I don’t know Marina (not her real name) well. She worked with me for a couple of years remotely from her home in Lviv, Ukraine.
I know her well enough to recall that she was a hard worker, had a pleasant disposition, had an awesome accent, an adorable child, a devoted husband, and a very nice curio full of figurines and other collectibles in the living room.
Sometimes, during our Zoom “standup meetings” (everyone always sits for these), her squiggly toddler would pop her head in and smile and fiddle with something. “No, don’t do that,” Marina would say, mildly, about as annoyed as a kid lapping up an ice cream cone. She was a mother first, a software engineer second.
Then, one awful day in the middle of one of our software projects, she became a Ukrainian first, wondering if Vlad Putin was going to blow her curio, her home, her child, to smithereens.
That's what recently happened to the child being held in the top photo a little more than 4 years later.
Marina’s boss, the lead engineer for the Ukraine development team on our projects, began to tell us in his daily status reports over Zoom that there was a small chance a code change might be delayed a day or two because he'd be busy making Molotov cocktails that evening. He'd try his best, he'd say, but, well, the Molotovs came first. “I hope you understand,” he'd say to dead silence from the American team because we were still stupefied by the insanity of the invasion.
This was before the line of Russian tanks began to stall on the outskirts of Kyiv. This was when everyone thought it was only a matter of time until kids who write code for a living would be throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks rolling into Lviv, just 40 miles away from the Polish border.
When Putin invaded Ukraine, I was struck by how similar her home was to millions of homes in the United States, and I wondered how we’d fare if a nation with Russia’s firepower rolled across our border and attacked us.
When Marina later dialed into a meeting from a church basement in Poland as a refugee, with her toddler in tow, the difference between my situation and hers became stark.1
Putin the humanitarian
This week, TrumpleSnakeSkin’s busiest diplomat, billionaire real estate Tycoon Steve Witkoff, called Putin a humanitarian during a meeting with him, most likely to discuss a new business partnership.2
This is the same week that a Russian strike killed the baby you see in the picture at the top of this essay.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of Ukrainian children have had their lives snuffed out by Witkoff’s humanitarian. When the news of this particular child’s death hit the interwebs this week, I thought of Marina, and the hundreds of times her city was struck by missiles during the last four and a half years when she and her child could have been one of the humanitarian’s victims, too.
Ukraine wasn’t the first
In 1999, Vladimir Putin ordered the complete destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny.
The Russian military laid waste to Grozny, killing tens of thousands of civilians. In Putin’s own words, his troops “fulfilled their task to the end.”
These paragraphs, written for Boston’s local NPR affiliate WBUR, are typical of the reports of the media summarizing Vladimir Putin’s destruction of Grozny when Chechen nationalists tried to secede from Russia.3
Here’s more (bold is mine):
By October 1999, then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered the complete takeover of the Chechen capital of Grozny. From December 1999 to February 2000, the Russian military laid siege to Grozny. Putin vowed that the military would not stop bombing Grozny until Russian troops quote ‘fulfilled their task to the end.’ They finished in February 2000, when the BBC’s Andrew Harding stepped foot into Grozny, a place the U.N. declared the most destroyed city on Earth.
Russian troops drive into Grozny, the city they destroyed in order to capture. In the suburbs, we saw mile after mile of total devastation, not a single house or cottage intact. Giant craters everywhere. Most streets are still too dangerous to walk down. Thousands of mines and booby traps have been discovered by Russian troops. Not always intentionally. ... This is unreal, it’s like walking through a World War II film set, this was the center of Grozny. These were 12, 15 story apartment blocks. Now there is nothing left here…
…This was an oil town, a prosperous oil town of half a million people. And it was flattened totally, block by block, ruthlessly, efficiently, deliberately. With every single weapon short of nuclear that the former Soviet army had.
Nobody really knows how many people were killed in Grozny.
Putin’s been at it ever since.
Georgia
In 2008, he ordered ethnic cleansing in the nation of Georgia, a hop, skip, and a jump away from Chechnya, his earlier killing field.
192,000 people in Georgia lost their homes during Georgia’s attempt to break away from Russia. Putin relied heavily on a proxy, the armed forces of a place called South Ossetia, which was loyal to Putin. Human Rights Watch, an international agency with a name that describes its purpose, declared the region an ethnic cleansing zone led by South Ossetia, with Putin and his Russian troops applauding from the sidelines.4
Ukraine
Alexander Nimayeva was a father of five living in the freezing realm of Siberia whose experience with guns most likely centered around taking a shot or two at a furry Siberian varmint. Suddenly, one fine day in February 2022, he was on his way to fight Ukrainians.
