Tag: russia

Time Magazine: Trump Is Getting Fooled by Putin Again

Here is the article, and I agree with every word here!

U.S. President Trump And Russian President Putin Meet On War In Ukraine At U.S. Air Base In Alaska
U.S. President Donald Trump greets Russian President Vladimir Putin as he arrives at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on Aug. 15, 2025 in Anchorage, Alaska. Andrew Harnik—Getty Images

What a difference a week makes.

Seven days ago, Ukraine’s supporters were watching on optimistically, as all signs pointed toward Donald Trump allowing Ukraine to acquire long-range Tomahawk missiles at a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday.

Giving the green light for Ukraine to buy and use such powerful weapons would have dramatically increased the country’s firepower and ability to strike military infrastructure inside Russia.

But Trump, whose tone towards Russia had hardened since his Alaska Summit with Putin in August failed to produce any meaningful results, made a U-turn that few saw coming.

Zelensky’s most recent trip to Washington had a lot more in common with the notorious shouting match that took place in the Oval Office in February. On top of Trump’s withholding of weapons Ukraine needs, he returned to some of his old talking points. Most alarmingly, he insisted that any halt to fighting would mean Ukraine give up the Donbas region to Putin—an area Russia has failed to take total control of, despite 11 years of fighting.

According to a report in the FT, Trump told the Ukrainian leader that if he did not bow to Putin’s will, Ukraine would be “destroyed.” The meeting reportedly descended into a bad-tempered shouting match, with Trump throwing away maps of the frontline, repeatedly swearing, and echoing a Kremlin talking point that the invasion is a “special operation, not even a war.”

Trump held a surprise two-and-a-half-hour phone call with the Russian President Vladimir Putin while Zelensky was on his way to America.

During that call, Trump reportedly agreed to a second face-to-face summit with Putin, this time in Budapest. Hungary is one of Putin’s few allies in the West, and its Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has repeatedly dug his heels in on Western efforts to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. To say it will be an embarrassment not just for Ukraine but many of its European allies is an understatement.

The meeting will allow Putin onto E.U. and NATO soil, where in theory he should be arrested given an ICC arrest warrant. The sight of Putin standing alongside the most powerful man in the world in a NATO country will instead likely be used as Kremlin propaganda—and another sign that Trump has once again been played for a fool by Putin.

For all the positive noises that have come each time Trump has made commitments to Ukraine, or encouraged NATO allies to spend more on defense, or apparently started to see Putin for who he really is, the facts speak for themselves. A BBC Verify report in August found that the number of Russian attacks on Ukraine has doubled since Trump’s inauguration. In recent weeks, mounting drone incursions have even brazenly entered NATO skies.

Trump’s desire for the war to end seems sincere. He has also made no secret of his wish to win a Nobel Peace Prize. But if the war in Ukraine ends with the nation’s future largely in the hands of its invader, the very idea that Trump is deserving of the prize would be a dishonor.

The Russian President is a man who lives by the axiom: give an inch, take a mile. When the Obama Administration let down Syria, Putin was more than happy to intervene there to prop up his ally Bashar al-Assad. The West’s decision to turn the other cheek after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 may have also emboldened him to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Putin scoring another summit with Trump is a diplomatic coup. So is Trump’s decision to renege on Tomahawks for Ukraine and swing back to Putin’s way of thinking.

A version of Occam’s razor—that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is probably correct—applies here. If Trump continues to reward Putin and punish Kyiv, Putin will most likely further escalate in Ukraine and test the West.

There is still hope that Trump may swing back to Ukraine, and heeding Zelensky’s call for an additional 25 U.S. Patriot anti-missile batteries is a good start.

Those closest to the U.S. President should urge Trump to do more for Ukraine, and stress that his current strategy is making Putin look smarter and stronger than Trump’s America.

For a man who cares about optics, that may be Ukraine’s best hope.

Get Out. Speak Up. Act

The destiny of Ukraine can’t be decided without Ukraine.

About Imperial Mindset – Again

One of the topics of our conversation with my friend, who visited me on Saturday, was how we both strive to break away from the imperial mindset we had for most of our lives, and how the war in Ukraine has forced both of us to re-examine our beliefs and our “defaults.” She told me about a project she is working on with the Chicago Kyrgyz community, and how she knew virtually nothing about Kyrgyzs before that. She feels a great deal of respect and admiration for this community, and she regrets that she was once clueless, following the “younger brothers” shortcuts of Soviet propaganda. I understand her very well, because I feel the same way, and I am ashamed of the younger me looking down at the “smaller nations.”

