Saturday Report 7/6/24 - Europe Stands With Ukraine

The Best of the Rest of the News

Every day in Riga, Latvia children bring their favorite stuffed animals to lay across the street from the Russian embassy to mourn the Russian kidnapping of over 100,000 Ukrainian children and the daily bombs and missiles killing tens of thousands of others.

— The double standard. Watching the news and reading the mainstream media, particularly the New York Times and Washington Post, has been astonishing. Donald Trump is promising to be a dictator from day one, Project 2025 and many of his advisors are openly promoting turning America into Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary, and the media is almost entirely ignoring any of that, or the fact that Trump lied nonstop in the debate and does so in every one of his rallies. It’s like the Hillary email “scandal” all over again; in 2016 we heard nonstop about that email “outrage,” but nary a word, for all practical purposes, about Trump’s moral failings, embrace of racism as a political weapon, rape allegations, and fraud, failures, and criminal activity as a businessman. As concerned as I was and am about Biden’s failure in the debate, I’m horrified by how our media continues to frame this election around personality rather than policy and the future of democracy in America and around the world.

— Louise and I are traveling and, over the past few days, have visited Sweden, Estonia, and Latvia (which is why our monthly “Ask Thom Anything” Zoom call will be next weekend). In Stockholm, we watched the weekly rally held in one of that city’s central squares on behalf of Ukraine. In Estonia, there were signs of resistance to Russia everywhere: a popular downtown Tallinn restaurant, for example, had a sign out front that you can see below. And in Riga, the capital of Latvia, the government hung a two-story high picture of Putin as a ghoul on the building that faces the Russian embassy, and erected a circle of Ukrainian flags in the park directly across the street from the front of the Russian embassy. There’s also a daily pile of stuffed animals that young people have been bringing to lay in front of the Russian embassy to represent the children Putin has kidnapped and murdered in Ukraine. (All the pictures below but one are mine.) One person we spent time with in Riga summarized the feeling we heard from folks we spoke with in the other countries: “We are much smaller than Ukraine and much more vulnerable; if we were not NATO members, Putin would’ve come for us first. In supporting Ukraine, we are also supporting ourselves; we know he will not stop with that country if he succeeds there.”

Stockholm pro-Ukraine rally (photo from a Swedish site I can’t find again).

What the staff of the Russian embassy in Riga see out their side windows. I was told the Riga government put up this poster.

A sign at a top restaurant in the main city square in Tallinn, Estonia.

A display of Ukrainian flags the Latvian government erected in the park across the street from the Russian Embassy (in the background).

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