Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia is deceiving Donald Trump and warned that the US president’s response to those lies could determine the future of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
This comes as US President Donald Trump has been stalling new sanctions against Russia, while pushing for Kyiv-Moscow talks, allegedly to end the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. While two rounds of such talks failed to bring a ceasefire, with Russia effectively demanding Ukraine’s capitulation, Moscow has escalated its air attacks against Ukrainian cities using hundreds of Iranian-designed Shahed drones every night.
In an interview published by Politico on 12 June, Zelenskyy stated:
“Russia is simply lying to Trump,” he said, adding that “most heads of state and government share my opinion,” expressing hope that the US understands the extent of Russian disinformation.
Zelenskyy said the leverage to end the war rests with Trump, noting that “Putin understands nothing but strength, and America has that strength.” He also emphasized that the effectiveness of sanctions and the speed of decision-making “depends on” Trump.
Ongoing war, weak peace efforts, lack of sanctions
Recent low-level Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul have made little progress, while Russia continues its escalated attacks on Ukraine. Zelenskyy said Trump expressed doubts about Moscow’s sincerity after a recent phone call with Putin. Trump bizarrely compared Russia and Ukraine to two squabbling children and said the deadline for more sanctions exists “in his brain.”
When asked if Trump’s opinions shift depending on whom he speaks with, Zelenskyy answered, “I don’t know,” but reiterated: “Russia is not sincere.”
Zelenskyy said Russia’s ongoing offensive is “not very successful,” adding that the Kremlin has failed to achieve its goals. He claimed Moscow is trying to buy time while its economy suffers. He believes stronger sanctions could further deplete Russia’s military capabilities and reduce attacks on Ukraine.
According to Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s survival hinges on continued support from Western nations. He warned that an American withdrawal would be “a perfect scenario” for Putin and could hand victory to Russia.
Zelenskyy acknowledged personal doubt, referencing Winston Churchill’s struggles during World War II.
“I have no fewer doubts than anyone else in Ukraine. But the difference is that I am the president,” he said. “So until the end of the war, I will never show any moments of weakness. And I will never share my dark days with anyone.”
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US President Donald Trump suggested that allowing Russia and Ukraine to continue fighting might be preferable for him for the time being, as he met with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on 5 June at the White House, RFE/RL reported. The statement came just hours before hundreds of Russian drones and missiles struck residential areas in Kyiv, Ternopil, Lutsk, and other Ukrainian cities.
Since taking office in January, Trump had been advocating for talks between Moscow and Kyiv to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But with Russia maintaining maximalist demands that amount to Ukraine’s capitulation, and continuing to target civilians and infrastructure, Trump’s efforts have proven ineffective — and he now appears to be starting to realize that his idea was flawed from the outset.
Trump signals retreat from his peace effort
According to Axios, Trump compared the ongoing war, in which Russia destroys multiple Ukrainian cities and keeps killing Ukrainian civilians, to a playground fight:
“Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy, they hate each other and they’re fighting in a park. Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart,” RFE/RL cited Trump as saying.
Trump said this analogy was something he shared with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a phone call on 4 June. The US President described himself like “a hockey referee letting players fight for a bit before putting an end to it.”
Trump, per Axios, acknowledged that “bad blood” and deep “hatred” between the sides — especially between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — made it difficult to reach a ceasefire. He said that “a lot of animosity” existed between the two leaders, according to RFE/RL.
Trump refuses to commit on Russia sanctions
When asked three times whether he would back new sanctions on Russia or support the sanctions bill sponsored by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump was non-committal, Axios reported.
He said he would discuss the matter with Merz but noted, per Axios,
“When I see the moment where it’s not gonna stop, we will be very tough, and it could be on both countries.” Trump added, “It takes two to tango.”
He also stated,
“If Russia is out of line, you will be amazed how tough [I’ll be].”
None of Trump’s earlier threats toward Russia have gone beyond rhetoric.
EU pushes for more sanctions
According to RFE/RL, Merz said he discussed sanctions with US senators and noted that the European Union is currently debating its 18th sanctions package since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. He predicted it would pass.
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“I signed an order,” Donald Trump declared in his address to Congress this week, “making it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female." It wasn’t quite the victory for common sense he thought it was. President Trump, consciously or not, was following a playbook. One that we at Coda Story have tracked for years — a playbook that was written in Russia and is now being followed almost to the letter in America.
For nearly a decade, our team has documented how anti-LGBT legislation and rhetoric has migrated from Russia to Central Asia to Turkey to Georgia, Brazil, and now the United States.
Trump's speech was instantly recognizable to those who have followed this trail. He took us on a tour of its classic landmarks: presenting anti-transgender policies as "protecting women," framing gender-affirming care as "mutilation," and positioning this politicized language as a return to common sense rather than an attack on civil rights.
But to understand how we got here, we need to look back more than a decade to when the Kremlin first deployed anti-LGBT rhetoric not as a moral stance, but as a tactical weapon.
