A Bell Is a Cup Until It Is Struck: The Disaster in Tuapse

Russia is readying for Victory Day — a major state holiday that the Kremlin has elevated into something of a sacred ritual — in far-from-perfect condition. For several weeks, Ukraine has been systematically and successfully attacking oil infrastructure across the country, with ecological consequences that local authorities are struggling to contain. The aftermath of the strikes, largely unreported in national media, is even visible from space. The attacks have only added to public discontent with Putin’s policies — but it is unlikely to have any serious consequences for the Kremlin.

Throughout the second half of April, Ukraine made the Black Sea resort of Tuapse its primary target. Tuapse is a sprawling oil city — home to a Rosneft oil refinery, one of Russia’s oldest, which operates alongside an export terminal that ships petroleum products overseas. From April 16 to May 1, Ukraine hit the town four times, damaging both the terminal and the refinery.

The drone strikes led to a genuine ecological catastrophe. Fires at the refinery caused plumes of smoke visible from orbit. Burning petroleum poured down one of the city’s streets. What became known as “oil rain” — thick black toxic precipitation — fell across the city, leaving stains on plants and animals. In several districts, air quality data showed an unsafe concentration of dangerous chemicals, specifically carcinogenic benzene and xylene, as well as choking soot. Residents living close to the terminal reported vomiting and nausea.

Some of the spilled oil entered the Tuapse River and, after heavy rain, flowed into the Black Sea. Ecologists from the Transparent World project studied satellite images from April 25 and concluded that the size of the spillage covered up to 3.8 square kilometers. The spill near the resort’s central beach was more than half a kilometer long. There is a shortage of workers and equipment to clear up the mess, an operation which has been complicated because the oil soaks deep into the pebble beaches, and the sea continually washes new pollutants ashore. In addition, residents keep finding dead dolphins on the beaches.

Local authorities declared a state of emergency — a special legal status allowing the immediate deployment of resources and a coordinated disaster relief effort. They recommended locals avoid going outside for long periods, keep windows closed, wear masks, and rinse their eyes, noses and throats. However, there was no official stay-at-home order. For many days, Tuapse’s schools did not cancel classes (before eventually being ordered to close only after one of the last attacks), even as air pollution significantly exceeded safe norms. Employers were similarly reluctant to allow staff to work remotely. “At the same time, you have to stay home but also go to work as usual. Choose for yourself which rule to break,” said one Tuapse resident who first had to take her children to school through a town blanketed in acrid smoke, before driving to work.

Vladimir Putin’s response has been muted. “Drone strikes on civilian infrastructure are becoming more frequent. The latest example is the attacks on energy facilities in Tuapse, which could have serious environmental consequences,” he said almost two weeks after the first attack. He then added: “However, the governor merely reported that there don’t seem to be any serious threats and people are coping with the challenges they face.” Residents were not impressed, judging by one report from the Black Sea resort. “People are coping. But where’s the government? They seem to be on some other planet. You can feel the anger: some people are doing something, while others are scratching their asses,” a local resident told the Ostorozhno Novosti publication.

National TV channels did not devote much time to the ecological catastrophe: the weekly news review, Vesti Nedeli, presented by leading propagandist Dmitry Kiselev, ran a five-minute segment on Tuapse in the second half of the show. In it, Governor Venyamin Kondratyev said that he would do everything “to ensure the resort season goes ahead.” Ecologists consider this unrealistic.

Tuapse is not the only place that has been hit by Ukrainian drones. On April 29 and 30, Ukraine attacked a refinery and pumping station in Perm, a city of one million people in the Urals, about 1,500 km from the front line. Ecologists told Agentstvo that an environmental catastrophe could unfold along similar lines there. The skies over Perm were shrouded by smoke, oil fell like rain and carcinogens entered the air. Meanwhile, the local authorities did nothing: the mayor’s page on vKontakte (the Russian version of Facebook) posted nothing about the attacks on the refinery.

