Marco Rubio warned on April 18 the U.S. will walk away from efforts to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace deal unless there are clear signs of progress in the next several days, according to Reuters and WP. Trump then said Rubio was “right in saying” that the U.S. wants to see the Russia-Ukraine war come to an end. Asked how to identify how many days that would be, Trump said, “No specific numbers of days, but quickly, we want to get it done,” according to NBC. On the prior day, Rubio and other U.S. officials1 attended a meeting with European leaders in Paris where they outline of terms to end the fighting and ease sanctions on Moscow in the event of a lasting ceasefire, according to Bloomberg. The proposal would effectively freeze the war, with Ukrainian territories now occupied by Russia remaining under Moscow’s control while Kyiv’s aspirations of joining NATO would also be off the table, according to this news agency. Rubio said he spoke with Sergei Lavrov to brief him on elements of the U.S. peace framework and that the Europeans had a central role to play in any peace pact, especially as their sanctions on Russia would likely need to be lifted to secure an accord, according to Reuters.Speaking on April 15 Trump’s special envoy Witkoff said Putin is open to a “permanent peace” deal with Ukraine and claimed the peace deal currently under discussion involves “five territories,” referring to Ukrainian regions currently occupied by Russian forces. In response to Witkoff’s comments, Zelensky said that recognizing any of Ukraine’s occupied territories as Russian is a “red line” for Kyiv.
Two Russian ballistic missiles struck Ukraine’s city of Sumy on Palm Sunday, killing 36 and injuring over 119. Donald Trump called the strike “horrible,” but noted that he was told Russia “made a mistake” and his administration told U.S. allies it couldn’t sign a G7 draft statement denouncing the April 13 attack. Trump also blamed Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky2 for the war,3 which he claimed to have left millions dead.4 For his part, Zelenskyy rejected Trump’s accusations and urged the U.S. leader to visit Ukraine and see the devastation caused by Russia himself. Russia’s Sergei Lavrov admitted to the strike, but claimed that it was targeting a gathering of Ukrainian military. Ukrainian authorities insisted Russian forces targeted civilians in the strike on Sumy, but An Ukrainian soldier described to WP how he was sitting at a military medal ceremony in a university building basement Sunday when two Russian ballistic missiles tore through the surrounding area in Sumy. Ukrainian government also fired Volodymyr Artiukh from the post of the Sumy Oblast governor following the strikes.5
Russia gained 142 square miles of Ukraine’s territory (about 1 1/2 Nantucket islands) in the past month, and its overall pace of advance has picked back up this week, according to the April 16 issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. This week’s gain of 50 square miles is nearly double the prior week’s advance of 29 square miles, according to the card. As of April 16 Russian forces occupied 112,581 square km (43,468 square miles), which constituted 18.65% of Ukraine’s territory and which is roughly equivalent to the state of Ohio, according to Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT group’s map.
Russia’s ruble has surged to become the best performing global currency, posting this year’s strongest gains against the dollar to outpace even the traditional safe haven of gold according to Bloomberg. The ruble has strengthened 38% versus the dollar on the over-the-counter market since the beginning of this year, data compiled by Bloomberg shows. The Russian ruble equaled 0.01216 U.S. dollars on April 14, 2025, appreciating by 3% since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, according to RM’s calculations.
Americans are now split on whether Russia is an ‘enemy,’ according to Pew.
Petr Lavrenin, an Odessa-born political journalist and expert on Ukraine and the former Soviet Union
On the first day of April in 2022, shocking videos began circulating on Ukrainian social media, showing the streets of Bucha, a town in Kiev region, strewn with dead bodies. The “Bucha massacre” quickly became one of the most widely discussed and controversial chapters of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict. Western media immediately accused the Russian army of mass killings, while Vladimir Zelensky declared that these acts were not only war crimes but a genocide against his country’s people.
However, a closer look at the situation raises numerous questions. An analysis of video footage, satellite images, and eyewitness accounts reveals significant inconsistencies that cast doubt on the official narrative adopted by Kiev and its Western allies. This article explores why it appears the so-called “Bucha massacre” has been fabricated.
What do we know
Bucha, with a population of 40,000 people, found itself on the front lines from the first days of the Ukraine conflict. To the north of Bucha lies the village of Gostomel, home to the strategically important Antonov Airport, where Russian paratroopers landed on the morning of February 24, 2022. This group soon joined the main Russian units advancing from Belarus.
