Weekly Highlights with Olga Maslova: August 4-8

      Within just (!) one week, Trump initially seemingly sent submarines to the shores of Russia, followed by his negotiator Steve Witkoff. How can one not recall the sacrosanct phrase attributed to the famous Chicago gangster Al Capone: "You can get further with a kind word and a revolver than with just a kind word."

      Remembering that Israel’s “decapitating” strikes on Iran occurred against the background of similar negotiations mediated by the United States—namely Witkoff himself—it is now time to refresh in memory almost a postulate by Russian military blogger Alexey Zhivov, formulated a year ago: “With one hand, the Americans slap the adversary in the face, and with the other hand, they immediately offer a disposable tissue to wipe the blood.”

      “To win any game, you first need to understand what game is being played against you. We are being played in ‘The Balkan Game.’

      This game has a very important feature: by understanding the weaknesses of the opponent, the Americans and their allies rock the victim on the swings: behave well, and an agreement is near.

      They have pushed the Serbs on these swings to the borders of the 10th century.

      With one hand, the Americans slap the opponent in the face; with the other, they carefully offer a disposable tissue to wipe the blood.

      In our case, the situation is complicated by our nuclear arsenal. The U.S. also has its theories and escalation concepts for this scenario, but the dance of the male around the seduced female will be more refined.

      Believe me, they will rock us on the swings: war negotiations, until they reach Moscow or until NATO contingents are brought into Ukraine.

      This game can be played with two people, or the table can be overturned, chips scattered, and the dealer beaten in the face. One thing must not be done: continue swinging on American swings.”

      A separate tension is created by persistent media reports about the need for a Putin-Zelensky meeting. However, all previous experience of the special military operation indicates that there is only one real scenario for such a meeting—signing the Ukrainian coup leader’s surrender.

      The authors of the Telegram channel Win/Win are openly asking—who needs this meeting of the leaders of the two warring parties, and for what purpose?

      “Does Israel and Iran even meet? Or India and Pakistan? Or Cambodia and Thailand finally?”—emphasizes Win/Win, noting the strangeness of this very demand.

      And it seems, for the first time in the American public arena—though not in mainstream media, but in the conservative magazine The American Conservative (TAC)—there is an opinion that Trump’s persistent attempts to “achieve peace” in Ukraine are futile.

      “For some reason, the US president has the impression that the war in Ukraine is like a border conflict in Cambodia, meaning it’s enough to just make a call—and they will stop,” writes Sumantra Maitre from TAC. “The Russians are actually winning on the battlefield, Europeans do not want to intervene, and the Ukrainians seek to disrupt any peace initiative,” he states the bitter truth for the West.

      Wishing to bring this “impossibility” to life, and introducing secondary sanctions “for supporting Russia,” the American leader is driving the situation toward a coalition of BRICS countries against the US.

      “This is what will happen. The president will get bogged down in trying to solve an unsolvable problem, and the Republicans will lose the midterm elections,” predicts the author of TAC. In the full version, the trade war with the Global South could lead to complete autarky and the isolation of America, he believes.

      In Russia, the most high-profile crime of the week was the mass poisoning in the south of the country with shmurdyak disguised as “grandmother’s chacha.” The final number of deaths remains unclear; at least 10 fatalities have been reported. According to Mash, the preliminary cause of death was the same methyl alcohol, which can’t be distinguished from ethyl alcohol by smell or taste.

      “It was added to bottles as part of fusel oils produced during homemade wine and chacha (local moonshine) production on a scale intended for sale,” reports the Telegram channel. A seventy-year-old grandmother who was selling “chacha” has already confessed that she didn’t make it herself, but bought it from a supplier (according to Mash, from Abkhazia).

      “There will be no morals,”—usually, in such cases, LOMs (local opinion makers) write cryptically.

      This week also saw another high-profile story on the “friendship-country” theme. A waiter at the Moscow Ukrainian cuisine restaurant “Taras Bulba” was fired after bringing salo (pork fat) as a compliment to two Muslim women.

      The women dressed quite secularly and came to the eatery themselves, where the menu understandably includes pork. However, upon seeing the rolled salo with bread in front of them, they caused a scandal, demanding an apology from the “offending” employee.

      The restaurant’s management sided with the customers. Sergey, the name of the waiter, was told he could not finish his shift or take new tables, according to the chief editor of IA Regnum, Marina Ahmedova, who shared this story in her Telegram channel. The young man turned out to be the son of an Orthodox priest and preferred to resign rather than endure humiliation.

      Regnum was told about the incident by Sergey’s mother. She fully supported her son’s decision. After the story was published, the manager called him, but only to settle the account.

      The owner of the Ukrainian cuisine restaurant does not plan to introduce halal options into the menu for now. Instead, businessman Yevgeny Batanov ordered his staff to carefully scrutinize visitors’ faces to figure out whether their salo might offend them.

      “So, they will still look closely, and the evaluation will start from the faces. That is, everything will change—not in the menu, but in service—and that’s much more serious,”—says Marina Ahmedova. “I don’t know why this way the restaurant expects to make more money.”

      “In principle, we already have quite a few religious distortions in service, simply because the business does not want to lose money. Such clients should be shown the door without any right to come back,”—concluded the journalist.

      Finally, a sketch from the life of liars from the European Commission, published in his Telegram channel yesterday by journalist Igor Shatrov.

      In the footage, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, during a speech to Finns in June, shouts at a man booing her that he should be grateful to live in democratic Finland, not in Moscow, where he would be immediately detained for such.

      Meanwhile, the camera of an eyewitness’s phone, aimed at Ursula’s microphone, slid behind her and managed to capture how two Finnish police officers roughly detain the protester. The European Commission has never had legs so short as now.