A Russian export
In 2012, facing mounting protests over corruption, Vladimir Putin's government desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. As our contributing editor Peter Pomerantsev later wrote: "Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere."
The opportunity came when self-declared feminist provocateurs Pussy Riot performed their "punk prayer" in Moscow's central cathedral. Putin seized the moment. Suddenly Russian state TV shifted their attention from corruption scandals to tabloid rants about witches, God, Satan, and anal sex. Europe, previously a symbol of the rule of law and transparency, was rebranded as "Gayropa."
This wasn't about deeply held religious beliefs. As Pomerantsev noted, "Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay." Russia's social culture is, Pomerantsev wrote, "hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn't."
But if Putin had no personal problem with homosexuality, he saw the potential of playing to prejudice. Russia's 2013 "gay propaganda" law banning the "promotion of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors became the template. Soon, nearly identical laws appeared in former Soviet countries—first in Lithuania, then Latvia, then across Central Asia. The language was often copied verbatim, with the same vague prohibitions against "propaganda" that left room to criminalize everything from pride parades to sex education to simply mentioning that LGBT people exist.
Pussy Riot on Red Square 2012, Moscow. Creative Commons CC BY 3.0/Denis_Bochkarev.
The creation of a global axis
What began as a deliberate distraction from Putin’s failure to rein in corruption evolved into a transnational movement. Russian "family values" defenders organized international conferences, bringing together American evangelicals, European far-right politicians, and anti-LGBT activists from Africa.
Those meetings bore fruit. The most powerful connections happened through the World Congress of Families, where links between Russian Orthodox activists and American evangelical groups were forged. These meetings created pathways for rhetoric and policies to travel, often through multiple countries in other continents, before reaching the mainstream in Western democracies.
"Homosexual propaganda is the disease of a modern anti-Christian society."
When Trump spoke about banning "gender ideology," he echoed language first deployed by the Kremlin. When he announced that he had "signed an executive order to ban men from playing in women's sports," he was repeating almost word-for-word the justifications used for Russia's bans on transgender athletes.
From Russia to Brazil to America
By 2020, this Christian-inflected, homophobic, family values playbook had made it to Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro deployed its tactics to appeal to a wide swathe of religious conservatives. In May 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro attempted to divert attention from his mishandling of the crisis by posting on Facebook that the World Health Organization was encouraging masturbation in children as young as four.
The post was bizarre, quickly deleted, and made little sense—but it wasn't the product of some Bolsonaro fever dream. Anyone who had watched Russian state television was already familiar with the crazy conspiracy theory about WHO encouraging childhood masturbation.
It first appeared on Russian state TV channels around 2014, when Putin's traditional values crusade had really picked up momentum. The whole theory was based on a WHO document on sex education that mentioned early childhood masturbation as a normal psychosexual phenomenon that teachers should be prepared to discuss—an obscure, academic point distorted by Russian media into evidence that European children were being forced to masturbate from the age of four.
Bizarre as it was, the story had legs, repeated so often that it migrated from Russian television to the Brazilian president’s social media to Christian conservative talking points in the U.S. and Britain.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends a forum for family values in Moscow on January 23, 2024. Gavril Grigorov/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.
Watching the Edges
What happens on the periphery—both geographical and narrative—eventually moves to the center. Eight years ago, we were documenting anti-LGBT legislation in Kyrgyzstan that seemed fringe, distant, and surely far removed from established democracies. Today, similar laws are being implemented in countries like Hungary, Georgia, and even the United States.
"People [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, you will be killed."
Georgia, my own country, is a fascinating case study in how such rhetoric takes root. Once the most promising democracy among the former Soviet republics, Georgia has regressed. With the Kremlin-friendly Georgian Dream in power, and despite determined and vocal opposition, the ruling party pushed through a "foreign agents" law modeled directly on its Russian counterpart and “family values” legislation that targets LGBT rights, including banning Pride parades and public displays of the rainbow flag.
The pattern is unmistakable and what makes it particularly dangerous is how these policies are laundered through increasingly respectable channels. Phrases that began on Russian state TV like "gender ideology" and protecting children from "propaganda" have become mainstream Republican talking points.
Russia's Blueprint: Unleashing Violence
The consequences of this exported blueprint are devastating. It gives license to religious conservatives everywhere to act on their prejudices and then point to them as universal. In Indonesia, for instance, which has been mulling changes to its broadcast law that single out investigative journalism and LGBT content, two young men in conservative Aceh were publicly flogged under Shariah law for gay sex. Vigilantes burst into a flat to find the men allegedly mid-embrace.
In Russia, the gay propaganda law unleashed unprecedented violence against LGBTQ people. As Lyosha Gorshkov, a gay Russian professor who fled to the United States, told us in 2016: "people [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, but you will be killed. Government keeps targeting LGBT population because it's easiest target.”