In the days that followed, fierce battles broke out around Bucha as Russian troops attempted to establish a foothold in the town and push toward Irpin, a large suburb of Kiev. Nevertheless, the area remained under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and territorial defense units.
Between March 3 and 5, Russian forces entered Bucha from the side of the village of Vorzel, setting up a base at a glass factory and along the southern outskirts of the city. From then on, Bucha became a transit point and rear base for Russian troops engaged in combat near Kiev.
On March 29, following a round of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin announced a significant reduction in military activity around Kiev and Chernigov.
By March 30, Russian forces began withdrawing from Kiev Region due to the shifting priorities of the military operation.
However, just days after their retreat, shocking footage emerged that stunned the whole world.
When Ukrainian soldiers entered Bucha, international media outlets began publishing photo and video evidence of murdered civilians. Vladimir Zelensky and his team quickly accused Russian troops of committing mass murder, labeling it an act of genocide.
“This is genocide. The annihilation of an entire nation and people,” Zelensky declared on CBS’s Face the Nation. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitri Kuleba called on the G7 countries to impose immediate “new devastating sanctions” against Russia, including imposing a complete embargo on Russian oil, gas, and coal, closing ports to Russian vessels, and disconnecting Russian banks from the SWIFT system.
The Russian Foreign Ministry denied any involvement in civilian deaths. Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov said that the images showed “signs of forgery” and manipulation.
From the beginning, the narrative surrounding the “Bucha massacre” was full of inconsistencies and peculiarities, many of which remain unclear to this day.
Timing discrepancies
Among the key arguments that cast doubt on the Ukrainian narrative of mass killings in Bucha are the timing discrepancies.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has consistently stated that all Russian units had left Bucha by March 30, 2022. This claim is supported by local authorities. On March 31, Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk recorded a video message confirming the withdrawal of Russian forces but did not mention any mass killings or bodies. In the background of the video, the streets appear clear, and there are no signs of corpses or destruction. At the same time, Ukrainian MPs and military personnel were in Bucha, yet none of them reported seeing dead bodies. Local residents did not mention any mass shootings either.
The first images of the bodies emerged only on April 1-2, a couple of days after Ukrainian military personnel and activists entered the city. This raises questions about the timing and circumstances surrounding their deaths: if Russian troops left Bucha on March 30, how could evidence of the killings have come to light only several days later?
Analysis of video footage from the scene further shows that many bodies appear too “fresh” to have been lying there for over a week. Forensic experts point out that signs of decomposition should have manifested much earlier if the deaths truly occurred in mid-March. Photos and videos provided by Ukrainian and Western media show signs (such as drying skin in certain areas) that suggest death likely took place just hours or a day before the images were captured.
Controversial satellite images and social media data
On April 1, 2022, Maxar Technologies released satellite images dated March 19, allegedly showing bodies on Yablonskaya Street in Bucha. These images were cited by Ukrainian and Western media as key evidence of mass killings supposedly carried out by Russian forces.
However, these images are highly questionable. Independent researchers have noted that the images may have been manipulated or backdated.
Firstly, the March images from Maxar, published by The New York Times, are of very low quality compared to the February photos. This complicates analysis and raises suspicions of manipulation. The objects depicted in the images cannot be unequivocally identified as bodies, so claims about corpses that have been there for a long time rely solely on Western media reports and have not been independently verified. The images could have been altered or backdated to suggest that the bodies had been on the streets since March.
Secondly, the weather conditions captured in the videos do not match the meteorological data for the dates specified in Western media reports. This discrepancy indicates a possible mismatch in the timing of the recordings.
Thirdly, Maxar Technologies has close ties to US government structures, raising concerns about a potential bias and the use of its data for propaganda purposes.
Alexey Tokarev, who has a PhD in political science, and his team from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations conducted an analysis of media coverage, social media, and Telegram channels related to Bucha, and uncovered an intriguing pattern: there were no mentions of bodies on Yablonskaya Street prior to April 1. While there were reports of destruction, prisoners, and fighting, there was no information regarding mass killings.
“If we are to believe the Western media, the town has been full of corpses since April 1, and according to a leading American newspaper, even earlier – since March 11. So why is it that in a video captured by the Ukrainian police on April 2, which features 14 civilians, no one mentions any bodies or mass executions? The nearly eight-minute-long video shows nine different locations in the small town, but we don’t see a single corpse,” Tokarev says.
