That’s two dollars on every gallon. Call it the Trump dividend. It’s what we pay for the luxury of having this president.

On Election Day I caught up with Jonathan Fink of Silicon Curtain. We kept it short on purpose, because we didn’t want to call the result before the votes are counted. But we covered what to watch tonight, and what comes after.

Election Day is an event horizon

Everything in Washington has been pushed toward one finish line: today. Once it’s crossed, expect the roaches to come out of the walls. It will feel like a building that just changed hands: “Under new management. It’s your problem now.”

Jonathan asked the obvious question. Trump has been signaling he’ll go hard on Iran once the elections are over. Why wait? And could a war be used to delay or muddy the results?

My answer: Trump, like Putin, doesn’t do whatever he wants. He does whatever he can. He’ll try one scenario, see if it breaks his way, then try the next. Claiming “we’re at war, so we can’t certify” would go to court and, I think, fail. But it’s exactly the kind of delay he would try.

The dangerous weeks

The House looks like simple math, and that math favors Democrats. The Senate is where it gets interesting.

Wherever a race is close, Trump will throw all his lawyers and resources at it. Dragging things out is his strategy for life. So the risky period isn’t tonight. It’s the stretch between the vote and the day the new members are seated. We saw that movie in 2020.

Why voters are angry

Corruption is reportedly the top issue for voters right now, and that makes sense. When life is good, nobody asks who the president is. When prices climb a little every month on everything, people start asking hard questions. Then they watch a president say things couldn’t be better while he stuffs his pockets.

His closing argument didn’t help. On the eve of the election, he stood in front of the Reflecting Pool and talked about drain pipes.

What it means for Ukraine

A Democratic House won’t solve everything. Nothing America does will, despite the myth that it could fix the world if it only wanted to. But we’ve been falling off a cliff for two years. A Democratic House would at least mean we’ve hit bottom.

It would bring investigations. Who exactly is Steve Witkoff? What did he and Jared Kushner discuss with Putin? A Senate majority would bring nomination power, and pressure on officials like Pete Hegseth who sit on aid that should be moving.

Hearings and publicity would push this shadow diplomacy back into the shadows, as Lev Parnas likes to say. Will that help Ukraine? At the very least, it will stop hurting so much. Right now Ukraine is cornered between Russia and the United States, and that has to end.

Jonathan raised one more thread: Kushner’s hacked private messages, which got far too little coverage. If the wave comes, that’s one of the first places to dig.

One race I’m watching

Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio. A candidate’s cardinal sin is panic, and I know that feeling from my own campaigns. He panicked, put out a nasty ad, and it may cost him the race.

Jonathan and I will reconvene when the results are in. Subscribe to Silicon Curtain if you haven’t. It’s one of the best resources out there on Russia’s hybrid war against Europe, which is escalating almost daily.

If you’re a US citizen and haven’t voted yet, vote for Democrats today. The man who spent his closing argument on drain pipes should learn tonight where the water actually goes.

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Olexander’s answer from Kyiv was a cold shower, and an important one.

“Nobody’s talking about elections”

Ukrainians read more news than Americans do, Olexander said, and that’s exactly why they’re not celebrating. They know nothing changes in Washington until January. They know Serbia’s incoming government has already signaled it doesn’t want weapons exported to Ukraine. A change of government somewhere else is not a change of policy toward Ukraine.

So the mood is simple: we have three more months to fight on our own.

This is something Americans miss. We look at the world through our parties. Ukrainians look at it through one question: who will help us survive? Lula was never pro-Ukraine, so his win doesn’t move anything there. From Kyiv, the only election that really matters is ours.

Where Ukrainians get their news

I asked why I and so many others ended up on YouTube instead of TV. Olexander confirmed it: he hasn’t turned on a television in three years. The state “telethon” is seen as propaganda, so people go to trusted channels that post every story with a link to the source — often the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times, whose correspondents are reporting from Kyiv.

That’s the full circle of trust: a Ukrainian reads an American paper’s story about Ukraine, via a Ukrainian channel that links to it. Credibility still matters. Which is why Lev warned: if Republicans hold on, expect more pressure on the independent platforms we all use. Don’t sit in one echo chamber. Follow your sources everywhere.

On the ground

Starlink is back up to speed. Warnings are coming in again. The last couple of nights were a bit quieter, and Ukraine has hit Russian factories producing missile fuel. Olexander’s point: the only way to stop an enemy is to hit him hard enough that he thinks twice next time.

But the lights are still going out. Driving home in Kyiv, he slows down at every crosswalk, because in a blackout you can’t see the people crossing.

The Melania story

In Ukraine, a story most Americans missed is huge: Putin reportedly offering a humanitarian corridor out of Oleshky as a goodwill gesture to Melania Trump.

Here’s what it is. Putin doesn’t do gestures. He gives Trump’s team a “win” they can show off, and in return he gets something real. It’s the same playbook as the prisoner releases. Lev called it smoke, and I agree. Olexander put it more bluntly: he prays she does the right thing for the children — but he doesn’t believe a word of it.

Ukrainians grab at straws because the situation is desperate. That isn’t naïveté. That’s what hope looks like under bombardment.

Our responsibility

Ukrainians keep asking me: what happens if Trump refuses to accept the results? Civil war? I understand the fear. But it can’t become an excuse.

Americans elected Trump. Americans have to fix it. Nobody in Kyiv, Belgrade or Brasília can do that for us. If you are a U.S. citizen and can vote, vote for Democrats on November 3. Then we deal with whatever he tries next — starting with his lawsuit over the Alaska ballot.

And watch Alaska. If American institutions start to wobble, don’t be surprised when someone in Moscow announces that Alaska was “always ours.”

Watch the full episode of Voice from Ukraine, subscribe (it’s free), and follow Olexander on Substack for daily reporting from Kyiv. And if you haven’t yet, subscribe to Rashkin Report here and on YouTube.

Slava Ukraini.

Olexander opened from Kyiv. Russia is now hitting Epicenter stores, the big one-stop shops where Ukrainians buy everything from food to dishware, in Kyiv, Romny and Kharkiv. Last night a train station near a bridge was hit, and people walked across that long bridge to get to work. More than 2,000 cars are stuck at the Polish border, with at least a two-day wait, because Shaheds keep flying over and people keep running to shelters.

“Before, you could see the enemy and have a strategy,” he said. “Now it’s a lottery. They took the clearness away.”

