Putin is a murdering KGB thug, and will act accordingly. And is worth opposing.
At the same time, such opposition will no doubt result in Putin whacking back with precisely the argument Sadredin Moosavi illustrates: your cancel culture is no better and likely worse.
Here in the West, we really have little to no basis on which to call out what is going on in Russia or China or other places.
We better clean up our own act, that is for sure. We have let the "woke camel"'s nose under the flaps of the tent and it is still wreaking previously unimaginable havoc.
If Putin actually was the "murdering thug", we would not be having this conversation. There would be no Ukraine government left. There would be no Zelensky and his insanely corrupt junta that fled Ukraine ahead of indictments running around yapping. There would probably be no Kiev left. Putin's group have handled Ukraine as a kind of civil war, which it is. The war split families. This has also been a war that has taught Russia great deal about current day warfare. It is valuable for this.
It is a great mistake to speak in as if Putin were the dictator of Russia. Putin is the one who is willing to take the limelight. He has a very cool head and the group that runs Russia approves of Putin's cool and careful head. Russians are now angry and chafing because Putin is so cautious. He is trying not to do things that will make the situation worse. Giving in on Ukraine is simply not an option.
If the situation was turned around, and the USA was facing an independent Texas, taken over by CAIR with support from China and Russia, what would the USA do? What would we do if Nustar Oil Refinery in Maryland was hit by drones or Chinese missiles launched from Texas? What would we do if the governor of Texas said he would build atom bombs?
- On the murders publicly associated with Putin.
- Politkovskaya. Her death occurred as she was about to file a story on Kadyrov, the Chechen premier accusing him of various atrocities. That is where motive lies, plus means and opportunity.
- The death of Litvinenko may have been a Russian op. There was motive. What evidence there is leans that way. However, Litvinenko's medical treatment was piss-poor.
- Sergei Skripal was poisoned with an agent said to have novichok in it, which is an analog to Sarin. He survived and was fine. Lack of motive is a problem. Skripal and his family traveled back and forth to Russia. If Russia wanted to get to him, it would be much easier there. The initial symptoms did not match with classical nerve agents like Sarin very well. Later, a Swiss lab identified two drugs, probably Novichok an AChE inhibitor (like Sarin) of the physostigmine class. The other was BZ, a long-acting drug like atropine that is an antagonist to acetylcholine by binding to receptors. In the Skripal case, there was no motive for Russia. This occurred at a time when Ukraine wanted more weapons, and Ukraine's scientists were quite familiar with these agents. The mix appeared to have both drugs, which would cancel each other out, with BZ being the longer-acting one.
- Navalny death. Again, what motive for Russia? Putin had given Navalny permission to travel internationally in violation of his criminal case many times. The only possible outcome of Navalny dying in prison would be to make Russia look bad. The PR war motive went to Ukraine on this one.
This is propaganda at a pseudo intellectual level. Like flatearthers. The evidences are overwhelming and well documented. Spartacus is Zelensky but here we hear Crassus words.
Some parts of STEM are irrevocably connected to national security. As a result of my involvement with this area, there are many parts of the world I would never dare travel to, even if there were no US State Department warnings. I wanted to know what went on in the "black world". The opportunities outside the black world were incredibly meagre at the time, and my curiosity got the better of me. It was a choice between that and becoming a "quant".
Many of my colleagues and mentors thought that succumbing to the lure of Wall Street and Finance (and 7 and 8 figure a year salaries) would have been an even worse choice than the black world. They were afraid I would be another talent lost to STEM, and perhaps they were correct.
The stupidity of assorted politically-correct or "woke" rules have caused many people like me to abandon STEM. Even though I have indigenous heritage, according to DNA, I probably look "too white" to be able to get a normal STEM position these days. It is ridiculous. I have encountered sneering University bureaucrats (themselves whiter than white) creating arbitrary rules on the fly about whether my input is of any value or not, based on my supposed "privileged background" (which is nonsense, since I started paid work at the age of 5 and my grandmother was an indentured servant, one step up from a slave).
