On October 11, 2026, access to the Yandex SpeechKit service stopped working in the Balabolka application. According to Russian media reports, Ukrainian UAVs destroyed three of Yandex’s five data centers. The third destroyed data center was located less than 100 kilometers from where I live (and about a dozen kilometers from my brother's house). Yandex is sort of like the Russian Google: the company started out by developing a search engine, and now it’s a cloud storage provider with a wide range of services.

In 2026, the Ukrainian army is proving highly effective. In Russia, there are gasoline shortages (lines at gas stations pop up from time to time in my city), Ukrainian drones have destroyed the warehouses of Wildberries (the Russian version of Amazon), and now Russians are having their internet services cut off. Here’s a funny story: I ordered an anti-war poster from China through Wildberries; it’s a copy of a Soviet anti-war poster from the 1960s (if you printed a poster like that in Russia, the printing press employees would be thrown in jail; but the Chinese can do whatever they want). While the poster was on its way from China, I was worried: would the Ukrainians bomb the warehouse where my poster was stored or not? I got lucky.

In 2026, the situation on the front lines for the Russian army is desperate. In ten months, only one Ukrainian city - Konstantinovka - has been captured (and even that not entirely). To understand the pace of the Russian army’s advance: the distance from the city of Bakhmut (Artyomovsk), which the Russians took control of in 2023, to the city of Konstantinovka is 25 kilometers (16 miles). The Russian army is struggling to recruit new soldiers; the Ministry of Defense is even signing contracts with elderly men: in October of this year, the governor of the region where I live published obituaries for my fellow countrymen, born in 1963 and 1965, who were killed in battle. Young people born in 2005 and 2006 are also dying: death spares no one.

That’s why the U.S. president’s flirtations with the Russian dictator look so despicable. What’s going on?! Could it really be that this is the Americans’ new hierarchy of priorities: having cheap fuel in the United States is more important than the lives of Ukrainians? This is no exaggeration. When the U.S. president said that Ukraine should stop striking Russian oil refineries, that’s exactly what he demonstrated. To make Americans more comfortable, Ukrainians are expected to stop the very actions that cause the aggressor the most trouble.

As a Russian citizen, I am outraged by these statements. Russian propaganda is already using the U.S. president’s words to strengthen its campaign for continuing the war. The oil deal will provide Russia with several additional billion dollars, which will be used to produce weapons. This is all some kind of twisted victim-blaming.