According to his wife, a journalist in the southern Siberian region of Buryatia, Alexander received a summons to report “to an urgent 4 a.m. meeting where it was announced that a train had been organized to bring men to the city of Chita,” according to the New York Times.5
“My husband is 38 years old, he is not in the reserve, he did not serve,” Ms. Nimayeva said in a video addressed to regional officials.
Despite their Russian-sounding names, many Russians in the Siberian hinterlands are not ethnic Russians, which makes them supremely expendable in the eyes of vampire Vlad. Russian demographics and geography give him a built-in advantage: It’s easy to gather non-Russians and conscript them into his war against Ukraine by simply feasting on large geographic regions of the Russian Federation that are full of them.
According to the New York Times, folks in Yakutsk, which for me was, curiously, always a favorite target when I played Risk as a kid, were “being taken by airplane out of remote Arctic villages.”6
The Russian defense minister at the time, Sergei Shoigu, claimed on Russian state-controlled television that “only” 300,000 men (as if that’s not a lot) were being marched into conscription. Reports around Russia indicated much higher numbers.7
The Nova Gazeta, a former Moscow-based newspaper shut down by Putin and now publishing out of Ukraine, reported at the time that “The secret seventh paragraph of the decree on mobilization allows the Ministry of Defense to call up one million people.”8
Putin ultimately conscripted a lot more than that. The casualty list within the Russian armed forces looks like something from a world war: 1,572,790 killed or wounded.
Many of those killed were men like Alexander Nimayeva, the father of five living in the freezing realm of Siberia. We don’t know where he is today, but there’s a good chance he’s buried six feet deep in the Siberian tundra.
Meanwhile, Putin has been threatening the world with nuclear annihilation if his fortunes in Ukraine don’t turn around, which they never do, even when he rains missiles onto Kyiv.
Putin understands terror.
In the war’s early days, when the war seemed to be going his way, he sent troops into seized Ukrainian territory door-to-door to take a vote among the terrorized people still living there.
This was a typical scenario:9
“Do you agree that your territory is now a part of the great Russian motherland?” a tipsy Russian soldier, armed with a Kalashnikov and his face hidden by a balaclava, would ask a terrified homeowner. The poor woman, shaking and just wanting to get back to her beet borscht because that’s all there was left to feed her kids, shakily nodded her head as the soldier jotted down her reply.
I’m not sure what the result would have been if the answer had been “no”, but I’m also pretty sure the answer was never “no”.
Teachers, too, were subjected to a form of terror that only a sadistic mind like Vlad’s could conceive:10
In the Buryatia region, teachers have been tasked with distributing draft notices, according to Vladimir Budaev, an activist with the Free Buryatia Foundation, an antiwar group based abroad. An acquaintance there received his summons at 11 p.m. on Wednesday from a teacher knocking on the door, he said.
And you thought we treated teachers like crap in the U.S.
One more quote from that New York Times story:
On social media, activists in regions like Kabardino-Balkaria in the Caucasus and Yakutia in northeastern Siberia kept a running tally of the summonses that had arrived in various villages. A woman who has already lost one son in the war told a New York Times reporter that three buses carrying newly mobilized soldiers had left her town in Dagestan, in the Caucasus, one of Russia’s poorest regions.
And this:
In Neryungri, the second largest town in Sakha, also known as Yakutia, video footage appeared to show dozens of men being gathered at the Gornyak football stadium and loaded on to buses bound for recruitment centres, as family members bid tearful farewells. Many of the men appeared to be in their 30s and 40s.
People in Russia quickly learned how to say their goodbyes:
CNN reported at the time that some Russian citizens who had the temerity to protest Putin’s call-ups were rewarded for their chutzpah by getting drafted at police stations immediately after getting arrested for protesting the war.
Meanwhile, the more sophisticated members of Putin’s army (in other words, the soldiers who aren’t running away from Ukrainian bullets) held guns to the heads of nuclear workers at Zaporizhzhia while its poor workers tried to prevent a nuclear catastrophe during the initial Russian invasion.11
Every day one of Putin’s missiles lands near the plant is another opportunity for a meltdown that would make Chernobyl seem like an insignificant fireworks accident.
So much for the argument that he won’t lob nukes because of the threat of fallout.