Channel 24 asked me about it earlier today: the ballistic missiles that hit Kyiv were reported to carry cluster munitions. Olexander has seen those fragments himself, in Avdiivka. They burn, and water won’t put them out. They’re made to kill as many people as possible.

Then came the hard question, and we didn’t agree.

I asked it this way: deterrence cuts both ways. We’re not restraining Russia anymore. So how long are we going to keep restraining Ukraine? What does Ukraine still have to lose by ignoring Trump, once it has already lost things like intelligence sharing?

Lev answered with conviction. If Ukraine starts killing civilians the way Russia does, Putin answers two deaths with two thousand, the propaganda machine goes to work, and Europe turns on Ukraine in a split second. “The second Ukraine crosses that line, we lost the war.”

Olexander, who lives under the missiles, said two wrongs don’t make a right, and that what Ukraine is doing is working. “If it weren’t succeeding, Trump would be quiet. Russia would be quiet.” But he also said what every Ukrainian has been saying since day one: “Let us fight. Take off the cuffs. Help us to help you.”

My view: everyone at that table is right, and that’s the problem. The longer we don’t help, the more desperate people get, and the more likely those choices become.

Lev connected the dots to energy. With the Strait of Hormuz disrupted and Gulf gas plants hit, Russia gets to pose as Europe’s savior this winter. Meanwhile Trump’s envoy Witkoff is calling Putin a “humanitarian.” And there is fresh confirmation that Russian bot networks are already targeting our midterms, including the Senate race in Texas.

The one piece of good news today: Starlink is working better in Ukraine after one phone call from Trump to Musk. One week of “nobody knows who did it,” then one call, and it’s back. Paul Krugman argues it’s time to take Starlink away from Musk. That conversation is coming, especially after the election.

We have 12 days. If you’re a US citizen, vote like lives depend on it, because they do.

Tomorrow at 11 a.m. Eastern, economist Roman Sheremeta joins me here on Substack. Don’t miss it.

Watch the full conversation on Voice from Ukraine, and follow Rashkin Report.

Slava Ukraini.

— Yuri Rashkin

The question Ukrainians keep asking me

Every week I go live on Ukraine’s Channel 24 with reporters in Kyiv and Lviv. Lviv is under attack more and more often now. Things there aren’t getting better. They’re getting worse.

This week everyone asks the same thing: why did Steve Witkoff call Putin a humanitarian? Is this a shock?

Only if you haven’t been paying attention. Witkoff has been ready to flatter Trump and Putin for years. The relationship between Witkoff and Putin has blossomed over the past year and a half like a romantic comedy. It’s horrible, but it isn’t a surprise.

On the wall behind me hangs a Charlie Hebdo cover from a year ago: Trump and Putin roasting Zelensky over a barbecue. If that wasn’t a surprise then, it shouldn’t be one now.

Three scenarios for Trump in China

Putin wants a three-way meeting with Trump and Xi. Like everything else, it will happen after the election: the next flare-up with Iran, the price increases, the rare earths. Here’s how I see the ways Trump could show up:

1. As a lame duck. He loses the House, maybe the Senate, and arrives looking weak.

2. With the country on fire. He refuses to accept defeat, declares martial law, and arrives as something closer to Lukashenko than a strong leader. Listen to his rallies, where he cheers on violence, and you’ll see he wouldn’t mind this. But I think he’d rather scare people into staying home.

3. With disputed results. Nothing is clear, and he arrives as a weak president. I think this is the most likely outcome.

In every scenario, he can’t do much. But he can give things away. He’s already trying to give away Ukraine, and Ukraine refuses. Taiwan could be next.

Why Trump hates Zelensky

A viewer wrote that Trump hates Zelensky because Zelensky stands up to him. I’d put it a little differently: Trump hates him more each time he stands up.

The US–Ukraine relationship now looks like an abusive marriage. Everyone tells Ukraine he’s no good for you. Yes, but he’s so influential. He’s cheating on you with Russia every night. Yes, but he still feeds the kids. Does he? Sort of.

We put that man in the White House, and now we’re all paying for it.

Zelensky and Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney did the same thing. They called it what it was and said no to aggression. In the short term that’s painful. In the long term, calling out a bully always wins. From experience: it’s good to leave a bad relationship.

I’ve noticed something else about Trump. It’s never about what was said, only who said it. If Putin says it, he’s a glorious leader. If Zelensky says the same thing, he doesn’t know when to stop.

Not crazy, just bad

A viewer sent me a letter arguing that we shouldn’t call Trump crazy, because it lets him off the hook. He isn’t crazy. He’s bad. I agree. When we call him crazy, we excuse him.

Another viewer wrote, “Trump is a Russian asset.” I’d flip that: is Trump an asset to Russia? No question.

How Trump and Putin got tied together is a question for a trial: discovery, evidence, all of it. For the rest of us, it’s like asking when the patient got infected. We have a plague on our hands. What are we going to do about it?

Do you have a plan to vote?

When I canvassed for local races in Wisconsin, we learned not to ask “Are you voting?” Everyone says yes. Ask instead: Do you have a plan? Do you know when? Do you know where your polling place is? People with a plan vote.

One viewer voted this morning, second in line. Another dropped her ballot in a box in California and got confirmation it was recorded. If you’re a US citizen, make your plan. And check your local rules about what you can wear to the polls.

One more thing

My Trump-voice impression has made me unexpectedly popular in the Russian-speaking world. One viewer wrote that she and her friends stood around doing it and laughed for five minutes. If people in a bomb shelter can laugh for a moment, I’ll take it. These people hate being laughed at. That’s exactly why we should keep doing it.

Coming up

• Today at 2 p.m. Eastern: Lev Parnas and Olexander are back with me on Voice from Ukraine.

• Tomorrow at this time: economist Roman Sheremeta joins me here on Substack to talk elections, Ukraine, behavioral economics and game theory. Bring your questions.

• Roman will also join me on WORT 89.9 FM in Madison, likely on November 9.

You suggested guests: Ken Harbaugh, Malcolm Nance, Jason Smart, Craig Unger. Keep the names coming in the comments. I’ll do my best to bring them on.

Slava Ukraini.

— Yuri Rashkin

Thank God he’s coming home. That part is simple.

What isn’t simple is the story Washington is telling about it.

Steve Witkoff thanked Putin and said the release “was not part of an exchange.” Trump said the US gave nothing in return.

Then Trump wrote that Hubbard would not have been released if the White House hadn’t stopped new Russia sanctions from taking effect last week.

So there was a price. Trump told us himself.

The Montenegro piece

This morning I heard former Ambassador John Herbst on NPR suggest this was the second half of a trade. Here is what we know.

