Afghan Woman Drumming, Afghan Market Outside Khorog, Tajikistan.

Afghanistan lies just a short walk across a bridge over the Panj River from the Afghan Market on the Tajik side of the border. Afghan market vendors walk their goods across the village from their nearby home villages on the other side of the river.

Source:  The Humans Being Project

Pamiri Tajiks, South Xinjiang, China

White people claim Central Asians as white, but the moment a group of Central Asians commit a terroristic attack, suddenly all Central Asians are terroristic churkas. So, what is it? Are we only white when it’s convenient, to make your nonexistent culture seem spicy and appropriate our food, clothing, and traditions? We’re so white, that they physically assimilate our language and stop us from speaking our native tongue because that’s the language of the barbaric savages. Ahh, got it.

Photographer NDA Li Xing Zhao

"Through the unknown Tashkurgan unveils an unworldly world I discovered on the Pamir Plateau. At China's west gate in the eastern part of the Pamirs on the "roof of the world" is the Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in Xinjiang. The Tajiks reside in relative isolation in the snow-capped Pamir Mountain range of West China near the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan. There are about 41,000 Tajiks living in Tashkurgan. These peoples live in harmony and with intimacy born out of mutual trust and love. From 2009 until now, I stayed for several month photographing the tajiks nomads, using a large-format digital camera Hasselblad and Profoto lighting. I was able to arrange an old pickup truck and a Tajiks driver. We travelled this sparsely populated landscape searching for the Tajiks nomads, staying with the families we encountered along the way."

https://www.photoawards.com/winner/zoom.php?eid=8-46418-12

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Please, when you see something written in Cyrillic, don't assume right away that it's russian. Russian is not the only language that uses Cyrillic. There are also Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Mongolian.

It's a sensitive topic especially for us Ukrainians because russian language is a weapon. It's a colonial language, it's presented like one and only true slavic language, it erases and replaces other languages. Belarusian is literally on the verge of extinction because of russian. Ukrainian has been banned 134 times throughout history, it is still called a "village language", a dialect of russian. Russian colonialism is literally the reason why there are so many russian speaking people in Ukraine (I was one of them btw). Ukrainian is banned on russian occupied territories and people are getting in trouble or even killed for using it there, Ukrainian POWs in russian captivity are getting brutally beaten for speaking Ukrainian.

Like okay, I can get why there's this confusion, so here's a clue to understand that the language you're looking at definitely is not russian — the letter і. If you see ї (like i but with two dots) it's 100% Ukrainian. If you see j it's Serbian. Russian alphabet also doesn't have such letters as Ђ, Љ, Њ, Ў, Џ (dont confuse with Ц ). Yes, it's not always gonna be easy to detect that the language in front of you is not russian, but when you have trouble with it just ask or run it through any translation app and it'll probably tell you the language.

Hope this will be helpful.

The last Jews of Bukhara, Uzbekistan, 2019, photographed by Bruno Zanzottera

Located along the Silk Roads and the edges of several former empires, the city of Bukhara has been home to a big and unique Jewish community for over two millennia - one of the most ancient ethnic groups in all of Central Asia. Historically they spoke Bukhori a Judeo-Tajik dialect. In the 1970s, Jews began to leave the Soviet Union, including Uzbekistan, and the synagogues as well as other Jewish institutions were closed by the Communist government. In Bukhara, the community has declined significantly: if in the past it consisted of 46,000 people, now there are just over 100 Jews. Those remaining want to make sure that their history, language and traditions do not get lost.