And there’s this, from the BBC:12
Sergei — not his real name — has already been called up.
The 26-year-old PhD student and lecturer was expecting a delivery of groceries the night before the Putin address, when two men arrived in civilian clothes handing him military papers to sign.
That, my friends, is Putin’s version of humanitarianism. Back then, the referendum and other armed forces “recruitment” tactics were well known in European circles. Along with the constant threats of nukes, it scared the pants off our European friends.
Putin has made it clear from the beginning of this long, World War One-style war that there would be no limits to Russian war tactics against Ukraine. Including nukes.
You can be sure that Ukraine’s current attacks on Russia’s refineries have turned the already dark-minded Putin into a seething demon with visions of genocide dancing in his head.
Putin’s “humanitarianism” started early in the Ukraine War.
One of the first things that Witkoff’s humanitarian friend Putin did in this war was repeat his Grozny frenzy by destroying the Ukrainian city of Mariupol when he was unable to seize it with his ground troops.
First, he laid siege to it for four months, cutting it off from everything, including food supplies. Folks, this was when the war was going well for him.
Ukrainian troops tried to take shelter in Mariupol’s Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, but were smoked out by terror bombing, and eventually surrendered.
The Red Cross, which has seen a bit of fighting and isn’t known for hyperbole, called Mariupol’s situation during the siege “apocalyptic.”13
The humanitarian’s terror bombing included strikes against places like a children’s and maternity hospital, which was full of women in labor when it was destroyed.
This has been Putin’s modus operandi since his initial invasion of Ukraine. His current tactic is to try to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in time for winter so its people can freeze to death.
Even his successful manipulation of the Trump regime, which has resulted in the Startlink/Starshield service intermittently dropping service, which in turn results in Ukrainian defense drones dropping from the skies, is a form of terror. Imagine trying to program your drones to rely on such a thing. Imagine trying to protect your troops this way.
The maestro of violence
Like the great Russian cultural masters, Putin is a master choreographer. He has turned Russia’s tradition of cultural magnificence on its head by turning violence into an art form.
The Russian master of violence poisons Russian defectors even after they leave the country.14 He locks up his political opponents at home.15
Alexei Navalny, once one of Putin’s rare political opponents, was flying one day from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk to Tomsk, a city on the Tom River in Siberia.
Before his flight, according to the Guardian, Navalny ordered a cup of tea at an airport cafe. He fell violently ill shortly after boarding his plane:16
“He started feeling really sick. They struggled to bring him round and he was screaming,” Lebedev said. Realising Navalny’s condition was grave, the pilot made an emergency landing at Omsk airport. Navalny was wheeled off on a gurney. Video from the scene showed a supine figure, looking pale and distressed. Medics loaded him into a yellow ambulance. They drove him away.
More from the same Guardian story:
Over the next few hours, the scenes at Omsk hospital number one were ghoulishly awful. According to Yarmysh, medical staff initially acknowledged that Navalny had probably been poisoned. Soon, however, police turned up, flooding the corridor outside the patient’s room. After that the doctors were less forthcoming. They were seemingly terrified of speaking out.
Navalny tried to recover from the poison attack in a Siberian gulag. Then, he died.
Violence is the new Russian art form. Nobody has mastered it better than Vladimir Putin, whom the Trump regime refers to as a humanitarian and who is now being treated as our new ally.
Putin incites conflict in Europe and faraway lands like America. Brexit, after all, was one of his St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency’s first successful initiatives. It was a practice run for the American elections.17
When Western economies or governments struggle, the Internet Research Agency shifts into high gear. You can be sure its troll farm is heavily involved in France’s current social unrest, no matter how genuine much of it is.
This is the same troll apparatus that helped the Con-in-Chief beat Hillary in 2016, something she’s keenly aware of these days, considering she’s one of the few Democrats who have consistently spoken out about Russian interference in American politics.
Putin’s war against America
Putin hasn’t directly attacked America. Instead, the Russian impresario of violence used the internet to sow divisiveness and hate while he helped install a sociopathic president. Years from now, his actions will be studied in war colleges around the world, if they aren’t already.
He’s been waging a stealth war against the United States pretty much since he gained power after the disastrous term of Boris Yeltsin, who never met a glass of vodka or an oligarch he didn’t like.