Anyway, the components of STEM that are NOT involved, even remotely, with national security should not be smeared and sullied with all sorts of political nonsense like this. It saddens me to read this. We are getting pushed further and further away from the ideal, it seems to me. Were things even as bad as this during the depths of the Cold War? I am not sure.
We continue to have people with weird decidedly unscientific woke political agendas at the helms of publications like Scientific American, Science Magazine and Nature. We must do better than this. Particularly if we want to have any credibility when we decry actions like Putin's.
I agree. The problem is that the fight is on two fronts, against the woke authoritarians and against the neoreactionary authoritarians such as Putin (From Communism -> Fascism) and enablers in the west (dark enlightenment folks).
After quite a bit of thought on the issue, I have concluded that the problem is the lack of freedom. As long as you have people of an authoritarian bent somewhere in the system meddling, you are going to hamper the ability of STEM to really produce much.
Even somewhat benign bureaucracies can end up hamstringing R&D. I labored in a number of bureaucratic environments over my career; academic, industrial, governmental and nonprofit think tanks. Only when I finally was freed of the bureaucratic constraints was I able to "really think".
I experienced a period of incredible unprecedented productivity as a result. Yes, I had much less support of various kinds without these big name flashy environments, and many fewer resources at my avail. But, I was unfettered like never before.
As a result, I have created some of the most amazing work of my career. It is still under wraps as I slowly progress towards startup launch.
I certainly agree with the authors that supporting RASA and Russian scientists against the attempts at cancel culture coming from the Putin's Russian Federation. Unfortunately, Western professional societies and universities have no moral or legal standing to object to Putin's actions as they practice and enable rampant cancel culture to be practiced against Western scientists at home. Stanford University in particular has awarded agents of cancel culture by giving them high profile academic positions that their unethical conduct and poor academic record do NOT warrant. Indeed, AAAS just published an editorial in Science by Lauer and Barnes on April 9, 2026 calling for establishment of the equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition to be imposed on science so that cancel culture efforts originating on university campuses or in academic societies can be made universal through a process that operates outside the legal system with its protections for due process. As Matthew 7:3 reminds us:
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
This type of hypocrisy is why the public has lost faith in academia and the scientific community.
I am reminded that the EGU (European Geosciences Union) removed their Russian President because she allegedly released the name of a complainant on some harassment case. The release was accidental...and ironically far more ETHICAL than the EGU process the complainant had initiated. EGU practices cancel culture just like its American counterparts on behalf of angry feminists. They allow anonymous accusations and provide no due process for those accused. One doesn't need Putin to impose totalitarian conduct on European scientists...they have done it to themselves as part of their progressive WOKE agenda.
"No vatniks", "No Uncle-Toms", "No nigg*r-lovers", "No cucks", "No Tories", "No scalawags", "No snowflakes", "No butternuts", "No transphobes". The history of political propaganda is filled with names made up to be used as ad hominem instruments against anyone that presents evidence or narrative against some group's official narrative. This propaganda technique bypasses logic and evidence.
In this case, Mr. Simonelis used the pejorative "vatnik" that was created in 2011 by Anton "Chadsky" Konovalov, then picked up in 2013-2014 as an epithet and propaganda tool in support of the coup in Ukraine. The CIA was in Ukraine along with Mossad during the runup to the coup. Joe Biden infamously put his addict son Hunter into Ukraine shortly after Hunter Biden was administratively discharged from The US Navy where he was an Ensign because he tested positive for cocaine. Mr. Simonellis posted his "No vatniks" in response to a fairly lengthy discussion of my understanding from study of Putin, Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia.