Overnight into May 3, Ukraine attacked Primorsk, Russia’s biggest oil terminal on the Baltic Sea — the latest time in a string of long-range strikes on the site. The port typically handles about 40% of oil Russia’s maritime oil exports. The Leningrad Region’s governor reported a fire had broken out, but no oil leak. The next night, a Ukrainian drone attacked an elite residential complex in the western part of central Moscow — a protected area, home to foreign embassies and where ex-president Dmitry Medvedev owns expensive real estate.

Amid the ongoing Ukrainian attacks, the Kremlin has taken a previously unthinkable step and scaled back the full-scale military parade to celebrate May 9 (for more on how this sacred day in Russia’s calendar became a way to glorify the current war, read here). Military hardware has trundled through Red Square every year since 2008, although following the invasion of Ukraine the parade has gotten smaller and smaller. This year, there will be no display of military equipment. Only infantry soldiers will march in the parade. “Amid … terrorist threats, of course, we are taking all measures to minimize risk,” said Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov, explaining the decision. In addition, Muscovites living in one of the most digital cities on Earth, again face a mobile internet shutdown from May 5-9. Operators are blocking access to the network “for security reasons.”

Increased taxes for business, rising prices for customers, regular mobile internet outages, the blocking of Telegram (Russia’s most popular online messenger) and general war fatigue among the population have seen Putin’s approval rating continue to fall for a second month. According to the latest survey by state pollster VTsIOM, 71% of Russians back the president — the lowest level since the invasion of Ukraine. FOM, another pollster that works with the presidential administration, recorded a drop in support to 73% — also its lowest reading since the opening days of the invasion in 2022. The decline in approval will not lead to any protests in Russia, an expert studying Russian public opinion told The Bell.

Why the world should care

Ukraine’s systematic and increasingly successful drone strikes against Russian cities clearly cast a shadow over Putin’s plans for May 9, arguably the most important day of the year for the Russian leader. The Kremlin uses the event not only to celebrate Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, but increasingly to justify the current war and lionize the Russians fighting at the front. In previous years, Kyiv has refrained from attacks on this date. Regardless of whether that remains the case this time, the key point remains: Russian society is not just tired of the war, but is starting to feel its full impact: constant restrictions, lockdowns, and dim economic prospects. In the fifth year of fighting, growth rates that were once trumpeted by Kremlin economists are already out of reach.

Sourcee: Denis Kasyanchuk, “Russia on Fire as Victory Day Approaches,” The Bell, 5 May 2026. As a paid subscriber to this exorbitantly overpriced biweekly newsletter, I am happy to share it occasionally with my own readers.||||| TRR

Wire, A Bell Is a Cup… Until It Is Struck (LP, 1988)

Hello!

This is the 7×7 newsletter, which tells the tale of two journalists, Alisa and Yelisei, who have set out on a voyage around Russia’s cities and towns to find out what life is like in the country’s regions. Care to join them?

The Ulysses have arrived in Tuapse. On the night of 1 May, the local marine terminal here caught fire once again following a drone attack. As a result of the incident, petroleum byproducts spilled into the river and the sea, polluting approximately sixty kilometers of coastline. Volunteers immediately rushed to the scene. Many of them already have experience in combating fuel oil pollution on the coast: they worked on the 2025 oil spill in Anapa.

The volunteers have been sadly convinced that the authorities had not learned from the previous disaster, and that they were once again left to deal with the oil alone. Officials, meanwhile, did nothing but issue directives on how not to tackle the spill’s aftermath. For instance, they proposed barring women from being involved in the cleanup efforts. You can find out how they justified this stance—and how the female volunteers responded—in the newsletter below.

Reading time: 8 minutes

Tags: Tuapse, Anapa, environmental disaster, oil spill, war’s effects, reproductive health, volunteering

“There is only one solution: once there are enough men available for this work, there will no longer be any need for women to do it,” the female volunteers in Tuapse remarked wryly as they head back to the beach. They had a busy May Day holiday digging up oil-contaminated pebbles on beaches, washing oil off dogs, cats, and birds, and recording videos appealing for help. They also could not help but notice that there were more women than men out on the beach.

Meanwhile, a correspondent for Kommersant reported that Tuapse city hall and the regional department of the Emergency Situations Ministry had not permitted female volunteers to clean up the oil due to “concerns” for their reproductive health. The conversation took place during a meeting with volunteers. Several women present at the meeting said that they would take care of their own reproductive choices themselves.

