The Iranian defense minister’s trip to Qingdao - his first foreign visit since the ceasefire with Israel - was meant to signal solidarity within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a block that includes Russia, India, and Pakistan. But the SCO, despite its ambitions, could only muster a joint statement of “serious concern” over Middle East tensions when Iran was being bombed by Israel - a statement India refused to sign. This exposed the stark limits of alternative alliances and the growing difficulty of presenting a united front against the West. In Qingdao, Andrei Belousov, the Russian defense minister, warned of “worsening geopolitical tensions” and “signs of further deterioration,” a statement that’s hard to argue with.  

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Trump relished his role as global peacemaker, claiming credit for an uneasy Israel-Iran truce - a truce that Russia welcomed while being careful to credit Qatar for its diplomatic efforts. Russia itself reportedly played a supporting role alongside Oman and Egypt. But the real diplomatic heavy lifting was done by others - and Russia’s own leverage  was exposed as limited. 

Once the region’s indispensable power broker, Moscow found itself on the sidelines. Its influence with Tehran diminished, and its air defense systems in Iran—meant to deter Israeli and later American strikes—were exposed as ineffective. With Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria collapsed, the Kremlin is acutely aware it cannot afford to lose another major ally in the region. As long as the Iranian government stands, Russia can still claim to have a role to play, but its ability to project power in the Middle East is now more symbolic than real. The 12-day war put Russia in an awkward position. Iran, a key supplier of drones for Russia’s war in Ukraine, was unimpressed by Moscow’s lack of support during the crisis. Even after signing a 20-year pact in January, Russia offered little more than “grave concern” when the bombs started falling. Similarly to the SCO, BRICS, supposedly the alternative to Western alliances, could only issue a joint statement, revealing just how thin multipolarity is in practice.

Enter the new narrative spin

For years, Vladimir Putin has argued that the West’s “rules-based order” is little more than a tool for maintaining Western dominance and justifying double standards. His vision of multipolarity is not just anti-American rhetoric—it’s a deliberate strategy to appeal to countries disillusioned by Western interventions, broken promises, and the arrogance of those who claimed victory in the Cold War. Russia has worked to turn Western failures—from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to the global financial crisis—into recruitment tools for its own vision of “civilizational diversity.” Multipolarity, in the Kremlin’s telling, is about giving every culture, every nation, a seat at the table, while quietly reserving the right to redraw the map and rewrite the rules when it suits Moscow’s interests.

For a time, this approach was paying off. Russia’s anti-colonial and multipolar rhetoric resonated well beyond its borders, particularly in the Global South and among those frustrated by Western hypocrisy. 

But across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire, from Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s multipolar message is seen not as liberation but as yet another chapter in a centuries-long cycle of conquest, repression and forced assimilation - a reality that continues to define the struggle for self-determination across Russia’s former empire.  Here, Russia’s message of “sameness” has long served as a colonial tool, erasing languages, cultures, and identities in the name of imperial unity. 

The recent conflict in the Middle East has forced Moscow to adapt its “multipolarity” messaging yet again. As its limitations as a regional power became impossible to ignore, Russian state media and officials began to reframe the conversation—no longer just championing multipolarity, but openly embracing the language of empire. In this new narrative, ‘empire’ is recast not as a relic of oppression, but as a stabilizing force uniquely capable of imposing order on an unruly world. The pivot is as much about masking diminished leverage as it is about projecting confidence: if Moscow can no longer dictate outcomes, it can still claim the mantle of indispensable power by rewriting the very terms of global legitimacy.

As we peered into the abyss of World War III, Russian state media pivoted: suddenly, ‘empire’—long a slur—was rebranded as a stabilizing force in a chaotic world.

This rhetorical shift has been swift and striking. Where once the Kremlin denounced imperialism as a Western vice, Russian commentators now argue that empires are not only inevitable but necessary for stability. “Empires could return to world politics not only as dark shadows of the past. Empire may soon become a buzzword for discussing the direction in which the world’s political organization is heading,” wrote one Russian analyst. The message is clear: in an age of chaos and fractured alliances, only a strong imperial center—preferably Moscow—can guarantee order. But beneath the surface, this embrace of empire reveals as much uncertainty as ambition, exposing deep anxieties about Russia’s place in a world it can no longer control as it once did.

