Tom Gilfether

Retired employee of the Voice of America's Russian Service and Eurasia Division.

[Shaun Pinner @ShaunPinnerUA]

For years, I’ve argued that Russia wasn’t moving forward, it was moving back.

Back towards the USSR.

Step by step, the Kremlin has expanded state control, dismantled freedoms, militarised society and revived many of the instincts of the Soviet system.

Now comes another warning sign.

Moscow is reportedly considering the return of Soviet-style exit visas, meaning Russians could once again require state permission to leave their own country. Officially, it’s about “protecting citizens abroad.” In reality, it appears far more likely to be about preventing talent, wealth and dissent from walking out of the door.

I’ve written for years that Putin’s Russia isn’t simply authoritarian; it is steadily recreating many of the mechanisms of the Soviet state, led by a political elite who came of age and built their careers during that era, only now adapted for the 21st century.

If this proposal becomes law, it won’t just restrict travel. It will mark another milestone in Russia’s long journey back behind a self-imposed Iron Curtain, reinforcing a trend I first began writing about years ago.

Worth keeping an eye on.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

Sorry, but anyone who seriously believes that a sanctioned Russian oligarch from the Kremlin’s inner circle, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of Russia’s war against Ukraine, decided on his own, without the Kremlin’s approval, to publish an article in a Western outlet because he’s some courageous free thinker who genuinely just wants “change” and “respect” for Russia simply does not understand Russia.

The desire to find a hero who will “come and fix everything” is extraordinarily naïve.

[olexander scherba🇺🇦 @olex_scherba]

The head of RT gave interview to RT.

And lied again. The Donbas war was LITERALLY started by Russia in April, 2014 by torturing and killing a Russian-speaking Donbas politician Volodymyr Rybak who wanted to hoist 🇺🇦 flag in a 🇺🇦 city.

You slit his stomach & pushed into a river.

In June, 2014 you tortured and killed four 🇺🇦 Evangelicals in Slovyansk - just for going to a wrong church.

In July, 2014 you tortured and killed Styopa Chubenko (16) for wearing a 🇺🇦 ribbon on a train.

[Shaun Pinner @ShaunPinnerUA]

I’m past caring what inconvenience the Russian state now faces, if I’m honest.

Russia exterminated more than 25,000 civilians in Mariupol alone, the vast majority Russian-speaking Ukrainians, including women and children.

For years, there has been remarkably little public outcry inside Russia over the bombing of Ukrainian cities and the killing of civilians.

Yet disruptions to fuel supplies and internet services inside Russia appear to generate a far louder public reaction than the suffering inflicted on Ukrainians.

You reap what you sow.

[Maksym Borodin @adnashmyash]

I can't understand why people are surprised by the bloodthirstiness of Russians under Putin?

The same Putin who, in 2014, after Ukraine annexed Crimea, spoke about how the Russian army would use Ukrainian women and children as human shields in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

[Денис Казанський @den_kazansky]

Российский военный Даниил Туленков, откровенно написал о том, как его командир пытал гражданских в Бердянске. Людей насиловали при их детях.

Это не украинская пропаганда, не ИПСО. Это пишет реальный российский участник «СВО», который уже успел стать писателем и написать книгу “Шторм Z” про свой опыт на войне.

Фильм «Груз 200», который многие считали какой-то адской чернухой - на самом деле просто детский мультик, в сравнении с тем, что в реальности творят российские выродки.

Все это никогда нельзя забывать. Каждое такое признание очень важно запоминать и документировать. Чтобы никто потом не сказал, что этого не было.

[Caolan @CaolanReports]

A European capital is on fire because Russia spent the night firing missiles at civilians in their beds.

Kyiv is full of smoke. People are buried under rubble.

This is terrorism.

[Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @jurgen_nauditt]

All the Russian lies have been repeatedly and irrefutably substantiated by independent investigations, court rulings, satellite imagery, intercepted radio transmissions, corpses, and eyewitness testimony.
And yet, there are people in the West who dismiss it all as "Western propaganda."
The reasons for this are not particularly honorable:

Many of these people have retreated into a parallel reality where everything originating in Moscow is viewed as bold and "alternative," while statements from independent Western or international institutions are automatically dismissed as a web of lies. They consume RT, Sputnik, Telegram channels, and select Western "alternative media" outlets that adopt Russian narratives wholesale. In these circles, every Russian lie is marketed as a "counter-narrative."
Those who remain in this environment long enough eventually come to regard evidence as irrelevant—simply because it comes "from the system."
A large segment of this group suffers from pathological distrust of their own state and media. Because the West has lied in the past (Iraq, Snowden, etc.), they summarily treat every Russian denial of war crimes and every Russian justification for war as equally valid. This is the height of intellectual laziness: instead of weighing evidence, they turn the premise that "everyone lies sometimes" into the conclusion that "therefore, everything is equally untrustworthy."

Then there is ideological delusion. For parts of the far left, Russia is the great disruptor of "the West" and thus automatically the lesser evil. For parts of the far right, Putin is the strongman defying "woke" decadence and "globalists"—regardless of how many cities he levels to the ground. Both groups need the Russian version of reality because their own worldviews would collapse without it.