Before fleeing Russia, Gorshkov was targeted by the Federal Security Service (the modern version of the KGB). An agent at his university called him into his office and demanded he identify communists and homosexuals. "He would follow me every single week, calling me, looking for me at the university," Gorshkov explained. When a bogus article circulated claiming Gorshkov was "promoting sodomy," he knew he had to leave.
In St. Petersburg, which became the epicenter for Russian homophobia, LGBT people faced increasing danger. Nearly nine years ago, journalist Dmitry Tsilikin was murdered in what police believed was a homophobic attack. Local politicians like Vitaly Milonov, who masterminded the city's gay propaganda law that later went national, routinely used dehumanizing language that inspired vigilante violence.
"We have to face moral dangers,” Milonov told our reporter Amy Mackinnon. Homosexual propaganda, he said, is “the disease of a modern anti-Christian society," Milonov told our reporter Amy MacKinnon.
In religiously conservative Aceh province in Indonesia, two young men were publicly caned on February 27 for having gay sex. Vigilantes burst into a room they had rented. Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images.
Coming Full Circle
President Trump's speech this week represents a concerning milestone in this journey of authoritarian rhetoric. When he promised to bring "common sense" back by recognizing only two genders, he was echoing Putin from a decade earlier, though no one acknowledged the source.
Particularly troubling is how within the United States such rhetoric is becoming law. Iowa's legislature recently passed a bill to strip the state's civil rights code of protections based on gender identity—the first state to explicitly revoke such protections. Georgia's state legislature, meanwhile, passed a bill to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors and people held in state prisons. Georgia had already passed a bill banning transgender athletes from school sports.
These are the legislative fruits from rhetorical roots planted over a decade ago. I'll never forget the May afternoon in 2016 when I sat in Tbilisi's main concert hall, watching Josiah Trenham, an Eastern Orthodox priest from California, take the stage at the World Congress of Families conference. The hall was packed with hundreds of guests, many of them Americans who had traveled to the Georgian capital to discuss ways to "save the world from homosexuality." What still haunts me is how warmly the audience applauded Trenham’s words.
"I have witnessed my nation disgrace itself before God and men," he thundered. "My counsel to beloved Georgians is this: stand firm in your faith against the LGBT revolution. Do not give in or your cities will become like San Francisco, where there are 80,000 more dogs in the city than there are children. Tell the LGBT tolerance tyrants, this lavender mafia, these homofascists, these rainbow radicals, that they are not welcome to promote their anti-religious anti-civilizational propaganda in your nations."
Later, when I confronted Trenham, he insisted he hadn't encouraged violence, claiming instead that the people "who are for provocation and violence are the LGBTs themselves." Outside, hundreds of Georgian Orthodox activists were gathered with religious icons and signs that quoted Biblical scripture. They were free to express their hate. But when my phone rang, it was an LGBT activist calling in panic because ten of his friends had been arrested for writing "Love is equal" on a sidewalk only a few blocks away.
Cynical Kremlin propaganda coupled with genuine religious fervor had created this monster, and more monsters were being bred everywhere. The success of the Russian playbook lies in its incremental nature. First, you frame the issue as one about protecting children. Then you expand to education. Then to adults. At each step, those opposing the restrictions can be painted as ideologues who don't care about protecting the vulnerable.
Setting Trump's speech alongside those made by others, from political leaders to religious preachers, reveals that the U.S. is just the latest domino to fall. Solid family values as a contrast to the licentiousness of the decadent West was a campaign that began in the Kremlin's halls of power as a distraction. It has now become a cornerstone of authoritarian governance worldwide.
In Tbilisi, at the World Congress of Families conference, a Polish anti-abortion activist explained: "You have to understand that in the west politicians are thinking in four-year terms... but in Russia they think more like emperors." The Kremlin’s long game has paid off.
For years, we've documented how authoritarianism travels across borders, now that story is becoming America’s story.
Why Did We Write This Story?
At Coda, we invite readers to look beyond the familiar "culture wars" framing that often dominates coverage of anti-LGBT legislation. While cultural values certainly play a role, our years of reporting across multiple countries reveal something more complex: a calculated political strategy with a documented history. The "culture wars" narrative inadvertently serves the interests of those deploying these tactics by making coordinated political movements appear to be spontaneous cultural conflicts. By understanding the deeper patterns at work, we can better recognize what's happening and perhaps influence how the story unfolds.
High noon on Saturday, February 15 – if Donald Trump had had his way – would have seen Israel resume its blitz on Gaza, destroying what little remains to be destroyed and driving two million Palestinians into exile.
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Trump had said that by his deadline Israel should demand the return of all 76 of the remaining Israeli hostages (including the remains of the 35 or so believed to be dead), or "let hell break out". Hamas had earlier threatened to call off the scheduled release of another three hostages unless the Israelis lifted the curbs it said they had imposed on the flow of aid into the battered enclave, especially shelter items.