Inside Russia, this new imperial rhetoric is both a rallying cry and a reflection of unease. In recent weeks, influential analysts have argued that Iran’s restraint—its so-called “peacefulness”—only invited aggression, a warning that resonates with those who fear Russia could be next. Enter Alexander Dugin, the far-right philosopher often described as “Putin’s brain,” whose apocalyptic worldview has shaped much of the Kremlin’s confrontational posture. Dugin warns that if the U.S. and Israel can strike Tehran with impunity, nothing would stop them from finding a pretext to strike Moscow. This siege mentality, echoed by senior officials, is now being used to justify a strategy of escalation and deterrence at any cost.

Dugin’s views were echoed by Konstantin Kosachev, chair of the Russian parliamentary foreign affairs committee: “If you don’t want to be bombed by the West, arm yourself. Build deterrence. Go all the way—even to the point of developing weapons of mass destruction.”

But for all the talk of “victory,” by all sides post the 12-day war,  the outcomes remain ambiguous. Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are undimmed. While Israel and Trump’s team says Iran is further from a bomb than ever before – still, the facts are murky and the region is no closer to peace. As one Russian analyst remarked, the normalization of “phoney war” logic means that everyone is arming up, alliances are transactional, and the rules are made up as we go along.

If the only lesson of the 12-day war is that everyone must arm themselves to the teeth, we’re not just reliving the Cold War—we’re entering a new era of empire-building, where deterrence is everything and the lines between friend and foe are as blurred as ever.

In a world where old alliances crumble and new narratives emerge, the true battle, it seems, is not just over territory or military might, but over the stories that define power itself. Russia’s pivot to an imperial narrative reveals both its ambitions and its anxieties, highlighting a global order in flux where legitimacy is contested and the rules are rewritten in real time. Understanding this evolving empire game is essential to grasping the future of international relations and the fragile balance that holds the world together.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Research and additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

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For nearly a decade, our team has documented how anti-LGBT legislation and rhetoric has migrated from Russia to Central Asia to Turkey to Georgia, Brazil, and now the United States. 

Trump's speech was instantly recognizable to those who have followed this trail. He took us on a tour of its classic landmarks: presenting anti-transgender policies as "protecting women," framing gender-affirming care as "mutilation," and positioning this politicized language as a return to common sense rather than an attack on civil rights. 

But to understand how we got here, we need to look back more than a decade to when the Kremlin first deployed anti-LGBT rhetoric not as a moral stance, but as a tactical weapon.

A Russian export

In 2012, facing mounting protests over corruption, Vladimir Putin's government desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. As our contributing editor Peter Pomerantsev later wrote: "Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere."

The opportunity came when self-declared feminist provocateurs Pussy Riot performed their "punk prayer" in Moscow's central cathedral. Putin seized the moment. Suddenly Russian state TV shifted their attention from corruption scandals to tabloid rants about witches, God, Satan, and anal sex. Europe, previously a symbol of the rule of law and transparency, was rebranded as "Gayropa."

This wasn't about deeply held religious beliefs. As Pomerantsev noted, "Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay." Russia's social culture is, Pomerantsev wrote, "hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn't." 

But if Putin had no personal problem with homosexuality, he saw the potential of playing to prejudice. Russia's 2013 "gay propaganda" law banning the "promotion of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors became the template. Soon, nearly identical laws appeared in former Soviet countries—first in Lithuania, then Latvia, then across Central Asia. The language was often copied verbatim, with the same vague prohibitions against "propaganda" that left room to criminalize everything from pride parades to sex education to simply mentioning that LGBT people exist.

The creation of a global axis

What began as a deliberate distraction from Putin’s failure to rein in corruption evolved into a transnational movement. Russian "family values" defenders organized international conferences, bringing together American evangelicals, European far-right politicians, and anti-LGBT activists from Africa.

Those meetings bore fruit. The most powerful connections happened through the World Congress of Families, where links between Russian Orthodox activists and American evangelical groups were forged. These meetings created pathways for rhetoric and policies to travel, often through multiple countries in other continents, before reaching the mainstream in Western democracies.