Some are simply useful to the Kremlin. They parrot Russian talking points, sow doubt, undermine support for Ukraine, and thereby prolong the war. Whether they are paid, ideologically motivated, or merely stupid and vain—the result is the same.
The crucial point is this: It is not a matter of "both sides having their narratives." It is about a regime that has elevated deception to a state doctrine and whose entire information policy is designed to systematically lie to its own population and to parts of the West. Anyone who—after all the evidence, all the corpses, all the court rulings, and all the documented lies—still says, "You can't believe everything the Russians say, but you can't believe Ukraine either," is no longer maintaining a critical stance. They are actively denying reality.

As long as this regime rules in Moscow, there is no rational reason to take even a single official Russian word regarding Ukraine seriously.
Anyone who does so anyway has either stopped taking evidence seriously—or never wanted it to be true in the first place.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

Call me nuts, but I'm starting to suspect that if a "think tank" or someone with a blue check on social media spends five years parroting the same "Ukraine will fall within 30 days" narrative (and is still doing so while Moscow is burning, occupied Crimea is under blockade, the front line has been deadlocked since 2022, and there's a massive fuel crisis reaching fucking Siberia), they might not be the most reliable source of information on the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Or, God forbid, they might even be acting in bad faith.

[Денис Казанський @den_kazansky]

Три года назад Пригожин развенчал ложь Кремля о том, что Украина собиралась уничтожить Донбасс, а Россия вынуждена была якобы его защищать.

Предлог для начала «СВО» был абсолютно фейковым.

Жить ему оставалось пару месяцев

[UNITED24 Media @United24media]

“We just wanted to eat and drink water,”

Ukrainian kids who survived Russian occupation and deportation testify in the Spanish Senate.

[EUvsDisinfo @EUvsDisinfo]

A conference called ‘Children for Peace’ is being promoted by Russian diplomatic missions abroad while the Russian president has been indicted by the ICC for crimes against Ukrainian children.

The venue is the children’s camp ‘Artek’ in occupied Crimea. Artek itself has been sanctioned by Western governments for organising camps for children from Ukraine, including in the illegally occupied territories.

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

Russia's chief communist Zyuganov called for the confiscation of money held by Russians and businesses in banks in order to solve Russia's budget and economic problems.

"There are 67 trillion of your money sitting in banks today. 67 trillion from individuals and 63 trillion from businesses. That’s a total of 130 trillion. That’s three times the size of the state budget. It’s just sitting there, making the bankers richer." According to him, about 30 trillion rubles could be "immediately mobilized."

"That money isn't being invested in production or anything else - not even in victory. This problem can be solved quickly. If I were the president, I'd do it with a single decree. In wartime, he has the right to do so - he is the supreme commander-in-chief," he added.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

APPLEBAUM: What Russians do is they put out not one lie, but million lies, or not one explanation, but one after another.

It's a propaganda technique. They just flood people with massive, contradictory stories, and sooner or later, people won't pay attention to anything at all.

And there's so much information all the time that people eventually just tune out, and they say, "I don't know what's true, I don't know what's not true, I don't believe anything, I'm not going to engage in this issue, I'm not going to get angry about it, I just don't want to know anything at all."

[Sulkhan Metreveli @Sulkhan]

I never understood the Western fascination with Russia. I was a Soviet citizen and lived under that system. I’ve also lived in America and Europe. Compared with the West, Russia is a shithole in every practical, moral and political sense. What exactly are you admiring?

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Applebaum: Part of the European right and the American right have this imaginary Russia they use as a political symbol — not understanding it has no relationship to reality.

Most people who admire Russia haven't even been to Moscow or St. Petersburg, let alone the rest of the country. 2/

[Devana 🇺🇦 @DevanaUkraine]

🇷🇺 The Root of the Russian Malignancy

The problem with Russia did not begin with Putin. Russians have always been like this mentally. Russians have always hated others; Russia has always been a country of lies and aggression, and Russia loves to kill, masking it as grand missions.

Historians like Richard Pipes and Alain Besançon have long argued that the nature of Russian autocracy—whether under the Tsars, the Soviets, or the current regime—is predicated on the total erasure of the individual in favor of the State. This creates a psychological environment where "the other" is inherently seen as a threat to the messianic, expansionist project of the "Empire."

As the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev noted in his analysis of the "Russian soul," there is a recurring tendency to oscillate between extreme nihilism and extreme religious-political expansionism. The "mission" provides the moral anesthesia necessary to commit atrocities; by framing the destruction of neighbors as a "holy" or "civilizational" duty, the perpetrator absolves themselves of individual guilt.

When a society consistently defines its identity through the negation and subjugation of its neighbors, it becomes trapped in a perpetual cycle of violence. As the philosopher Karl Popper warned in The Open Society and Its Enemies, closed societies built on myth and aggressive ideology are inherently incapable of peaceful coexistence until they are forced to confront the reality of their own moral bankruptcy.

The question remains, can Russia be cured? The situation here is not at all the same as with Nazism in Flight 3, because Nazism there arose in one historical period and disappeared within one generation, while in Russia the disease has been present for centuries - from the very beginning of the founding of Russia by a Ukrainian...

[Денис Казанський @den_kazansky]

❤️❤️❤️

[ChrisO_wiki @ChrisO_wiki]

Moscow's instantly-iconic exploding fuel storage tank is resulting in a flood of memes. I'll add a selection below...

[Devana 🇺🇦 @DevanaUkraine]

🛡️ The Admissions of a War Criminal

In 2014, the leader of the Russian army, Girkin-Strelkov, stated that the Russian forces were criticized by the Ukrainian military for hiding behind civilians. To this, Strelkov replied that if they did not use civilians as a human shield, the Ukrainians would have destroyed them immediately.