The Ukraine war is central to the Western media/political case against Putin. The Ukraine war is a major reason for Western attacks on Russia, Putin, and it is the cause of sanctions. There is a good history available now. See:
My major addition to Ivan's work is the lobbying by Larry Fink, founder of Blackrock (Merz, of Germany is the former Blackrock EU CEO). Larry is an old friend of Joe Biden. Based on other evidence, Larry Fink (and other private equity funds/investors) had made plans in the 1990's to acquire Ukraine's $16 trillion of mineral resources when the IMF loans built up and the IMF forced Ukraine into receivership. For details of how the IMF takes over nations using loan packages see:
All that $16 trillion bonanaza evaporated in 2013 when Yanukovych chose the Russian loan package over the IMF (US) package. This was an eminently sensible decision by Yanukovych, rather like Mexico choosing a loan package from the USA that allowed it to get out from crippling debts provided in Yuan by China. Larry Fink used his friendship with Joe Biden to do something to stop it. That was the coup that plunged Ukraine into civil war for 8 years prior to the invasion by Russia, after Zelensky said in Munich that if Ukraine couldn't enter NATO, Ukraine would build nuclear weapons. Everyone in foreign policy knew that this was a red-lilne for Russia.
The war on Donbas began in April of 2014, less than 2 months after the coup that displaced the elected president of Ukraine. Why? There was a CIA web site map of the ethnic divisions in Ukraine that made it clear. Donbas was largely Russian ethnic. This was an attempt to secure the mineral resources of Donbas quickly. The Ukraine coup government waged it as an ethnic cleansing war on neighborhoods of homes to try to clear the region of Russian ethnics.
Not long after, Ukraine conveyed ICBM technology to North Korea that made it possible for North Korea to hit every city in the USA. Ukraine was notoriously corrupt before the coup, it became more so after. Why? This was probably done by an oligarch simply for the money, because he could. And, they got away with it, without consequence. That oligarch's calculation that Ukraine was too important to politicians in the US to allow CIA or FBI to come after them was correct. This could easily have been done because the USA has a uniquely strong and fast extradition treaty with Ukraine. (That is probably why Joe Biden was so aggressive getting the prosecutor in Ukraine fired who filed corruption charges against Hunter. The USA would have had to extradite Hunter to Ukraine immediately.)
The provocation worked and Russia invaded Ukraine Feb 24, 2022. This gambit was a duplicate of the Carter gambit in Afghanistan that provoked Russia to invade that country Dec 24, 1979. Carter and Brzezinski worked together, and Carter signed secret orders to train and equip jihadists in Afghanistan for the purpose of baiting Russia into invasion. Brzezinski bragged about it many years later. I am sure that Zelensky's baiting Russia in Munich was sold to within the West Wing as Afghanistan gambit redux --- the one that worked well. You see, that Carter gambit was credited with bringing down the USSR after Soviet-Afghan war's end.
This is how the original desperation play originating in 2013, that overthrew the friendly democracy in Ukraine morphed into an "opportunity" to overthrow the country of Russia using Ukraine to bleed Russia dry.
The men running Ukraine are acting exactly like proxy warlords do everywhere. They know they are above the law, and they steal billions. They do so with impunity. This behavior by Zelensky and his people is the same as that of Hamas leaders and the PLO's Yasir Arafat.
Putin is a murdering KGB thug, and will act accordingly. And is worth opposing.
At the same time, such opposition will no doubt result in Putin whacking back with precisely the argument Sadredin Moosavi illustrates: your cancel culture is no better and likely worse.
Unfortunately very true.
Here in the West, we really have little to no basis on which to call out what is going on in Russia or China or other places.
We better clean up our own act, that is for sure. We have let the "woke camel"'s nose under the flaps of the tent and it is still wreaking previously unimaginable havoc.
If Putin actually was the "murdering thug", we would not be having this conversation. There would be no Ukraine government left. There would be no Zelensky and his insanely corrupt junta that fled Ukraine ahead of indictments running around yapping. There would probably be no Kiev left. Putin's group have handled Ukraine as a kind of civil war, which it is. The war split families. This has also been a war that has taught Russia great deal about current day warfare. It is valuable for this.