Discrepancies in visual evidence
The videos and photographs released by the Ukrainian side reveal numerous inconsistencies that suggest a possible staging. For instance, in one case, we see Ukrainian soldiers moving bodies between takes, while in another video, a “corpse’s” hand noticeably twitches. These signs indicate that the individuals depicted were not actually dead.
The Investigative Committee of Russia reported that the bodies did not display signs of having been outside for an extended period – there were no corpse marks and uncoagulated blood in wounds – casting doubt on the official Ukrainian narrative. Experts also noted the absence of shrapnel or explosive damage near the bodies, further contradicting claims of mass shootings.
Additionally, many victims, judging by photos, wore white armbands – a symbol typically associated with pro-Russian civilians. This suggests that Ukrainian forces might have targeted individuals suspected of “collaboration”, i.e., cooperating with Russian troops, and then accused the other side of the murders.
Moreover, in the initial days following the withdrawal of Russian troops from Bucha, a curfew was imposed, restricting locals from venturing into the streets. This created suitable conditions for the potential fabrication of events.
Eyewitness accounts and questionable sources
Adrien Bocquet, a French volunteer and journalist who was in Kiev Region during intense fighting, claimed that he personally witnessed Ukrainian forces staging mass killings in Bucha.
He recounted seeing bodies being brought into the city and arranged on the streets to create the impression of “mass deaths”. “When we drove into Bucha, I was in the passenger seat. As we passed through the city, I saw bodies lying on the roadside, and right before my eyes, people were unloading corpses from trucks and placing them next to those already on the ground to amplify the effect of mass casualties,” he said.
“One of the volunteers who had been there the day before – let me emphasize that this is not something I observed myself, but what I heard from another volunteer – told me he saw refrigerated trucks arriving in Bucha from other cities in Ukraine, unloading bodies and lining them up. From this, I realized that these were staged incidents,” he stated.
According to Bocquet, volunteers were prohibited from taking photos or videos.
Interestingly, in June 2022, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine stated that many claims made by former Ombudsman for Human Rights in Ukraine Lyudmila Denisova, including those related to the events in Bucha, were not accurate. “Law enforcement officials tried to carry out their own investigation. They went through all medical reports, police statements, and data on the deceased, attempting to find cases (…). However, all this work proved futile,” reported the news outlet Ukrainskaya Pravda.
Russian military correspondents, including Aleksandr Kots, have also referred to the so-called Bucha massacre as fake. Kots, who visited Bucha in February and March 2022, said “It’s not hard to verify what I’m saying. A forensic examination would determine the time of death of those poor people and align it with NATO’s objective monitoring data, which clearly indicates when Russian troops withdrew. But that’s if you’re looking for the truth. And who in the West wants that?”
Motives and geopolitical context
The story of the Bucha massacre emerged at a time when both the Ukrainian and Russian sides, albeit with varying degrees of optimism, were reporting progress in ceasefire negotiations.
“The Ukrainian side has become more realistic regarding issues related to Ukraine’s neutral and non-nuclear status, but the draft agreement is not ready for top-level discussions,”said Vladimir Medinsky, head of the Russian delegation and an aide to the President of Russia. Meanwhile, Ukrainian negotiator David Arahamiya noted that the document was ready, and the two presidents could meet and discuss it.
However, following reports of the “Bucha massacre,” Zelensky withdrew from the peace talks.
The incident in Bucha became a pivotal moment that not only derailed peace negotiations in Istanbul but also intensified Russia’s diplomatic isolation in the West, led to the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats and tighter sanctions, and resulted in Ukraine receiving additional military aid from NATO states.
Without presenting sufficient evidence, Western media spread the narrative of the “atrocities” committed by Russian forces. This suggests that the events in Bucha may have been used as a propaganda tool.
To date, no independent investigation has confirmed the accuracy of Ukraine’s accounts. Additionally, a complete list of casualties and the circumstances surrounding their deaths has yet to be made public.
***
Analyzing timing discrepancies, satellite images, video footage, eyewitness accounts, and Ukraine’s motives suggests that the events in Bucha may have been fabricated or politically exploited.