The source that you yourself provided for the Uyghur post says "mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity" AND there have been multiple allegations of rape/SA from the inmates themselves. Even if it's not a genocide, it's weird that you're bootlicking for the Chinese government. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/14/the-faux-anti-imperialism-of-denying-anti-uighur?traffic_source=KeepReading

Which source? The foreign policy one? Of course they would say that they're a bourgeois news source. Your article, written by journalists from two western DOTBs and two strongly bourgeois institutions must have a real well rounded view when it comes to foreign countries. Just because they throw in some lines about "disavowing the american imperialist machine" while consistently citing western backed NGOS like human rights watch, who takes sponsorships from military contractors, doesn't mean they aren't engaging in blatant propaganda manufacturing. And then they go on to try and discredit sources and positions which go against them. Is this not taking the american side by default? The article tries to take a third position on the issue but what does it materially accomplish? The separatists are backed by the united states and serves usa interests in the region. The people in Xinjiang and vocational schools are backed by the PRC. You will fall into either camp one way or another.

99% of all the claims about XInjiang come from or are in some way involved with the usa state department, the NED, ETIM, or the world uyghur congress, all institutions or NGOs deeply involved with washington. The unites states and its running dogs have accused and lied about countries across the world in order to maintain their geopolitical positions. They will lie about babies being left in incubators. About WMDs. About rogue attacks. And they will lie about genocide. Take a look at the west's track history on genocide. Every single time they have done nothing to ever actually stop one and not only do they not stop genocide, they are the ones actively participating or supplies them. Look at the blatant lying about Palestine and tell me with a straight face what they actually care about genocide and Muslims. The real question is not why im "bootlicking for the Chinese government" but why you are doing the propaganda legwork for the imperialists.

As I have already said, multiple times, many international organizations, especially Islamic and Muslim ones have come to Xinjiang, investigated, and found no wrongdoing. Here's a look inside the vocational centers. Locals and attendees disavow the claims of forced labor. And there are serious issues with mass detainment claims. And people do actually graduate from the vocational schools. Contrary to popular belief, just like the province of Yunnan, Xinjiang is a province of many minorities; 19 out of the 52 nationally recognized groups. The largest are the Uyghurs, but mongols, Tajiks, and many more also live there. This is what Xinjiang is actually like. The PRC's primary de-radicalizing policy is the anti-poverty campaign. The past few years have seen tremendous material and money investment in China's poorest provinces, most notably, Xinjiang. Numerous programs like from animal husbandry, e-commerce, healthcare, clean water initiatives, childhood education, and more. The reason you don't see more new claims coming out from Xinjiang these days is that these policies have worked to reduce radicalization and poverty! The vocational schools are slowly emptying!

The american propagandists and you lot continue to come with more and more allegations and it is always the job of the communists to find evidence of the non-existence of a genocide? To prove a negative? ridiculous. You are letting the united states and its running dogs manufacture a false narrative on every country under the sun. Stop letting them take advantage of your humanity. They won't lift a finger to help the Palestinians, why would they be so fervently supportive of the Uyghurs? Where's the mass fleeing of people from Xinjiang into neighboring regions? What do you want me to show, live footage of the millions of kilometers of border? Where's the distinct targeting of intellectuals, journalists, professionals, and leaders like you see in Palestine? In occupied territories like Palestine and Kashmir, you will see consistent news about attacks and resistance movements. There are none in Xinjiang; since 2017 and the start of the de-radicalization and anti-poverty campaign. Is China so competent that they have eliminated all the resistance groups and weapons and etc. but simultaneously incompetent enough to not dismantle ETIM and other groups? You have examples of SEVERAL genocides live streamed in front of your fucking face and you still want to believe the lie about a fake one being generated entirely by foreign forces.

there was Chinese interest in the Out Of Asia theory, in both the Republic, Chiang Republic and People’s Republic periods before the Out Of Africa theory became commonly accepted. Was the 1954 Yeti expedition done just from the Nepalese-Indian side or were the American agents and “anthropologists” given access on the Sino-Tibetan side of the Himalayan border?

During the early part of this century, it was absolutely believed for a long time that the deserts of Western China were the most likely place of human origins, as seen in this migration map from 1944, made from the best available knowledge of the time:

Remember, the oldest fossil remains at this point were in China, where Homo erectus was discovered (originally known by his initial place of discovery in Chungkotien Cave, nicknamed "Peking Man"). The discovery of Australopithecus and Homo habilis in Olduvai Gorge and South Africa, which place human origins in Africa, were not until the 50s and 60s, so it seemed entirely reasonable that Homo sapiens evolved in Western China.