City hall issued no formal legal ban on women’s involvement in the cleanup effort, limiting itself instead to a verbal recommendation. Yet even these suggestions sparked considerable controversy.

Ecologist Roman Pukalov urged women to refrain from working directly on the beaches. According to him, after spending forty years studying the effects of petroleum products on humans, he has concluded that “the fairer sex constitutes the primary risk group.” He asked female volunteers to focus on other forms of assistance (aside from beach cleanup) such as organizing meals, overseeing the delivery of humanitarian aid, and coordinating targeted fundraising efforts.

“We members of the fairer sex make up the majority,” Anastasia, a volunteer from the Anapa-based volunteer squad Ghosts, reminded Pukalov in the comments section. She herself requires medical attention after being involved in the cleanup of fuel oil in Veselovka. She urged her fellow female volunteers to take care of themselves and undergo all necessary medical checkups following their time in the field.

Other volunteers noted in the comments that fuel oil is not only dangerous to reproductive health. It can also lead to anemia, to which women are more susceptible than men. The women should therefore undergo a medical checkup before the cleanup begins so they are aware of the risks involved, and volunteer coordinators should explain the potential harm of petroleum byproducts and discourage those at high risk of harm to their health from taking part in the cleanup.

What has upset the female volunteers most was that no one has been carrying out medical checks or providing any information at all about the dangers of fuel oil. The officials simply impose bans, and do so under the guise of concern for reproductive health. Yet the women working to clean the beaches may not even want to have children.

Alisa: “If officials were so worried about the women’s health, they should pay to have them tested and treated, if necessary.”*

Petroleum products can in fact cause a range of health problems in women: disturbances in the menstrual cycle, complications during pregnancy and fetal abnormalities, and the onset of anemia.

Women are more vulnerable to the effects of petroleum products: their dangerous components accumulate in fatty tissue, which women have more of, and affect the endocrine system. In some cases, these components are eliminated more slowly than in men, due to the effect of sex hormones on the liver.

Alisa (right): “And yet no one has been calling on the women of Tuapse to evacuate the city!”
Yelisei (left): “For that to happen, the authorities would have to admit that the disaster is real and that it has consequences.”

The volunteers themselves complain that they are short of hands. The authorities, meanwhile, have promised to have the beaches completely cleared of oil by 1 June. But environmentalists doubt that the clean-up crews will manage to meet the deadline: the area affected by the spill is simply too vast.

What is more, the city is experiencing “oil rain”: petroleum byproducts are released into the air and settling on the ground in the guise black droplets along with the rainfall. They then seep into the soil, poisoning plants, animals, and the drinking water.

The oil rain poses a particular risk to pregnant women living in the city, rather than those directly involved in the cleanup.

“In this sense, now is the worst possible time to try to have children. There is a high probability that these children will suffer from developmental abnormalities. Pregnant women need to keep their windows closed, wash the floors at home twice a day, wear a mask (even indoors), change their clothes daily, and take every possible precaution to avoid exposure to this filth. And the same goes for those who aren’t pregnant, too,” ecologist Igor Shkradyuk told 7×7.

The authorities did in fact evacuate residents from one district—not due to the risk of oil poisoning, however, but rather due to the aftermath of the drone strikes. Residents of private homes destroyed by fire were among those who left. Yet the authorities have been making strenuous efforts to conceal the true magnitude of the pollution. For instance, Sergei Boyko, head of the Krasnodar Territory’s Tuapse Municipal District, said on Solovyov Live that Tuapse would be ready to welcome tourists during the resort season, arguing that “what happened on one beach will in no way affect the other beaches.”

The Emergency Situations Ministry’s Tuapse office eventually explained to Kommersant that volunteers are barred only from the most heavily polluted (and, therefore, most dangerous) beaches. Nevertheless, the women have been going on with their work despite these “recommendations”: they have not only being cleaning the beaches but also washing animals, removing polluted sand, coordinating volunteers, sending out appeals for assistance, and recording videos documenting the situation.

