A few months ago, there was much ado in the news about multiple sightings of what appeared to be drones in the skies near military facilities in various parts of the world, including the U.K. and the eastern U.S. It was beginning to feel like a replay of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds,” but with visuals.

And then . . . nothing.

Lots of far-fetched theories, and some attempts by various governments to assure us that there was nothing to worry about even though they claimed to have no idea what was going on . . . but no real explanation.

And now we are learning that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is testing systems to detect drones in New Jersey — where hundreds of drone sightings were originally reported. Not that there’s anything to be concerned about . . .

The FAA’s Center of Excellence for UAS Research is using off-the-shelf drones (officially known as Unmanned Aerial Systems) of various sizes and shapes to determine whether their presence can be picked up by a combination of systems including Remote ID, Acoustic Array, and X-Band radar, and to determine whether they might interfere with FAA or aircraft navigation systems. [Pete Muntean, CNN, April 15, 2025.]

As for those earlier sightings in November and December, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has labelled it the New Jersey “drone fiasco under the last administration,” and assured the public:

“This administration has taken a completely different approach, radical transparency. The FAA is doing this to ensure we can properly detect drones in our airspace and make sure they don’t interfere with airplane navigation systems . . . This is about protecting our national security and American safety.” [Id.]

(Sure . . . it’s all Joe Biden’s fault. The world is obviously much safer under Donald Trump’s inspired guidance.)

Looking at Duffy’s statement, two things leap out at me:

First, that “radical transparency” — on any topic — most assuredly would be a “completely different approach” for this administration; and

Second, we still don’t know what those earlier sightings were. The FAA says that more than 100 drones are sighted near airports each month. Maybe so . . . but whose are they, and why aren’t they being destroyed? Aren’t they violating protected air space?

In fact, congressional reports have said that U.S. Navy and Secret Service tests of anti-drone systems in Washington, D.C., last month caused collision alerts to go off in several planes preparing to land at Reagan National Airport. [Id.]

So is the anti-drone technology as great a danger to aviation as the drones themselves? Presumably, that’s the purpose of the tests in New Jersey.

But it’s okay, because “Officials have urged calm and emphasized there is no evidence suggesting the sightings posed a security threat.” [Id.]

I can see it’s going to be another one of those nights.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/17/25

Although it’s difficult to quantify the various items on Donald Trump’s ever-growing bucket list for his second administration, I would have to rank his desire to make Canada the 51st state of the United States in the top ten of his “most bizarre” pipe dreams.

Canada, of course, is a country rich in natural resources, including those rare earth minerals he has been so focused on lately (even demanding them in payment from Ukraine for having helped defend them for the past three years), and thus understandably desirable.

And it now turns out that there is another resource — one associated with a tiny, sparsely-inhabited island in the waters off the coast of both the U.S. state of Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick — that could be of great interest to Trump. It is known as Machias Seal Island; and the 277 square miles of sea surrounding it, known as the Grey Zone, has been the subject of dispute since the late 1700s. In 1984, an international court ruling awarded both countries fishing rights to the area. [Anthony Zurcher, BBC, April 14, 2025.]

The priceless resource in which those icy waters abound is the incomparably ugly — and incomparably delicious — Maine lobster.

Or Canadian lobster — depending on where you live.

The two countries have each laid claim to the island and the surrounding waters, which would include the resident lobsters. And, despite the long history of friendly relations between Canada and the U.S., it has remained something of a bone of contention . . . to say the least. John Drouin, a U.S. lobsterman in the Grey Zone for some 30 years, has described the ongoing battle between Canadians and Americans each summer season to be first to place their lobster traps:

“People have literally lost parts of their bodies, have had concussions, [their] head smashed and everything.” [Id.]

Ouch! And this, of course, has now been magnified by Trump’s acquisitive designs on Canada, Greenland, and whatever piece of property he sets his sights on next.

I’ve been to both the far eastern and far western parts of Canada, and have wonderful memories of both trips . . . particularly the genuine friendliness of the people I met. The first trip involved a cruise from Boston to Portland to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, then down the St. Lawrence Seaway to Quebec City and Montreal. One of our shore excursions included a memorable boiled lobster lunch at a seafood shack by the shore, during which I had to instruct a family of U.S. midwesterners in the fine art of dissecting the beasts and locating the edible parts. As a native New Englander, I’ve also eaten many another Maine lobster in my lifetime. And believe me, they are worth fighting over.