Egyptian and Qatari mediators ironed out the problem, as they had done with previous hitches. But, in the meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu's far right government took up the baton Trump had handed to it. In preparation to unleash hell, if "our hostages" were not freed by the deadline, Israel massed troops in and around Gaza. It was left unclear whether Israel was demanding the release of all 76 hostages, or just the 17 due to be freed over the current 42-day first phase of the Gaza agreement, or just the three originally meant to be freed on that Saturday in line with the accord.
In the event, the sixth hostage handover of Phase 1 went ahead smoothly, with three Israeli men, looking as fit and healthy as could be expected given their ordeal, handed over to the International Red Cross and thence back to Israel in exchange for the release of 369 Palestinian prisoners, 36 of them serving long-term sentences and the rest Gazans picked up at random with no charges.
Netanyahu hates the Palestinian Authority at least as much as he does Hamas, because the PA wants a two-state solution. "There will be no Hamas and no PA in Gaza after the war," he said.
As before, and against the wishes of the Red Cross, Hamas turned the handover into a spectacle aimed at conveying the message that it is still strong and in control, with hundreds of heavily-armed, smartly-uniformed fighters, some toting advanced Israeli combat weapons probably seized in the October 7 2023 attack, cordoning off a large square and displaying the hostages on a stage festooned with Hamas banners and slogans.
With the closing stages of the first phase set to continue (14 more days, 14 more hostages) did this mean that some daylight was opening up between Netanyahu and Trump, who had railed against the release of hostages in "dribs and drabs"? Not really. Trump is clearly in tune with the more vocally extreme elements in the Israeli cabinet, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, but Netanyahu could not simply junk the elaborately-negotiated and signed agreement, especially as the highly-emotive issue of hostage lives was at stake. At the security cabinet meeting where the exchange was approved, he is reported to have told his ministers not to give interviews or mention the Trump plan, to avoid appearing to act counter to the volatile US president.
So the focus shifted to the second phase of the accord, which was supposed to see the release of all Israeli hostages and many more Palestinian prisoners, and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. It would mean the end of the war, with preparations for a third phase devoted to reconstruction.
Negotiations on Phase 2 were meant to start on February 4, but two weeks went by before movement started in that direction, and the process was clearly going to be fraught. The issue of who would control and govern Gaza had been left open. As the TV screens glaringly showed, Hamas was still very much there and in charge. All attempts had failed to encourage an alternative local leadership, or to posit a takeover by the discredited Palestinian Authority from the West Bank.
Netanyahu hates the PA at least as much as he does Hamas, because the PA wants a two-state solution. "There will be no Hamas and no PA in Gaza after the war," he said on February 17. "I am committed to U.S. President Trump's plan for the realization of a different Gaza."
"Any plan that leaves Hamas in charge of Gaza will be unacceptable to Israel," said Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio. After talks with Netanyahu, he added : "Hamas cannot continue as a military or government force. It must be eliminated or eradicated."
"The next phase of the hostage deal remains under great threat," concluded Amir Tibon in Haaretz. "It is clear that Netanyahu wants the deal to collapse and the war to resume, and that he is doing everything in his power to make that happen." The collapse of the deal with Hamas would be the only way to enable Trump's "plan" for the US to "take over, own and cherish" a Gaza flattened beyond redemption and devoid of its Palestinian inhabitants, who would be rehoused happily and permanently in "beautiful communities" elsewhere while their Gaza was reborn as an incredible Riviera for others.
As Donald Trump warned Hamas and threatened to take over Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu described the U.S. president as the "greatest friend Israel has ever had." Avi Ohayon (GPO) /Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images.
It's a real estate hustler's fantasy that collides head-on with every sanctity and imperative in Arab history and politics. Egypt and Jordan immediately rejected Trump's suggestion that they take in Palestinians from Gaza. Trump was presumably assuming that the several billion dollars both receive in US military and economic aid would leverage obedience. But there are some issues that are beyond pressure and bribery. It would be an existential threat for King Abdullah's Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in particular. He knows that if the Gazans are displaced, the much closer and more numerous inhabitants of the West Bank, where things are already hotting up dangerously, would not be far behind.
No Arab leader can go down in history as collaborating in a second Nakba, the first being the displacement of Palestinians by the creation of Israel in 1948. The Saudis, who Trump is counting on to join Israel in an expanded Abraham Accord despite Gaza, know this as well as any, and have long made it unequivocally clear that there is no way normalisation will happen without a clear pathway to a Palestinian state. They were further irked by Netanyahu's facetious suggestion that if they were so keen on that, why not establish it in the Kingdom?
Riyadh set about rallying the Arabs behind a plan to counter the Trump scheme, with Egypt and others working on the details of a formula for reconstructing the Strip without displacing its inhabitants. The key issue is whether Hamas could be induced to stand aside, and who would take political and security control. Whatever the arrangement, Hamas would still be the power behind the camouflage. Would Israel accept such a cosmetic ploy, or, with Trump's backing, go all out to complete its stated war aim of destroying Hamas?
