Yulia Alyoshina was coerced into saying she would live as a man

In May 2024, "Yulia Alyoshina, who headed the opposition Civic Initiative party in Siberia’s Altai region until 2022, announced...that she had returned to her gender assigned at birth and changed her channel’s name to 'Alyoshin', the male version of her surname."

She is "the first openly transgender politician in Russia." So why did she do this?

On June 25, Novaya Gazeta Baltic reported that (as Novaya Gazeta Europe paraphrased) she "has described how the Russian authorities threatened to commit her to a psychiatric hospital unless she detransitioned."

Read more: Russia’s first transgender politician reveals she was forced to announce her detransition, Novaya Gazeta Europe, 25 June 2024

About the news outlet

Quote:

"Journalists from Russia’s oldest independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, have launched a new, Europe-based media outlet in a bid to avoid an ongoing media clampdown amid their country’s war in Ukraine.

The creation of Novaya Gazeta Europe comes nine days after its Russian counterpart suspended operations in Moscow. The outlet, headed by Nobel Peace Prize-winning editor Dmitry Muratov, had been repeatedly threatened with closure for its reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe, Kirill Martynov, said that the paper will be independent from Russia’s Novaya Gazeta, “both legally and in practice.” The newsroom itself will consist of Novaya Gazeta staffers who have chosen to leave Russia.

'There’ll be no one working for Novaya Gazeta and Novaya Gazeta Europe at the same time,' Martynov told The Moscow Times on Thursday. 'We’ll have our own editorial council and guidelines.'"

— Novaya Gazeta Launches European Edition in Bid to Dodge Kremlin Censorship, Irina Shcherbakova, Moscow Times, April 19, 2022

The CIA under Allen Dulles

Jared Yates Sexton begins his book, The Midnight Kingdom, talking about his grandmother's beliefs in the 1980s: "The center of evil in the world, she had been assured by those same preachers and a bevy of politicians, rested in Moscow; it wasn’t even debatable whether the Kremlin was in league with Satan. The Soviet Union was the kingdom of the Antichrist, she believed."

Where did that belief come from?

Decades ago, there was "Allen Dulles, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services and the longest-serving and arguably most influential director of the CIA." When he took over: "The CIA became a force unto itself that acted upon the affairs of the rest of the world, engaging in secret activities that were unknown to its victims, the people of the United States, and even government officials as high-ranking as the president, all of it created, directed, and implemented by individuals who had never been elected and faced no possibility of electoral consequences."

He goes on:

"Under Dulles, the CIA carried out coups and subversive actions, traded in psychological operations that both skewed and obliterated truth, illegally experimented on and surveilled American citizens, orchestrated assassinations, and fought an undeclared secret war in pursuit of strengthening America’s political and economic interests, most often in assistance of the aims of wealthy individuals and the nation’s corporations. The battle against Soviet Russia, predicated on false and biased information and in service of the political and economic interests of a privileged few, meant deploying any measures imaginable, including overthrowing democratically elected leaders, carrying out coordinated assassinations, sacrificing entire populations of civilians, and creating wars out of thin air. The CIA was dedicated to achieving its objectives at any cost, all while obfuscating its methods and intentionally casting doubt on the very notion of objective truth. It’s hardly any wonder that, in this environment and in these times, paranoia as a cultural state and a political weapon became so omnipresent and so significant."

That's part of how the Soviet Union got linked to conspiracy theories and the idea of evil.

"As the Soviet Union was cast as the embodiment of Satan in the modern world," Sexton writes, "once more Americans saw evil spirits conspiring in the darkness and plotting the nation’s destruction."

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You may also be interested to read about Christiana Spens's book, The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media. See: "On the Ritual of Political Scapegoating". It's a 10-minute read on Medium.

NYT opinion: Russia's invasion of Ukraine is fueled by fossils

Please check out Farhad Manjoo's opinion in the New York Times:

On one hand, it would seem uncontroversial to point out that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a war enabled and exacerbated by the world’s insatiable appetite for fossil fuels. It couldn’t not be so: Russia is a petrostate...By accelerating our transition to cheap and abundant renewable fuels, we can address two grave threats to the planet at once: the climate-warming, air-polluting menace of hydrocarbons and the dictators who rule their supply.

And yet American politicians on the left sure seem incapable of drawing out this connection, don’t they?

"If the 'climate lobby' were truly so powerful," Manjoo says, "it might have long ago prevented Europe from building its society upon a devilish bargain with Russian energy."

