according to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Many are victims of abductions, widespread in the territories occupied by Russia. Ukrainian lawyers and human rights activists have compiled a register of more than five thousand “enforced disappearances,” in addition to the widely publicized cases of kidnapped children.
Long prison sentences, imposed with little or no pretense of legal procedure, and savage torture — especially of those suspected of sympathizing with Ukrainian resistance — are ubiquitous in the occupied territories. The indefatigable Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group’s website reports a stream of life-destroying sentences for peaceful activities deemed dissident.
Doing all we can to provide practical support for political prisoners and engaging with their compelling articulations of their motives is central to international solidarity.
Try Me For Treason premieres on Sunday, May 17. You can sign up to watch it here.