I’m not here to arbitrate the territorial dispute over Machias Seal Island and its aquatic crustaceans. But, looking at the above map, I can’t help wondering what Donald Trump would think if the Canadian government suddenly decided to take a cue from his own methodology and change its maps, declaring that area — now known as the Gulf of Maine — to be the “Gulf of Canada.”

Eh?

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/16/25

On Sunday, April 13th, a Russian missile attack on a civilian neighborhood in the Ukrainian city of Sumy killed 35 people, including two children in a playground, and injured 117 others.

This followed by just nine days a similar attack in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home town of Kryvyi Rih, in which 20 people — nine of them children — were killed, and another 70 or more wounded.

And on Monday, April 14th, Donald Trump blamed Ukraine’s president for having started the war . . . the very one the Russians refer to as their “special military operation,” and which the whole world witnessed as Russian troops invaded Ukrainian territory on February 24, 2022.

But, from some parallel universe in which Trump’s psyche apparently lives, he would have us believe that “Millions of people [are] dead because of three people. Let’s say Putin number one, let’s say Biden who had no idea what the hell he was doing, number two, and Zelensky.” [Yang Tian and Ian Aikman, BBC News, April 15, 2025.]

“You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he continued, adding that Zelensky was “always looking to purchase missiles. When you start a war, you got to know you can win.” [Id.]

Ignoring the fact that not “millions of people” (as falsely stated by Trump) have been killed in this war to date, let’s instead focus on the intentional lie — perpetrated by Vladimir Putin from the very beginning — that Ukraine was in any way responsible for the decimation of its own country over the past three years.

That very lie has been picked up and repeated by Trump as he continues to court Putin as his new best friend. He even — after first describing the Sumy attack as merely “terrible” — said on Monday that he had been told Russia had “made a mistake.” [Id.]

Who allegedly told him, and why he chose to believe it, remain a mystery. But the Kremlin has said — without providing evidence — that it had actually targeted a supposed meeting of Ukrainian soldiers, and that 60 of them had been killed in the attack. [Id.]

And that, apparently, is good enough for Donald Trump.

*. *. *

Trump is right about one thing, though: You do not start a war against a country 20 times your size and strength. And Volodymyr Zelensky is smart enough to know that. Neither he, nor anyone else in Ukraine, invited Russia to invade their country; nor did they in any way pose a threat to Russia’s safety or sovereignty.

In truth, Vladimir Putin — still mourning the breakup of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” — wants nothing less than to seize Ukraine as part of Russia’s territory. He illegally claimed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, and still holds it; and since his invasion of 2022, he has similarly claimed the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. He won’t be satisfied until he has all the rest as well.

To blame the victim — to suggest, without basis in fact, that Volodymyr Zelensky bears any responsibility for Vladimir Putin’s actions — is despicable and indefensible. It is akin to blaming Poland for Nazi Germany’s invasion of 1939.

And it requires an immediate apology.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/16/25

Is it just coincidence that the Latin word “Dei” translates to the English word “God”? Or is the current drive to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in America also an attempt to eliminate God? Perhaps the goal is to crown new gods, represented by golden idols, for people to worship, obey, and sacrifice to.

It has happened before.

Far-fetched, you say? It can’t happen here? Is that what you think?

Really?

Well, then you may not have heard of the newest edict from the U.S. Department of State (including its overseas embassies), ordering its employees to report any instances of co-workers displaying “anti-Christian bias” — as part of its compliance with the newest executive order supporting those of Christian faith working in the federal government. [Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi, Politico, April 11, 2025.]

What constitutes “Christian” values is unclear, though presumably it is meant to denote support for right-wing ultra-conservatism, and not necessarily the elimination of other religions . . . yet.

According to an internal cable, DOS will be working with the Trump administration’s task force to gather information “involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration,” including collecting examples of such bias through anonymous employee report forms. [Id.]

