I’m actually glad that Twitter banned me. I now have a new account and it’s 100% Ukrainian + Alex Berenson. I now only post and comment in Ukrainian. What’s really sweet is when I comment in Ukrainian on the tweets of pro-Ukrainian Russians. They don’t know how to respond in Ukrainian, so they answer with hearts and smileys.

Local rabbits at the grocery store are $26 for one. But the Chinese ones at the Global Food store are $9. Of course, they might be cats.

I made a great rabbit (or cat) and mushroom stew with Chinese rabbit and a Polish bouillon cube. We are eating it over Ukrainian buckwheat with locally grown basil.

On social media, you can see that the disappointment of the regular people in Russia with Putin is growing. More and more often, they criticize him, and the criticism gets harsher every day.

Putin is too tolerant, they say. He’s too kind to Ukrainians. He’s weak. If only he were stronger and really went at those evil Ukrainian bastards. Why doesn’t he kill all the Ukrainian children who were removed from Ukraine and taken to Russia? Why doesn’t he cut their heads off publicly on the Red Square? Or at least put a thousand children at each ammo depot to prevent Ukrainians from bombing them? Why doesn’t he nuke Kyiv? Or London? Why, why?

All American journalists who cover Russia need to spend an hour randomly scrolling through Russian social media. Of course, they’ll need psychiatric help to deal with the trauma but at least they’ll leave fantasy and join reality.

The anti-Putin sentiment in Russia does not only exist on social media. There was a massive demonstration by the Russian nationalists (who hate Putin) in Moscow yesterday. The main message of the participants was that Putin is weak and pathetic. He should be bombing Washington, they said, instead of trying to play nice with the world leaders.

I am yet to see any discontent of regular Russians with the actual fact of the war, with the failing economy, with corruption, the lack of opportunities, etc. Instead, there’s unsatisfied bloodlust that’s scary to observe.

Rather than a brutal dictator, Putin is a weak, waffling fellow who has to start wars to prevent his people from murdering him. Unfortunately, nobody is providing serious analysis. All we see are fantasies, projections, and primitive analogies. We have all interiorized the belief that cultural differences do not exist and humans are interchangeable widgets. As a result, people think they can provide insight without speaking the language or knowing the culture. What’s even worse, they can’t break their addiction to analogies.

Analogies are a psychological self-defense mechanism against the pain of learning. They are addictive because they cocoon us and protect us from coming into contact with reality. Everything new gets looped back to the already digested and familiar. Anxiety is what causes this. What if I find out that the world is a lot bigger, scarier and more confusing than I thought? How can I deal? Nah, forget all that. Let me shut my eyes really tight because if I don’t see scary things, it’s as if they didn’t exist.

Diversity only permits differences that conform to the system; it constitutes an otherness that has been made consumable.

Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other