Despite the extensive media coverage of the “Bucha massacre,” Ukraine’s official narrative raises many questions and demands an independent inquiry. Ukraine has failed to conduct a thorough investigation or provide any coherent explanation as to why Russian soldiers would kill innocent civilians. The argument of Russia’s deep-seated hatred and brutality towards Ukrainians simply doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, since no similar tragedies have been documented during the course of the conflict. Instead, the “massacre” has become part of a media campaign aimed at dehumanizing Russian soldiers and portraying them as occupiers.
Bucha stands as one of the key propaganda symbols in the anti-Russia campaign. However, a closer examination of the evidence reveals numerous unanswered questions that officials prefer to avoid. An independent investigation could shed light on the true circumstances, but given the ongoing information war, it is unlikely to happen soon.
I want to draw your attention to an article by A. Wess Mitchell that appeared in the National Interest in August 2021. The article, A Strategy for Avoiding Two-Front War, is an excellent summary of how the US foreign policy elite view the world — i.e., the United States faces two formidable enemies, Russia and China, and we need to figure out a way to screw them over and maintain our hegemony. But Mitchell is not engaged in an academic exercise… he prepared a version of this paper for the Pentagon Office of Net Assessment in fall 2020. This was a road map for the war in Ukraine — i.e., provoke Russia into attacking Ukraine and then, with Western help, beat the hell out of them. [https://nationalinterest.org/feature/strategy-avoiding-two-front-war-192137]
I learned of this article today while listening to Alexander Mercouris. Mr. Mitchell is an intelligent, well-educated man, but he is captive to an ideology and world view that plagues the Deep State. He conjures up a Manichean-world, portraying Russia and China as ravenous imperialists hell-bent on devouring the peace loving countries of the world, while touting the United States as the force for good. He ignores the fact that the United States, not Russia or China, has been the one country during the last 70-years that has launched multiple color revolutions and relentlessly attacked and pillaged scores of nations around the world. His piece has one purpose — create a straw man, only in this case it is straw men, to justify US military expansion, but doing so under the guise of diplomacy.
Mitchell correctly acknowledges that the United States lacks the military strength and resources to simultaneously engage both Russia and China. At least he is not insane. He discusses three diplomatic options that could be employed to contain Russia and China:
Option 1: “Flip” the weaker. Perhaps the most common form of sequencing is to align with the weaker of two rivals in order to concentrate resources on the stronger. This is the method that Edwardian Britain used when it recruited Tsarist Russia—against which it had waged a decades-long cold war in Central Asia no less intense than our own—into an alliance against Imperial Germany.
Option 2: Defer competition with the stronger. A second sequencing strategy is to delay rivalry with the stronger of two opponents in order to deal conclusively with the weaker. The mid-sixteenth-century Republic of Venice employed such a strategy to deflect the threat of the rising Ottoman Empire and deal conclusively with its mainland rival Milan. A similar logic guided Britain’s ill-fated quest in the 1930s to appease Germany in order to prioritize naval resources for the Far East and buy time for rearmament in Europe.
Option 3: Co-opt both rivals. The third and most difficult, but perhaps most elegant, solution for the simultaneity problem has been to transcend it entirely—to negate its pressures by co-opting both rivals into cooperative structures that prevent or mitigate conflict. This was the method that the nineteenth-century Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich used to enmesh Austria’s flanking rivals, France and Russia, in a system of concert diplomacy that kept the peace in Europe for almost a century.
So what does Mr. Mitchell propose? The war in Ukraine:
“The leitmotif of the Russia-in-Europe policy should be adamantine resistance to Russian expansion culminating in a decisive defeat for Russia’s present aims in Europe’s borderlands. If history is any indication, Russia only takes détente with an adversary seriously after it has been forced to do so by a defeat or serious setback. This was as much a precondition for Ronald Reagan’s success at Reykjavík after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as it was for the English statesmen who brokered the Anglo-Russian entente after Russia’s defeat at Port Arthur in 1905. Attempts to reach détente before Russia has suffered such a setback are not only likely to fail, they are also likely to be counterproductive insofar as they implicitly concede territory and validate the wager of Russia’s current leaders that renewed empire in the west is achievable by force of arms.