On October 9, Montenegro arrested Mikhail Zvinchuk, founder of the pro-Kremlin war channel Rybar. The United States has a $10 million reward out for information on him. Montenegro didn’t extradite him. It expelled him, and two days later he was back in Moscow.

That same day, Dmitry Medvedev wrote that Russia might need to replenish its “exchange fund” with European and American citizens.

A man wanted by the US goes home to Moscow instead of to a courtroom in New York. Ten days later Putin hands Trump a “free” American. Officially it’s not a swap. In practice, it looks exactly like one.

What Lev and Olexander added

Lev made a point I think is key. Putin gives Trump a token every time Witkoff visits, so Trump can bring home a “win” for his base. Who argues against bringing an American home? That’s why it works as propaganda. Meanwhile, Russia says it has no deal with Ukraine.

Olexander, speaking from Kyiv, called the release a warm-up: soften the American public now, then roll out a ceasefire announcement right before the election.

My take

Ukrainians have given up on Trump. They’re no longer asking whether he’ll help. They’re asking how bad it will get.

I expect one level of pressure on Ukraine until the November elections, and a different level until Trump has to hand over power.

But look at what this pressure actually produces. Lower diesel prices? No. More popularity for Trump? No. The only person it benefits is Vladimir Putin. That tells me Putin is in trouble, and he’s throwing everything at Ukraine because his window is closing.

Zelensky said that if the US and Russia work together, Ukraine can’t win. I disagree. Ukraine is its people. They’re not going anywhere, and they don’t want to be part of Russia, no matter who sits in the White House.

One more thing

A listener in Odesa, stressed out by the Russian rockets, started making candles and mailed me a box. One of them is Trump. Sort of. Fittingly, this candle doesn’t smell great.

About 15% of my audience is in Russia. I make no money from them, because they can’t pay. But they watch. Someone in St. Petersburg wrote that they wish they could give me more than likes. That tells me something too.

If you’re a US citizen, vote. In the Russian-speaking world I hear people say they can’t vote for Trump and can’t stand Democrats, so they’ll stay home. A friend of mine put it plainly: if you don’t vote, you’re not helping Ukraine. He’s right.

Watch the full conversation above. Subscribe to Voice from Ukraine, and follow Rashkin Report, where I explain what’s really happening in America.

Slava Ukraini.

— Yuri Rashkin

Part of me wanted to dance. Peace! Somebody give that man a Nobel Prize.

Then I looked for Putin’s confirmation. Where is it? Where is Peskov with his mustache saying “yes, we have an agreement”? Nowhere.

I talked this through with Iryna Uzlova on War & Politics 24. Here’s my read.

This is not a black swan. It’s a white swan.

A black swan is something nobody saw coming. Trump siding openly with Russia is the opposite. Anyone paying attention since November 2024 saw it coming. The only surprise is the timing. He took this long, and then chose to reveal himself two weeks before his party faces voters.

The ceasefire is damage control.

The diesel deal flew like a lead balloon. People here in Wisconsin stop me and ask: can you believe we’re buying diesel from Russia?

They care because it touches their wallet. When I buy groceries, the truck that brought them ran on diesel. If that diesel is Russian, I’m subsidizing Putin’s war. A tiny amount, yes. But my hands are not clean anymore.

So Trump needs a new story. If there’s “peace,” then the diesel isn’t a problem, right? That’s the logic. It’s not diplomacy. It’s a cover-up.

Next step: Ukraine becomes the villain.

A Fox News host claimed Ukraine killed a million Russian children. The White House said nothing. When the administration stays silent on a claim like that, it’s a signal: the new enemy is Ukraine. Then Trump can say your gas prices are Ukraine’s fault, not his.

Remember, he said “we gave Ukraine $350 billion” a million times. The real number is closer to $100 billion. Today it’s a million children. Tomorrow it could be five million. In Russian we’d call that cockroaches in his head.

Trump just handed his own party an October surprise.

Republican candidates now have to defend Russian diesel instead of talking about anything else. Don Bacon and Brian Fitzpatrick are pushing back. But Congress can’t fix this before the election. So every Republican on the ballot carries this bucket of blood across the finish line.

What happens if Democrats win the House:

1. Investigations. Starting with what Witkoff and Kushner have been doing. Rubio, at least, tried to follow a process. He got pushed out of the room.

2. Legislation: aid to Ukraine, limits on buying Russian oil and gas, guardrails on Trump.

Trump knows this. That’s why he campaigns for Republican senators like he’s picking jurors for his own trial.

You don’t have to do politics. But politics will still do you. This time it’s doing it at the gas pump.

And that’s the part I find hopeful. Speaking up against this president is no longer just the right thing to do. It’s becoming the popular thing to do.

Surprise, surprise. This is a man with six bankruptcies, several of them casinos. Who ever thought he was good at business? Somebody who watched a reality show and mistook it for a résumé.

The betrayal of the wallet voter

Every society has people who care more about their wallet than about values. I’m not judging. That’s just how it is. But for those people, this president has been a giant betrayal. He promised no wars. He promised prices would go down.

Trump’s base still has to insist he kept every promise. That’s how a base works. It’s also why the base keeps shrinking. You can hate politics, but at the gas station reality stares you in the face.

I live in Wisconsin. All summer I watch the corn grow, rows so tall it’s like driving through a green tunnel. Now the tunnel is coming down. Harvest is over. So what future is Trump talking about, when he hurt his own farmers right here in the Midwest, right before an election?

Will the blame stop after the election?

In many countries, politicians blame somebody before an election, and often it’s Ukraine. Then the vote passes and people get real: Russia is the bigger threat.

Don’t expect that here.

Zelensky isn’t being attacked because of our election calendar. He’s being attacked because the White House has a plan to replace him. They think that’s the easier road to “peace.” It has to do with how well Ukraine is doing on the battlefield, how badly Russia is doing, how Russia is running out of time, and how greedy Donald Trump is.

After November 3, I expect Trump to keep asking Ukraine the same thing: Had enough yet? What else do we have to do for you to surrender?

For Trump, values don’t matter. He doesn’t even care about victory. He just wants to pocket the money.

Most Americans aren’t like that. We love capitalism, we like money in our pockets, but we have a sense of balance. This administration has lost it completely and tilted all the way toward Russia.

It’s all about turnout

We’re not done with this election by a long shot. I’ve been elected to local office many times, and I know what the final weeks look like. Voters already know whom they like. The only question is whether you can get your people to show up.