Putin famously aimed his internet army at U.S. social media sites to influence the election because he correctly saw the Orange Mouth of Methane as an epicenter of American destabilization. Russian influence on the bloviator’s henchmen is alleged to include such charming individuals as Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort, both of whom managed the Orange Puffaroon’s presidential campaign.18
According to the Mueller Report, which we’ve all forgotten because it was buried by the administration being investigated, there were multiple Russian/Bannon connections, including:
The sharing of polling data with an alleged Russian intelligence operative, a practice begun by Bannon’s predecessor Paul Manafort, continued into the period while Bannon was running the Trump campaign. Manafort was also in contact with Bannon during the period.
Bannon also played a key role in setting up the meeting in the Seychelles between Trump adviser Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the sanctioned, state-run Russian Direct Investment Fund, and subsequently discussed the meeting with Prince.
Steve Bannon’s ability to stay out of a federal penitentiary is now legendary in the right-wing world of snakes and snarls. Even when it looked like he’d be swept up in the tide of Mueller’s investigations, he continued to blather in his “War Room” podcasts as if he would remain untouched forever.
Then Merrick Garland became Biden’s Attorney General, and decided to take a long nap with his feet on top of his desk in a remarkable display of lazy intellectual flatulence that will be studied by law schools for the next hundred years.
One would think that once the Orange Pestilence was elected, Putin would have been happy with the victory.
One would be wrong, because humanitarians like Putin are never happy.
Putin then went after American women, proving that it isn’t only Republicans who have disdain for the better gender.19
Russia’s army of internet orcs staged a sustained attack on a Women’s March in 2017, which was the first significant protest against the head of New York’s luckiest crime family after he snuck into the Oval Office with fewer popular votes than “Lock her up” Hillary.
They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners. But one message performed better with audiences than any other.
It singled out an element of the Women’s March that might, at first, have seemed like a detail: Among its four co-chairs was Ms. Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist whose hijab marked her as an observant Muslim.
18 months, 152 Russian social media accounts, and 2,642 tweets later, Russian attacks on Linda Sarsour, the original leader of the Women’s March, were so successful that her name became synonymous with the disintegration of the movement’s organized effort against their worst enemy.
Russia continues its attacks on America through social media to this day.
Most of us think things like, “those dumb rural idiots and their love for the Moron of Mar-a-Lago is sheer madness,” without considering the very simple and quite discoverable truth that their thinking is significantly shaped by Russian intelligence officers tapping at their keyboards in St. Petersburg, Russia.
This sustained attack has produced meme after meme after meme, trying to influence Americans. They post on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, TikTok, and others in an attempt to shape opinion.
Short of war, there’s not much you and I can do about this. But we can do one thing: Realize that most of the trolls you see on a variety of social media sites are paid by Vlad Putin’s oil money, which American President Krasnov has now helped unleash at a level not seen since Putin’s war against Ukraine began.
What is Russia without its despots?
Sadly, Russia has a long history of despotic rulers. The nation, for all its cultural immensity, has always had a bit of an inferiority complex.20
But now, its people are paying a nasty penalty for their subservience. They looked askance as the war grew, pretending that their favorite American brands were leaving because America is mean.
Now, Putin is calling more of their children to war and forcing Russian citizens into gasoline queues reminiscent of American gas lines during the OPEC crisis of the 1970s.
More than a million of its young people have been killed or maimed by Witkoff’s humanitarian.
We can’t know yet if the worst is yet to come, or how much worse it can get if it does come.
But the fact that the Trump regime is trying to turn someone like this into an ally can only mean one thing. The United States is now a part of a new Axis of Evil.
The U.S. Regime Just Declared Itself an Axis Power
In December 2024, I discussed how the American presidential election began America’s transition into an Axis power for the 21st Century (see Notes). There, I argued that Russian and Chinese political pundits were eager for a Trump presidency so that a new world order could be established.
Thanks for reading!
You can now purchase a PDF of all my Substack Fiction. Only $4.99. That’s less than a Starbucks Venti Latte.
Enter SUBSCRIBER_SPECIAL to get a 20 percent discount.
It’s also now available on Amazon/Kindle in ebook, paperback, and hardcover formats (the Kindle version is free if you have Kindle Unlimited):
If you are a paid subscriber, it’s available free as a Perk. Just go to the “Perks” page via the web page menu to find it.
You can help me reach more people by subscribing (paid or free), sharing, restacking, and commenting.
Footnotes
Marina is back in Lviv, but the terror overhead continues.