“The equivalent of Port Arthur or Afghanistan today is Ukraine. The United States should wish to see Russia suffer a military rebuff of sufficient magnitude to prompt its leaders to reassess their assumptions about the permissiveness of the post-Soviet space as a preferred zone of strategic expansion. America can help bring about this outcome much as it did in Afghanistan: by providing locals the means to better resist Russia at higher volumes than it has done to date and encouraging European allies to do the same. And we should significantly raise the costs for cyber and other attacks on the United States, including via reciprocal attacks on Russian critical infrastructure and by sanctioning Putin’s inner circle and the secondary market for Russian bonds.
“This pain, however, must have a goal beyond simply punishment; namely, to inflict a defeat for strategic effect, with the calculated aim of convincing Russia that its chosen path of westward expansion is closed. By contrast, U.S. policy toward Russia-in-Asia should be calibrated to encourage a redirection of Russia’s focus and energies in this direction. Such a policy would consist of economic, military, and political planks.”
There you have it. If you think the ghouls at the Pentagon tossed this paper into the trash or filed it away in a cavernous warehouse, you are naive. Mr. Mitchell provided the raison d’etre for provoking Russia into attacking Ukraine, and the strategy for supplying Ukraine with weapons, intelligence and money.
This article is laced with many false, wrongheaded assumptions. For example, Mitchell assumes that Russia’s economy is weak and incapable of matching Western military output. Whoops! How did that turn out?
Another misguided, erroneous assumption — and it is not unique to Mr. Mitchell, it also is embraced by most of the Deep State strategists — is that Russia is the prison-bitch with respect to China, and can eventually be convinced to break with Beijing. Mitch writes:
“By widening the power disparity between China and Russia, the pandemic has heightened Russia’s economic dependency on China as a source of capital, markets, and international political support. Paradoxically, the very fact of this deepening dependency is likely to increase Russian fear of becoming a sidecar to Beijing’s ambitions and create incentives for Moscow to reorient its foreign policy.”
I have been astounded by the number of US experts and pundits who fervently believe that the relationship between Russia and China is superficial and temporary. They genuinely believe that the United States can cynically play Russia off against China, and that neither country is smart enough to discern the US ploy. I asked Foreign Minister Lavrov about this very thing. He scoffed at the notion. While Lavrov noted that Russia and China, by virtue of their respective histories, have some differences, they are fundamentally united to counter the imperialist ambitions of the West. Russia and China have entered into a comprehensive, strategic partnership that encompasses defense, manufacturing, trade, finance and diplomacy.
The war in Ukraine, the genocidal policy of Israel in West Asia, the threat to destroy Iran and the tariff war against China are not separate, unrelated conflicts. The Russian and Chinese leaders understand this and are acting in concert to counter the US divide-and-conquer strategy. That is why Russia and China conducted a joint-military exercise with Iran in the first week of March. That is why Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats met twice in March — first in Beijing and then, a week ago, in Moscow. They are coordinating policies and discussing strategies for dealing with the threat posed by the United States. I do not think that Donald Trump and his team of bobble heads comprehend this.
Russians’ wellbeing levels surge in face of war, sanctions and repression
Despite being hit with unprecedented Western sanctions, the war with Ukraine has been accompanied by a noticeable increase in the well-being of Russians. A new study has revealed the extent of the domestic feel-good factor, with economists at the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economics (BOFIT) finding the level of Russians’ satisfaction with their household and personal circumstances has hit its highest in a decade.
-To understand how the restructuring of Russia’s economy during wartime affected Russians, economists Sinikka Parviainen (BOFIT) and William Pyle (Middlebury College, USA) used data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Service (RLMS), which has been conducted by the Higher School of Economics almost every year since the 1990s. This research tracks the economic well-being of Russian households and individuals with a sample size of around 6,000-8,000 households and 17,000-21,000 people.
-The economists looked at RLMS data from 2013-2023, scrutinising responses to the questions: “how satisfied with life are you right now?” and “how satisfied with your financial circumstances are you right now?”. They also looked at whether households had made large purchases over the past year, how much they spent on cultural events and how long they could maintain their current lifestyle if they lost their main source of income.
-They concluded that the first two years of Russia’s invasion — 2022 and 2023 — saw the highest levels of general satisfaction, and specific financial satisfaction had also returned to 2014 levels for the first time. That year is seen as a benchmark before Russia was plunged into an economic crisis following the annexation of Crimea, imposition of Western sanctions and an oil price crash.