For Republicans, that’s getting harder. The polls show them down 8 to 10 points, and I think they suspect it’s worse, because their voters have lost enthusiasm. I once talked to a Russian-speaking Trump supporter after the full-scale invasion. When Trump came back and refused to help Ukraine, he told me: “I’ve decided I’m just not good at politics.” I think a lot of Republican voters feel that way right now. They won’t switch sides. They’ll just stay home.

Democrats, meanwhile, are scared to death, and that’s a good thing. We lost the most important election of our lifetime two years ago. People are running and volunteering in big numbers. And still we worry, because the federal government is doing everything it can to slow the process, confuse voters and sow distrust.

Corruption is a Russian word now

Americans tell pollsters they’re upset about government corruption. That matters to me, because in American political talk today corruption also means Russia. This White House has a Russian for everything: Dmitriev for the big contracts, Kremlin money for the family wedding.

Americans are fed up with a president who starts wars with no strategy and admits as much. We’re sick of gas prices driven by those wars, even if many people still haven’t connected the stupid war to the stupid price. And health care is getting worse, not better.

Why Ukraine matters on November 3

For Republican voters, Ukraine probably won’t be the issue that moves them. Their wallets will be.

But for Democrats, and for people of conscience, Ukraine is both the ultimate victim and the ultimate beacon. A country unfairly attacked by an empire, fighting for democracy just as we are now fighting for ours. We thought we’d be the ones protecting it. Starting with the Budapest Memorandum, we failed our part.

And here’s what gives me hope. Roughly 30 percent of Republicans don’t support this administration. Here in Wisconsin, the Republican candidate for governor actually admitted that Joe Biden won in 2020. In New Hampshire, a Republican candidate is criticizing Trump for the Russia deal and the Iran war, because he has to face voters in a few weeks, and standing next to Trump means deep trouble.

And Trump is standing next to Putin.

Americans see it. The question is how much power we still have, as voters, to fix it.

November 3 will tell us.

I’ll be honest about where I started. When a majority of Americans voted for Donald Trump (I wasn’t one of them), I took it as America saying goodbye to world leadership. Some people simply didn’t value it. And the rest of the free world was counting on us to help protect a democracy against a vile invader. Instead, we elected someone who admires the invader.

This past week, that showed up in its ugliest form. An American president did things nobody would expect an American president to do.

Intelligence is back. Here’s what that tells us.

Intelligence sharing with Ukraine has been restored. That’s good news. Thank you to everyone who spoke up and made noise about it.

But look at what the episode reveals. First, this administration is always looking for an opportunity to cut Ukraine off. Second, it’s testing whether Ukraine will scream, and how many friends Ukraine still has with enough influence to push back. This time it still had enough, and the decider decided to back off.

It’s shameful that we did this for any period of time at all. Ukrainian lives were put in danger.

Who did it? Come on.

Was it Trump? Hegseth? Musk? We know who makes the decisions in this White House. Elon Musk takes his cue from Trump. If anyone doubts who’s on top of that totem pole, look at how much money Musk just poured into American elections.

Then Musk tells us “the slaughter continues” and blames Zelensky. The slaughter has a name. It’s Putin. And Musk has his hand in this too.

And Marco Rubio, asked who throttled Ukraine’s satellite link, offers this: “It sort of happened.”

That’s this administration. Nothing is ever anyone’s fault. Trump wants the credit and never the responsibility.

We got clarity this week.

Here is what I think most Americans finally understood this week, for better or worse. Trump and Putin are working together to get Ukraine to capitulate.

The Lindsey Graham sanctions law, which Ukrainians and their friends fought for over months, was spit upon. The diesel deal went to Putin. That isn’t pressure on Moscow. It’s a gift.

It’s painful to watch the United States stop acting like the country we thought it was. But clarity matters. This week we got plenty of it.

60 days means November 3.

When the administration says it needs “60 days” to study the sanctions, ask yourself what those 60 days are really about. They’re about getting across the finish line on November 3. After that, there will be a new chaos to deal with, and nobody will be counting.

Meanwhile, the election is already happening. Early voting is underway, and Democrats in particular tend to vote early. Some of those hundreds of millions in last-minute ads are going nowhere.

Republicans are starting to peel off.

Republicans who are retiring now say true things, consistently: Tillis, McConnell, Don Bacon in the House. Bacon has even floated running for president. I’d encourage him. The Republican Party needs someone who stands for the old party many of us want back.

But the real story is the ones who aren’t retiring. Ted Cruz said we shouldn’t have done the diesel deal and should have used Canadian fuel instead. He even offered a solution. That’s the state of things now: this White House would rather do business with Russia than with Canada.

Why does this matter? Trump owns his party. When his own party starts saying something different from him, it gets interesting. Many of these Republicans face voters in two years, and they know Trump won’t be more popular a year from now. He’ll be less.

When Democrats take power, they’ll need Republicans to pass legislation that helps Ukraine. Investigations into whatever Kushner and Witkoff have been doing will carry more legitimacy if they’re bipartisan. And impeachment takes 67 votes in the Senate. They aren’t there today. But every time Trump does something as despicable as a deal with Russia, a few more Republicans drift away.

The dumbest possible timing.

Frankly, I’m glad this happened a few weeks before the election rather than after. Voters deserve to see Trump’s priorities before they vote.

It’s also a sign of how desperate Putin is. If the Kremlin really wanted to help Trump, it would stop attacking Ukraine until after November 3. It can’t help itself. Putin needs everything now, and Trump and his party look worse for it.

This isn’t about Ukraine. It’s about Trump, and the Trump family enriching themselves as fast as possible, with Russia happy to play along. Russia always has money to corrupt others. It just never has the will to build anything for its own people.

One job.

Trump really thought Ukraine would fold. Everyone kept telling him how great and important he was. Great, he said, then surrender. And the Ukrainians said no.

So we’re watching this show in real time. Donald Trump had one job: deliver Ukraine to Putin.

Has he been able to do that? No.

This is part one of my latest conversation with Iryna Uzlova. Part two is coming.

Second livestream of the day. This time with Jonathan Fink of Silicon Curtain, freshly back from Warsaw.

He’d been at the Free Russia Forum. Several hundred exiled Russians, Garry Kasparov’s crowd, and Jonathan was the only Westerner in the room. These aren’t the polite opposition. They openly say the Russian empire has to end. Not reform. End.

And Putin noticed. Jonathan pointed out that Kasparov was high on the list in the assassination plot the Justice Department says it foiled. He admitted he skipped the buffet for half an hour, just to see if anyone keeled over. He wasn’t joking.

