There was a fake story circulating the Intertoobz that in some kind of Turkish broadcast, Dmitry Medvedev said:

“Trump should not think that the video archive of his past immoralities is only in the hands of Mossad.”

The fake, as good fakes do, plays on something real about the moment, even while confirming what people want to be true.

After, earlier in the summer, giving Putin the time he wanted to finish whatever he wants in Ukraine, Trump has reversed course, sort of. He has been trying to stop Putin from doing what Putin was going to do anyway, wagging but not imposing sanctions. Five days ago, Trump declared he was imposing a ten day deadline on Putin or else he will stop the car (just like Dad used to threaten on long roadtrips).

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Russia must agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine by Aug. 8 or risk sanctions, accelerating a deadline that was previously up in the air.

Trump in July set a 50-day deadline for the agreement with Ukraine, threatening tariffs if a deal was not made. On Monday, during his meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, he said he was shortening this deadline to “10 or 12 days.”

Aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, on his way back to the United States, Trump said the clock was ticking and it was “10 days from today.”

“And then we’re going to put on tariffs,” Trump added, “and I don’t know if it’s going to affect Russia, because he wants to, obviously, probably keep the war going.”

The president has flipped on his views on the war in Ukraine throughout his second administration, recently expressing he is “disappointed” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He said Tuesday he has not yet heard from Russia about the new timeline.

In response, Real Medvedev trolled Trump on Xitter, likening him to Joe Biden.

Then Trump — still targeting Medvedev — claimed he was sending out his nukes.

Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Trump got the reaction his tweets alway get from Pavlov’s press corps, a slew of headlines treating this as true and meaningful.

Russian experts, however, mostly noted Russia yawning.

Could this be the first time in history a social media spat triggers nuclear escalation?

President Donald Trump, offended by posts by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, says he’s ordered two nuclear submarines to move closer to Russia.

So, how will Moscow respond? Are we on a path to a nuclear standoff between America and Russia? An internet-age version of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis?

I doubt it, judging by initial reaction in Russia.

Russian news outlets have been rather dismissive of Trump’s announcement.

Speaking to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, a military commentator concluded that Trump was “throwing a temper tantrum”.

A retired lieutenant-general told Kommersant that the US president’s talk of submarines was “meaningless blather. It’s how he gets his kicks”.

Then Putin — not Medvedev — made it known that Trump has misunderstood the scope of Putin’s ambition.

“All disappointments arise from inflated expectations,” Putin said, in an apparent reference to Trump’s “disappointment” with the Russian leader for not bringing an end to the war.

[snip]

Speaking on Friday at the Valaam Monastery on an island in north-western Russia, Putin said he expected negotiations with Ukraine to continue, adding that he viewed “negotiations positively”.

But in a veiled reference to growing pressure from Ukraine and its Western allies to agree to a long-term ceasefire, he said: “As for any disappointments on the part of anyone, all disappointments arise from inflated expectations.

Both Putin and Medvedev are making Trump look weak — or rather exposing that he is weak. My guess is they have good reason to know Trump’s is scared of exercising any real leverage over Putin, and for reasons that go well beyond any similarity to “Sleepy Joe.”

This fake Medvedev interview plays into that, suggesting that Russia has leverage because they have the Epstein files.

The claim is not remotely outlandish. Craig Unger has been focusing on the Russian aspects of Epstein’s past, including Svetlana Pozhidaeva, the woman trained as Russia trains its spies, who opened a modeling agency and then got a bunch of funding from Epstein to fund other things, as well as Masha Drokova, the pro-Russian activist who first served as Epstein’s publicist and then infiltrated Silicon Valley. More important, perhaps (since this is a fake Medvedev speech), is John Dougan, who was a West Palm Beach cop before he became — and still is — a Russian disinformation operative, one who overtly crafted anti-Harris disinformation in last year’s election.

His story begins in 2005 when Palm Beach authorities began investigating Epstein’s sex crimes. That meant the Epstein case had entered the court system, which in turn meant that his computers and videos became evidence, and new people—detectives, police, lawyers, and the like— suddenly had access to his secrets.