My first thought was that Pavlik Morozov ** had come back to life and was working at the State Department.

** Pavlik Morozov was a 12-year-old Russian peasant boy — a charter member of the Young Pioneers branch of Stalin’s Komsomol (Communist Youth) — who became famous in 1932 for denouncing his own father to the Soviet authorities for allegedly selling favors to kulaks (wealthier peasants who resisted the collectivization of Russia’s farmlands). He also accused other peasants of hoarding their grain in order to protect it from seizure by the authorities. His father was imprisoned and ultimately executed. And for his misplaced loyalty, Pavlik himself was killed, just shy of his 14th birthday, by those he had turned against.

And I immediately saw this latest executive order for what it truly is: a poorly-disguised attempt to emulate the Stalinist regime of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, when co-workers, neighbors, friends, and even family members turned against each other in a frenzied race to be first to curry favor with the Kremlin . . . and to save their own skins.

And this is what our country — for nearly 250 years the shining example of democracy for the rest of the world, and a beacon of light to the downtrodden of every land — is being reduced to:

— Deportation, not only of illegal immigrants or those guilty of committing serious crimes while here, but of any and all who fail to meet newly-established, onerous standards, or dare to speak openly against administration policy;

— Exclusivity: the exclusion and punishment of all who do not fit a prescribed mold, reminiscent of Hitler’s vision of the so-called “Aryan” man: White, Anglo-Saxon, Christian . . . and straight;

— Intolerance, of any who do not live up to the standards of the autocrat who would be emperor.

And to accelerate the process, we — beginning with those who work in the federal government, at some universities, and even at major law firms — are not simply being encouraged, but actually ordered, to become a nation of snitches and sycophants.

Are we going to let it continue, buying into false promises and ignoring reality, until it is too late to reverse course? The Russians did, when they thought that even Bolshevism would be better than the reign of the Tsar; and the German people fell into the same trap when they took the word of a madman and his brown-shirted thugs.

Aren’t we smarter than that?

Please . . . we can’t let it happen here.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/15/25

Some emperors fiddle while their empires burn; others play golf . . . all at the expense of the lowly citizens.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/15/25

It all started, as one might expect, in early childhood. It was during World War II, when there were nightly blackouts, and the ambient light that used to filter through our windows from the street and the neighbors’ houses was no longer there. After trying for a while to fall asleep, I would tiptoe into my parents’ room, shake my mother awake, and whisper, “I had a bad dream. Can I rest with you?”

“Rest,” of course, meant stay there — her arm wrapped securely around me — for the remainder of the night.

Eventually, the war ended, streetlights were turned back on, and I outgrew the need for my mother’s protection.

Until some 40 years later.

I was visiting my boss and his wife at their summer home on a lake in the beautiful State of Maine. There were no street lights around the lake, of course; and the five or six other houses in the area were scattered along the lakeshore and nowhere near each other. The first night, when I settled down in the guest bedroom and turned off the bedside lamp, I suddenly learned what it meant to be totally, terrifyingly blind.

And then I saw it: a tiny red dot of light across the room, like the eye of some small, other-worldly creature come to . . . well, who knows what? But then I remembered that there was a fax machine in that room, so that the boss could keep in touch with the office. (This was pre-cell phones and pre-internet, remember.)

I thought of leaving the lamp on all night, but if I’d been found out, I never would have lived it down. So that little red light was my only beacon, my directional guide to the door in case I had to get up during the night for any reason. By focusing on it, I eventually got to sleep, with the aid of the call of the loons outside my window. (Not the crazy neighbors . . . real loons. It was actually quite lovely.)

Of course, when I returned to my urban home, I was no longer thrust into total darkness at night. But the die had been cast; I found that I fell asleep best with the light from the television glaring at me and the volume turned up full-blast. I set it to turn itself off after an hour, by which time it had worked its magic.

Then I had the nightmare. I dreamt that someone — a tall, blond man — was breaking into my apartment. I woke with a start, and the dream had been so real, I got out of bed, turned on the light, and inspected the entire apartment — the hallway door, balcony door, and every corner of every room — before going back to bed . . . leaving the foyer light on that night and every night thereafter.

