At the “We Shall Not Be Moved” event in New York on September 21, Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a programmatic speech that attacked the United States’ staggering trillion-dollar war budget. He described the war industry draining the life out of society as a global and not just American problem. This is why, he said, progressives should oppose Donald Trump’s war in Iran, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the United Arab Emirates’ proxy war in Sudan. This is also why “we must rally and work with grassroots activists in Russia to put an end to Putin’s disastrous war in Ukraine,” Sanders asserted.

Had he been addressing an audience of the said Russian activists, his comment would have come across as uninformed and tone-deaf. Hardly any of them are physically in Russia to begin with — and hopes of returning any time soon are dim.

The war has allowed Vladimir Putin to wipe out the opposition and civil society at large, forcing the vast majority of people involved to leave the country for fear of spending the rest of their lives in torture prisons. Sanders might be envisaging a grassroots antiwar movement like the one he participated in during America’s war in Vietnam. But he didn’t face anything remotely similar to the eight-year prison sentence — handed down the day after his speech — upon Mikhail Antonovich from Tyumen in Western Siberia, who simply left some paid likes (generating tiny automatic donations) under Telegram posts by pro-Ukrainian commentators.