That would complete the conversion of Gaza into a totally unlivable hell on earth, to which it is already pretty close. If that were to happen and the doors were opened, the bulk of the population might have no option but to stream out for the sake of simple survival. "Give them a choice. Not forcible eviction. Not ethnic cleansing," as Netanyahu said.
If the Gaza issue might produce some Arab pushback against Trump's wilder notions, Israel's ambition to deal with Iran is less contentious, though further conflict is unlikely to be welcomed by the Gulf countries. The Saudis, UAE and others roundly condemned Israel's large-scale attack on Iran on October 26 last year – their relations with Tehran have improved considerably since Trump's first term.
But Iran is certainly in the crosshairs. After meeting with Secretary of State Rubio on February 16, Netanyahu said that with President Trump's support, "I have no doubt we can and will finish the job." While Rubio said that Israel and the U.S. "stand shoulder to shoulder" against Iran, it remains to be seen whether Trump, who supposedly prefers making deals to making war, would prefer to squeeze Iran into quasi-submission rather than encouraging or engaging in conflict.
The effect of Israel's devastating blows to Iran's regional allies is being felt strongly in Lebanon, where the new government formed by PM Nawaf Salam onFebruary 8 clearly reflected a new balance of power, with Hezbollah losing its ability to veto decisions it doesn't like.
The day after the new Lebanese cabinet held its first meeting, Israeli warplanes broke the sound barrier over Beirut, rattling windows and nerves throughout the city. It was a clear message aimed at Beirut airport, which the Israelis (through the US) threatened to bombard if it allowed flights from Tehran to land, on the accusation that such planes were bringing in cash and possibly weapons for Hezbollah. The airport cancelled the incoming flights, prompting protest demonstrations by Hezbollah followers around the airport in which vehicles of UN peacekeepers were attacked and burned. The Salam government then went further, and cancelled all flights to and from Iran until further notice.
Under the November 27 ceasefire agreement last year between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli forces were supposed to leave Lebanon by January 27, but the deadline was pushed back to February 18. Though the accord's co-sponsor France insisted the Israelis should then pull out fully, the U.S. did not oppose Israel's decision to retain five strategic hilltop positions in southern Lebanon. Israel also continued to carry out strikes on what it deemed Hezbollah targets in the Beqaa Valley, and on February 17 assassinated a Hamas officer with a drone strike on his car in the Lebanese city of Sidon. The concept of "ceasefire" seemed to be somewhat relative.
Netanyahu hailed Trump as the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. The question now is whether the American president can treat the Arab side of the equation as amounting to nothing.
Swaggering through Europe this week, the U.S. vice president JD Vance and secretary of defense Pete Hegseth gave a masterclass in how to alienate friends and annoy people. At the AI Summit in France, Vance accused European regulators of “tightening the screws” on U.S. companies. “America cannot and will not accept that,” he added, warning his “European friends” to lay off Big Tech. Or else.
PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel must have thought the bet he made on Vance in the 2022 Ohio Senate race had paid off in Paris. Thiel, alongside fellow venture capitalists David Sacks and Elon Musk, is the money behind the rise of JD Vance to the vice presidency of the United States. And in the French capital, Vance gave his investors the returns they've been banking on, making the argument that even the tamest regulation would stifle the AI industry and kill innovation.
"The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety," Vance lectured assembled global leaders. "It will be won by building." Perhaps inevitably, given the tone being taken, the United States (alongside the United Kingdom) refused to sign an innocuous pledge at the end of the conference to "reduce digital divides" and "ensure AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure, and trustworthy." Nearly sixty other countries did sign.
Trump, it seems, doesn’t do multilateral, global treaties, having already pulled the U.S. out of a panoply of international agreements on health, climate change, justice, trade and taxation. And as the U.S. refused to play ball, China declared its intent to collaborate freely with other countries, to play its part in creating "a community with a shared future for mankind".
Vance’s first speech abroad as vice president showed how the Trump administration is looking to force everyone - allies and adversaries alike - to react while the U.S. sets the tune. Clearly, by countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.
Not long after Vance’s visit to Paris, it was Hegseth’s turn to lecture the U.S.’s European allies. “Make no mistake,” he said in Brussels, “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.”
Hegseth told reporters that the “peace dividend has to end.” Europe needs to spend more on its own defense because there are “autocrats with ambitions around the globe from Russia to the communist Chinese.” Either the West, he added, “awakens to that reality… or we will abdicate that responsibility to somebody else with all the wrong values.”
The Trump administration is looking to force allies and adversaries alike to march to the beat of America's drum. By countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.
