Matt Cleary Sports Writer

Letter to Trump. The renowned Soviet and Russian director and writer Eduard Topol has penned an open letter to US President Donald Trump regarding Putin and his war. Here is the full text of the letter. Unfortunately, Trump will most likely not read it—by all appearances, he is accustomed to watching cartoons and does not absorb texts longer than two sentences: "Dear Mr. President! Dear Donald! As the author of fifty books and a dozen films about Russia, I believe I have the right to share this with you before your meeting with Putin. You should know that he cannot end the war against Ukraine—even if you were to hand over your Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Trump Tower in New York, and a dozen golf clubs to him. And this is not because he does not want to take a break from the war, but because he cannot. For he knows Russian history not from Medinsky’s textbook, but as it truly was: The return of Russian troops from Europe to Russia following the victory over Napoleon led to the Decembrist revolt against the Tsar in 1825. Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War led to the Revolution of 1905. The flight of a million Russian soldiers from the Russian-German front during World War I led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the February Revolution of 1917. The peace treaty Lenin signed with Germany enabled the Bolsheviks to execute the entire Tsarist family. The return of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in February 1989 marked the beginning of the USSR’s collapse. Given these facts, Putin cannot end the war against Ukraine or send his troops home." Only the option of keeping almost his entire army in Europe as an occupation force in May 1945 saved Stalin from a coup in the postwar period. That is precisely why Putin dreams of occupying Ukraine, as well as the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and so on: to keep his army away from Moscow. He remembers how the 525,000 soldiers returning from Afghanistan in 1989 turned into "Afghan bandits" who terrorized the entire population of the USSR. And he knows what will happen when one and a half million soldiers return from the Ukrainian front—men who have learned to kill, loot, and rape professionally. The war against Ukraine has enabled Putin to get rid of two million of his most active opponents by forcing them to flee Russia; as for the remaining young Russians, he either sent them to the front or recruited them from penal colonies. Today, any war—whether against Ukraine, the Baltic states, NATO, or whomever else—is the best means of compelling Russia to submit to Putin and his junta. Unfortunately, none of your advisors will explain this to you before your meeting with Putin, but you can have my arguments verified by Jack Matlock and Michael McFaul. I do not want Putin—that bandit, thief, and murderer of millions—to continue with his brazen deception, his lies, and his misleading of my president. Of course, I am neither a military expert nor a political scientist, but I am a writer with a good memory. I remember how Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II drove the price of oil down to 9 dollars a barrel and supplied the Afghans with "Stinger" missiles, thereby halting Moscow’s conquest of Afghanistan and bringing about the collapse of the USSR. If you want to stop Putin and the imperial ambitions—shared by at least half of the Russian population—you must do the same: drive the price of oil down to at least 25 dollars a barrel and supply Ukraine with weapons that will help it defeat the aggressor. As for your desire for American-Russian business partnerships: in practice—and not merely in words—this might not happen for another hundred years, or perhaps never at all. If you would like to know why, give me a call; I would be happy to explain it to you. Sincerely, Eduard Topol t.me/MirovichMedia/15392