A couple of weeks before Vladimir Putin announced his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, he met in the Kremlin with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The Russians have plainly said that they deem the Ukrainian government to be U.S-controlled, not a free agent, and they hold Washington directly responsible for whatever may happen on the ground in their neighborhood. 

You cannot argue with mass hypnosis. You can keep a diary, write a chronicle that reveals the falseness of the spirit of the age to hopefully enlighten future readers, because, as we hear in another of the main points of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita, “manuscripts do not burn.” That is what I do….

This essay draws upon my personal acquaintance with Alexander Gaponenko, the victim of ongoing cruel and unusual judicial procedures in Riga, Latvia which violate fundamentally the much-touted “values” of the European Union.