Yelisei (right): “I think they would like it if they were called environmental superheroines, or just superheroines, like earlier.” Alisa (left): “I think they’d like it more if more rescuers came to Tuapse, whatever their sex, and if the rescuers who are already here stopped being pestered.”

If you have read about the risks of poisoning and are still willing to help, check out the volunteers’ channels on Telegram and VKontakte. Volunteers are urgently needed right now to catch birds, wash animals, and clean up the fuel oil. Before setting out, be sure to contact the coordinators, as particular jobs, locations, and needs for supplies may change during the course of the day. A bot set up by the volunteers provides their contact details. You can also help remotely: fundraising efforts support washing operations, the bird-catching team, and the equipment warehouse are ongoing.

* AI tools were used to produce the images in this article.

Source: 7 x 7 weekly email newsletter, 5 May 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

No sooner had local officials declared that they had finally brought under control a fire that raged for days at an oil refinery in Tuapse, a port town on Russia’s Black Sea coast, than it flared up again.

The blaze is visible from as far away as Sochi — and even from space. Satellite images show vast oil slicks spreading across the sea. Online, volunteers are posting videos of dead marine life, including dolphins, their bodies coated in crude.

How much oil has already been spilled: hundreds of tons, or thousands? No one seems to know.

President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that there were “no serious threats in Tuapse, and people are managing to cope with the challenges they face on the ground.” Governor Venyamin Kondratyev told him so, he said.

Putin is no stranger to calamity, or to minimizing it. But it is worth taking a look at what is actually happening.

The inferno first erupted last week. Storage tanks filled with petroleum products burned, sending columns of black smoke visible more than 100 kilometers away.

The volume of combustion byproducts released into the air was so large that Tuapse experienced what residents called “oil rain,” because it felt like the city had been doused with oil. A film resembling an oil slick settled on streets, plants, people and any pets or stray animals that happened to be outside at the wrong time.

That film contains a toxic mix of pollutants, including carcinogens such as benzene. Because the fire is still burning, dangerous concentrations of these substances persist in the air. Black rain may well continue.

Officials say levels of harmful substances are two to three times above what is considered safe.

To paraphrase a Russian proverb, lying is nothing compared to lifting sacks. Talk is cheap.

There is no reliable independent data, but it is hard to imagine that concentrations near the fire are merely double or triple permissible limits. More likely, they are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times higher.

Last week, roughly 60% of the facility’s storage capacity was on fire. Now the rest is burning.

The resulting clouds of soot and carcinogens are especially dangerous for children, the elderly and those with cardiovascular or respiratory conditions. People with fragile health are already feeling the effects. The rise in cancer rates will come later; that is how such exposures work.

And when the fire finally burns out, the disaster will not end. Toxic residues left behind by the fires and the oily rains will remain in the environment, re-entering human bodies again and again.

Nor is the damage confined to the air. At least several hundred tons of petroleum products have spilled into the Tuapse River and the Black Sea. Satellite imagery showed large slicks as early as last week; the leakage continued this week. The impact on marine ecosystems and the coastline will be severe. Drinking water contamination is a real risk.

To understand what may come next, one need only recall the spill in the Black Sea at the end of 2024, which saw thousands of tons of oil products released. Fish, mollusks, dolphins and birds died in large numbers.

As then, volunteers are now desperately scrambling to respond while Putin and Governor Kondratyev tell the country that there are no serious problems.

Remember those videos where they’re cleaning oil off the birds? Well, most of them die anyway. I don’t mean to say that washing the birds is pointless — some of them will survive. Just not many.

Even if the visible oil is removed from beaches, the problem will linger for years. Each storm will dredge buried petroleum products back up to the surface. Effective, repeated cleanup requires sustained resources and political will, both of which are in short supply given the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the global oil market.

In my more than 35 years of environmental work, I cannot recall a single instance in which the Russian authorities were prepared for an emergency. They always take a long time to decide what to do at the outset of a crisis, when time is of the essence.

A proper response to a major refinery fire would begin with clear public guidance: stay indoors, close windows, limit exposure. It would include the distribution of effective protective equipment — not surgical masks, but respirators capable of filtering fine particles — and, crucially, early evacuation to areas with clean air.