The idea that China's desert regions were the origin of modern humans and culture is seen a lot in pop culture from 1900-1950, mainly because there were tremendous explorations in the region, especially Aurel Stein's expedition of 1908, who ventured into the Taklamakan Desert to find the Dunhuang Caves and Khara-Khoto, a city destroyed completely by Genghis Khan and vanished in the desert.

If you've ever heard of Roy Chapman Andrews and his famous expeditions in the 1920s, it's worth noting that he ventured into the Gobi Desert looking for human remains....not dinosaurs, and the discovery of dinosaur eggs was an unexpected surprise.

For that reason, there was a short lived Silk Road Mania that seemed to be a smaller scale predecessor to the pop culture dominating Egyptomania of the 1920s. It's bizarre to read adventure and fantasy fiction of the 1910s-1920s that features mentions of Silk Road peoples like the Kyrgyz, Sogdians, Tajik, Uigurians, and Tuvans. The best example I can think of would be the Khlit the Kossack stories of Harold Lamb (who also wrote a biography of Tamerlane), which together with Tarzan and Tros of Samothrace, formed the core inspiration for Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian.

The most interesting example of this would be A. Merritt's Dwellers in the Mirage, which featured a lost city in Xinjiang that was the home of the Nordic race, who worshipped their original religion, the kraken-like squid devil god Khalkru. It was widely believed in this era that Nordics emerged from Central Asia originally, and while it's easy to write this off as turn of the century racialist claptrap pseudohistory (along with Hyperborea legends), in this case, it is actually true: a branch of the Indo-European family lived in West China, and 5,000 year old redheaded mummies have been found in the region. As usual, A. Merritt was right on the money with his archeology, more so than other 1920s authors. After all, his "Moon Pool" was set around the just discovered ruins of Nan Madol, the Venice of Micronesia.

Jack Williamson's still chilling Darker Than You Think in 1948 was also set in the Silk Road/Central Asian region, as the place the race of shapeshifters emerged from, Homo magi, who await the coming of their evil messiah, the Night King, who will give them power over the human race.

H. Rider Haggard set "Ayesha: the Return of She" (1905) in Xinjiang, among a lost Greek colony in Central Asia (no doubt based on Alexandria on the Indus, a Greek colony in modern Pakistan that was the furthest bastion of Greek Culture). This was also two years after the Younghusband Thibetan Expedition of 1903, where the British invaded Tibet. At the time, the Qing Dynasty was completely declining and lost control of the frontier regions, and the power vacuum was filled by religious authority by default (this is something you also saw in Xinjiang, where for example, the leader of the city was the Imam of Kashgar).

This is one of the many British invasions they have attempted to cram down the memory hole, but if you ever see a Himalayan art piece that was "obtained in 1903-1904" ....well, you know where it came from.

Incidentally, there's one really funny recent conspiracy theory about paleontology, fossils, and China that I find incredibly interesting: the idea that dinosaurs having feathers is a lie and a sinister plot spread by the Communist Chinese (who else?) to make American youth into sissy fancylads, like Jessie "the Body" Ventura. How? By lying to us and making up that the manly and vigorous Tyrannosaurus, a beast with off the charts heterosexuality and a model for boys everywhere, might have been feathered like a debutante's dress. What next - lipstick on a Great White Shark? The long term goal is to make Americans effeminate C. Nelson Reilly types unable to defend against invasion. This is a theory that is getting steam among the kind of people who used to read Soldier of Fortune magazine, and among abusive stepfathers the world over.

...okay, are you done laughing? Yeah, this is obvious crackpottery and transparent sexual pathology, on the level of the John Birch Society in the 60s saying the Beatles were a Communist mind control plot. Mostly because animals just look how they look, and if it turned out that the ferocious Tyrannosaurus had feathers and looked like a fancylad Jessie Ventura to you, well, that's your problem and mental baggage, really.