What struck him most: one idea ran through every panel. Victory in Ukraine comes first. Everything else comes after. No grandstanding, no fighting over who gets the spotlight. People raising money for drones. People fighting in Russian units of Ukraine’s army. A woman whose charity advocates for Ukrainian civilians held in Russian camps. She told Jonathan there are far more of them than military prisoners, and almost no one speaks for them.

Russian opposition usually looks like a sci-fi convention to me. People debating a country that doesn’t exist. This one, Jonathan says, felt real.

Back in Washington

Then we got to the part that’s making everyone furious: Starlink, intelligence sharing, the diesel deal.

Jonathan’s verdict was the title of his latest episode: they sound like clowns, but act like killers. Toddlers with the power of gods. And while people in Ukraine were dying, Musk was showing off a jet-powered car.

My question is simpler: why now? Three weeks before the election, none of this helps Trump. The diesel deal covers maybe half a day of our consumption. Pressure on Ukraine is unpopular. So who does it help?

Putin. Every one of these “peace plans” comes from the Kremlin. Trump just delivers them.

And now the plan is to get rid of Zelensky. Remember when Trump tried to pick the next ayatollah of Iran? Exactly.

The election

Trump is losing, and his people know it. Gerrymandering didn’t save them. So they’re looking at two tracks: lawsuits, or something with soldiers in it. Martial law has become the flavor of the day.

My hope is the “Hungarian scenario”: a defeat so big it can’t be stolen. Then the next step. In 1974 Republican senators told Nixon he had maybe 15 votes left, and he resigned the next day. Trump won’t. He’ll try to be a squatter in the White House. We’ll find out what it takes to evict him.

The real lesson

A viewer asked whether all this incompetence hides how evil it is. Jonathan said if smart people were doing it, we’d be finished.

I see it differently. Nobody wants to fight Russia. Nobody except Ukraine, because Ukraine has no choice. The rest of us pretend we’re in some kind of “hybrid” situation. It’s not about competence. It’s about whether you admit the danger.

And would Trump roll out the red carpet for Zelensky if Ukraine crushed Russia tomorrow? Jonathan says the day after Ukraine wins, Trump will pitch a Trump Tower in Kyiv.

Our word of the day was shame. He doesn’t have any.

Watch the full conversation below, and subscribe to Silicon Curtain.

Slava Ukraini. 🇺🇦

—Yuri

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He spent nine hours yesterday with five different groups of people in Kyiv. Soldiers, civilians, people from completely different circles. They talked about the attacks. The power stations. How Ukraine is striking back.

Not one person mentioned Trump. Not once.

A year ago, Trump was the topic. People still had some hope. Now he’s just gone from the conversation. Ukrainians have decided he doesn’t matter, and they’ve moved on to the thing that does: survival.

And survival is the word. During the “ceasefire” Trump announced, Russia knocked out every power station in the Kyiv region. Olexander walked out to his car for twenty seconds and came back to find his neighbors stuck in the elevator. That’s daily life now.

Lev’s read on the bigger picture

Lev Parnas laid out what he’s hearing about Witkoff and Kushner in Europe, pushing to move frozen Russian assets into a fund controlled by the White House. Not Ukraine. The White House.

He also made the case I’ve been hearing more and more from my own Ukrainian TV appearances: the plan now is to take out Zelensky. Not militarily. Politically. Paint him as corrupt, wear him down, and get someone more agreeable in the chair.

Here’s why it won’t work. Olexander says it plainly: the harder they push on Zelensky, the higher his rating goes. Ukrainians don’t love their politicians. They distrust all of them, which, honestly, we could use a little more of here. But they know a scapegoat when they see one.

And to every Ukrainian who asks me “What can we give Trump to change his mind?” The answer, from all three of us today, was the same.

Nothing.

What we’re dealing with at home

Trump’s diesel deal with Russia? It covers about one day of American consumption. Meanwhile, according to Olexander, Canada offered to supply more. This was never about fuel. It was about normalizing Russia.

And here in the Midwest it’s landing as a dangerous combination. I’m hearing people say “I don’t trust Trump” and “Zelensky is hurting our farmers” in the same breath. That’s the real damage.

18 days until the midterms. If you’re a US citizen and can vote, the choice is pretty simple: people who believe in changing a government at the ballot box, and people who want a monarchy. Pick one.

The part that matters most

We ended with Olexander’s visit to a clinic for severely disabled children. They live in a basement now, sometimes 12 to 18 hours at a stretch, because the sirens never stop long enough to move them back upstairs. One woman runs the place. That’s her whole life. The kids, and her eight cats.

She gave Olexander a list: clothes, water, a solar generator. Winter is coming.

If you can give, please do. The links are on Voice from Ukraine. If you can’t, share this. Somebody else might.

And thank you. Yesterday we were #7 in Substack’s Rising in World Politics. Today we’re #1. That’s you.

Slava Ukraini. 🇺🇦

—Yuri

Before that, he was a network engineer and a teacher in the American Southwest. He taught computers, science and reading to Native American kids. He built a wireless internet backbone stretching from Albuquerque to the Grand Canyon. Somewhere in there he worked at NASA, Apple and HP. Today he’s a soldier in Ukraine’s National Guard and head of engineering innovation for his regiment. He builds drones.

One of our viewers wrote in from Gallup, New Mexico. James laughed: if you’ve ever driven past a cell tower in Gallup, it was his.

He joined me today from home, on medical leave, in a full leg cast, refusing to stay in bed. Hundreds of you told him to keep his leg up. His wife and mother-in-law agree with you.

The Starlink “speed limit”

This week Ukraine’s military Starlink terminals stopped working for anything moving faster than 100 miles an hour. Elon Musk says the U.S. government and “ultimately POTUS” decide those limits. The White House says it doesn’t control SpaceX. One official called it a glitch.

James explained why the limit exists in the first place. When a terminal moves fast, it has to keep switching between satellites, and the satellites are moving too. It’s real-time trigonometry, and it costs the network extra resources. That’s why civilian Starlink has the cap. His understanding is that the military Starshield contract was supposed to cover those resources so the cap wouldn’t apply.

So could it be a technical error? “Possible, but unlikely,” he said. As a former network engineer, he could switch that limit on with a single command. “Five minutes out of my day.”

And look at what the cap hits: the fast fixed-wing drones Ukraine uses for mid- and long-range strikes. Exactly the drones Russia doesn’t want flying. “It’s a very curious thing,” he said, and he’s right.

