The hall is filling up ahead of Putin’s Annual end of year press conference and Call-in show. Times to start at 12 Moscow time. Putin praises Hungary’s Viktor Orban – “He is defending his people’s own interests - but there are not others like him. Why not? Because they are dependent on big brother.”

I’m at Luzhniki stadium I. Moscow for a patriotic concert and celebration of Russia’s Defenders of the Fatherland day. Organizers say 200K here. Putin to speak later. Performers have sung one patriotic song after another. Here is a “remix” of the Soviet song “Katyusha.”

Putin continues to repeat that Russia tried to find a peaceful solution but “a completely different scenario was being prepared behind our backs.” And, he said, “the whole world is pockmarked with US military bases.” “I repeat, they are the ones who unleashed this war, not us.” "We are not fighting against the Ukrainian people," Mr. Putin said. "They are the hostages of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, who are essentially occupying this country in the political, military and economic sense."

Hello from Moscow, which has changed since Sep. 21, when a mobilization campaign sent men fleeing across borders or to the army. Barbershop chairs are empty, pool halls full of women, the women left behind try to keep things going—until they can leave too.
nytimes.com/2022/10/19/wor… “I feel like we are a country of women now,” Stanislava, a 33 yo photographer, said at a recent birthday party that was attended mostly by women. “I was searching for male friends to help me move some furniture, and I realized almost all of them had left.”
She plans to leave too.

Across Ukraine, I have been meeting people w close relatives in Russia who refuse to believe the extent of the violence their state is perpetrating.
Cities suffer missile attacks, mothers fear for sons, but fathers, sisters, brothers respond w denial. 🧵
nytimes.com/2022/03/06/wor… It was 4 days into the war before Misha Katsiurin called his dad in Nizhny Novgorod.
“I’m trying to evacuate my children and my wife, everything is extremely scary,” Katsiurin told him.
“He started to yell at me and told me, ‘Look, everything is going like this. They are Nazis."

I travelled the westward road that millions of Ukrainians have used to flee bombing, fighting and increasingly dire situations in Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson...We slept in a kindergarten with families from Cherkasy + Balta. This is their story:

https://twitter.com/VALERIEinNYT/status/1499498953720705032

The families staggered in, bleary-eyed around 1 am, exhausted after a long journey from home, about 300 miles away. As they settled in for a few hours of sleep on a set of cots sized for 4-year-olds, air raid sirens blared from the administrative building next door.

As rancour builds in the EU over delays to its coronavirus vaccination rollout, Serbia has sped ahead to achieve continental Europe’s highest per capita inoculation rate.

Largely because of China's Sinopharm vaccine.
ft.com/content/7508a3… “The world has hit an iceberg, like the Titanic, and the rich and the richest only save themselves and their loved ones,” Serbian Pres @avucic said last week.

“We’re drowning together with the Titanic. It may not be their intention, but it is not particularly important to them.”

My story about how Hungary has changed in the decade since Orban returned to power is in this weekend's @FTMag. I spoke to Hungarians who've been shaped & affected by the past 10 years about Orban's strategy to reshape society and how they feel about it. 1/ft.com/content/414f20… 2006-2009, 🇭🇺was struggling under painful austerity measures. About 3/4 of the population said they’d been better off under communism. Less than half felt the transition to capitalism had been the right path. Far right militias were marching, and there were some intense riots. 2/