I was left scratching my head over this one. But there is (kind of) something to this, and that is that a huge chunk of recent dinosaur discoveries have been in China. I don't think it has anything to do with a Communist plot to turn American boys into fancylads, but more to do with a major push in internal public investment in sciences in that country, and an explosion of Chinese dinosaur discoveries. If you want to see a great undervisited dinosaur museum, go to the Zigong Dinosaur Museum in Sichuan.

Pop quiz: what living scientist has named more dinosaur discoveries? It's not Bakker or Horner. The greatest living paleontologist, Xu Xing, which is why a lot of recently found dinosaurs are named things like Shangtungasaurus.

Three Tajik teenage girls chat with each other in Tashkurgan. Pamir Mountains, Xinjiang Province, People's Republic of China.

Earl & Nazima Kowall

Thank you to the Red Army and the 34 million Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Belarussians, Estonians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Latvians, Lithuanians, Moldovans, Russians, Tajiks, Turkmen, Ukrainians, and Uzbeks who saved the world from fascism. Fuck reactionary nationalism and fuck what became of the Soviet people's sacrifice. We won't let the future they fought for die out.

Why i see Jason Todd as Central Asian:

Both Batman and him thought Lady Shiva could be his mother, suggesting he has asian features because like come on, Batman the greatest detective in the world. These are possible all over Eurasia (e.g. the Sami people have similar features) but is more common in Asia (for obvious reasons)

He has red hair which he dyes. While natural red hair can be found all across Asia (usually through mutation and in very small percentages), the Asian ethnic groups with the most chance of having red hair are: Uyghurs and Tajiks. These two ethnicities are a mix of Central Asian ethnicities (with Uyghurs being a mix of Central Asian, Turkic and Mongolian ethncities and the Tajiks being Afghani)

Shoroon Bumbagar, tomb of a Turkic (Gokturk) nobleman, 650-700 CE

"Like Chinese historians, Muslim writers in general depict the ‘Turks’ as possessing East Asian physiognomy. For instance, Sharaf al-Zamān Tāhir Marvazī describes them as being ‘short, with small eyes, nostrils, and mouths’ (1942: 53–4, 156). Similarly, Tabarī (d. 923) depicts the ‘Turks’ as being ‘full-faced with small eyes’ (1987: 21). In his Qābūs-nāma, the eleventh-century Ziyarid ruler Kai Kā'ūs also describes the ‘Turks’ as possessing ‘a large head (sar-i buzurg), a broad face (rūy-i pahn), narrow eyes (chashmhā-i tang), and a flat nose (bīnī-i pakhch), and unpleasing lips and teeth (lab va dandān na nīkū)’ (Kai Kā'ūs ibn Iskandar 1951a: 103; 1951b: 64). The Arab historian and geographer al-Mas'ūdī (896–956) writes that the Oghuz Turks residing in Yengi-kent, a town near the mouth of the Syr Darya, ‘are distinguished from other Turks by their valour, their slanted eyes, and the smallness of their stature’ (wa hum ashadd al-Turk ba’san wa aqsaruhum wa asgharuhum a‘yunan wa fī al-Turk man huwa aqsar min hā’ulā’) (al-Mas'ūdī 1962–: Vol. 1, 212). However, Muslim writers later differentiated the Oghuz Turks from other Turks in terms of physiognomy. Rashīd al-Dīn writes that ‘because of the climate their features gradually changed into those of Tajiks. Since they were not Tajiks, the Tajik peoples called them turkmān, i.e. Turk-like (Turk-mānand)’ (Rashīd al-Dīn Fażlallāh Hamadānī 1988: Vol. 1, 35–6; Rashiduddin Fazlullah 1998–99:  Vol. 1, 31). Hāfiz Tanīsh Mīr Muhammad Bukhārī (d. c. 1549) also relates that after the Oghuz came to Transoxiana and Iran, their ‘Turkic face did not re-main as it was’ (1983: fol. 17a (text), Vol. 1, 61 (trans.)). Abū al-Ghāzī Bahadur Khan similarly writes that ‘their chin started to become narrow, their eyes started to become large, their faces started to become small, and their noses started to become big’ after five or six generations (Abu-l-Gazi 1958: 42 (text), 57 (trans.); Ebülgazî Bahadir Han 1975: 57–8). As a matter of fact, the mixed nature of the Ottomans, belonging to the Oghuz Turkic group, is noted by the Ottoman historian Mustafā Ālī (1541–1600). In his Künhü'l-ahbār, he remarks that the Ottoman elites of the sixteenth century were of mostly of non-Turkic origin: ‘Most of the inhabitants of  Rum are of confused ethnic origin. Among its notables there are few whose lineage does not go back to a convert to Islam …’ (Ekser-i sükkān-i vilāyet-i Rūm meclis-i muhtelit ul-mefhūm olub ā‘yānında az kimsene bulunur ki nesebi bir müslüm-i cedīde muntehī olmaya) (Fleischer 1986: 254; Mustafā Ālī, Künhü'l-ahbār 1860–68: Vol. 1, 16)."