But our lives change, and now I live in a rural area, though in a residential neighborhood and not on a lake. My TV is in my den, not my bedroom. At this stage of my life, the nocturnal calls of nature (no, not the loons) have become the rule rather than the exception, and my bathroom is outside my bedroom and down a short hallway. Not wanting to bang into the walls or run over the cat and risk waking the rest of the household, I need a little bit of light. And so I leave my closet light on, with the door nearly shut but not quite, and the light on my phone guides me the rest of the way.

At least, that’s my excuse.

Okay, that last part was probably far too much information, but I couldn’t think of another way to bring this tale to a close.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. Old age, on the other hand, is just a mother.

*. *. *

So, whatever the experts say about dousing all ambient light in order to gain a better quality of sleep, I ignore them. I may be the exception to the general rule, but if no one minds, I’m going to continue sleeping with my night light, thank you.

I may even adopt a teddy bear for extra comfort.

But maybe just a bit smaller.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/15/25

That’s the way things worked when the world was relatively sane, and our biggest worry was the Covid pandemic. But those halcyon days are behind us.

Now I find myself waking to wonder, not only what day it is, but whether the terrible things I’m remembering are segments of my last dream, or a too-real memory of yesterday’s news.

And then I make my first major mistake of the day: I check the news headlines. Today, for example, I learned the following:

Headline #1: “White House and El Salvador’s president make clear mistakenly deported man won’t be returned to US.”

That “deported man” is, of course, Salvadoran citizen Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whose “mistaken” deportation has been much in the news lately.

During a meeting between Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele today, the latter unequivocally stated in response to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins:

“I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.” [Kaitlan Collins and Kevin Liptak, CNN, April 14, 2025.]

Despite having said last week that he would comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump refused to respond to questions from the press. But he did say — speaking to members of his administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — that the U.S. does not have the power to return Abrego Garcia. According to Bondi:

“That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us. The Supreme Court ruled that if El Salvador wants to return him … we would facilitate it: meaning, provide a plane.” [Id.]

And there you have it — Trump doing another 180, this time shifting responsibility to the Supreme Court’s admittedly weak wording of its otherwise correct decision, wherein they ordered Trump to “facilitate,” rather than “effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return.

The administration is now saying it’s “not up to us” to bring back the man they illegally deported in the first place. That is, of course, total bullshit.

I ask you: When has Donald Trump ever hesitated to apply pressure on another person, another institution — or another country — in order to achieve his goals? NEVER . . . that’s when. But suddenly, there’s nothing he can do for this man who was granted asylum and has been living in the U.S. legally, with his family, without so much as a traffic violation, for six years? I repeat:

*. *. *

Headline #2: “Dozens Killed In ‘Horrific’ Russian Missile Strike, Prompting Global Condemnation.”

In the second major attack against civilians in the past ten days, Russia has bombarded the Ukrainian city of Sumy with a missile strike that left at least 34 people dead, and at least another 117 — including 15 children — severely injured. [RFE/RL, April 14, 2025.]

The Kremlin, of course, repeated the same old refrain, denying that the two attacks targeted civilian infrastructure. Really? Then what would they call this:

At the risk of sounding like my own broken record, I have to say it one more time: Vladimir Putin has zero intention of bringing this war to an end, other than in his own time and on his own terms.

And Donald Trump — who campaigned on a promise (along with others, equally untrue) that he would bring the war to an end “within 24 hours” — continues to schmooze Putin into “normalizing” diplomatic relations.

*. *. *

And that’s just a small sampling of one day’s news. Is it any wonder I choose to sleep until noon on most days?

I’m simply afraid to wake up.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/14/25

In 1988, I took my very first overseas trip. My children were grown and independent, and I was ready for a fling. I wanted to travel, but not to anywhere predictable; no boring Caribbean cruise for me. Instead, one of my Russian language classmates and I decided to join a tour group to the Soviet Union.

I remember my mother asking why — of all the countries on earth I could have chosen — I would want to go to that God-forsaken place (her description). And I told her that it was for the same reason I had decided to study the language: it was my heritage.

