ROMAN SHEREMETA

Oct 12, 2025

Blind in the russian eye.

In October 2025, Angela Merkel is still wrong about russia.

Today, I took the time to listen to the full interview that Hungarian YouTuber Márton Gyulás conducted with Angela Merkel last week.

I wanted to understand the full context and get a clear picture of her statements, which offended Poles, the Baltic peoples, and Ukrainians alike.

Her choice of words reinforces my impression that she still fails to recognize how completely she misjudged russia’s imperialist expansion plans during the negotiations surrounding the Minsk agreements. These are mistakes that are now obvious to everyone, yet she refuses to admit them — not only rejecting responsibility but, even more troublingly, shifting the blame onto the Poles and the Balts. The peoples of Central and Eastern Europe have never trusted russia, for good reason: they have been deceived by it far too often throughout their history.

This is an extremely disturbing statement from a German who once held the highest political office in the country.

All three former Chancellors who are still alive — Schröder, Merkel, and Scholz — share the same naïve, even ignorant, blindness toward russia’s war of conquest against Ukraine and Europe. It takes a remarkable degree of stubbornness, irresponsibility, and historical amnesia to hold such a view in 2025.

Germany cannot afford to adopt this stance — not in light of its own past, and not in view of the threat that looms over us in the near future.

For my part, I am deeply grateful to Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine for their consistently clear and honest stance against russia.

Author: Malte Patrik Rosenberger

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Germany, under Merkel, trained the russian army before it invaded Ukraine — Spiegel

By Merkel’s decision, Germany helped teach russia modern combat tactics before 2014. The defense giant Rheinmetall developed simulators, software, and equipment — expecting a €1 billion contract with Moscow.

With the full backing of Merkel’s government, plans were made to build a network of training centers across russia, modeled after Germany’s Altmark base — where modern warfare simulations were practiced.

At the NATO summit in Bucharest (April 2008), Ukraine and Georgia were denied entry into the Membership Action Plan — partly because Merkel opposed it. That decision left both nations unprotected when russia struck.

Merkel was one of the main reasons Putin invaded Crimea. It was precisely her policy of “direct talks with russia” that emboldened him in the first place.

But instead of taking responsibility, Merkel recently started to blame Poland and the Baltic states for triggering Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, claiming they refused to support her initiative for direct talks with russia in 2021.

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Another horrifying story of how the russians torture people.

Donetsk doctor Ihor Kirianenko was 57 when the russians seized him on the road. They tied him to a metal table, stretching his arms and legs like on a cross. Then they attached wires to his fingers and toes, shocking his genitals and ears.

They broke his ribs and fingers, cut his face to the bone, and pulled out his teeth with pliers. “I screamed, and they laughed: ‘Don’t scream so loud — there’s a kindergarten above us. You’ll scare the children,’” Hromadske reports.

After the torture, they brought him home. Ihor stood barefoot, his face shattered, wrapped in a plastic bag. The russians searched for wiretaps, smashed his antique shop, overturned furniture, and stole his equipment. Then they arrested his wife.

After that, they took him back to the torture chamber. On New Year’s Eve, the guards got drunk. “They knocked out all my teeth. Pulled my canines out with pliers. I heard a crunch and blacked out. When I came to, they were kicking me, breaking ribs and fingers. They were drunk and didn’t feel their own strength,” Ihor recalls.

They brought him back to the cell, but the guards refused to take him — he was covered in blood. They feared he would die. A doctor was called. He looked at Ihor and said: “He won’t die overnight, don’t worry.” They forced Ihor to sign a statement saying he had fallen down the stairs. Blood dripped onto the paper as he signed.

The cell reeked of mold; rats scurried between holes in the walls. The food was ground fish with bones and scales. Ihor’s fingers healed crookedly, without bandages. In court, he testified about the torture, but the judge ruled: “No evidence of torture established.” He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

In the Makiivka colony, he refused seven times to take a russian passport. During roll calls, he always responded in Ukrainian: “Ihor Volodymyrovych.” For that, they beat him.

On August 15, 2025, he finally returned to Ukraine. “People came out to greet us. An old man in underwear with crooked legs waved a flag. A grandmother began to cross herself. People smiled and cried at the same time.”

Ihor spent seven years in captivity. He is now 64. He says he just wants to live.

Source: translated and adopted from Tymofiy Mylovanov

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Occupation is not peace. Occupation is silent terror.

This is the story of a small, seemingly random Ukrainian village that turned out to hold a horror story.

Staryi Bykiv, in the Chernihiv region, endured more than a month of russian occupation and experienced everything.

Executions:
On the evening of February 27 — the very first day of occupation — russian troops entered Staryi Bykiv and executed six civilian men they had seized on the street. Their bodies showed clear signs of violent death. The occupiers even forbade a mother from burying her son. Only nine days later were the men finally laid to rest in the local cemetery.

Torture:
In the basement of a boiler house in neighboring Novyi Bykiv, russians set up a torture chamber where they held at least 40 people captive. Four civilians were reportedly executed — among them Mykhailo (64), Volodymyr (38), and Oleksandr (52), all identified after the occupation ended. One survivor recalled that Volodymyr’s inability to speak russian deeply irritated the occupiers — possibly one of the reasons they decided to shoot him. “They beat prisoners over the head with glass bottles, fired weapons next to their ears, hit them with rifle butts. One man had a gun shoved into his mouth while they told him they were about to execute him,” recounted 21-year-old Maksym Didyk, one of the captives who survived.

Mass destruction:
After the fighting, around 100 houses were destroyed, and nearly all local infrastructure lay in ruins. By March 29–30, russian forces were finally forced to retreat under pressure from the Ukrainian army.

How many such villages and places are there across Ukraine? Far too many.

Author: Yana Rudenko, survivor from Bucha