-Large purchases fell to a minimum in 2022 but demand for non-food goods has since increased faster than inflation and wages, in line with The Bell’s earlier calculations. There was also a sharp rise in the proportion of households spending money on entertainment: in 2023 this reached 2018 levels, the researchers noted. The number of respondents who said they would be able to last more than a few months on their savings reached a 10-year high.
-These findings correspond with Russia’s official statistics which also point to improved financial circumstances since the start of the war. In 2023, real incomes in Russia not only returned to 2013 levels after a decade of lost living standards, but surpassed the pre-Crimea level by 5%, the researchers highlighted.
-There are no surprises as to the cause — a huge increase in state spending on the invasion and the military-industrial complex that has driven record labor shortages and pushed wages up across the economy. The high salaries offered by the state to people sent to work at the front, as well as those paid to soldiers (from 200,000 rubles a month) have played a big part, and the main winners have been residents of Russia’s poorest regions, which have recorded an unusually sudden increase in bank deposits.
Why the world should care
Putin’s regime is unlikely to face any internal threat as long as Russians’ well-being and overall happiness is on the rise.
Are Russia’s war emigrants heading home?
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russians left the country. Most of them were highly-skilled personnel who could work remotely or find jobs abroad. The Russian authorities are sticking to their story that most of those who were “scared off” at the start have since returned. And by the end of the third year of the war, foreign media outlets started writing about Russia’s brain drain being replaced by an influx. However, as new research by OutRush shows, the number of Russians that have actually returned since summer 2023 is no more than 8%.
-In July 2024 The Bell calculated that since 2022 the most modest estimate for the number of people that had left Russia and not returned stood at around 650,000. The Russian authorities initially insisted that most who left, either after the invasion or after the September 2022 mobilization later returned. The topic of Russian emigres returning home has been picked up by analysts and media outlets, some of which estimated return rates ranging from 15% to 45%.
-But researchers Emil Kamalov (European University Institute, Florence), Ivetta Sergeyeva (Stanford University) and Karolina Nugumanova (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa) have conducted their own measurements as part of the OutRush project, based on a sample of 8,500 Russian emigrants living in more than 100 countries from summer 2023 to 2024.
-OutRush’s research suggests that, from 2023 to 2024, there has been no mass return to the motherland. The survey showed that over the year-long period studied, only 8% of emigrants who left Russia after the war began had returned home. A further 5% said that they planned to do so in the foreseeable future. In addition, 21% of those surveyed had moved from one country to another, while another 28% were planning to move to somewhere different, but not Russia.
-“We are seeing a kind of stabilization of migration: about 6-8% return each year, but roughly the same number leave, so the overall figures do not change very much,” the authors of the report concluded. Moreover, only 54% of those surveyed said that they would consider returning to Russia under any circumstances — including the end of the war or the fall of Putin’s regime.
-Of those Russians who left since 2022, only 1% are considering leaving Western countries such as Germany, Spain, the Netherlands or the USA. A second group of countries saw middling rates of departure — around 13-16% had left Israel, Argentina and Serbia. Russians that settled in non-EU countries were most likely to have left — like Georgia (58%), Turkey (47%), Armenia (47%), Kazakhstan (40%) and Montenegro (33%). However, sizeable numbers of them were heading to other countries, not Russia, with Serbia being the most popular destination as a second country for Russians that left after 2022.
-Among those who returned to Russia, 34% complained that they could not find good jobs abroad. Another 34% missed their homeland and 32% were dissatisfied with the country they had moved to. The numbers planning to return were higher among people who left due to fear of the draft, for family reasons or in search of better opportunities.
-By profession, 43% of those surveyed worked in tech. The most popular destinations for them were Cyprus, Spain and Portugal. Workers in the arts, culture, science education and media made up another 21% of those who left, with France, Israel and Britain the most popular destinations. Since leaving, 7% have set up their own business and 28% plan to do so. The most popular locations for starting a new enterprise were Argentina, Brazil and Spain, along with Serbia, Montenegro, Georgia and the United States.
Why the world should care
People who left Russia after 2022 were mainly motivated either by politics (their opposition to the Kremlin and the war) or fear of being mobilized. For the most part, neither group seems interested in coming back.