Reports of evacuations suddenly appeared on Tuesday. In reality, residents of a few streets were moved to a nearby school, still within the zone of contamination, rather than taken somewhere where the air isn’t polluted with carcinogens.

This catastrophe is part of the broader consequences of the senseless and bloody war Putin unleashed more than four years ago. He isn’t bothered by the hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian military deaths for which he bears direct responsibility, so it’s naive to expect him to care about burning oil tanks and poisoned seas.

And things will only get worse.

Vladimir Slivyak is co-chairman of Russian environmental group Ecodefense and laureate of the Right Livelihood Award 2021.

Source: Vladimir Slivyak, “The Kremlin Fiddles While Tuapse Burns,” Moscow Times, 30 April 2026

Mr. Nobody and His Critics

Nobody About Nothing

Russian films don’t win Oscars every time out, so I finally made up my mind to watch the movie Mr. Nobody Against Putin. It turned out that the film wasn’t about a school, the war, Russia, or Putin—it’s Pavel Talankin’s film about himself. The film begins with him and ends with him. He’s in almost every scene in between. And it goes on like that for ninety minutes.

I don’t know if you can call a film a documentary when the vast majority of its scenes are staged. I suppose you can, but the Academy’s members know best. I’m not a film critic, and my opinions are purely those of an amateur. I’m a mere viewer.

I was amazed by how tacky the self-promotion was. I mean, it is just off the charts. Here comes the protagonist, taking what he calls a “super risk”: he tapes the letter X on the school’s windows over the letter Z. He claims that the X is a symbol of protection for Ukrainian refugees. (?) And here he is, secretly but on camera, ripping the Russian flag from the school’s roof, as witnessed by a cameraman* and Talankin himself. And there he is getting a haircut—a charming, intimate detail, certainly vital for understanding the current state of affairs Russia’s regions. When the toilets in the school’s bathroom flashed on screen, I feared that Talankin would be in the starring role there too, but that didn’t happen, thank God.

It’s funny that Talankin has arranged the books in his home by the color of their spines, and it’s even funnier that, while looking every bit the diehard undergrounder and following the orders of a mysterious overseas handler, he messes around with hard drives that must be smuggled out of the country. We’re living in the twenty-first century, so what prevents Talankin from uploading at least a few gigabytes of video footage to the cloud or transferring it via FTP, instead of lugging the hardware through customs? But I get it: that would not be cinematic, and the documentary would have suffered.

Whether the documentary suffered because Talankin filmed children and adults without informing them of his objective is a question for the Academy’s members. Perhaps this is acceptable in the American cinema, but journalists are obliged to honestly tell interviewees on whose behalf they are interviewing them and to what end.

I’m not arguing with the fact that Talankin’s film won an Oscar. If Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for the color of his skin, and Bob Dylan got a Nobel Prize in Literature for his songs, then why shouldn’t Pavel Talankin get an Oscar for a docudrama about Pavel Talankin? It’s all good.

Something else makes my blood boil. It’s not even the profanity that is liberally sprinkled throughout the film. That’s just how the characters express their folksiness. I get that. What makes my blood boil is the extraordinary ease with which Talankin switches from serving the regime as a propagandist to a new job on a new project. Before he was hired to make the film, he faithfully played the despicable role of a Putin propagandist, organizing and filming pseudo-patriotic productions on orders from his superiors. He sends reports to the Ministry of Education. He reshoots when the first take doesn’t turn out. He corrects the teacher who repeatedly fails to pronounce the word “denazification”—and again, he does take after take. Everything has to look perfect. That’s the job. He gets paid for it.

It would be fine if Talakin didn’t get it, like the moronic history teacher who garners so much screen time in the film. But no, Talankin gets it all. He films what he himself calls “show lessons.” He admits that he works in propaganda: “It wears me out.” While filming a pro-war car rally he laments, “I have to play by their rules.” Why does he have to play by their rules? Is there no other way for him to make a living? He cannot fail to realize that he’s just as much an obedient cog in the propaganda machine as the history teacher. Only Talankin’s caliber is smaller, and his threads are thinner. He doesn’t explain why he has to play by their rules. But it’s obvious anyway, and there’s a universal explanation for it: honest work pays less and demands a heavier workload. The entire propaganda machine in an authoritarian regime is based on this. There’s always a way out if you want out.

