Of course, we welcome the release of a wrongly incarcerated American who has been in a Russian prison for 4 years. And if Putin had to be called something he wasn’t to get the release, so be it. But let’s not lose sight of the forest because of a single tree. Putin practices Ukrainian-directed genocide.
Left to right: Maksym Korzh, 46th Separate Airmobile Brigade (Air Assault Forces); David Kotok; Illia Haiduk, 128th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade; Iryna Discipio-Vashchuk, CEO for Revived Soldiers Ukraine (RSU). See “An After-Action Report from Camp Kotok 2025” for the background and details about RSU.
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Dear readers, this is personal to me.
Here’s my quick summary. One hundred fifty years ago, some ancestors left the region near Odessa and migrated across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage on a ship. The first ancestors settled in southern New Jersey in 1886. Remnants of my family who remained dealt with Russian Czars and endured oppression. Those who survived World War I dealt with Stalin and the Ukrainian famine known as the Holodomor. Those who survived faced Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust. Those who survived now must deal with Vladimir Putin, whose ballistic missile targeted and hit the maternity hospital in Odessa. For all I know, one of my cousins, four generations removed, was in that hospital.
Fact. Putin is a ruthless practitioner of Ukraine-directed genocide. He is consistent with the tradition of his predecessors like Stalin. At the end of this missive, we catalog Russian genocide policy directed at Ukraine.
Putin targets hospitals and ambulances. He kidnaps children and sends them to indoctrination camps the way the Hitler Youth did. He wages war with no restraint. On his hands is the blood of a million dead and wounded.
Jake Hanley at Teucrium provides this detailed example of how Putin disrupts worldwide food prices, a collective punishment that especially targets the world’s poor, something he has been doing since he started the war: “Wheat Drops 5% on Peace Talks, but Russia Is Still Sinking Ships in the Black Sea”
TEUCRIUMWheat Drops 5% on Peace Talks, but Russia Is Still Sinking Ships in the Black Sea
3 days ago · 14 likes · Jake Hanley
He played POTUS 47 for years while stonewalling.
Ukraine wins on the battlefield and has had to fight often with constraints imposed by Washington. First Biden, and now Trump. The latest Starlink satellite speed cap affair is one of many examples. Ukrainian civilians died while Musk, Hegseth, and Trump figured out who is saying what. Really?
Meanwhile, Putin’s intentions are clear. Here’s the latest example analyzed by the Carnegie Endowment.
Containing Escalation in the Black Sea, “Russia is testing the waters of NATO’s mutual defense clause. What do strikes in Romanian territorial waters mean for the alliance’s posture toward Moscow?”
Kotok view: Serious readers may want to take a few minutes and examine these two reports from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). You will find that they demonstrate why Ukraine can win against Russia and what the impediments are that are making it more difficult for Ukraine to succeed. Note that the decision-making is based on this misguided, IMO, belief that Putin will prevail in the war. The evidence is that Putin has been destroying his own economy since he embraced a war, which cannot be won if the Ukrainians are permitted to fully defend themselves. Business deals, corruption, and private activity between Putin and some of our actors in Washington seem to be supporting a common theme for how American policy is formed toward the conflict.
1) Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 23, 2026
2) The Myth of Inevitable Russian Victory over Ukraine
IMO, the fastest way to get the Russo-Ukrainian war to a cessation of hostilities is to fully arm and equip Ukraine so they can fight with both hands. Putin will never honor any deal. Only when the price is severe enough to jeopardize his power from internal opposition will there be any ceasefire.
History supports not trusting Russia with anything.
We’ve compiled and chronologically organized the history of Russia’s actions to militarily seize, politically absorb, and demographically subjugate Ukraine. At the end, we include the key academic and international citations, including Encyclopædia Britannica and the United Nations.
Here’s the list.
I. Medieval and Imperial Eras (12th–18th Centuries)
- Sack of Kyiv (1169): Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal (a northern principality ancestor of the Russian state) sacked and looted Kyiv. This event signaled a deliberate shift of political power away from Kievan Rus toward northern Russian domains [Britannica History of Kyiv].
- Citation: Encyclopædia Britannica: Kyiv History.
- The Pereyaslav Agreement & Subsequent Wars (1654–1659): Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky signed a military protection pact with the Tsardom of Russia. Moscow interpreted the treaty as total submission rather than a temporary alliance, prompting armed resistance and a Russian invasion that was temporarily repelled at the Battle of Konotop [Britannica Pereyaslav Agreement].