"Homosexual propaganda is the disease of a modern anti-Christian society."

When Trump spoke about banning "gender ideology," he echoed language first deployed by the Kremlin. When he announced that he had "signed an executive order to ban men from playing in women's sports," he was repeating almost word-for-word the justifications used for Russia's bans on transgender athletes.

From Russia to Brazil to America

By 2020, this Christian-inflected, homophobic, family values playbook had made it to Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro deployed its tactics to appeal to a wide swathe of religious conservatives. In May 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro attempted to divert attention from his mishandling of the crisis by posting on Facebook that the World Health Organization was encouraging masturbation in children as young as four.

The post was bizarre, quickly deleted, and made little sense—but it wasn't the product of some Bolsonaro fever dream. Anyone who had watched Russian state television was already familiar with the crazy conspiracy theory about WHO encouraging childhood masturbation.

It first appeared on Russian state TV channels around 2014, when Putin's traditional values crusade had really picked up momentum. The whole theory was based on a WHO document on sex education that mentioned early childhood masturbation as a normal psychosexual phenomenon that teachers should be prepared to discuss—an obscure, academic point distorted by Russian media into evidence that European children were being forced to masturbate from the age of four.

Bizarre as it was, the story had legs, repeated so often that it migrated from Russian television to the Brazilian president’s social media to Christian conservative talking points in the U.S. and Britain. 

Watching the Edges

What happens on the periphery—both geographical and narrative—eventually moves to the center. Eight years ago, we were documenting anti-LGBT legislation in Kyrgyzstan that seemed fringe, distant, and surely far removed from established democracies. Today, similar laws are being implemented in countries like Hungary, Georgia, and even the United States.

"People [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, you will be killed."

Georgia, my own country, is a fascinating case study in how such rhetoric takes root. Once the most promising democracy among the former Soviet republics, Georgia has regressed. With the Kremlin-friendly Georgian Dream in power, and despite determined and vocal opposition, the ruling party pushed through a "foreign agents" law modeled directly on its Russian counterpart and “family values” legislation that targets LGBT rights, including banning Pride parades and public displays of the rainbow flag.

The pattern is unmistakable and what makes it particularly dangerous is how these policies are laundered through increasingly respectable channels. Phrases that began on Russian state TV like "gender ideology" and protecting children from "propaganda" have become mainstream Republican talking points.

Russia's Blueprint: Unleashing Violence

The consequences of this exported blueprint are devastating. It gives license to religious conservatives everywhere to act on  their prejudices and then point to them as universal. In Indonesia, for instance, which has been mulling changes to its broadcast law that single out investigative journalism and LGBT content, two young men in conservative Aceh were publicly flogged under Shariah law for gay sex. Vigilantes burst into a flat to find the men allegedly mid-embrace.   

In Russia, the gay propaganda law unleashed unprecedented violence against LGBTQ people. As Lyosha Gorshkov, a gay Russian professor who fled to the United States, told us in 2016:  "people [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, but you will be killed. Government keeps targeting LGBT population because it's easiest target.”

Before fleeing Russia, Gorshkov was targeted by the Federal Security Service (the modern version of the KGB). An agent at his university called him into his office and demanded he identify communists and homosexuals. "He would follow me every single week, calling me, looking for me at the university," Gorshkov explained. When a bogus article circulated claiming Gorshkov was "promoting sodomy," he knew he had to leave.

In St. Petersburg, which became the epicenter for Russian homophobia, LGBT people faced increasing danger. Nearly nine years ago, journalist Dmitry Tsilikin was murdered in what police believed was a homophobic attack. Local politicians like Vitaly Milonov, who masterminded the city's gay propaganda law that later went national, routinely used dehumanizing language that inspired vigilante violence.

"We have to face moral dangers,” Milonov told our reporter Amy Mackinnon. Homosexual propaganda, he said, is “the disease of a modern anti-Christian society," Milonov told our reporter Amy MacKinnon.

Coming Full Circle

President Trump's speech this week represents a concerning milestone in this journey of authoritarian rhetoric. When he promised to bring "common sense" back by recognizing only two genders, he was echoing Putin from a decade earlier, though no one acknowledged the source.

