Letter From the Editors

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was finally laid to rest this week, over four months after his death. The funeral was a countrywide event, what Ekspert’s Ilya Arzumanov called a “winding final journey” that took Khamenei’s body to important religious sites in several cities. The mourning events began in Tehran, where the Iranian authorities said 20 million people had gathered to watch the funeral procession. While Iranian oppositionists claimed that “a maximum of several hundred thousand people” were present and that the authorities used AI to make the crowds look bigger, Kommersant’s Yelena Chernenko confirmed from Tehran that a multitude of mourners had indeed gathered for the services. According to expert Grigory Lukyanov, the scale of the events was intended as a display of the Iranian government’s legitimacy and staying power: “The entire world is being shown that millions of Iranians are ready to defend the existing system of government and share the values the regime is broadcasting.”

But, as Chernenko points out, Iranian society is not “homogeneous,” something she discovered during a visit to a northern neighborhood in Tehran. There, one young woman framed her feelings as follows: “We do not support the current system, mainly because of restrictions on freedom and the lack of economic prospects. . . . We didn’t ask them to bomb our country and kill people. We want to bring about these reforms and changes on our own. We don’t need such ‘help’ from outside.” Meanwhile, Izvestia’s Daniil Sechkin visited Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, where well-stocked stores and stalls seem to belie that idea that Iran is in a “deep economic crisis.” However, he says, Iran “has learned to live in isolation,” and the stability gained by this isolation comes at the cost of weak economic indicators.

But it does not appear that the economy will become a focus anytime soon – hostilities in the Middle East reignited during the mourning period, just as NATO leaders were gathering for their Ankara summit. According to Yevgeny Shestakov, the summit “took place in an atmosphere of disingenuous love and universal mistrust,” with European leaders kowtowing to Trump “to avoid incurring his wrath.” In the end, the summit produced a declaration that merely reaffirmed the alliance’s standard phrasing about aid for Ukraine and the “long-term threat” posed by Russia.

In fact, the main developments on the Russia-Ukraine front came just ahead of the summit, when Trump spoke on the phone with Putin about Russia’s taking of Konstantinovka. According to Aleksei Vagin, Western think tanks have been “stoking” misleading narratives about Russia’s “horrific losses” and charging Russia with using AI-enhanced videos to exaggerate its gains in Ukraine. He says this does not reflect the true situation on the battlefield, which is that “the Russian Army is closer than ever to achieving its key aims in the Donetsk Basin.” But, in what Gennady Petrov calls a shift from the Anchorage spirit to the Ankara spirit, Trump now appears to be applying more pressure on Russia to end the conflict than on Ukraine, making Kiev the clear winner of the summit.

While NATO was busy doing not much of anything, the specter of a wildly popular Russian cartoon – “Masha and the Bear” – was haunting the West. As Dan Storyev explains, Ukrainian disinformation centers have claimed that the show provides a platform for Russian propaganda, with Estonia’s foreign minister “amplifying” the message, saying it is “part of the Kremlin’s soft power, embedding pro-Kremlin and militaristic messaging in children’s entertainment while normalizing Russia’s aggression and imperial ambitions.” But with the show’s Ukrainian-language YouTube channel one of the most popular in Ukraine, Storyev says there is no need to fear the animated Russian bear.

Likewise, an NG editorial asserts that AI should not be feared, but adapted to, rolling out the familiar argument that AI cannot replace humans, but can help them. One wonders, though, how the editorial board would feel if AI took over its page and succeeded in deceiving readers.