Heather Cox Richardson writes:
In the news, Trump’s abandonment of the traditional allies of the United States to embrace Vladimir Putin and Russia remains front and center. Today, videos circulated of Trump’s special envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” even as the Russian military continues to bombard Ukrainian civilians, this week killing a baby in a stroller at a public park.
Today, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton told Kara Swisher: “I continue to believe that Putin has things on Trump. I continue to believe that he is holding photos, videos, whatever it might be.” Clinton reiterated that Trump “is a willing Putin puppet to help Putin. Putin’s not going to stop with Ukraine…. I guess Trump has this idea that he wants to divide the world,” Clinton said. “He gets the Western Hemisphere, Putin gets Russia and Europe, and Xi Jinping gets the rest of the world.”
Of course, I’ve gone further than Hillary in the past on just how compromised the Traitor-in-Chief is. It all began in the 1980s:
Is Trump Intentionally Trying to Destroy the United States?
We hear stuff like this all the time in one form or another: “He’s destroying the country!”
Hillary has long been one of the very few prominent Democrats willing to accuse him of being in Putin’s lap.
McQuilkin, Hilary, and Meghna Chakrabarti. “What Putin’s Destruction of Grozny in 1999 Means for Ukraine Now | On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti.” wbur. WBUR, March 2, 2022. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/03/02/putin-grozny-chechen-ukraine-russia-military-past.
Troianovski, Anton, Valerie Hopkins, Ivan Nechepurenko, and Alina Lobzina. “Ukraine War Comes to Russia as Putin Imposes Draft.” nytimes. The New York Times, September 22, 2022.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/world/europe/putin-russia-military-ukraine-war.html.
New York Times, ibid
Lendon, Brad. “Putin Can Call up All the Troops He Wants, but Russia Can’t Train or Support Them.” CNN, September 22, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/22/europe/russia-mobilization-logistics-analysis-intl-hnk-ml.
Bilefsky, Dan, Cora Engelbrecht, and Maria Varenikova. “Referendums in Russian-Occupied Ukraine Evoke Fear, Anger and Defiance..” nytimes. The New York Times, September 23, 2022.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/24/world/europe/referendums-in-russian-occupied-ukraine-evoke-fear-anger-and-defiance.html.
New York Times, ibid
Granados, Samuel. “Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant on the Frontline in the War in Ukraine.” Reuters, September 2022. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/ZAPORIZHZHIA/mypmnznjqvr/.
Peter, Laurence, and Laura Gozzi. “Ukraine War: Russia Arrests Hundreds as Call-Up Sparks Protests.” Bbc.com. BBC News, September 21, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62981293.
Harding, Luke, Julian Borger, and Jon Henley. “Russian Bombing of Maternity Hospital ‘Genocide,’ Says Zelenskiy.” the Guardian. The Guardian, March 9, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/09/ukraine-mariupol-civilians-russia-war.
Neuman, Scott. “Russia Fatally Poisoned A Prominent Defector In London, A Court Concludes.” NPR, September 21, 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/09/21/1039224996/russia-alexander-litvinenko-european-court-human-rights-putin.
The Associated Press. “Russia Has Officially Named Jailed Opposition Leader Alexei Navalny a Terrorist.” NPR, January 26, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/26/1075710006/russia-named-jailed-opposition-leader-alexei-navalny-terrorist.
Harding, Luke, and Andrew Roth. “A Cup of Tea, Then Screams of Agony: How Alexei Navalny Was Left Fighting for His Life.” the Guardian. The Guardian, August 20, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/20/a-cup-of-tea-then-screams-of-agony-how-alexei-navalny-was-left-fighting-for-his-life.
Weaver, Matthew, Robert Booth, Alex Hern, Shaun Walker, and Stacee Smith. “Russia Used Hundreds of Fake Accounts to Tweet about Brexit, Data Shows.” the Guardian. The Guardian, November 14, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/14/how-400-russia-run-fake-accounts-posted-bogus-brexit-tweets.
The Moscow Project. “Breaking Down the Mueller Report: Steve Bannon - The Moscow Project,” August 26, 2019. https://themoscowproject.org/breaking-down-the-mueller-report/breaking-down-the-mueller-report-steve-bannon/.
Barry, Ellen. “How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step.” nytimes. The New York Times, September 18, 2022.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/womens-march-russia-trump.html.
Remnick, David. “A Scholar of Stalin Discusses Putin, Russia, Ukraine, and the West.” The New Yorker, March 11, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/stephen-kotkin-putin-russia-ukraine-stalin. (Paywall)