Particularly troubling is how within the United States such rhetoric is becoming law. Iowa's legislature recently passed a bill to strip the state's civil rights code of protections based on gender identity—the first state to explicitly revoke such protections. Georgia's state legislature, meanwhile, passed a bill to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors and people held in state prisons. Georgia had already passed a bill banning transgender athletes from school sports.

These are the legislative fruits from rhetorical roots planted over a decade ago. I'll never forget the May afternoon in 2016 when I sat in Tbilisi's main concert hall, watching Josiah Trenham, an Eastern Orthodox priest from California, take the stage at the World Congress of Families conference. The hall was packed with hundreds of guests, many of them Americans who had traveled to the Georgian capital to discuss ways to "save the world from homosexuality." What still haunts me is how warmly the audience applauded Trenham’s words.

"I have witnessed my nation disgrace itself before God and men," he thundered. "My counsel to beloved Georgians is this: stand firm in your faith against the LGBT revolution. Do not give in or your cities will become like San Francisco, where there are 80,000 more dogs in the city than there are children. Tell the LGBT tolerance tyrants, this lavender mafia, these homofascists, these rainbow radicals, that they are not welcome to promote their anti-religious anti-civilizational propaganda in your nations."

Later, when I confronted Trenham, he insisted he hadn't encouraged violence, claiming instead that the people "who are for provocation and violence are the LGBTs themselves." Outside, hundreds of Georgian Orthodox activists were gathered with religious icons and signs that quoted Biblical scripture. They were free to express their hate. But when my phone rang, it was an LGBT activist calling in panic because ten of his friends had been arrested for writing "Love is equal" on a sidewalk only a few blocks away.

Cynical Kremlin propaganda coupled with genuine religious fervor had created this monster, and more monsters were being bred everywhere. The success of the Russian playbook lies in its incremental nature. First, you frame the issue as one about protecting children. Then you expand to education. Then to adults. At each step, those opposing the restrictions can be painted as ideologues who don't care about protecting the vulnerable.

Setting Trump's speech alongside those made by others, from political leaders to religious preachers, reveals that the U.S. is just the latest domino to fall. Solid family values as a contrast to the licentiousness of the decadent West  was a campaign that began in the Kremlin's halls of power as a distraction. It has now become a cornerstone of authoritarian governance worldwide.

In Tbilisi, at the World Congress of Families conference, a Polish anti-abortion activist explained: "You have to understand that in the west politicians are thinking in four-year terms... but in Russia they think more like emperors." The Kremlin’s long game has paid off.

For years, we've documented how authoritarianism travels across borders, now that story is becoming America’s story.

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Trump had said that by his deadline Israel should demand the return of all 76 of the remaining Israeli hostages (including the remains of the 35 or so believed to be dead), or "let hell break out". Hamas had earlier threatened to call off the scheduled release of another three hostages unless the Israelis lifted the curbs it said they had imposed on the flow of aid into the battered enclave, especially shelter items. 

Egyptian and Qatari mediators ironed out the problem, as they had done with previous hitches. But, in the meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu's far right government took up the baton Trump had handed to it. In preparation to unleash hell, if "our hostages" were not freed by the deadline, Israel massed troops in and around Gaza. It was left unclear whether Israel was demanding the release of all 76 hostages, or just the 17 due to be freed over the current 42-day first phase of the Gaza agreement, or just the three originally meant to be freed on that Saturday in line with the accord.

In the event, the sixth hostage handover of Phase 1 went ahead smoothly, with three Israeli men, looking as fit and healthy as could be expected given their ordeal, handed over to the International Red Cross and thence back to Israel in exchange for the release of 369 Palestinian prisoners, 36 of them serving long-term sentences and the rest Gazans picked up at random with no charges. 

Netanyahu hates the Palestinian Authority at least as much as he does Hamas, because the PA wants a two-state solution. "There will be no Hamas and no PA in Gaza after the war," he said.

As before, and against the wishes of the Red Cross, Hamas turned the handover into a spectacle aimed at conveying the message that it is still strong and in control, with hundreds of heavily-armed, smartly-uniformed fighters, some toting advanced Israeli combat weapons probably seized in the October 7 2023 attack, cordoning off a large square and displaying the hostages on a stage festooned with Hamas banners and slogans. 