Meanwhile in Washington, DC, Donald Trump was demonstrating the extent to which the United States seemed to be marginalizing NATO, by claiming to have already agreed with Vladimir Putin to begin negotiating a peace deal over Ukraine. No European leader had been clued in; neither had the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. If Europe was getting the stick, it very much seemed as if Putin was getting the carrot. “I know him very well,” Trump said about Putin. “I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t.” Trump also expressed his hope that Russia could rejoin the G7 (formerly G8) bloc of the world’s wealthiest nations.
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“Europe must be part of any negotiations,” a group of European foreign ministers said in Paris, insisting plaintively on a seat at the table even as Trump seems intent on pulling that seat out from underneath them. A meeting between Putin and Trump has been mooted to discuss Ukraine – it will be held in Saudi Arabia and, as of now, nobody else has been invited. Though, as Vance prepares to meet with Zelensky at a security conference in Munich at the weekend, at least the U.S. acknowledges that Ukraine will need to be a part of the process. But an indication of the terms on which a peace deal with Russia might be agreed was provided by U.S. defence secretary Pete Hegseth who said that neither NATO membership nor reclaiming all its land occupied by Russia were “realistic” goals for Ukraine.
China, reportedly, has also offered to host Trump and Putin for a summit to discuss a peace deal. Speaking in London, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, said “China is willing to work together with all parties, including the European side, to continue to play a constructive role in this regard.” The “rationality” of China’s position, he maintained, has been borne out by recent developments. Last year, China and Brazil said it could broker a peace deal, an offer Zelensky dismissed, questioning both countries’ motivations. “You will not boost your power,” he said, “at Ukraine’s expense.”
Since Trump returned to the White House, China’s approach has been to remind the world that it is a responsible global power. As the U.S. puts the world on the defensive, "China will increasingly be seen as a reliable global partner," noted one state magazine. The article was a reaction to the USAID freeze and argued that Beijing could now persuade other countries that its model "provides a more predictable and lasting choice for cooperation."
Russian commentators, even as they welcomed Trump’s return, have been more cautious about any strategic benefits Russia might accrue. "The liberal agenda of previous administrations was something we learned to counter effectively," wrote an RT columnist. "But this conservative agenda, focused on patriotism, traditional family structures, and individual success, could prove more difficult to combat." Moscow must now compete with a Trump administration that can’t be attacked for being “woke,” that addresses the world from a vantage point that Russia thought was theirs, through conservative rather than progressive values and through Big Tech and trade tariffs rather than aid.
But with Trump intent on posturing as the lone gunslinger in town, Russia might take comfort in its alliance with China. What of Europe, though, and Western consensus?
A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.
Why did we write this story?
Attending an AI conference in Paris, U.S. vice president JD Vance made the Trump administration's disdain for collaboration clear. He spoke but didn't wait to hear others speak. And the U.S., accompanied by the U.K., refused to sign a pledge signed by every other country at the summit. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth's visit to Europe was similarly contentious. Uncle Sam, he said, would not become "Uncle Sucker". American exceptionalism is in danger of becoming American alienation, thus diminishing America’s influence on the world.
It was 2014, and I was standing in the ruins of Donetsk airport, when a Russian-backed rebel commander launched into what seemed like an oddly academic lecture. Between bursts of artillery fire, he explained an American political science concept: the Overton Window - a theory that describes the range of policies and ideas a society considers acceptable at any given time. Politicians can't successfully propose anything outside this "window" of acceptability without risking their careers. "The West uses this window," he said, smoke from his cigarette blowing into my face, "to destroy our traditional values by telling us it's okay for me to marry a man and for you to marry a woman. But we won't let them."
The encounter was jarring not just for its surreal nature - a discussion of political theory amid artillery fire - but for what it revealed about Russian propaganda's evolving sophistication. When I researched the Overton Window after our conversation, I discovered that Russian state media had long been obsessed with the concept, transforming this Western analytical framework into something more potent: both an explanation for social change and supposed proof of Western cultural warfare. Russian commentators didn't just cite the theory - they wielded it as both explanation and evidence of Western attempts to undermine Russian society.
Over the next decade, I watched this once-academic term slide from Russian state TV screens and the trenches of eastern Ukraine into mainstream Western discourse - embraced by commentators on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum. What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.
Now we're watching this process play out in real time. For instance, Elon Musk's handpicked team running DOGE - the new Department of Government Efficiency - are inexperienced young men between the ages of 19 and 24 with unfettered access to federal systems. A decade ago, putting Silicon Valley twenty-somethings in charge of critical government functions would have sparked outrage. Today, it's celebrated as innovation.
What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.
The transformation extends far beyond Washington. When America's president proposes to "take over" Gaza and turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," when Musk tells Germans to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, they're deliberately expanding what's politically possible. From Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson, from African opinion writers praising Trump's aid cuts as "liberation" to conservative thinkers reimagining solutions for Gaza - each pushes the boundaries of acceptable discourse a little further.