It is a great mistake to speak in as if Putin were the dictator of Russia. Putin is the one who is willing to take the limelight. He has a very cool head and the group that runs Russia approves of Putin's cool and careful head. Russians are now angry and chafing because Putin is so cautious. He is trying not to do things that will make the situation worse. Giving in on Ukraine is simply not an option.
If the situation was turned around, and the USA was facing an independent Texas, taken over by CAIR with support from China and Russia, what would the USA do? What would we do if Nustar Oil Refinery in Maryland was hit by drones or Chinese missiles launched from Texas? What would we do if the governor of Texas said he would build atom bombs?
- On the murders publicly associated with Putin.
- Politkovskaya. Her death occurred as she was about to file a story on Kadyrov, the Chechen premier accusing him of various atrocities. That is where motive lies, plus means and opportunity.
- The death of Litvinenko may have been a Russian op. There was motive. What evidence there is leans that way. However, Litvinenko's medical treatment was piss-poor.
- Sergei Skripal was poisoned with an agent said to have novichok in it, which is an analog to Sarin. He survived and was fine. Lack of motive is a problem. Skripal and his family traveled back and forth to Russia. If Russia wanted to get to him, it would be much easier there. The initial symptoms did not match with classical nerve agents like Sarin very well. Later, a Swiss lab identified two drugs, probably Novichok an AChE inhibitor (like Sarin) of the physostigmine class. The other was BZ, a long-acting drug like atropine that is an antagonist to acetylcholine by binding to receptors. In the Skripal case, there was no motive for Russia. This occurred at a time when Ukraine wanted more weapons, and Ukraine's scientists were quite familiar with these agents. The mix appeared to have both drugs, which would cancel each other out, with BZ being the longer-acting one.
- Navalny death. Again, what motive for Russia? Putin had given Navalny permission to travel internationally in violation of his criminal case many times. The only possible outcome of Navalny dying in prison would be to make Russia look bad. The PR war motive went to Ukraine on this one.
This is propaganda at a pseudo intellectual level. Like flatearthers. The evidences are overwhelming and well documented. Spartacus is Zelensky but here we hear Crassus words.
No vatniks. Thanks.
Very good article BTW Anna !
KGB made cancel culture ! A new phenomenon.
Some parts of STEM are irrevocably connected to national security. As a result of my involvement with this area, there are many parts of the world I would never dare travel to, even if there were no US State Department warnings. I wanted to know what went on in the "black world". The opportunities outside the black world were incredibly meagre at the time, and my curiosity got the better of me. It was a choice between that and becoming a "quant".
Many of my colleagues and mentors thought that succumbing to the lure of Wall Street and Finance (and 7 and 8 figure a year salaries) would have been an even worse choice than the black world. They were afraid I would be another talent lost to STEM, and perhaps they were correct.
The stupidity of assorted politically-correct or "woke" rules have caused many people like me to abandon STEM. Even though I have indigenous heritage, according to DNA, I probably look "too white" to be able to get a normal STEM position these days. It is ridiculous. I have encountered sneering University bureaucrats (themselves whiter than white) creating arbitrary rules on the fly about whether my input is of any value or not, based on my supposed "privileged background" (which is nonsense, since I started paid work at the age of 5 and my grandmother was an indentured servant, one step up from a slave).
Anyway, the components of STEM that are NOT involved, even remotely, with national security should not be smeared and sullied with all sorts of political nonsense like this. It saddens me to read this. We are getting pushed further and further away from the ideal, it seems to me. Were things even as bad as this during the depths of the Cold War? I am not sure.
We continue to have people with weird decidedly unscientific woke political agendas at the helms of publications like Scientific American, Science Magazine and Nature. We must do better than this. Particularly if we want to have any credibility when we decry actions like Putin's.
