Beware: We Are Entering a New Phase of the Trump Era
In a show that recently opened at the LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village, a group of actors led by a young, ambitious, charmingly naïve director are almost finished rehearsing Chekhov's 'The Seagull' at the famed Moscow Art Theater when Russia invades Ukraine. Thanks to social media, they can hear the sirens and see the bombs falling on Kharkiv and Kyiv.
We witness the shock and disbelief, the feeling of utter impossibility of staying in one's country, one's city, one's skin that so many people in Moscow experienced in the days after the full-scale invasion. They cry. They shout at one another. One of them frantically packs a suitcase.
And then the show goes on.
This isn't a theater review, and I'm not here to tell you why you should go see the play, 'Seagull: True Story.' I have too many social connections to Alexander Molochnikov, the exile Russian director, and anyway, the current run is sold out. I'm interested in something else: that moment when the shock fades and the (figurative) show goes on.
I think we are entering that moment in the United States.
Living in and reporting on Russia when Vladimir Putin took and consolidated power, I was shocked many times. I couldn't sleep in September 2004, after tanks shelled a school in which terrorists were holding hundreds of children hostage, and I was shocked when Putin used this terrorist attack as a pretext to eliminate elected governorships.
I was shaken when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. My world changed when three very young women were sentenced to jail time for a protest performance in a church in 2012, the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action. I couldn't breathe when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was poisoned in 2020, arrested in 2021 and almost certainly killed in prison in 2024. And when Russia again invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Along the way there were many smaller, yet also catastrophic, milestones: the state takeovers of universities and media outlets, the series of legislative steps that outlawed L.G.B.T.Q. people, the branding of many journalists and activists as 'foreign agents.' The state of shock would last a day or a week or a month, but time went on and the shocking event became a fact of our lives.
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American Military News
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This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that a massive Russian drone and missile attack on Kyiv, which claimed dozens of civilian lives, is a reminder that Russia is disregarding cease-fire efforts and 'chooses to kill.' 'This strike is a reminder to the world that Russia spurns a cease-fire and chooses to kill,' Zelenskyy said on June 19 while visiting the site of a nine-story building that collapsed as a result of what Ukraine said was a direct missile hit during the intense aerial assault two nights earlier. 'This vile attack, carried out in the middle of the night, claimed the lives of 23 civilians,' he said on X. Five people were killed in other parts of the capital and more than 150 people in Kyiv and elsewhere were wounded in the massive attack early on June 17, emergency services said. At least two people were killed in the Black Sea port city of Odesa. 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'Most of them had been held captive since 2022… Our goal is to free every single one of them,' Zelenskyy added. Putin said talks could resume at some point after June 22, a date he has previously suggested for a major new swap of prisoners and the bodies of the dead. The Russian leader added, however, that he would only meet Zelenskyy in the 'final phase' of any peace negotiations. Zelenskyy has sought to meet with Putin amid the talks, but the Kremlin says an agreement on a deal must be reached first and Putin repeated his groundless claim that Zelenskyy is not a legitimate leader. 'I am ready to meet with everyone, including Zelenskyy. That is not the issue — if the Ukrainian state trusts someone in particular to conduct negotiations, for God's sake, it can be Zelenskyy,' Putin said. 'I am even ready to meet him — but only if it is some kind of final phase.' 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