One particular story she told me, struck me. When she was teaching a gymnastic class in a Russian-speaking daycare for pre-schoolers, she noticed a girl, sitting by herself and not coming to participate in the gymnastics activities. She encouraged the girl to join, but the teacher, who herself was a Ukrainian refugee, dismissed the move: “What would you expect from aul?” The aul is a word for a small rural village, and the whole sentence was a diminitive reference to the girl being from a “small nation.” My friend was appauled by the fact that a person who just experienced the Russian agression would say this, but she said nothing and still encouraged the girl to participted. Months later, that same teached approached my friend and said: I was thinking about that episode and our conversation, and I am sorry I said that. Now I realize how wrong I was.

I do not think there is much to comment on that, but I shared both my friend’s respect for this person who came a long way to realize that her believes needed some corrections, and also my friend’s deep regret about how deep inside each of us this sense of superiority was rooted.

Family History: Finding A Missing Relative

Like everyone, I knew about the Ellis Island archives, but I never thought I would need to search there, because I do not have any “ancestors” who arrived in America many years ago – it’s me, who came here! But here I was the other day, trying to find whether and when my great-grandmother’s brother came to America. I was pretty sure he did, because my second cousin told me that the family “was in touch” with him and then “lost touch”, shortly after the revolution, I would assume.

Given how many Jews were escaping Russia during the 1900s pogroms, and not knowing the year when my great-grand-uncle came to America, and not even being sure about the name, I didn’t have high expectations about success in the Ellis Island archives. Still, to my surprise, I got a result in five minutes, just typing a couple of possible name spelling variations. Funny that the guide to the search for your ancestors suggested you shouldn’t type the name that they adopted in the US. It states that all of this “using the name of the village as the last name” or “translating Italian names into English” are not more than legends, that the newcomers adopted their new names after arrival. So I first tried his legal name, and that’s when my first several tries didn’t yield any results. But the moment I typed the name, my cousin said my great-grand-uncle has adopted, I found him! Again, I was surprised that only one person checked all the boxes!

I have to figure out what “Dranden” is because no geographical location is identified by this name, so the officers were not that knowledgeable. Also, I ordered the print of the ship manifest page, because I can’t see all of the details in the frame they showed me on the website. The manifest mentions he came from Lithuania, and it is quite possible that he was on his way, but I still can’t figure out what place name was mutilated like this!

And one more discovery. I vaguely remembered that my uncle, who immigrated to the US independently from me, mentioned our relatives “who were here before us.” I contacted his widow, who told me that she knew about these relatives and even used to be in contact with them, but those were yet other relatives! The relatives from my father’s father’s side, and all the connections are well known, so I will try to get in touch with them as well!

I will tell more about them when I get to the other part of my family history!

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

Russian Lies #6

The last documentary of the Russian Lies series is about Russian athletes and how they are perceived in Western countries. Once again, there was not that much new information for me, but the most valuable part is a clear explanation of how the Russian government uses the athletic achievements of the Russian citizen to it’s advantage. This situation is very similar to the conferences participation, and that’s what I have difficulties explaining to many of my peers. So many times my peers would ask me why I want to panish people “who didn’t do anything,” and tell me that “they want to support them during difficult times.” And each and single time I explain to them that Russian authorities use these situations (like some important person coming to a Russian conference or some Russian researcher is being accepted to speak at some European conference) as an evidence of the fact that “they like us,” ” they can’t survive without us,” and so on. And they so totally-completely do not get the part which is so clearly explained in this documentary!

Russian Lies #5

The fifth of the “Russian lies” documentaries, that one is about the role of media in Russian society, and it is restricted. Probably the least surprising of all of these documentaries – all happened on my watch.

Russian Lies #4

I wish this documentary was separated into at least two films because it touches on several different topics. Otherwise, I have little to comment on. Being intimately familiar with the selection process and the teaching methods at the Vaganova Academy through a friend, I never had illusions about Russian ballet. I remember an evening at my Palatine neighbor’s home when her older daughter rushed in after her first ballet class with a Russian teacher: “She was hitting us on our legs! “

As for looting art, it is, unfortunately, a universal problem. Some governments choose to correct their mistakes, and some don’t…

Russian Lies #3

The third documentary of the series is about Soviet and Russian movies. I am leaving only minimal comments here because Russian cinematography is almost unknown in the US, to the best of my knowledge. Even my most frequent movie-going friends had seen very little if any, of the Soviet movies and even less of the Russian ones. And the fact that movies are the most efficient propaganda tool is well-known, so I have nothing essential to add.