Who Russia is really hitting

Today Russia struck a grocery store in Odesa. James described driving across eastern Ukraine: outside the big cities there are almost no working gas stations left, just burnt-out shells. When the air alarm sounds now, staff clear the station and block it off with cones, because the whole place is a target.

None of this touches military operations, he said. Units keep their own fuel depots, well hidden and almost never hit. The strikes on fuel are aimed at civilians.

He believes Putin is throwing everything at Kyiv now because he’s losing on the battlefield and sees a window before the U.S. elections. James thinks that’s a misreading of American politics. Every missile on Kyiv puts Ukraine back in the news and hurts Trump. If Moscow were smart, it would go quiet until November 4. Same with the diesel deal: Trump announced 500,000 tons because almost nobody can convert tons to barrels. The estimate I’d heard from Paul Krugman is about 16 hours of U.S. demand. A drop in the bucket for us, a lifeline for Putin.

“The cloud is a lie”

Why do Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers matter? Because “the cloud” is a marketing word, James said. Every cloud is a physical building with physical servers. Western networks are spread out, with backup copies running in different cities, so if one site goes down another picks up instantly. Russia’s infrastructure is far more concentrated around Moscow. Hit the building, and it’s like spilling your beer on a hard drive you never backed up, times ten thousand.

The war that’s coming

Then James got serious. Today’s “AI drones” aren’t really AI, he said. They’re simple image matching: the pilot snaps a picture of the target, and when jamming blinds the pilot, a chip on the drone keeps steering toward what’s in that picture.

Real AI is six months to a year away from the battlefield, he said. A drone that can hear a soldier’s accent and decide by itself whether he’s Russian or Ukrainian. Hegseth is already talking about “autonomous warfare.” “That should terrify all of us,” James said.

His hot take on AI: the artificial intelligence isn’t in the machines, it’s in us. Every time we read the chatbot’s summary instead of the source, we hand our thinking to a data center. He wants a “fourth law” of robotics, and told everyone to go read Asimov.

My view is that we need AI, and we need rules for it, the way a road needs stop signs. And the more we move to solar and wind, the less leverage Putin has over the world’s energy.

James ended with the most honest line of the hour. He builds these weapons because Ukraine didn’t get what it needed in time, so it had to make its own. “I woke up this morning and said, oh God, I don’t want to do this. But here I am.”

Support his lab

James runs a fiber-optic drone lab and is setting up a fixed-wing lab for his frontline unit. You can support it at yukraine.com.

Voice from Ukraine streams Tuesdays and Fridays at 11 a.m. Eastern with Lev Parnas, Oleksandr Bolbirer and me. I’m also on solo Thursdays at 11 a.m. Tomorrow we’re back with Lev. Share this, subscribe, and stay united. Slava Ukraini.

— Yuri Rashkin

Part of me wanted to dance. Peace breaking out! Somebody give that man a Nobel Prize. But I don’t believe it, and neither should you.

A white swan

A black swan is something nobody saw coming. Trump siding openly with Moscow is the opposite. Anyone paying attention has seen it coming since November 2024. What surprised me is how long it took. And look at the timing: three weeks before an election in which his party will be judged on everything he has done.

It reminds me of a man who decided long ago to leave his wife. He waits until the day before the mistress shows up at the door, then announces, “We’ve reached a difficult decision.” You reached it a long time ago. You just found the courage to say it now.

Why the “ceasefire” is actually good news

The ceasefire announcement tells us how badly the diesel deal landed. People here in Wisconsin stop me and ask: can you believe we’re buying diesel from Russia? It’s a drop in the bucket for American supply, but it puts Ukrainian blood on our hands. Every time I buy groceries, the truck that delivered them may be burning fuel that funds Putin’s war.

Trump wouldn’t be announcing a ceasefire if he weren’t under pressure. The logic is simple: if there’s peace, there’s no problem with Russian diesel. But where is the Kremlin saying yes? Where is Peskov? Nowhere. Because there is no agreement. There is a cover-up for an unpopular decision.

Ukraine outside the parentheses

For weeks I’ve been saying on Ukrainian media that Trump wants to put Ukraine outside the parentheses of his relationship with Putin, and forget it exists. When he has to remember it, it’s always in a negative context. His first experience with Ukraine ended in impeachment. He’s not a happy Ukrainian camper.

That’s why fake numbers flow so easily. Trump has claimed many times that we gave Ukraine $350 billion, when the real figure is far lower. Today it’s one inflated number, tomorrow another. In Russian we have an expression for this: cockroaches in the head.

An October surprise for his own party

Here’s the irony. Congress has gone home to campaign. Republicans can’t vote on anything until after the election. So this deal is baggage they have to carry to the finish line. Trump handed his own party an October surprise.

More Republicans are speaking up. Opposing this president is now both the right thing and the popular thing. Democrats like Senators Blumenthal and Murphy have grown a spine and a voice over the past two years, and they’ll need both.

What Democrats would do with a majority

If the players are allowed to sit at the chessboard instead of hitting each other with it, Democrats have a plan. First, investigations: what exactly are Kushner and Witkoff doing, and for whom? Second, legislation: aid packages for Ukraine and real limits on Trump, including bans on purchases of Russian energy.

There’s an old saying: you don’t have to do politics, but politics will do you anyway. Gas and diesel prices are doing every American right now. The rest depends on turnout.

Watch my full conversation with Iryna Uzlova on War & Politics 24. Subscribe to Rashkin Report for more on what’s really happening in America.

— Yuri Rashkin

Over the weekend, all of it played out. Today’s stream was the aftermath, and it got loud.

Lev: this didn’t happen overnight

Lev came in angry, and he said so. His point was that the diesel deal is not a sudden Trump impulse. He traces the Kushner–Dmitriev channel back to 2017, and he says that he and Oleksandr were talking about Nord Stream on this show long before mainstream outlets picked it up.

“Think about what we know,” Lev said. “Now think about what we don’t know.” In his view the 300,000 tons are a press release, not the deal. More announcements are lined up for the coming months.

Lev also said his sources tell him the administration has stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine. That is his sourcing and not yet confirmed publicly. If true, he said, it crosses a line. He’s seen this before: in 2019, as he reminded us, he was there when aid to Ukraine was frozen.

Oleksandr: the missile came before the siren

Last night around midnight, Oleksandr heard a missile hit before any siren sounded. It struck a residential building near a children’s playground. When he got into his elevator this morning, an elderly neighbor was crying. Her son had been driving past and slowed down at the last second. If he hadn’t, the debris would have landed on him.