The shift manifests across every domain of power. Inside federal agencies, tech executives now make decisions once reserved for career civil servants, normalizing private control of public functions. On the global stage, raw deal-making has replaced diplomatic principles, with decades-old alliances discarded in favor of transactional relationships. El Salvador's president offers his prisons to house American inmates. Ukraine, fighting for survival against Russia, signals its willingness to trade military support for mineral rights. Even humanitarian aid, long seen as a moral imperative, is being recast as a form of dependency that needs to be eliminated.
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BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has already adapted to this new reality. Their latest analysis simply divides nations into "winners and losers" based on their ability to navigate this new transactional diplomacy and stay on Trump’s good side. No moral judgments, no democratic values - just raw negotiating power.
The Overton Window - or "Окно Овертона блядь" as the Russian commander put it in 2014, mechanically adding the profanity at the end of each phrase like a full stop - offers a powerful framework for understanding how societies transform - not through sudden upheaval but through the gradual shifting of what people consider acceptable. Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries.
This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook - a calculated strategy of gradually expanding what society will tolerate, inch by inch, controversy by controversy. The goal is not just to push boundaries, but to exhaust resistance, to make the previously unimaginable seem not just possible, but inevitable.
The same mechanism operates in political discourse, where deliberate provocation becomes a strategic tool for reshaping collective perception. Donald Trump is the master of this approach.
Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries. This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook.
His political methodology isn't about achieving specific outcomes, but about continuously expanding the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Each provocative statement serves as a strategic instrument, deliberately designed to recalibrate social and political norms. When he suggests purchasing Greenland or proposing radical reimaginings of geopolitical landscapes like in Gaza, the actual feasibility becomes secondary to the act of introducing previously unthinkable concepts into mainstream conversation.
The genius of this approach lies in its relentlessness. By consistently proposing ideas that initially seem outrageous, extreme positions gradually become reference points for future discussions. Each controversial statement doesn't just distract from previous controversies; it fundamentally reshapes the political imagination. The goal is not immediate implementation but permanent transformation - moving the entire conceptual framework of what society considers possible.
Russian propagandists were early to grasp its significance, weaponizing the Overton Window theory itself as supposed evidence of Western cultural imperialism. That commander in Donetsk was just echoing what Russian state media had been claiming for years: that the West was deliberately expanding society's boundaries to impose its values on Russia.
A decade later, we're watching this process unfold in reverse. As transactional relationships replace values-based alliances, as oligarchic control displaces democratic institutions, as the unthinkable becomes routine - the transformation of our societies isn't happening by accident.
Through the years of Brexit, Trump's first win, Orbán's rise, and the growing global polarization, that conversation in the ruins of Donetsk has stayed with me. There was something chilling about a commander discussing political theory between artillery fire - not because it felt academic, but because he embodied how thoroughly manufactured narratives could drive real-world violence. He was willing to fight and die for a worldview constructed by Russian state media about "traditional values" under attack.
In the end, we are all unwitting participants in this grand narrative shift, our perceptions subtly recalibrated by the very forces that seek to reshape our understanding of what is possible, acceptable, and true. And whether we are shocked by those in power or find ourselves applauding them, we are simultaneously the observers and the changed.
A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.
Why Did We Write This Story?
As political actors systematically push the boundaries of acceptable discourse, they transform radical ideas into mainstream conversations. This isn't about genuine ideological debate, but about deliberately fragmenting social consensus. Each provocative statement serves to polarize rather than unite, effectively preventing meaningful collective action or understanding.
This week, as DeepSeek, a free AI-powered chatbot from China, embarrassed American tech giants and panicked investors, sending global markets tumbling, investor Marc Andreessen described its emergence as "AI's Sputnik moment." That is, the moment when self-belief and confidence tips over into hubris. It was not just stock prices that plummeted. The carefully constructed story of American technological supremacy also took a deep plunge.
But perhaps the real shock should be that Silicon Valley was shocked at all.
For years, Silicon Valley and its cheerleaders spread the narrative of inevitable American dominance of the artificial intelligence industry. From the "Why China Can't Innovate" cover story in the Harvard Business Review to the breathless reporting on billion-dollar investments in AI, U.S. media spent years building an image of insurmountable Western technological superiority. Even this week, when Wired reported on the "shock, awe, and questions" DeepSeek had sparked, the persistent subtext seemed to be that technological efficiency from unexpected quarters was somehow fundamentally illegitimate.
“In the West, our sense of exceptionalism is truly our greatest weakness,” says data analyst Christopher Wylie, author of MindF*ck, who famously blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica in 2017.
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That arrogance was on full display just last year when OpenAI's Sam Altman, speaking to an audience in India, declared: "It's totally hopeless to compete with us. You can try and it's your job to try but I believe it is hopeless." He was dismissing the possibility that teams outside Silicon Valley could build substantial AI systems with limited resources.