But then something clicked, Talankin’s fortunes changed, and now all the video footage he had painstakingly compiled was put to a new use. Up until that point, he had worked in the field of pro-government propaganda; now he would work to expose it. Why not kill two birds with one stone? Everything must be put to use, not a single frame should be wasted.

People sometimes do suddenly acknowledge the harmfulness of their work and make a complete U-turn. Such things do happen, thank God. But if they do it sincerely, and not for opportunistic reasons, their conscience torments them over their past deeds; they suffer, and they seek to atone for the past through their new endeavors. They don’t gloss over the mistakes they have made in life. Such people are instantly recognizable: they do not flaunt their rewards, they take no delight in newfound fame, and they often pay a heavy price for the new path they have gone down. Talankin’s is a different case entirely. His is merely an elegant segue from one cushy job to another. In that sense, we can certainly congratulate Mr. Nobody on his success.

* Podrabinek’s is the only review of Mr. Nobody Against Putin which I’ve read that mentions the mysterious second cameraman (who is clearly a consummate professional), although they were apparently on location in Karabash for months on end. In the film’s credits, they are identified only as “Anonymous,” but their palpable presence is not otherwise mentioned or explained, not even in the film itself. ||||| TRR

Source: Alexander Podrabinek (Facebook), 18 March 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

MR.NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN?

Many years ago, as a graduate student at UMICH in Ann Arbor, I took two semesters on Nabokov with the late Omri Ronen – one of the most extraordinary intellectual experiences I had there, and that’s saying something.

We spent a great deal of time on Lolita, especially its dialogue with Dostoevsky’s “cult of feelings,” and on Humbert Humbert as a “romantic” yet profoundly unreliable narrator. Ronen often emphasized that while it is natural to sympathize with a narrator who claims to be in love, Nabokov refuses to do the reader’s ethical work for them. Humbert Humbert is a criminal who destroys Lolita’s life – something she herself makes clear by the end (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”) The reader’s task is not to be disarmed by his rhetoric, but to remain morally alert and to imagine the experience of his victim.

Watching Mr. Nobody Against Putin and reading its reception, I could not help but think just how thoroughly this lesson seems to be missed by those celebrating the film and its narrator, who is every bit part and parcel of the phenomenon he set out to document.

The film centers overwhelmingly on Pavel Talankin’s feeeeeelings, granting them disproportionate narrative space, something not uncommon in Russian films about Russia. His attachment to Karabash and its people, to the textures of Russian life (the ugly Soviet prefab panel blocks that have gained a somewhat romantic vibe among the younger Russians, the harsh winters, etc.) is rendered with great sympathy. So too is the school environment. But Talankin’s commitment to “loving” the bleak, the outwardly ugly, and the brutal is not just an aesthetic quirk — it’s a moral stance. What is strikingly absent in all of it is Ukraine and its people, which is only briefly mentioned as a destination, not a society under attack. Russian children are not just being indoctrinated to volunteer, to be mobilized, and to die, they are being prepared to kill and that is what they do in Ukraine — something, which is not even once mentioned.

There is also an obvious schism between the reality Talankin documents and the way he interprets it. In his account, he appears to be the only figure with agency — the only one capable of making meaningful choices — while everyone else is stripped of agency and reduced to a passive recipient of propaganda. Even the sinister history teacher, the school’s most zealous and vicious propagandist, is described as “brainwashed.” But if that is the case, who, exactly, is doing the brainwashing? These are the very people who inculcate cynicism, cowardice, and doublethink in their students, they are actors in this process, not victims, and they do have moral choices, just like everybody else. (It is also worth noting that the community is neither visibly poor nor destitute — undercutting the familiar explanation that people volunteer to kill because poverty leaves them no choice.)

Again, this is not just an aesthetic imbalance, but also a moral one, with the focus remaining on “our” suffering, “our” losses, “our” children, not what we and these children have done to others. As a result — just as Omri Ronen warned his sophomore Nabokov students — the aggressor is sentimentalized, and his perspective eclipses that of his victims.