“You don’t have to go to the front line anymore,” Oleksandr said. “Just stay in Kyiv.”

Then he said something I didn’t expect. For two years he argued with Lev that no politician would bury Ukraine this openly, because it would be political suicide. “This Friday, I could not believe my ears,” he said. “I was wrong.”

My take: why now, and what’s the way out

I pushed on timing. Plans can be years in the making, but announcements happen when something forces them. The midterms are three weeks out. Russia is struggling at the front. And, frankly, I see one silver lining. Trump took off the last of his disguise right before an election, not after. Voters can see exactly whose interests he serves, and they can still act on it on November 3.

Lev and I disagreed on accountability. I believe a new Congress will run real investigations and the evidence will come out. Lev bet me it won’t: the White House will stonewall every subpoena, just as it did in 2019. I hope I’m right. He has been in the room, and I haven’t.

Ukraine is united. Why isn’t America?

Lev’s biggest frustration was division: among Democrats, among independent media, among people who all say they stand with Ukraine. My answer is practical. I’ll keep inviting voices onto my Thursday slot, whether or not they invite me back. That’s how it works in the Russian-language space, and it works.

At the end I asked Oleksandr whether Ukraine is united. He didn’t take even a second to answer: “Of course.”

So what’s the difference? Ukraine knows it’s under attack. Ballistic missiles make that very clear. Here, Oleksandr says, Americans treat this as a thunderstorm that will pass by the next election. It’s a hurricane.

One of our viewers, Cheech, put it best in the chat: Ukrainians are fighting for their lives. We are fighting for ours too. We just don’t think so yet.

Voice from Ukraine streams Tuesdays and Fridays at 11 a.m. Eastern with Lev Parnas, Oleksandr Bolbirer and me. I’m also on solo Thursdays at 11 a.m. Share this, subscribe, and stay united. Slava Ukraini.

After the election there are two scenarios. The messy one deserves its own conversation, and I’m afraid we’ll be having it for a while. But if the players are allowed to play the chess match, instead of hitting each other over the head with the board, Democrats have a plan.

First, investigations. Corruption, and specifically: what exactly are Kushner and Witkoff doing? Second, restoring trust with our allies. Third, affordable healthcare, because under Trump everything went up, medical bills included. Hello to everyone who wanted a fascist for cheaper eggs. Are you happy now?

This is also why Trump treats Senate races like picking jurors for his own trial. He knows what a Democratic majority means for him.

On Ukraine, I see two directions. Investigations, and legislation: aid packages and laws to restrain Trump. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick’s push to ban Russian oil purchases is exactly that kind of project. Which is why Trump is now trying to let the air out of that balloon by announcing an “energy ceasefire” nobody has confirmed. He’s losing, and he’s covering for it.

Meanwhile the list keeps growing. The same week as the diesel deal, Hegseth announced a live-streamed execution. That’s October in America: everything comes out before the election, and every voter has to decide what matters to them.

There’s an old saying: you don’t have to do politics, but politics will still do you. Right now, the gas can is doing all of us.

So it comes down to turnout. Trump can dump in all the money he wants. If you’re a US citizen and can vote, show up.

That’s the other purpose of the diesel deal with Putin. Now Trump can say high gas and diesel prices are Ukraine’s fault. If only Ukraine stopped hitting Russian refineries, everything would be cheaper. Where does that lead? To criticizing Ukraine for trying to win a war it didn’t start, while Putin starts looking like the good guy.

I’ve been saying this on Ukrainian TV for a while: Trump wants to take Ukraine out of the equation of his relationship with Putin. Forget it exists. And when he has to remember it, it’s always negative. His first experience with Ukraine ended in impeachment.

This administration has never been shy about fake numbers. Trump has repeated a million times that we gave Ukraine $350 billion, when the real figure is a fraction of that. Today it’s a million children. Tomorrow it could be five million. It has nothing to do with Ukraine and everything to do with what’s going on in Trump’s head.

Now the good news: more Republicans are refusing to stay silent. Don Bacon called the deal a grave error. He’s retiring, sadly. And Democrats like Senators Blumenthal and Murphy have grown real spines over the last two years.

It matters, because political violence in America is rising. In Minnesota, a state legislator and her husband were murdered in their home. Even Republicans like Mike Collins talk about death threats. A president who spews hatred at his enemies makes all of this worse.

That’s why speaking up matters. It’s the right thing to do, and with a president this unpopular, it’s increasingly the popular thing too. We have No Kings protests coming up, and I bet we’ll see a lot of Ukrainian flags. Because it’s obvious to many Americans: we’re selling out our democracy and our values to Russia for a bucket of blood.

And here’s the good news hiding inside the bad. He revealed himself before the election, not after. With Trump flooding the zone every day, we can barely remember what happened 24 hours ago, let alone two years from now. This time, voters get to respond while it’s fresh.

And they are responding. Here in Wisconsin, people stop me to ask: “Can you believe we’re buying diesel from Russia?” After four and a half years of war, a lot of outrages just wash past people. This one is sticking.

Then there’s the timing. The first tanker reportedly left Russia weeks ago, while Russia was banning its own diesel exports, and sailed toward a country whose sanctions forbade buying it. Trump only told us when it was almost at the dock. It’s like a man who decided to leave his wife long ago and only finds the courage to tell her the day before he moves out.

The diesel itself is a drop in the bucket for the US. But it means that every time I buy groceries delivered by a diesel truck, I’m subsidizing Putin’s war. In a small, miserable way, our hands are now stained with Ukrainian blood. A lot of Americans feel that, and they’re disgusted.

So why announce an “energy ceasefire” now? It looks like a cover-up: if there’s no war, there’s no problem with the diesel. But where is Putin’s confirmation? Where is Peskov? Nowhere. Because there’s no deal. There’s just another unpopular decision, right before an election, and a president trying to paper over it.

Start with the timing. Reports say the first tanker left St. Petersburg on September 22. That is weeks before Trump announced anything. Yes, tankers sometimes sail before they have a buyer. But this one left a country that bans its own diesel exports and headed for a country whose sanctions forbade buying it. And somehow everything lined up. As Jonathan put it: what an extraordinary coincidence.

I called it a white swan. Not a black swan, the shock nobody saw coming. A white swan, the thing everyone could see coming and too many chose not to. This fits a pattern. Trump walks off another cliff and waits to see who follows.