With the closing stages of the first phase set to continue (14 more days, 14 more hostages) did this mean that some daylight was opening up between Netanyahu and Trump, who had railed against the release of hostages in "dribs and drabs"? Not really. Trump is clearly in tune with the more vocally extreme elements in the Israeli cabinet, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, but Netanyahu could not simply junk the elaborately-negotiated and signed agreement, especially as the highly-emotive issue of hostage lives was at stake. At the security cabinet meeting where the exchange was approved, he is reported to have told his ministers not to give interviews or mention the Trump plan, to avoid appearing to act counter to the volatile US president.

So the focus shifted to the second phase of the accord, which was supposed to see the release of all Israeli hostages and many more Palestinian prisoners, and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. It would mean the end of the war, with preparations for a third phase devoted to reconstruction. 

Negotiations on Phase 2 were meant to start on February 4, but two weeks went by before movement started in that direction, and the process was clearly going to be fraught. The issue of who would control and govern Gaza had been left open. As the TV screens glaringly showed, Hamas was still very much there and in charge. All attempts had failed to encourage an alternative local leadership, or to posit a takeover by the discredited Palestinian Authority from the West Bank. 

Netanyahu hates the PA at least as much as he does Hamas, because the PA wants a two-state solution. "There will be no Hamas and no PA in Gaza after the war," he said on February 17. "I am committed to U.S. President Trump's plan for the realization of a different Gaza."

"Any plan that leaves Hamas in charge of Gaza will be unacceptable to Israel," said Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio. After talks with Netanyahu, he added : "Hamas cannot continue as a military or government force. It must be eliminated or eradicated."

"The next phase of the hostage deal remains under great threat," concluded Amir Tibon in Haaretz. "It is clear that Netanyahu wants the deal to collapse and the war to resume, and that he is doing everything in his power to make that happen." The collapse of the deal with Hamas would be the only way to enable Trump's "plan" for the US to "take over, own and cherish" a Gaza flattened beyond redemption and devoid of its Palestinian inhabitants, who would be rehoused happily and permanently in "beautiful communities" elsewhere while their Gaza was reborn as an incredible Riviera for others. 

It's a real estate hustler's fantasy that collides head-on with every sanctity and imperative in Arab history and politics. Egypt and Jordan immediately rejected Trump's suggestion that they take in Palestinians from Gaza. Trump was presumably assuming that the several billion dollars both receive in US military and economic aid would leverage obedience. But there are some issues that are beyond pressure and bribery. It would be an existential threat for King Abdullah's Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in particular. He knows that if the Gazans are displaced, the much closer and more numerous inhabitants of the West Bank, where things are already hotting up dangerously, would not be far behind. 

No Arab leader can go down in history as collaborating in a second Nakba, the first being the displacement of Palestinians by the creation of Israel in 1948. The Saudis, who Trump is counting on to join Israel in an expanded Abraham Accord despite Gaza, know this as well as any, and have long made it unequivocally clear that there is no way normalisation will happen without a clear pathway to a Palestinian state. They were further irked by Netanyahu's facetious suggestion that if they were so keen on that, why not establish it in the Kingdom? 

Riyadh set about rallying the Arabs behind a plan to counter the Trump scheme, with Egypt and others working on the details of a formula for reconstructing the Strip without displacing its inhabitants. The key issue is whether Hamas could be induced to stand aside, and who would take political and security control. Whatever the arrangement, Hamas would still be the power behind the camouflage. Would Israel accept such a cosmetic ploy, or, with Trump's backing, go all out to complete its stated war aim of destroying Hamas? 

That would complete the conversion of Gaza into a totally unlivable hell on earth, to which it is already pretty close. If that were to happen and the doors were opened, the bulk of the population might have no option but to stream out for the sake of simple survival. "Give them a choice. Not forcible eviction. Not ethnic cleansing," as Netanyahu said.

If the Gaza issue might produce some Arab pushback against Trump's wilder notions, Israel's ambition to deal with Iran is less contentious, though further conflict is unlikely to be welcomed by the Gulf countries. The Saudis, UAE and others roundly condemned Israel's large-scale attack on Iran on October 26 last year – their relations with Tehran have improved considerably since Trump's first term. 