I agree. The problem is that the fight is on two fronts, against the woke authoritarians and against the neoreactionary authoritarians such as Putin (From Communism -> Fascism) and enablers in the west (dark enlightenment folks).
After quite a bit of thought on the issue, I have concluded that the problem is the lack of freedom. As long as you have people of an authoritarian bent somewhere in the system meddling, you are going to hamper the ability of STEM to really produce much.
Even somewhat benign bureaucracies can end up hamstringing R&D. I labored in a number of bureaucratic environments over my career; academic, industrial, governmental and nonprofit think tanks. Only when I finally was freed of the bureaucratic constraints was I able to "really think".
I experienced a period of incredible unprecedented productivity as a result. Yes, I had much less support of various kinds without these big name flashy environments, and many fewer resources at my avail. But, I was unfettered like never before.
As a result, I have created some of the most amazing work of my career. It is still under wraps as I slowly progress towards startup launch.
I certainly agree with the authors that supporting RASA and Russian scientists against the attempts at cancel culture coming from the Putin's Russian Federation. Unfortunately, Western professional societies and universities have no moral or legal standing to object to Putin's actions as they practice and enable rampant cancel culture to be practiced against Western scientists at home. Stanford University in particular has awarded agents of cancel culture by giving them high profile academic positions that their unethical conduct and poor academic record do NOT warrant. Indeed, AAAS just published an editorial in Science by Lauer and Barnes on April 9, 2026 calling for establishment of the equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition to be imposed on science so that cancel culture efforts originating on university campuses or in academic societies can be made universal through a process that operates outside the legal system with its protections for due process. As Matthew 7:3 reminds us:
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
This type of hypocrisy is why the public has lost faith in academia and the scientific community.
Yes, I am in complete agreement. We need to get this political nonsense out of ALL STEM, at home and abroad.
We are one international community and we have to stand against this sort of nonsense.
House cleaning begins at home, at least that's how I was raised!
I am reminded that the EGU (European Geosciences Union) removed their Russian President because she allegedly released the name of a complainant on some harassment case. The release was accidental...and ironically far more ETHICAL than the EGU process the complainant had initiated. EGU practices cancel culture just like its American counterparts on behalf of angry feminists. They allow anonymous accusations and provide no due process for those accused. One doesn't need Putin to impose totalitarian conduct on European scientists...they have done it to themselves as part of their progressive WOKE agenda.
Yep.
From The College Fix "Russia targets academics in U.S. as ‘foreign agents’ in intimidation campaign"
https://www.thecollegefix.com/russia-targets-academics-in-u-s-as-foreign-agents-in-intimidation-campaign/
Update: On May 8, the Russians added Igor Efimov and a few others to the list of "foreign agents":
https://t.me/minjustrf/13781
"No vatniks", "No Uncle-Toms", "No nigg*r-lovers", "No cucks", "No Tories", "No scalawags", "No snowflakes", "No butternuts", "No transphobes". The history of political propaganda is filled with names made up to be used as ad hominem instruments against anyone that presents evidence or narrative against some group's official narrative. This propaganda technique bypasses logic and evidence.
In this case, Mr. Simonelis used the pejorative "vatnik" that was created in 2011 by Anton "Chadsky" Konovalov, then picked up in 2013-2014 as an epithet and propaganda tool in support of the coup in Ukraine. The CIA was in Ukraine along with Mossad during the runup to the coup. Joe Biden infamously put his addict son Hunter into Ukraine shortly after Hunter Biden was administratively discharged from The US Navy where he was an Ensign because he tested positive for cocaine. Mr. Simonellis posted his "No vatniks" in response to a fairly lengthy discussion of my understanding from study of Putin, Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia.
