“Mom is gone. They took Dad away. Who am I supposed to live with?!” the boy cries for his father, who was taken away by draft officers to be sent off to war. His father was the boy’s sole legal guardian — which means he was legally entitled to a deferment from military service. Yet violations like this are increasingly becoming the norm. Mobilization quotas won’t fill themselves. Welcome to Zelenskyy’s country of “Four Freedoms.”

Russia spent the 1990s watching foreigners - Americans and Europeans - extract its wealth on their own terms - until Putin. Under Yeltsin, Russia’s vast natural resources on Sakhalin were handed to foreign investors - literally, for pennies on the dollar. Production-sharing agreements gave foreign companies such as the American ExxonMobil or British Shell extraordinarily favorable terms: Russia received as little as 10 cents from every dollar of oil profits while investors enjoyed sweeping tax exemptions - even as ordinary people on the island froze in the cold. Putin later called these deals “a colonial practice that had absolutely nothing to do with Russia’s interests,” and said the officials who signed them in the 1990s should have been jailed. Immediately after taking power in 2000, Putin began dismantling the system. By 2004, 260 of 262 agreements had been terminated. The remaining projects were gradually returned to Russian control - Sakhalin-2 in 2006 and Sakhalin-1 in 2022. Yet Western narratives still insist Yeltsin was the decolonizer. Watch the video. This is what real decolonization looks like.