-Joo-Yup Lee & Shuntu Kuang, A Comparative Analysis of Chinese Historical Sources and Y-DNA Studies with Regard to the Early and Medieval Turkic Peoples

A woman wearing Tajik (塔吉克族) attire. The Tajik people are one of 56 official ethnic groups in China.

Please reblog for a bigger sample size!

If you have any fun fact about Tajikistan, please tell us and I'll reblog it!

Be respectful in your comments. You can criticize a government without offending its people.

Putin's paranoia (updated)

Terror, delusion, and self-destruction

Timothy Snyder

Mar 29, 2024

            A week ago, four men associated with Islamic State attacked civilians in a concert venue near Moscow known as Crocus City Hall.  Islamic State (IS-K) claimed responsibility for the horrifying mass murder, and released videos recorded the terrorists' perspective (don't watch them).  Russia has since apprehended four men, who seem to be the perpetrators. 

            Russia has been engaged with Islamic State for some time.  Russia has been bombing Syria since 2015.  Russia and Islamic State compete throughout Africa for resources.  All four of the accused are Tajiks, a people subjected to discrimination inside Russia.

            These are the facts, subject to further verification and interpretation -- and inherently unpredictable, as facts always are.  What was entirely predictable (and predicted) was that, regardless of the facts, Putin and his propagandists would place the blame for the attack on Ukraine and the United States.  On the internet (and in the Russian and Serbian press) this version is present.

            It is not hard to see why.  If Ukraine and the West are guilty, then Russian security services do not have to explain why they failed to stop Islamic terrorists from killing so many Russians, because Islamic terror vanishes from the story.  And if Ukrainians are to blame, then this would seem to justify the war that Russia is prosecuting against Ukraine.

Aftermath of Russian ballistic missile strike on Kyiv, 25 March

            Russian officials make a highly circumstantial argument: the terrorists' car was stopped near Bryansk, which is in western Russia, and so vaguely near Ukraine, which means that the four Tajiks in a Renault were intending to cross the Ukrainian border, which means that they had Ukrainian backers, which means that it was a Ukrainian operation, which means that the Americans were behind it.  The reasoning here leaves something to be desired.  And the series of associations rests on no factual basis.

            The suspects were in a car near the west Russian city of Bryansk.  This much seems to be true.  The first version of the story was that they were headed for Belarus, which would make more sense, given the route.  Anyone with local knowledge would make a still more telling point. Because of the special relationship between Russia and Belarus, the Russian-Belarusian border is porous.  Once inside Belarus, it is relatively easy to pass into the European Union, because the Belarusian regime enables human smuggling into Lithuania and Poland.  Four Tajiks in a Renault would have been, in this sense, welcome in Belarus.  They would have had a decent chance to pay a smuggler to get them into the Schengen zone and thereby escape.