Only three months into his second term, Donald Trump’s national security team looks to be seriously divided. As I reported late last year as the administration was taking shape, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who led the transition and is known to have played a major role in vetting candidates for top national security posts, was intent on repeating the mistakes of the first Trump term by handing hardline neoconservatives plum roles within the administration, including, fatefully, the job of national security adviser to Florida Congressman Michael Waltz.
The division between America First stalwarts such as Vice President JD Vance and neocons like Waltz burst out into the open last month thanks to Signal-gate. The decision to bomb the Houthis (and killing at least 13 civilians in the process) was met with childish exuberance by the likes of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Vance, on the other hand, was the sole participant on the now infamous chat to express any reservations about the (pointless, illegal, immoral, and counterproductive) airstrikes. Addressing the underlying motives for the Houthi attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes is how an America First, rather than an AIPAC First, foreign policy ought to be conducted.
That aside, last week Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff, who is Secretary of State in all but name, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Witkoff, like his boss, appears to favor dialogue and diplomacy over endless war. To the former real estate moguls, it’s about the art of the deal. Witkoff’s elevation over the ostensible Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recalls a time when the national security advisers under Nixon and Carter (Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski) ran roughshod over the good men (William Rogers and Cyrus Vance) who were then serving as Secretary of State. The difference here of course is that while the nation would have been far better served if Rogers and Vance had won their respective power struggles with Kissinger and Brzezinski, President Trump has made the right call in downgrading Rubio. Trump appears equally intent on downgrading Rubio’s department–proposing a 50 percent cut in the State Department’s budget for FY2026.
Not surprisingly, the divide between the Neocon (Waltz, Rubio) and the American First (Vance, Gabbard) camps extends to the administration’s policies toward Russia, Iran and Africa.
The recent Russian airstrikes on Sumy only underscore the humanitarian imperative to put an end to the conflict. On that score, Europe is being particularly unhelpful, its continent-wide policy hijacked by the smallest yet hardest-line nations within the EU. A former Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, is at the forefront of the effort to prolong the war in her new role as the EU’s chief diplomat. Last week, European states committed to sending $24 billion in military aid to Ukraine to Kiev. This no doubt came as welcome news to Trump administration hard-liners. According to a Tuesday (April 14) report in the Wall Street Journal, Rubio and Trump’s Envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, have “recommended more caution when dealing with Putin and for a harder line against Moscow’s demands for territorial concessions from Kyiv.” Yet, the Journal concedes that Trump continues to back Witkoff in his effort to broker a deal to end the fighting.
Trump and Witkoff are facing similar headwinds from their own team when it comes to talks with Tehran. Witkoff has said publicly that Trump has suggested the establishment of “a verification program so no one has to worry about the weaponization of your [Iran’s] nuclear material.” The mere prospect of Witkoff succeeding (and thereby thwarting Netanyahu’s long held dream of an American war on Iran) has the neocons foaming at the mouth. Matthew Continetti, who, like his father-in-law Bill Kristol, has never been shy about his desire to send your kids to fight in wars he never would, believes that Iran is ripe (yet again) for regime change. And, unfortunately, there are elements within the Republican party and Trump’s own NSC that are inclined to agree.
One such Trump adviser is the improbable Sebastian Gorka, who is now serving as NSC senior director for counterterrorism. Unceremoniously shown the door during Trump’s first term, the Hungarian-British operative is back with a vengeance. According to career neocon stenographer Eli Lake, upon returning to the White House this year, one of the first things Gorka did was to,
…order new lanyards for his team with eight letters and an ampersand: WWFY & WWKY. These cryptic abbreviations were drawn from a quote from Gorka’s boss, President Donald Trump: “We will find you, and we will kill you.”
The terrorists Gorka wants to find and kill seem to be, well, everywhere. At his urging, Trump has already launched airstrikes on Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Somalia looms large in Gorka’s imagination and a battle seems to be shaping up within the administration over what approach to take in Somalia as the terrorist group Al Shabab threatens Mogadishu. Last Thursday (April 10) the New York Times reported that at an interagency meeting in early April,
…Mr. Gorka is said to have argued against shrinking the U.S. presence, contending that it would be intolerable to let Al Shabab take over the country and proposing to instead step up strikes targeting militants.
Intolerable for whom?
Cooler heads are said to be arguing for closing the US Embassy in Mogadishu and withdrawing diplomatic personnel from the country. They should also consider withdrawing the 500-600 American troops stationed there as well.
