On the car radio one low and dreamy male voice says to the other: “Hi, General. What are you expecting of the talks in Istanbul? Have you heard the rumor that at one point Putin and Trump are going to surprise everybody by flying there together?”
“Oh, yes, yes,” says the one called “General.” “Of course they both are awfully busy, but we still hope to see them there.”
It is early morning, I am riding in a taxi after a sleepless night of listening to drones and worrying about my colleagues from the largest publishing house in Russia, who were just detained en masse by the police for nobody knows quite what.
The cooing tones of the men on Vesti FM, a popular Kremlin-controlled radio station, remind me of how teenage girls talk about their K-pop idols. I turn on my VPN and check Russian independent media sites—they report that because the EKSMO publishing house sold some out-of-favor books that were legally published before the 2022–23 censorship laws, a number of employees will go to prison.
No one is going to mention that on the radio.
Hope in the peace deal promised by Trump is so pervasive here it’s as if everything was put on hold and replaced by an alternative reality in which “we” and “America” are ruling the world hand in hand. It does not concern anybody that the American businesses that left after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine are still gone, or that it is impossible to directly transfer money between the two countries.
Fantasies of “the Savior from Mar-a-Lago” who will not just put an end to the war but negotiate peace on conditions favorable to Russia—conditions which would be possible only if we were winning, which we are not—fills everyday conversations, memes, social-media posts.
But those pleasant daydreams were interrupted last Sunday. Moscow and regions close to the border are used to drones, but the massive sneak drone attacks on military aircraft in Murmansk and Irkutsk, deep in the heart of the country, shocked everyone. The government has been silent. In a televised Cabinet meeting this week, Putin called Ukrainians “terrorists” but did not say a word about the devastating attack on the remote airfields. (He did tell Trump in a phone call that he planned to retaliate, then kept his word with a massive attack on Kyiv, killing civilians and damaging buildings.)
Panic can be detected in some of the less conformist blogs, but the closer writers are to the Kremlin, the more they ignore all breaches in our defenses. The most pro-Putin reaction to bad news is simple disregard or, at most, new bursts of hate toward Ukrainians, as if they were not supposed to fight back at all.
And massive drone attacks are still raining down in different parts of Russia. On June 3, Putin’s pet project, the Crimean bridge that attaches the annexed Ukrainian peninsula to the Russian mainland, was attacked—this after it was rebuilt subsequent to being severely damaged in 2022. Every night since the beginning of May, I wake up to the loud crashes of drones being shot down by the Russian air defense close to my home—I happen to live near an airport.
“Looks like that peace deal is not going so well,” my neighbors joke sardonically in our group chat while advising each other to go sleep in the bathroom to avoid possible injuries from broken glass.
For the more gullible, or brainwashed, Trump and his MAGA followers seemed like long-awaited, like-minded allies: conspiracy-driven, anti-liberal, there to blow up the “globalist” world order Vladimir Putin is also known to oppose.
“In America, tolerance exists only on Tumblr, they hate gay people and other religions, too,” somebody writes in the comments section of an online comedy show that routinely pokes fun at “corrupted Western freedoms.”
“Phew, there is still hope for the world, then,” someone replies. Many of us have been taught to instinctively hate anything resembling “wokeness.”
Moreover, even more liberal Russians who do not believe in bringing outdated conservative mores back are sometimes seduced by the idea of having at long last found what seems to be a friendly superpower. (There were a lot of attempts to build such a relationship with China, but they all led to nothing in the end.)
Since 2022, we have become quite used to being cast as pariahs by the West, so this illusion of being respected and reckoned with brings joy as well as hope that the fighting might stop—the war’s toll feels really exhausting after these three years. I do not have any friends in the military, but even I know more than one person who went to the war and never came back. And it goes without saying how much I would like to sleep normally again.
And yet, after the abrupt end of the talks in Istanbul last week, with the Russian government announcing maximalist and unattainable peace conditions, it should become clear that the dreams of a new life with a little help from the Trump White House have been nothing but a delusion from the start.
Interestingly, some patriotic bloggers have been expressing their dissatisfaction with Trump—and even vocally “missing” Biden—for a few weeks now. Trump appears uncontrollable, with one statement contradicting another, and that may confuse even his more credulous fans. Biden was at least a “predictable” enemy, as is customary: the Cold War has never really been forgotten.
But even if the Trump-Putin “friendship” were to work out as effectively as many have hoped, it would not stop the other war we endure—the war on culture. All these months after the American election, while the Russian public’s hopes have been unprecedentedly up, freedom within the country has been rapidly going down.
On May 14, the staff of two subsidiaries of EKSMO were suddenly detained in their homes and workplaces and brought in for questioning—line editors and accountants—resulting in house arrests and upcoming criminal trials for three people.
It turns out that some agents provocateurs posing as ordinary clients asked the publishing house to sell them romance and history books that could be considered problematic under the new anti-L.G.B.T. laws. Upon the purchase, the sellers were charged with extremism, facing sentences of up to seven years. This is a typical police sting operation for catching drug dealers.
The “Editors’ Case,” as it has been labeled in the media, is just one blow in a huge strike against independent cultural institutions. Our Ministry of Culture appears no less eager to bury our education system than Trump is to cripple Harvard: banned-book lists feature plenty of acclaimed Western philosophers such as Susan Sontag and Hannah Arendt, who were on my university curriculum in 2017.
This spring, peace at times seemed so near—especially during the Easter truce. But all we have as summer begins is a hangover from dashed expectations, more bombing, and ever more vigilant government repression. I will not be surprised if the Russian public’s attitude toward Trump changes from love to hate and vice versa many times more—but, for now, we are likely to trudge on with our own war on the economy, liberty, knowledge, and close neighbors.
Katya V. is a poet, a feminist, and a tutor of Russian and English