But Iran is certainly in the crosshairs. After meeting with Secretary of State Rubio on February 16, Netanyahu said that with President Trump's support, "I have no doubt we can and will finish the job." While Rubio said that Israel and the U.S. "stand shoulder to shoulder" against Iran, it remains to be seen whether Trump, who supposedly prefers making deals to making war, would prefer to squeeze Iran into quasi-submission rather than encouraging or engaging in conflict. 

The effect of Israel's devastating blows to Iran's regional allies is being felt strongly in Lebanon, where the new government formed by PM Nawaf Salam onFebruary 8 clearly reflected a new balance of power, with Hezbollah losing its ability to veto decisions it doesn't like. 

The day after the new Lebanese cabinet held its first meeting, Israeli warplanes broke the sound barrier over Beirut, rattling windows and nerves throughout the city. It was a clear message aimed at Beirut airport, which the Israelis (through the US) threatened to bombard if it allowed flights from Tehran to land, on the accusation that such planes were bringing in cash and possibly weapons for Hezbollah. The airport cancelled the incoming flights, prompting protest demonstrations by Hezbollah followers around the airport in which vehicles of UN peacekeepers were attacked and burned. The Salam government then went further, and cancelled all flights to and from Iran until further notice.

Under the November 27 ceasefire agreement last year between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli forces were supposed to leave Lebanon by January 27, but the deadline was pushed back to February 18. Though the accord's co-sponsor France insisted the Israelis should then pull out fully, the U.S. did not oppose Israel's decision to retain five strategic hilltop positions in southern Lebanon. Israel also continued to carry out strikes on what it deemed Hezbollah targets in the Beqaa Valley, and on February 17 assassinated a Hamas officer with a drone strike on his car in the Lebanese city of Sidon. The concept of "ceasefire" seemed to be somewhat relative.

Netanyahu hailed Trump as the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. The question now is whether the American president can treat the Arab side of the equation as amounting to nothing.

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PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel must have thought the bet he made on Vance in the 2022 Ohio Senate race had paid off in Paris. Thiel, alongside fellow venture capitalists David Sacks and Elon Musk, is the money behind the rise of JD Vance to the vice presidency of the United States. And in the French capital, Vance gave his investors the returns they've been banking on, making the argument that even the tamest regulation would stifle the AI industry and kill innovation.

"The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety," Vance lectured assembled global leaders. "It will be won by building." Perhaps inevitably, given the tone being taken, the United States (alongside the United Kingdom) refused to sign an innocuous pledge at the end of the conference to "reduce digital divides" and "ensure AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure, and trustworthy." Nearly sixty other countries did sign.

Trump, it seems, doesn’t do multilateral, global treaties, having already pulled the U.S. out of a panoply of international agreements on health, climate change, justice, trade and taxation. And as the U.S. refused to play ball, China declared its intent to collaborate freely with other countries, to play its part in creating "a community with a shared future for mankind".

Vance’s first speech abroad as vice president showed how the Trump administration is looking to force everyone - allies and adversaries alike - to react while the U.S. sets the tune. Clearly, by countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Not long after Vance’s visit to Paris, it was Hegseth’s turn to lecture the U.S.’s European allies. “Make no mistake,” he said in Brussels, “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.”

Hegseth told reporters that the “peace dividend has to end.” Europe needs to spend more on its own defense because there are “autocrats with ambitions around the globe from Russia to the communist Chinese.” Either the West, he added, “awakens to that reality… or we will abdicate that responsibility to somebody else with all the wrong values.” 

The Trump administration is looking to force allies and adversaries alike to march to the beat of America's drum. By countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, Donald Trump was demonstrating the extent to which the United States seemed to be marginalizing NATO, by claiming to have already agreed with Vladimir Putin to begin negotiating a peace deal over Ukraine. No European leader had been clued in; neither had the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. If Europe was getting the stick, it very much seemed as if Putin was getting the carrot. “I know him very well,” Trump said about Putin. “I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t.” Trump also expressed his hope that Russia could rejoin the G7 (formerly G8) bloc of the world’s wealthiest nations.