            The idea that the suspects were headed for Ukraine seems to be entirely invented and is extremely implausible.  As of this writing, none of the suspects seem to have said anything about Ukraine, despite the fact that they have been tortured, presumably with such a confession in mind.  And the notion of a Ukrainian escape route makes no sense.  The Russian-Ukrainian border is a place where Russian security forces are concentrated.  It is a site of combat.  It is the last place terrorists would want to go.  Four Tajiks in a Renault would have needed some very, very high-level Russian protection to get anywhere near the Russian-Ukrainian border. 

            Russian propagandists have told the population that it was not Islamic State but Ukraine who is to blame.  ISIS is just a "fake."  The propagandists need not give reasons, and don't.  In the press, one finds the wildest chains of association.  Britain is to blame for the attack (goes one claim) because one of the suspects was once in Turkey and the Turkish president knows the head of British foreign intelligence.

            Only Putin is permitted to set the theoretical tone for the argument for Ukrainian involvement, and yesterday (25 March) he gave that a shot.  His version went like this: Ukrainians are Nazis; Nazis do bad things; a bad thing happened; therefore Ukraine is to blame.  One does not have to be a logician to find the holes.  They are disturbingly large.   While it is true that Nazis do bad things, it does not follow that all bad things are done by Nazis. 

            And the factual premise is empirically false. One should not have to say this at this point of the war, but the Ukrainians are not the Nazis in this conflict.  The Ukrainian far right has never done well in elections, and is far less prominent than in any European state you care to name, let alone the United States.  Ukrainians have an active civil society, a vibrant press, multiple political parties, and freedom of speech.  Ukraine's president won a free and fair election.  He is also, incidentally, Jewish.  The Ukrainian minister of defense, for that matter, is a Muslim.  The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces was born in Russia, where his parents still reside.  This kind of political and social pluralism is unusual by any standards.

A Kyivan looks out the window after the 25 March Russian missile strike.

            In Putin's version of the Russian language, of course, the word "Nazi" has no meaning beyond "what I wish for you to consider as the enemy."  If we are going to pursue the question of who the fascists in this war are, however, it is worth knowing that Russia has none of what Ukraine has.  Putin has never won anything like a plausible election to any office.  His regime has crushed civil society, political parties (except his own), and the press.  Putin runs a single-party state where the only principle of the single party is his personal status as its Leader.  He rules at home by terror and prosecutes a genocidal war abroad, in Ukraine, with the help of Russian soldiers who ever more often openly identify as fascists.  Putin himself espouses what is unmistakably a fascist ideology.

            Calling the Ukrainians the Nazis while being the Nazis is not itself a problem within this system, since being the fascists involves living within a big lie.  The challenge to such a system is that reality sometimes intervenes in a way that is hard to control -- as when Islamic State carries out an act of terror.  This brings in a whole set of political and social realities that are usually suppressed in Russian propaganda: the bombing of Syrian civilians since 2015; the bloody resource wars in Africa; the oppression of Tajiks.  

            In Russia's system, it is not simply political convenience that adds the big lie of Ukrainian jihadism to the big lie of Ukrainian Nazism.  It is the deeper need to make reality, or at least psychological reality, conform to the story told by the state.  In the psychological project, more killing is necessary.  Russians are engaged in the project of killing Ukrainians.  Russians in Ukraine torture Ukrainians for being loyal to Ukraine, deport Ukrainian children for assimilation to Russia, and persecute and execute local elites who they regard as threats.  Russians fire some combination of shells, glide bombs, drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles at Ukraine every single day, for no reason that communicates with reality. Yesterday, for example, multiple Ukrainian cities were struck by fifty-seven Russian missiles and drones.