So off we went, my friend Gisela and I, with a group of about 20 strangers and a young, rather inexperienced tour guide, on a two-week trip that was supposed to have included Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Tbilisi (Georgia), and Kiev (Ukraine). But at the last minute, Kiev (Ukrainian spelling: Kyiv) was scrubbed, and instead we were treated to a stay in the beautiful Black Sea resort of Sochi.

The reason for the change in itinerary: the still dangerous level of contamination in Ukraine from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl two years earlier.

*. *. *

Fast forward to May of 1993, when I was living in Moscow as manager of the local office of an American humanitarian aid foundation that was providing healthy food for children in orphanages and in hospitals for chronically ill children — including victims of Chernobyl. That job required that I travel to meet with our partners and government officials, not only in Moscow, but also in St. Petersburg and Kyiv.

I’ve already written at some length about one of the rather hilarious overnight train rides to Kyiv, but not much about the other details of those trips.

To begin with, there was the visit to the hospital for the child victims of that horrific nuclear meltdown, which left embedded in my brain pictures that will never, ever go away. To this day, I am haunted by the visages of those innocent little ones: their emaciated bodies, the pain written on their faces, and the uniform expression of hopelessness in their eyes.

I still remember longing to sit down with them, to speak to them, and most of all to hug each and every one of them. But it was not allowed. They were physically contaminated, and psychologically — permanently — scarred.

And as I went from meeting to meeting during those few days, I noticed something else: a sore throat that started around the second day, and would not respond to medication. Our Ukrainian partner in Kyiv — who became my good friend over the years — told me not to worry; it was “only” the Chernobyl effect.

And so it was. Because no sooner had I returned to Moscow than that sore throat disappeared, only resurfacing on my second visit to Kyiv. It took just a couple of days each time to feel the lingering effect of that nuclear fallout, some seven years after the event. Imagine what it did to the people who had to live with it.

*. *. *

This month marks the 39th anniversary of that calamitous event. And still the surrounding area — including the abandoned, highly radioactive city of Pripyat — is designated as an exclusion zone, with only limited, controlled visitation allowed. The sarcophagus that was built around the reactor to contain the radiation is in place and holding . . . but it is not impermeable to wear over time, or to damage from external forces.

And those forces exist today, in the form of Russian missiles, drones, and on-the-ground troops. One such drone, packed with explosives, struck the container in February, opening a gash that took weeks to repair.

Although no leaks have been detected, there is lingering radioactive dust around the area. An agency director at the site has said that, if an attack triggered an explosion, that dust “would fly with the wind.” [Jake Epstein, Business Insider, April 12, 2025.]

And that dust has recently been stirred up by the bombardments and the armored vehicles involved in Russia’s attempted advance toward Kyiv. That assault was successfully blocked by Ukraine’s forces, and the Russian troops have withdrawn from the area. [Id.]

But what damage was already done . . . and what more might have been done had they been successful in claiming that region as their own?

In fact, what effect will those Russian troops who marched through the so-called Red Forest suffer in the years to come? That, of course, remains to be seen . . . and was clearly not considered by the Russian authorities who ordered those men into the radioactive exclusion zone.

*. *. *

When we speak of the horrors of war, we tend to think in historic terms: the two World Wars, the civil wars of numerous countries, or as far back as the Peloponnesian Wars some 400 years B.C. But how can we overlook the exponentially more cataclysmic effects of war in the nuclear age? The oldest members of my generation remember the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II in Japan . . . and took the lives of more than 200,000 people in those two cities alone.

Are we again headed to a nuclear holocaust — even an accidental one — if this unconscionable war in Ukraine isn’t soon finished?

“Those who forget history . . .”

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/14/25

I recently considered using the descriptor “Machiavellian” in an article about . . . well, you can probably guess about whom . . . and it occurred to me that I really knew very little about the person — Niccolo Machiavelli — who unintentionally inspired the creation of the eponymous adjective.

To be fair, Machiavelli lived long before the invention of the camera, so images of him are unreliable, at best. They range from this:

. . . to this:

. . . to this:

However, I was less concerned with his appearance than his political philosophies. So I did what any so-called normal person would do: I first Googled his name for general information, then immediately ordered a copy of “The Prince” from Amazon, which was delivered almost before I had hit “Place Order” on my iPad.