“Europe must be part of any negotiations,” a group of European foreign ministers said in Paris, insisting plaintively on a seat at the table even as Trump seems intent on pulling that seat out from underneath them. A meeting between Putin and Trump has been mooted to discuss Ukraine – it will be held in Saudi Arabia and, as of now, nobody else has been invited. Though, as Vance prepares to meet with Zelensky at a security conference in Munich at the weekend, at least the U.S. acknowledges that Ukraine will need to be a part of the process. But an indication of the terms on which a peace deal with Russia might be agreed was provided by U.S. defence secretary Pete Hegseth who said that neither NATO membership nor reclaiming all its land occupied by Russia were “realistic” goals for Ukraine. 

China, reportedly, has also offered to host Trump and Putin for a summit to discuss a peace deal. Speaking in London, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, said “China is willing to work together with all parties, including the European side, to continue to play a constructive role in this regard.” The “rationality” of China’s position, he maintained, has been borne out by recent developments. Last year, China and Brazil said it could broker a peace deal, an offer Zelensky dismissed, questioning both countries’ motivations. “You will not boost your power,” he said, “at Ukraine’s expense.”

Since Trump returned to the White House, China’s approach has been to remind the world that it is a responsible global power. As the U.S. puts the world on the defensive, "China will increasingly be seen as a reliable global partner," noted one state magazine. The article was a reaction to the USAID freeze and argued that Beijing could now persuade other countries that its model "provides a more predictable and lasting choice for cooperation." 

Russian commentators, even as they welcomed Trump’s return, have been more cautious about any strategic benefits Russia might accrue. "The liberal agenda of previous administrations was something we learned to counter effectively," wrote an RT columnist. "But this conservative agenda, focused on patriotism, traditional family structures, and individual success, could prove more difficult to combat." Moscow must now compete with a Trump administration that can’t be attacked for being “woke,” that addresses the world from a vantage point that Russia thought was theirs, through conservative rather than progressive values and through Big Tech and trade tariffs rather than aid.

But with Trump intent on posturing as the lone gunslinger in town, Russia might take comfort in its alliance with China. What of Europe, though, and Western consensus?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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The encounter was jarring not just for its surreal nature - a discussion of political theory amid artillery fire - but for what it revealed about Russian propaganda's evolving sophistication. When I researched the Overton Window after our conversation, I discovered that Russian state media had long been obsessed with the concept, transforming this Western analytical framework into something more potent: both an explanation for social change and supposed proof of Western cultural warfare. Russian commentators didn't just cite the theory -  they wielded it as both explanation and evidence of Western attempts to undermine Russian society.

Over the next decade, I watched this once-academic term slide from Russian state TV screens and the trenches of eastern Ukraine into mainstream Western discourse - embraced by commentators on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum. What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

Now we're watching this process play out in real time.  For instance, Elon Musk's handpicked team running DOGE - the new Department of Government Efficiency - are inexperienced young men between the ages of 19 and 24 with unfettered access to federal systems. A decade ago, putting Silicon Valley twenty-somethings in charge of critical government functions would have sparked outrage. Today, it's celebrated as innovation.

What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

The transformation extends far beyond Washington. When America's president proposes to "take over" Gaza and turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," when Musk tells Germans to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, they're deliberately expanding what's politically possible. From Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson, from African opinion writers praising Trump's aid cuts as "liberation" to conservative thinkers reimagining solutions for Gaza - each pushes the boundaries of acceptable discourse a little further.

The shift manifests across every domain of power. Inside federal agencies, tech executives now make decisions once reserved for career civil servants, normalizing private control of public functions. On the global stage, raw deal-making has replaced diplomatic principles, with decades-old alliances discarded in favor of transactional relationships. El Salvador's president offers his prisons to house American inmates. Ukraine, fighting for survival against Russia, signals its willingness to trade military support for mineral rights. Even humanitarian aid, long seen as a moral imperative, is being recast as a form of dependency that needs to be eliminated.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has already adapted to this new reality. Their latest analysis simply divides nations into "winners and losers" based on their ability to navigate this new transactional diplomacy and stay on Trump’s good side. No moral judgments, no democratic values - just raw negotiating power.