But that is past. Looking forward: Will the Democrats be able to pass Build Back Better legislation — with or without Sen. Joe Manchin?

"We’re in a Fossil Fuel War. Biden Should Say So." Farhad Manjoo. New York Times. March 24, 2022.

Also, Thomas L. Friedman:

This is our umpteenth confrontation with a petro-dictator whose viciousness and recklessness are possible only because of the oil wealth he extracts from the ground. No matter how the war ends in Ukraine, it needs to end with America finally, formally, categorically and irreversibly ending its addiction to oil.

"How to Defeat Putin and Save the Planet." Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times. March 29, 2022.

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CNN explains:

"The September 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which pumped methane gas from Russia to Germany, was a major flashpoint in the energy war between Europe and Russia. Amid its invasion of Ukraine, Russia halted all gas supplies to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 at the time, blaming Western sanctions for causing technical difficulties. Authorities have yet to determine who was behind the sabotage.

At the time of the leak, UN Environment Programme detected on satellite a massive plume of concentrated methane. It later reported the ruptures were likely the largest single release of methane ever recorded."

— "Sweden’s climate pollution should have been down. The Nord Stream pipeline leak sent it skyrocketing," Rachel Ramirez, CNN, December 14, 2023

See also: "In near unanimous vote, European lawmakers call for Russia to be declared a 'terrorist' regime" CNN, October 2022.

October 2024: Russia appears to be getting help from North Korean soldiers to invade Ukraine.

We scrutinized unverified Russian social media videos and located North Korean soldiers training at a military complex in Russia’s Far East, potentially preparing for deployment. I know lots of ppl canceled subscriptions, so I’m sharing a gift link and threading screenshots here. wapo.st/3UqOYpz

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— Michelle Ye Hee Lee (@myhlee.bsky.social) October 26, 2024 at 10:31 AM

Trump pushes Erdoğan to stop buying Russian oil as shutdown looms in the US, by Maureen Chowdhury, Samantha Waldenberg and Adam Cancryn, CNN, September 25, 2025

Biden's fossil fuel reduction goals during Russia's war on Ukraine

As described in an article today in the Huffington Post, U.S. President Joe Biden

has committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, meaning America’s forests, farm fields and clean-industrial projects would remove more carbon from the atmosphere each year than the country’s cars, power plants and factories emit. To achieve that goal, he passed an infrastructure bill with some renewable energy incentives and pursued a much more ambitious set of renewable energy tax credits as part of the stalled Build Back Better legislation. Using the powers of the executive branch, Biden also revoked authorization for the Keystone XL oil pipeline and raised federal fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks.

* * *

So long as Biden does not reauthorize Keystone XL, which would incentivize fossil-fuel extraction over the long term, the president’s efforts to limit the political fallout from higher gas prices are compatible with Biden’s plans to phase out fossil fuels, according to Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University.

On the other hand, Biden has released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and this week decided to "increase liquefied natural gas exports to Europe to decrease [Europe's] reliance on Russian gas."

Source: "Gas Price Hikes Test The Climate Action Movement", by Daniel Marans and Alexander C. Kaufman, Huffington Post, 18 March 2022.

See also: "War May Change How We Rely on Big Oil". It's a 3-minute read on Medium. Consider a paid membership on the platform.

Image by Tama66 at Pixabay

Swan Lake, and TV Rain is gone

A few minutes ago, the Washington Post published "Russia’s last independent news station suspends broadcasts". TV Rain, the last remaining independent TV/radio news in Russia, has gone dark. Lateshia Beachum explains: "Russia blocked access to the station and declared it and fellow news station, Radio Echo, as foreign agents for their coverage of the war with Ukraine in which they used the terms “war” and “invasion,” usage of which the Kremlin has banned, the New Yorker reported." The reporters have fled. The story continues: "The last seconds of TV Rain’s broadcast, where one of its journalists walked off reportedly saying “no war,” was of a black-and-white broadcast of Swan Lake. The last time the station aired the performance was in 1991 when the Soviet Union was on the edge of collapsing, according to NBC News."

The last seconds of the Dozhd TV channel's broadcast looked like this. pic.twitter.com/p4t14T2Ghq

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) March 3, 2022

Image of the swan by Peter H from Pixabay

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/w... Very sad. Her stories were so important.

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— Cathryn Thurston (@drthurston.bsky.social) December 20, 2024 at 8:51 AM