            It is the killing itself that makes the lies true, in a psychological sense.  Russian soldiers who have killed Ukrainians believe they are fighting "Nazis," whatever that means.  And now Russian soldiers write "for Crocus" on he shells they fire at Ukrainians.  Yesterday (25 March) Russia fired two ballistic missiles at central Kyiv, even as Russian authorities announced that the terrorist attack means that they are permitted to kill high officials of the Ukrainian state.

Rescue workers prepare to help victims after a Russian ballistic missile hit the Kyiv Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design. Photo by Kostiantyn Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images)

            Among Ukrainians, all of this generates a weary shrug.  It has been a kind of Western parlor game these last two years to ascertain the "rational" motivations behind Russia's war of atrocity in Ukraine.  Such a debate is attractive in the West, because if one can identify a Russian rationality one can then defend a policy of doing less, or doing nothing, to help Ukraine win the war.  If Russia is rational, then surely some compromise can be found.  This is a Russian leadership, however, that interprets the fact of American warnings about the attack as a reason to blame the United States for it: as the puppetmaster of Ukraine, which is itself the puppetmaster of Islamic State. 

            For Ukrainians, being identified as Islamists as well as Nazis is just one more detail in what is for them a war of self-defense and survival.  And of course, as Ukrainians will remind you, for different audiences the Kremlin also characterizes Ukraine as the center of gay civilization, as an element of the Jewish international conspiracy, and as a Satanist cult.  So (the memes are out there) Ukraine is now a gay Jewish Nazi Islamist Satanist regime.

            The Kremlin goal of identifying Ukrainians as terrorists might matter in the war.  It can be used as an excuse to continue, to mobilize, to commit new kinds of war crimes.  This is one way this will certainly go.  But it is not certain that this development will be stable. 

            It might matter to Russians that Putin's big lie about Ukraine is growing whiskers.  Once forced into gay-Nazi-Jewish-Islamist-Satanist territory, Russians just might be reminded of the late Stalinist purges directed against supposed Zionist-Trotskyite-fascist-imperialist (etc.) conspiracies.  Or, more simply, people inside the regime, backed into a corner by Putin's escalation of unreality, might just realize that the Ukrainian scenario makes no logistical sense, and lacks any evidentiary basis. 

            This can undermine Putin's authority, and the sense that his story is a useful one.  Judging by yesterday's appearance, this is no longer the nimble post-truth Putin who is capable of changing out one lie for another as necessary, with a wink to the insider along the way.  This now seems to be a Putin who actually believes what he says -- or, in the best case, lacks the creativity to react to events in the world.  His speech yesterday was grim for everyone, including to Russians who would like to think that their leader is ahead of events.

            Putin's Ukrainian theory could make Russia more vulnerable to terrorism.  The Crocus City Hall attack was more likely because Putin has chosen to use his security apparatus against Ukraine and the opposition.  It is typical of his priorities that, on the very day of the Crocus City Hall attack, the regime defined international LGBT organizations as "terrorist."  When Putin publicly ridiculed the United States on 19 March for warning of an Islamic State attack, he was signaling to the security apparatus that this was not a real danger.  In conflating Islamic State with Ukraine now, he is doing the same thing at a higher level.  That cannot be helpful in the practical work of preventing another attack.

            Nor can, surely, Putin’s idea that Islamic State takes orders from the Jewish president of a European state, and that its actors are nothing more than pawns of American masters.  I am not going to claim any expert knowledge of how Islamic State works or its leaders think, but it seems like it would not be best practice to ignore it and insult it at the same time.  Publicizing the photos of the tortured suspects, as Russia has done, almost seems like goading Islamic State. 

            And although the official Kremlin position is that Kyiv and Washington and London are to blame, Russians have reacted (to the attack, and presumably also to the photos) by treating migrants and minorities aggressively.  Because Putin denies that Islamic State is the actor, he cannot tell Russians that Islamic State is one thing and Muslims in Tajiks in general are another.  He has created the impression, instead, that Muslims and Tadjiks are the enemy because they work for the West.