Letter From the Editors
US President Donald Trump has recently had his fingers in the pies of Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, creating the impression that he has tired of peace talks on Ukraine and moved the whole conflict to the back burner. However, representatives of the US, Russia and Ukraine did meet in the United Arab Emirates this week. RG reports that the talks were constructive and useful, especially to the “Russian and American sides,” but that things aren’t going so well for the “Kievan dictator,” who was unable to get Trump to agree to further support for Ukraine when the two met at the WEF in Davos last week. The same old sticking point remains – territory. However, NG says, President Zelensky is the one who will have to make a political decision about a truce, since Moscow is willing to concede Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Provinces, which are parts of Russia under the Russian Constitution.
But back to Trump’s pies for a moment. This week, two Kommersant correspondents visiting Venezuela report that the country is emerging from its state of shock after President Maduro’s seizure by the US. However, while demonstrations supporting Maduro and Chavismo in general are gathering steam, the Kommersant correspondents note that, in the barrio, people are “fighting for survival, and they don’t really care about Maduro, Rodríguez or Machado.”
Meanwhile, Iran appears to be facing a large-scale attack as the US moves what Trump is calling a “massive armada” into the Gulf of Oman. As Grigory Lukyanov tells Ekspert, the aim of any strike will be “unconditional capitulation” designed to destroy “the foundation of the existing political regime.” And, he warns, the ensuing chaos from such an attack will “literally tear Iran to pieces and do horrible damage to the region as a whole.”
Officially, Trump’s military buildup in the Middle East is an “attempt to defend” Iranian demonstrators. Ironically, though, Trump has deployed some of Ayatollah Khamenei’s same tactics against demonstrators protesting the ICE presence in Minneapolis. Take, for example, the senseless murders, by ICE agents, of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two peaceful protesters exercising their right to freedom of expression. As Yevgeny Shestakov reports in RG, the killings have united “Republican and Democratic functionaries in an upsurge of indignation,” forcing Trump to withdraw agents from Minneapolis in an extremely rare gesture of conciliation.
And while polls show that 58% of Americans believe ICE’s tactics are “too forceful,” they also show that Americans are most jittery about the cost of living and the economy. This bodes even worse for Trump, since, as an American Studies expert put it to NGE, US elections are decided “by the refrigerator, not the TV set.” This, NGE says, makes it all the more likely that Trump’s party will lose its “dominant position” in the upcoming midterm elections, complicating Trump’s apparent plans to ascend to the level of true autocrat.
But what does Cheburashka, that adorable Soviet cartoon icon, have to do with all of this? As Meduza reports, Russian ultranationalist thinker Aleksandr Dugin took aim at the beloved cartoon character this week following the blockbuster release of “Cheburashka 2.” Dugin, who has complained about this lovable “animal unknown to science” in the past, went on the offensive, saying: “The figure of Cheburashka is derived from ancient pentacles that reproduce the symbolic features of the Moon demon Shedbarshemoth Sharthathan.” And as if that weren’t enough, he went on to accuse the guileless Cheburashka of “dismantling” the Soviet Union. Naturally, several State Duma deputies immediately jumped on Dugin’s bandwagon, with one calling for the repeal of Art. 9 of Russia’s culture law, which enshrines the “right to create art.” So what fate awaits poor Cheburashka? Well, for one thing, we may find that his likeness is replaced on toy store shelves by a new line of authoritarian dictator plushies.