Jonathan spends a lot of time on forums full of former Republicans and Reagan conservatives. For four and a half years, almost nothing moved them. This did. Many now say openly that Trump works in alignment with Putin’s goals. One of them used the words “impeachment” and “Trump” in the same sentence for the first time. Jonathan also pointed to Keith Kellogg, who now says Ukraine has not just a right but an obligation to hit Russian refineries. That puts Trump’s own former envoy directly against Trump’s policy.

What comes next is just as predictable. Jonathan expects the deal to become a cudgel: against Ukraine’s access to US intelligence, against allies, against NATO. A Ukrainian soldier he knows posted a joke that Trump was sending Patriot interceptors to defend Putin’s refineries. The comments didn’t say “that’s absurd.” They asked, “Is this true?” That’s how far down the well we are.

Jonathan said the line I keep coming back to: this money buys glide bombs and missiles that will kill Ukrainian civilians. The red in red diesel is now their blood.

We also disagreed a bit, which is the point of the show. My Ukrainian viewers have told me for years that Americans need their own Maidan, that you don’t remove a Yanukovych with paperwork. I keep answering: we have institutions, we have elections, and people are voting. Both realities are colliding right now. And even impeachment would give us President Vance. Realistically, the best near-term outcome may be an administration too tied up in chaos to keep putting its hand on the scale for Russia.

Finally, the end of deterrence. This week I interviewed an opposition journalist in Kazakhstan, Dinara Yegeubaeva. She now faces a criminal case and can’t leave the country. Autocrats everywhere are reading the same signal: America no longer holds anyone back. Jonathan warned where this leads: Russia is running out of people, and it will take them from occupied territories and neighboring states to keep the war going.

Meanwhile, Kyiv faces a hard winter. A Ukrainian culture stream I host with friends near Kyiv had to be canceled this week. The power was out.

If you are a US citizen and can vote, this election is the first real chance to put a check on all of this. Please use it.

And if you want to hear these things before they become headlines: twice a week I stream Voice from Ukraine with Lev Parnas here on Substack. Lev flagged the diesel deal hours before it was announced.

Writer Elvira Bary told me this story on Thursday’s live stream. I’ve been thinking about it all day.

Elvira writes historical novels, teaches creative writing, and explains Russia to English speakers on YouTube. She takes the uncomfortable questions one at a time. Why do Russians always end up with a czar? Why don’t they seem to care when the neighbors’ sons die? Every “why,” she says, needs a translation.

I left Moscow at 13. One reason my parents took us out was so my brother and I would never serve in that army. So when Elvira talks about who goes to this war and who doesn’t, I don’t need it explained. But most Americans do.

Who actually fights

Russia has a caste system. It’s not written in any law, but everyone knows it. A minister’s son can kill someone with his car and walk away. A nobody goes to prison for a “like.”

In Elvira’s educated circle in Nizhny Novgorod, she doesn’t know a single young man who served. The ones who go are trapped in places where a house is worth nothing and a train ticket is out of reach. For them, a contract is a ticket out and a way to prove they can provide for their families. They don’t care about Donbas. They need money.

The girl from Magadan has a phone and the internet. She takes pictures of the hills around her village. The only jobs left are the post office and the school, and there’s no one left to marry.

Artificial childhood

Elvira describes Russian history as the history of an abusive family. The father owns everything, punishes whom he wants, and tells the children nobody loves them but him. Keep that up for centuries and you get 70-year-olds who say about the war, “The boss knows better. He’s the chess master.”

Why don’t they remove Putin? Her answer: if you’re six years old, how do you remove your father?

Here’s the part Americans should hear

Elvira’s sharpest idea: authoritarianism is the natural state of things. Walk into any zoo, prison, army unit or middle school classroom and you’ll find a pyramid with an alpha at the top. Democracy is what takes work.

And democracy, she says, is an exit strategy for everybody.

In America, if you lose power, you can teach, start a business, write a book. Life goes on. In Russia, the person at the top of a clan carries thousands of people who depend on him. Losing means social death for all of them. So the boss can never be allowed to lose.

When Americans tell her “we have the same thing here,” she says no. Here, you’re not jailed for a thought. Here, you can remove the ruler.

She’s right. But let me translate that into this week’s news.

When a leader can’t afford to lose, he starts preparing an explanation for losing before the votes are counted. Protesters become “paid by enemies of our nation.” Voting machines become “Chinese.” The woman who handed out the keys to a county’s voting system gets invited to the White House to talk about election security.

That’s not Russia. Not yet. America still has the exit. Thousands of local clerks, courts that have said no, and an election in 26 days. But the exit only works if you use it. That’s the whole lesson of Russia: nobody took it away in a single day.

A Russian writer, now a “foreign agent”

Before the full-scale war, Elvira published with a top Moscow house. After February 2022, she couldn’t write for two years. Then she wrote a novel about this war, built from interviews with Russian elites who had been her students and with Ukrainians from the Kharkiv region.

A Moscow businesswoman grows rich on government contracts and sends her daughter to Harvard. The daughter marries a Ukrainian and goes to Kyiv to help refugees. When she texts from a metro station during an air raid, her mother answers that it’s Ukrainian propaganda.

Elvira posted it for free. Two weeks later, the state named her a foreign agent. Now thousands of Russians read it.

The English edition comes out November 9. All proceeds go to Ukraine. Look for Elvira Bary on Amazon and YouTube.

How it ends

Not at a summit table, she says. With money. Around 40% of the budget goes to war. First a financial crisis, then fuel and logistics, then the economy. Eventually soldiers stop getting paid, and they go home.

And the news from Russia already reads like the 16th century: plague in Siberia, bears in the streets, saints’ relics paraded to the front lines.

Somebody in Moscow wished to go back to the good old days. Wish granted.

I host Rashkin Report in English on Voice from Ukraine every Thursday at 11 a.m. ET. If you want to understand what’s really happening in America, and why it matters to Ukraine, subscribe.

— Yuri Rashkin

We started with Dmitry Medvedev, who warned this week that action against Russia’s satellite network could lead to a war in space with Starlink.

Russia has been waving its nuclear threats since the third day of this war. They don’t scare people the way they used to, at least not people who’ve been paying attention. So Russia needs…

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Russia hasn’t told us what happened. We’re already promising to help.

I was eleven when Chernobyl happened. The Soviet government said nothing. My family found out from Voice of America. Then the park near our home in Moscow filled with children evacuated from Kyiv. Forty years later, the Kremlin’s only statement is: trust only official sources.

The real disease here isn’t the bacteria. It’s the lie. And this time, the American president is offering to carry it for them.