P.S. I also watched Ksenia Sobchak’s documentary about so-called “black widows” — women who marry Russian soldiers, often under dubious circumstances (with grooms heavily intoxicated), and later claim substantial compensation after their deaths. In contrast to Pavel Talankin’s film, it’s really hard to sympathize with any of the people on the screen. Sobchak’s role within the Kremlin’s propaganda ecosystem is well documented; what is worth briefly noting here is how thoroughly this story (and Russian “society” at large) is framed as a story about women: as caregivers, opportunists, con-artists, bereaved wives, or negligent, alcoholic mothers and grandmothers who affect the fates of men, entirely at their disposal.

Men, by contrast, are consistently infantilized, cast as troublemakers, drifters, habitual drinkers, and absent fathers with no clear purpose in life. But invariably “nice”: women say (posthumously) that they are sorry for them (again, barely a reference to what these men did to Ukrainians). In this framing, war supplies these men what their civilian lives lack: purpose, agency, a “heroic”, manly identity, a sense of belonging, and a handsome income – leaving behind, in the end, something for the women to remember them by.

Source: Ksenia Krimer (Facebook), 18 March 2026. Thanks to Alexandr Wolodarskij for the heads-up.

Hello! This week we cover how Oscar-winning documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, went down inside Russia, and why it’s caused a stir among both the Kremlin’s backers and its critics.

Russians fight over Mr. Nobody

Earlier this month, Russia won the Best Documentary Oscar for the first time in more than 80 years. Well, sort of. The statuette went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin, a Danish-Czech production directed by Pavel Talankin, a young teacher from a small town in the Urals, who documented pro-war propaganda inside Russia’s school system. Western critics were enthusiastic about its take on the militarization of schools amid the invasion of Ukraine. Russian officials and propaganda outlets were, unsurprisingly, not so keen on the film. But interestingly, even some anti-war campaigners have criticized the movie, accusing Talankin of making a shallow diatribe that did not advance our understanding of Russia’s wartime propaganda machine.

The documentary tells the story of educator and school videographer Talankin and his school in Karabash, a small industrial town of about 10,000 people in the Urals region of Chelyabinsk. Talankin, now 35, was a highly respected teacher in his hometown. In 2018, he won the regional “Leader of the 21st Century” competition, his students won an award at a local festival for a movie shot under his direction, and in 2021 the town’s mayor praised a virtual model of Karabash that Talankin’s students had created in Minecraft.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Talankin was assigned to film propaganda lessons in which children were taught Kremlin talking points about the war’s supposedly noble aims, and the unfairness of the West towards Russia. Talankin and US documentary filmmaker David Borenstein got in touch via an online advert in Russia seeking people whose lives had been changed by the invasion. The videographer offered to use the footage he was obtaining as part of a joint documentary. Talankin carried on working and then eventually smuggled hard drives containing two-and-a-half years of footage out of Russia.

The clips from the propaganda lessons — called “Conversations about Important Things” in Russia — were the centerpiece of the film. In one scene, a teacher, reading a propaganda script, struggles to pronounce the words “denazification” and “demilitarization”, two of the official reasons the Kremlin gave for its war. In another, a history teacher (the film’s main antagonist) tells children how in the near future France and Britain will soon face economic collapse as people there are already starving due to sanctions on Russia. Another scene shows mercenaries from the now defunct private Wagner militia advising children how to throw grenades.

What Talankin showed from one school in a provincial town is the same as what’s happening in thousands throughout Russia. After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the state embraced mass propaganda in education. Lessons with war veterans were already commonplace, as were issuing Kremlin-approved justifications for the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the seizure of Ukrainian territory. Watching the film, it’s easy to imagine how the exact same “Conversations about Important Things” are happening right across Russia on a daily basis from Moscow to Vladivostok.

The award was [a] surprise, with US film The Perfect Neighbor going into the Oscars as the favourite. According to renowned Ukrainian producer Alexander Rodnyansky, Mr. Nobody Against Putin won out for its portrayal of a “dumbing down mechanism” that could be applied in multiple countries.