Russian Lies #1

A friend shared with me a series of Ukrainian documentaries uncovering the tools Russian propaganda uses to mislead both the world and its own people about Russian and Ukrainian history, culture, and their respective roles in the world and how the Russian-Ukrainian war is the logical continuation of all of the above. I want to present these documentaries one by one and write (hopefully) detailed comments about each of them, mostly targeting my American friends.

The first documentary is about the history of Russia. Most of my friends likely remember only some episodes of Russian history that, for this reason or that reason, were mentioned in popular culture or were taught in school in relation to US history. The bottom line is that I do not expect anybody to have extensive knowledge of Russian history, so here is some explanation.

The first part of this documentary talks about the Medieval state Kyivan Rus (or Ancient Rus), with Kyiev being its capital and the language being the predecessor for three languages: Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian (and if you ask me, I’d say that nowadays Ukrainian is the closest of three to this old language). After the disintegration of the Kyivan Rus (the stage all the Medieval states went through) and after the Mongol invasion, the Moscow Principality gradually rose to power and eventually conquered most of the original Kyivan Rus land, but the rest of the world referred to it as Moscovia, not Rus. As this documentary states correctly, “Russia” as a name of the state appeared way later.

The most striking fact is that nobody ever made a secret of it! I was very much into history when I was in school, and by the time we started to study Russian history in the fourth grade, I already knew “all of it.” Nevertheless, I remember our textbook as clear as if I read it yesterday, and all of the above facts were mentioned there!

There were many facts I didn’t know about the newer parts of history; for example, I knew nothing about the joined annexation of Poland and the Soviet-Nazi parade in Brest, but everything related to Ancient history was well-known and was always in plain sight. I can’t explain why I never questioned the moral grounds of “conquering Siberia” and other colonial acquisitions. Let me repeat it again: while 20th-century history was heavily censored and presented as the “liberation” and the “fight for justice,” there were never any attempts for a similar cover-up of the earlier history. We all knew it, and we all thought it was OK.

***

I talked to a co-worker the other day. He is not Russian, not Eastern European – nothing that would make him especially sensitive to the current political situation. I do not recall what prompted his comment about “as a Russian,” but I replied as usual that “it is not what defines me.” He proceeded with, “You are not denouncing your Russianness” and “It has nothing to do with this political situation.” It started to be more serious than a breakfast conversation in the cafeteria, but I couldn’t drop it at that point. I replied that I felt like I had everything to do with the situation because it’s my generation that didn’t follow up after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolving of the Communist Party. It was my generation that let it go, and thereby I do feel responsible.

He said: I have Ukrainian neighbors on one side and Russian neighbors on the other side, and my Russian neighbors are afraid to speak Russian. And then he talked about his closest friends who are Russian and about some bets and about drinking. The latter one is a serious trigger point for me, so I said that this conversation was making me uncomfortable.

We both had to go to our desks, but I hope to continue this conversation with him. I want to ask him whether his Russian friends feel that they have something to do with what the Russian government does or if they do not think it is related to them. As for speaking Russian, I am acutely aware that at this moment in history, the Russian language for Ukrainians sounds like German during WWII for many European nations, so I do not think it’s appropriate to speak Russian in their presence (unless it’s their initiative).

Recently, I read an essay by Michael Shishkin – a Russian writer who is not at the top of the list either in Russia or internationally. I was deeply moved by this essay – my thoughts and words exactly. I agree with him that it is extremely important to understand that everybody born and raised in Russia, no matter how progressive or even radical was their upbringing, carries the baggage of imperialism. The paragraph which particularly struck me was this one:

Throughout my life, I felt I could stand steadily on the foundation of the great Russian Culture. Nowadays, there is emptiness under my feet.

Also, the way he describes the silence of the Russian writers and other intelligentsia as “hosting regular events” and “pretending that nothing is happening.” That’s exactly how I feel when I read about cultural events or new productions in Russia: I can’t take it in that people “do normal things.” And yes, I am hypocritical, I know. And yes, I understand that living under permanent pressure is impossible, and a person’s mind finds ways to accept reality as a norm. And yes, I understand that I am making many people upset. And no, I do not think I am always right, and I do not think I have any moral right to criticize others. Still, I want to be honest and convey how I feel.

Link to the essay