- Destruction of the Cossack Hetmanate (1708–1775): Following Ivan Mazepa’s alliance with Sweden during the Great Northern War, Russian forces under Peter the Great destroyed the Cossack capital of Baturyn. Catherine the Great later liquidated the Zaporozhian Sich, completely absorbing central and eastern Ukrainian lands into the Russian Empire and replacing local governance with direct imperial rule [Britannica Imperial Rule].
- Partitions of Poland (1793–1795): Through the second and third partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire annexed vast tracts of Right-Bank Ukraine, implementing strict Russification policies to systematically suppress Ukrainian language and culture [Britannica Imperial Rule].
- Citation: Encyclopædia Britannica: Ukraine Under Imperial Russian Rule.
II. Soviet Campaigns and the Stalinist Era (20th Century)
- First and Second Ukrainian-Soviet Wars (1917–1921): Following the collapse of the Russian Empire and Ukraine’s declaration of the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic, Bolshevik forces invaded and captured Kyiv in February 1918. Red Army forces launched a massive re-invasion to defeat Ukrainian independence movements, culminating in the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) and its forced entry into the USSR [Britannica War Timeline].
- The Destruction of the Ukrainian Elite (1930s): Joseph Stalin launched the “Executed Renaissance,” a campaign that systematically arrested, exiled, or executed thousands of Ukrainian writers, artists, intellectuals, and religious leaders to wipe out independent Ukrainian culture.
- The Holodomor (1932–1933): Stalin engineered a catastrophic, man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR that killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians. By imposing impossible grain quotas, seizing all food, blacklisting starving villages, and blockading Ukraine’s borders, the Soviet regime deliberately targeted the Ukrainian peasantry to crush resistance to Soviet rule and collectivization [Britannica Holodomor].
- Mass Deportations and Demographic Shifts (1933–1953): In the immediate wake of the famine, Soviet authorities actively moved waves of ethnic Russian settlers into the hollowed-out Ukrainian countryside [Britannica Famine Aftermath]. Following World War II, Stalin ordered the deportation of hundreds of thousands of western Ukrainians to Siberia to quell the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) insurgency, further altering the region’s demographics [Britannica Famine Aftermath].
- Soviet Annexation of Western Ukraine (1939–1940): Under the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin invaded and annexed eastern Poland (western Ukraine), bringing regions like Galicia and Volhynia under Moscow’s control for the first time.
III. Modern Post-Soviet Era (21st Century)
- Annexation of Crimea and Donbas War (2014): Following the Euromaidan Revolution, Russia used military force to illegally annex the Crimean Peninsula and orchestrated a proxy-backed separatist war to fracture the eastern Donbas region [Britannica War Timeline, Geneva US Mission].
- Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine (2022–Present): Russia launched a multi-pronged, full-scale military invasion from the north, east, and south in an outright attempt to overthrow the Ukrainian government, occupy its major cities, and permanently absorb Ukrainian territory [Britannica Russian Invasion].
- State-Sanctioned Mass Abduction of Ukrainian Children (2014–Present): Heavily accelerating after the 2022 invasion, Vladimir Putin’s regime instituted a systematic campaign to forcibly transfer and deport Ukrainian children to Russia.
- The Verified Numbers: As of late 2026, the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine has officially verified 20,651 individual cases of child deportation [Embassy of Ukraine USA]. Independent international bodies and Ukrainian ombudsmen estimate the real total is significantly higher, with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of children affected [OSCE PA Report, European Commission].
- Forced Assimilation: In Russia, these children are subjected to forced Russification, institutionalized re-education camps, document alteration, and fast-tracked Russian citizenship for forced adoption into Russian families, an effort designed to erase their Ukrainian identity [UN Press Release, European Commission].
- International Prosecution: The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has concluded that these systematic acts constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes [UN News, Reuters]. This follows the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing historic arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, in March 2023 [UN News].
- Citations: United Nations News: Independent Inquiry Findings, UN OHCHR Press Release, Reuters: UN Inquiry on Child Deportations, European Commission: Bringing Ukrainian Children Home, Embassy of Ukraine in the USA Statement, and OSCE PA Briefing Document.
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