And while I waited a whole 18 hours for the book to arrive on my doorstep, I learned a few things by following some online links.

This much I already knew; but for the uninitiated (or the simply uninterested), Oxford Languages defines “Machiavellian” as “cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous, especially in politics.” So it seemed the perfect word to describe you-know-whom.

[For the die-hard grammarians out there, note Oxford’s use of the Oxford comma after the word “scheming” — a personal favorite of mine.]

And then I discovered that, despite popular belief that Machiavelli truly subscribed to the philosophies with which his name is unfortunately now associated, he was actually quite the liberal for his time, and a passionate defender of the republican form of government and the rule of law.

It turns out that the poor guy was seriously misunderstood.

The next thing I found was an article by one Luke Hallam on the persuasion.community site dated March 3, 2025, expressing the very same train of thought I had been following . . . and presenting it in a much more erudite manner. So, not wishing to appear to be piggy-backing on (or, heaven forbid, plagiarizing) another person’s good work, I scrapped my proposed article.

But then The Prince arrived, and I began reading. And, while still in the first few pages, I found several bits of advice that some of today’s so-called world leaders would do well to heed.

I won’t burden you with a slew of samples; but there is one that I particularly focused on, because it applies both to the autocratic leader and to the people who voted him into office. If I may . . .

“ . . . for men change their rulers willingly, hoping to better themselves, and this hope induces them to take up arms against him who rules: wherein they are deceived, because they afterwards find by experience they have gone from bad to worse. . . .

“In this way you have enemies in all those whom you have injured in seizing that principality [or, in modern terms, that presidency], and you are not able to keep those friends who put you there because of your not being able to satisfy them in the way they expected, and you cannot take strong measures against them, feeling bound to them. For, although one may be very strong in armed forces, yet in entering a province one has always need of the goodwill of the natives.” [The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli, Fingerprint Classics, Prakash Books, 2024.]

In short, to the autocratic ruler (of any country) I would offer this reminder: “Be careful how you treat people on your way up, because you’re likely to meet them again on the way back down.”

And to the voters who put the tyrant in office: “Next time, get your heads out of your asses, and use the brains God gave you.”

I call it “Machiavellian Philosophy for Dummies.”

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/13/25

Yes, she is back at home in the U.S., after serving over a year of a 12-year prison sentence in Russia for allegedly having committed treason. Her actual “offense”? Having made — two years earlier, in the U.S. — a $51 donation to a pro-Ukraine fund. The transaction was found in her cell phone records when she was detained by authorities while on a visit to her family in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in early 2024.

Negotiations for her release are said to have been underway for some time (presumably begun during the Biden administration), and were finally concluded during a meeting in Washington between presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin adviser Kirill Dmitriev.

In return, the U.S. released dual Russian-German citizen Arthur Petrov, who had been charged with export control violations, smuggling, wire fraud, and money laundering. Clearly, America got the better end of that trade.

And so we welcome home Ksenia Karelina, whose nightmare is finally over. That’s one more name crossed off of our list.

*. *. *

And never forgetting those left behind . . .

The Azov 12
David Barnes
Ales Bialiatski (in Belarus)
Gordon Black
Andrei Chapiuk (in Belarus)
Antonina Favorskaya
Konstantin Gabov
Robert Gilman
Stephen James Hubbard
Sergey Karelin
Ksenia Karelina
Ihar Karney (in Belarus)
Vadim Kobzev
Artyom Kriger
Uladzimir Labkovich (in Belarus)
Michael Travis Leake
Aleksei Liptser
Ihar Losik (in Belarus)
Daniel Martindale
Farid Mehralizada (in Azerbaijan)
Nika Novak
Marfa Rabkova (in Belarus)
Igor Sergunin
Dmitry Shatresov
Robert Shonov
Eugene Spector
Valiantsin Stafanovic (in Belarus)
Siarhei Tsikhanouski (in Belarus)
Laurent Vinatier
Robert Romanov Woodland
Vladislav Yesypenko (in Crimea)
Yuras Zyankovich (in Belarus)

. . . while looking forward to the day they’re all at home again.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/13/25