However, despite winning the most prestigious documentary prize on offer, there are many who are openly critical of the film — and they are by no means limited to supporters of the war and Putin’s regime. Several recurring complaints crop up. They include that Borenstein compiled the movie “for export” — targeting foreign audiences and festival juries — and that its success closed the door for any chance of a more powerful study of what is happening in Russian schools. In Russia, everybody knows about propaganda in educational institutions (for example, we wrote about it here) and, to them, this film does not offer anything new or go deeper than what has been widely reported. Doubters also say the film suffers from artificiality — especially in Talankin’s monologues. Some scenes, such as the tearing down of a Russian flag or the posting of the “Z” symbol backing the invasion in school windows — seemed staged to many critics.

Respected fact-checker Ilya Ber published a detailed analysis with several complaints that was widely shared on Russian-language Facebook groups. The claim that UNESCO described heavily polluted Karabash as the “dirtiest town on Earth” is not backed up by any documents and is simply an urban myth circulated in the Russian press. The film portrays children being checked with metal detectors as a symbol of a military dictatorship when, in fact, it’s standard procedure in Russian schools ahead of final exams and has nothing to do with the war. Finally, Ber questioned the underlying narrative that Talankin was in danger. He worked in a school where everyone knew his views, nobody denounced him and after the Oscars, pirated copies of the movie are widely available on VK, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook that is closely watched and de facto controlled by the authorities.

The filming of children without parental consent for use in the documentary is another sore point — and the one that Russia has officially latched on to. From an ethical point of view, all subjects should provide documented consent to take part in filming, and minors cannot be filmed without the permission of their parents or guardians. This is precisely the argument the Russian authorities are using and the Presidential Human Rights Council filed a complaint with the Oscars organizers alleging violation of children’s rights.

On the other hand, Talankin was not filming secretly. Children and parents knew they were being filmed for both the local education ministry and for his own projects. “It’s funny that all these years he would come around, film us, and say we would be on the BBC. We laughed at him like he was an idiot. And now he’s going to the Oscars. I don’t think he really believed it himself,” said one graduate of the school, speaking before the awards ceremony. “I knew they were filming me because we often had conversations on camera and it was some kind of lifestyle thing. I didn’t see anything wrong with it,” said another.

Of course, the film has many fans. Movie critic Ekaterina Barabash (who fled Russia while under house arrest for criticism of the authorities) noted that it was well made and gave a unique view inside the regime. Fellow critic Anton Dolin wrote that nobody had ever depicted the workings of propaganda with such chilling clarity. Political analyst Alexander Baunov felt that the fact Talankin filmed in the town where he was born, raised and had been living and working made his testimony especially valuable.

In Karabash, they prefer not to mention the film. According to Talankin himself, “a year ago, when the film came out, FSB officers came to the school and said: ‘This man wasn’t here, this film never existed. You don’t comment on the film, you don’t talk to this man,’”. He said that he’s considered a traitor in the town — a view shared by some propaganda outfits (1,2).

Most national pro-government media outlets have simply ignored the film, which was Russia’s first documentary Oscar for more than 80 years (in 1943 the award went to Moscow Strikes Back). Russian online movie service Kinopoisk, operated by IT giant Yandex, chose not to translate the film’s title into Russian in its live coverage of the Oscars ceremony.

Why the world should care

Despite all the criticism, Talankin managed to show Western audiences something that they had not seen before: exactly how brainwashing works in Russian schools. To Russian viewers, this was no surprise. Reports of propaganda lessons still frequently appear on school social media pages and in news roundups.

Source: Denis Kasyanchuk, “Everybody Against Mr Nobody,” The Bell, 24 March 2026. Translated by Andy Potts. The Bell‘s always informative and sometimes thought-provoking biweekly newsletters used to be free and were delivered to my inbox in whole. Last year, though, they went behind an extravagantly expensive paywall ($189 for a yearly subscription), and I have ignored them. But I was already prepping this omnibus post when a sneak preview of this week’s first newsletter popped into my email, and I couldn’t resist spending one dollar on a one-month trial subscription (which will revert to $18.90 monthly at trial’s end).

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