There are still questions over whether DeepSeek had access to more computing power than it is admitting. Scale AI chief executive Alexandr Wong said in a recent interview that the Chinese company had access to thousands more of the highest grade chips than people know about, despite U.S. export controls. What's clear, though, is that Altman didn't anticipate that a competitor would simply refuse to play by the rules he was trying to set and would instead reimagine the game itself.
By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight. While companies like OpenAI have poured hundreds of billions into massive data centers—with the Stargate project alone pledging an “initial investment” of $100 billion—DeepSeek demonstrated a fundamentally different path to innovation.
"For the first time in public, they've provided an efficient way to train reasoning models," explains Thomas Cao, professor of technology policy at Tufts University. "The technical detail is that they've come up with a way to do reinforcement learning without supervision. You don't have to hand-label a lot of data. That makes training much more efficient."
By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight.
For the American media, which has drunk the Silicon Valley Kool Aid, the DeepSeek story is a hard one to stomach. For a long time, Wylie argues, while countries in Asia made massive technological breakthroughs, the story commonly told to the American people focused on American tech exceptionalism.
An alternative approach, Wylie says, would be to see and “acknowledge that China is doing good things we can learn from without meaning that we have to adopt their system. Things can exist in parallel.” But instead, he adds, the mainstream media followed the politicians down the rabbit hole of focusing on the "China threat."
These geopolitical fears have helped Big Tech shield itself from genuine competition and regulatory scrutiny. The narrative of a Cold War style “AI race” with China has also fed the assumption that a major technological power can be bullied into submission through trade restrictions.
That assumption has also crumpled. The U.S. has spent the past two years attempting to curtail China's AI development through increasingly strict controls on advanced semiconductors. These restrictions, which began under Biden in 2022 and were significantly expanded last week under Trump, were designed to prevent Chinese companies from accessing the most advanced chips needed for AI development.
DeepSeek developed its model using older generation chips stockpiled before the restrictions took effect, and its breakthrough has been held up as an example of genuine, bootstrap innovation. But Professor Cao cautions against reading too much into how export controls have catalysed development and innovation at DeepSeek. "If there had been no export control requirements,” he said, “DeepSeek could have been able to do things even more efficiently and faster. We don't see the counterfactual."
DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to both Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it.
As millions of Americans downloaded DeepSeek, making it the most downloaded app in the U.S., OpenAI’s Steven Heidel peevishly claimed that using it would mean giving away data to the Chinese Communist Party. Lawmakers too have warned about national security risks and dozens of stories like this one echoed suggestions that the app could be sending U.S. data to China.
Security concers aside, what really sets DeepSeek apart from its Western counterparts is not just efficiency of the model, but also the fact that it is open source. Which, counter-intuitively, makes a Beijing-funded app more democratic than its Silicon Valley predecessors.
In the heated discourse surrounding technological innovation, "open source" has become more than just a technical term—it's a philosophy of transparency. Unlike proprietary models where code is a closely guarded corporate secret, open source invites global scrutiny and collective improvement.
DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it.
At its core, open source means that the source code of a software is made freely available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. When a technology is open source, users can download the entire code, run it on their own servers, and verify every line of its functionality. For consumers and technologists alike, open source means the ability to understand, modify, and improve technology without asking permission. It's a model that prioritizes collective advancement over corporate control. Already, for instance, the Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba has released a new version of its own large language model that it says is an upgrade on DeepSpeak.
Unlike ChatGPT or any other Western AI system, DeepSource can be run locally without giving away any data. "Despite the media fear-mongering, the irony is DeepSeek is now open source and could be implemented in a far more privacy-preserving way than anything offered by Meta or OpenAI," Wylie says. “If Sam Altman open sourced OpenAI, we wouldn’t look at it with the same skepticism, he would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize."
The open-source nature of DeepSeek is a huge part of the disruption it has caused. It challenges Silicon Valley's entire proprietary model and challenges our collective assumptions about both AI development and global competition. Not surprisingly, part of Silicon Valley’s response has been to complain that Chinese companies are using American companies’ intellectual property, even as their own large language models have been built by consuming vast amounts of information without permission.
This counterintuitive strategy of openness coming from an authoritarian state also gives China a massive soft power win that it will translate into geopolitical brownie points. Just as TikTok's algorithms outmaneuvered Instagram and YouTube by focusing on accessibility over profit, DeepSeek, which is currently topping iPhone downloads, represents another moment where what's better for users—open-source, efficient, privacy-preserving—challenges what's better for the boardroom.
We are yet to see how DeepSeek will reroute the development of AI, but just as the original Sputnik moment galvanized American scientific innovation during the Cold War, DeepSeek could shake Silicon Valley out of its complacency. For Professor Cao the immediate lesson is that the US must reinvest in fundamental research or risk falling behind. For Wylie, the takeaway of the DeepSeek fallout in the US is more meta: There is no need for a new Cold War, he argues. “There will only be an AI war if we decide to have one.”
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