Enter John Mark Dougan, who had served as a deputy in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (PBSO) from 2002 to late 2008. With his shaved head and the sturdy build of a former Marine, Dougan is the sort of macho antihero of highly questionable reliability one encounters in the comic Florida crime fiction of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. His patchy job history has taken him laterally from police work to horse transportation to database design to piloting. In interviews with me in 2020, he presented himself as a hapless and Quixotic underdog who has been taking on the powers that be in Palm Beach County since he resigned in 2009.

But now he is an operative for Russian intelligence.

[snip]

In October, just before the election, Catherine Belton reported in The Washington Post that Dougan was directly working with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, that he was being mentored by Alexander Dugin, a far-right ideologue sometimes known as “Putin’s brain,” and that his posts smearing Tim Walz and Kamala Harris had reached at least 64 million people.

I know separately that, as recently as June, Dougan was trying to resuscitate the ghost of Seth Rich.

As Unger explains, Dougan has told both him and Julie Brown that the real investigator behind the Epstein case left files with Dougan for safekeeping.

So, Dougan said, Recarey came over to his office in Palm Beach with a cartful of boxes. “One of the boxes was a bunch of ­ DVDs— the blank kind that you record your own media on,” Dougan recalled. “They were labeled by date and spanned from 1994 to 2005 or so.”

Recarey didn’t elaborate about the contents of the boxes, but he said they were related to the Epstein case. In addition, Dougan told me, Recarey explained that his investigation was being sabotaged by both Epstein and his powerful allies, and he wanted to make sure he had copies in case they tried to make the originals disappear.

Dougan also told me that he later found out that Recarey’s disk contained 478 sex tapes of Epstein’s friends having sex with young girls, many of whom were underage.

But both Unger and Brown found the claim lacked merit.

The thing is, even if Dougan’s claims to have had Epstein tapes back in 2020 were false, it’s certainly possible that Russia has obtained copies now. That’s because Pam Bondi is an incompetent dipshit, and had 1,000 people do a rushed review of the Epstein materials on a SharePoint server.

Among other tasks, the lawyers were instructed to flag any mentions of Mr. Trump and other celebrities, including former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, in the documents, according to one of the former officials familiar with the process. The references were recorded in a Microsoft SharePoint online collaborative file.

At the very least, those files would likely have been easy for any of several Elon DOGE boys to steal. And it’s possible the SharePoint server itself would have been vulnerable to the recently identified zero day that made certain kinds of SharePoint servers easily accessible.

Now, it’s certainly possible that Russia believes Trump won’t push too hard because they have precisely the same incriminating information that Todd Blanche is busy covering up.

But as has been the case for years, it was never the pee tapes that would most worry Trump. It’s the proof that Trump owes his presidency — now, both of them — to Russia. Remember how, days after Trump won, Nicolay Patrushev warned Trump that, this time, he better deliver on the promises , on precisely this issue, Ukraine.

In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.

And while it is absolutely the case that Trump has been releasing Russia Russia Russia documents in the last several weeks in a desperate — and only partially successful — bid to get his mob refocused away from his sex trafficking scandal, I have been wondering all that time whether Trump wasn’t also trying to lay the groundwork for capitulation to Putin by preempting any claim that he’s a Russian agent by reminding his mob that their foundational belief is that Trump was wronged by the Russian investigation that showed that his Coffee Boy, National Security Advisor, Campaign Manager, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker were all adjudged to have lied to cover up his Russian ties.

Mind you, even that effort is having only limited success. Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe are so fucking incompetent they have instead disclosed proof that they’ve been carrying water for Russian spies for at least the last five years, and in Kash’s case, almost as soon as some Russian spooks thought it’d be fun to, “put more oil into the fire.”

Still, Trump is rousing the muscle memory of his base to view each and every capitulation Trump makes to Russia as proof of Democratic corruption. And he’s been doing so at the moment when he would have to prove his strength in front of the man who has played him so well for a decade.

Update: Fixed spelling of Unger’s last name.