The Ukraine war is central to the Western media/political case against Putin. The Ukraine war is a major reason for Western attacks on Russia, Putin, and it is the cause of sanctions. There is a good history available now. See:
Ivan Katchanovski (2026) "The Russia-Ukraine War and its Origins From the Maidan to the Ukraine War." https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98724-3
@ivankatchanovski
My major addition to Ivan's work is the lobbying by Larry Fink, founder of Blackrock (Merz, of Germany is the former Blackrock EU CEO). Larry is an old friend of Joe Biden. Based on other evidence, Larry Fink (and other private equity funds/investors) had made plans in the 1990's to acquire Ukraine's $16 trillion of mineral resources when the IMF loans built up and the IMF forced Ukraine into receivership. For details of how the IMF takes over nations using loan packages see:
John Perkins (2016) "The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man." https://archive.org/details/the-new-confessions-of-an-econo-john-perkins/page/n5/mode/2up
All that $16 trillion bonanaza evaporated in 2013 when Yanukovych chose the Russian loan package over the IMF (US) package. This was an eminently sensible decision by Yanukovych, rather like Mexico choosing a loan package from the USA that allowed it to get out from crippling debts provided in Yuan by China. Larry Fink used his friendship with Joe Biden to do something to stop it. That was the coup that plunged Ukraine into civil war for 8 years prior to the invasion by Russia, after Zelensky said in Munich that if Ukraine couldn't enter NATO, Ukraine would build nuclear weapons. Everyone in foreign policy knew that this was a red-lilne for Russia.
The war on Donbas began in April of 2014, less than 2 months after the coup that displaced the elected president of Ukraine. Why? There was a CIA web site map of the ethnic divisions in Ukraine that made it clear. Donbas was largely Russian ethnic. This was an attempt to secure the mineral resources of Donbas quickly. The Ukraine coup government waged it as an ethnic cleansing war on neighborhoods of homes to try to clear the region of Russian ethnics.
Not long after, Ukraine conveyed ICBM technology to North Korea that made it possible for North Korea to hit every city in the USA. Ukraine was notoriously corrupt before the coup, it became more so after. Why? This was probably done by an oligarch simply for the money, because he could. And, they got away with it, without consequence. That oligarch's calculation that Ukraine was too important to politicians in the US to allow CIA or FBI to come after them was correct. This could easily have been done because the USA has a uniquely strong and fast extradition treaty with Ukraine. (That is probably why Joe Biden was so aggressive getting the prosecutor in Ukraine fired who filed corruption charges against Hunter. The USA would have had to extradite Hunter to Ukraine immediately.)
Larry Fink appeared in public asserting his rights to the $16 trillion Ukrainian minerals prize. This plan has a big problem. Russia's army occupies that land. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-10/blackrock-s-larry-fink-joins-trump-team-talks-to-rebuild-ukraine
The provocation worked and Russia invaded Ukraine Feb 24, 2022. This gambit was a duplicate of the Carter gambit in Afghanistan that provoked Russia to invade that country Dec 24, 1979. Carter and Brzezinski worked together, and Carter signed secret orders to train and equip jihadists in Afghanistan for the purpose of baiting Russia into invasion. Brzezinski bragged about it many years later. I am sure that Zelensky's baiting Russia in Munich was sold to within the West Wing as Afghanistan gambit redux --- the one that worked well. You see, that Carter gambit was credited with bringing down the USSR after Soviet-Afghan war's end.
This is how the original desperation play originating in 2013, that overthrew the friendly democracy in Ukraine morphed into an "opportunity" to overthrow the country of Russia using Ukraine to bleed Russia dry.
The men running Ukraine are acting exactly like proxy warlords do everywhere. They know they are above the law, and they steal billions. They do so with impunity. This behavior by Zelensky and his people is the same as that of Hamas leaders and the PLO's Yasir Arafat.
https://x.com/Dubinsky_pro/status/2049888594265837665
I will close with this link to what just happened today. This was almost 1700 miles into Russia.
https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/2049791212530327824
Imagine what the USA would do if such an attack supported by Russia happened here?