The Overton Window - or "Окно Овертона блядь" as the Russian commander put it in 2014, mechanically adding the profanity at the end of each phrase like a full stop - offers a powerful framework for understanding how societies transform - not through sudden upheaval but through the gradual shifting of what people consider acceptable.  Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries.

This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook - a calculated strategy of gradually expanding what society will tolerate, inch by inch, controversy by controversy. The goal is not just to push boundaries, but to exhaust resistance, to make the previously unimaginable seem not just possible, but inevitable.

The same mechanism operates in political discourse, where deliberate provocation becomes a strategic tool for reshaping collective perception. Donald Trump is the master of this approach. 

Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries. This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook.

His political methodology isn't about achieving specific outcomes, but about continuously expanding the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Each provocative statement serves as a strategic instrument, deliberately designed to recalibrate social and political norms. When he suggests purchasing Greenland or proposing radical reimaginings of geopolitical landscapes like in Gaza, the actual feasibility becomes secondary to the act of introducing previously unthinkable concepts into mainstream conversation.

The genius of this approach lies in its relentlessness. By consistently proposing ideas that initially seem outrageous, extreme positions gradually become reference points for future discussions. Each controversial statement doesn't just distract from previous controversies; it fundamentally reshapes the political imagination. The goal is not immediate implementation but permanent transformation - moving the entire conceptual framework of what society considers possible.

Russian propagandists were early to grasp its significance, weaponizing the Overton Window theory itself as supposed evidence of Western cultural imperialism. That commander in Donetsk was just echoing what Russian state media had been claiming for years: that the West was deliberately expanding society's boundaries to impose its values on Russia.

A decade later, we're watching this process unfold in reverse. As transactional relationships replace values-based alliances, as oligarchic control displaces democratic institutions, as the unthinkable becomes routine - the transformation of our societies isn't happening by accident. 

Through the years of Brexit, Trump's first win, Orbán's rise, and the growing global polarization, that conversation in the ruins of Donetsk has stayed with me. There was something chilling about a commander discussing political theory between artillery fire - not because it felt academic, but because he embodied how thoroughly manufactured narratives could drive real-world violence. He was willing to fight and die for a worldview constructed by Russian state media about "traditional values" under attack. 

In the end, we are all unwitting participants in this grand narrative shift, our perceptions subtly recalibrated by the very forces that seek to reshape our understanding of what is possible, acceptable, and true. And whether we are shocked by those in power or find ourselves applauding them, we are simultaneously the observers and the changed.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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But perhaps the real shock should be that Silicon Valley was shocked at all.

For years, Silicon Valley and its cheerleaders spread the narrative of inevitable American dominance of the artificial intelligence industry. From the "Why China Can't Innovate" cover story in the Harvard Business Review to the breathless reporting on billion-dollar investments in AI, U.S. media spent years building an image of insurmountable Western technological superiority. Even this week, when Wired reported on the "shock, awe, and questions" DeepSeek had sparked, the persistent subtext seemed to be that technological efficiency from unexpected quarters was somehow fundamentally illegitimate. 

“In the West, our sense of exceptionalism is truly our greatest weakness,” says data analyst Christopher Wylie, author of MindF*ck, who famously blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica in 2017. 

That arrogance was on full display just last year when OpenAI's Sam Altman, speaking to an audience in India, declared: "It's totally hopeless to compete with us. You can try and it's your job to try but I believe it is hopeless." He was dismissing the possibility that teams outside Silicon Valley could build substantial AI systems with limited resources.

There are still questions over whether DeepSeek had access to more computing power than it is admitting. Scale AI chief executive Alexandr Wong said in a recent interview that the Chinese company had access to thousands more of the highest grade chips than people know about, despite U.S. export controls.  What's clear, though, is that Altman didn't anticipate that a competitor would simply refuse to play by the rules he was trying to set and would instead reimagine the game itself.

By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight. While companies like OpenAI have poured hundreds of billions into massive data centers—with the Stargate project alone pledging an “initial investment” of $100 billion—DeepSeek demonstrated a fundamentally different path to innovation.

"For the first time in public, they've provided an efficient way to train reasoning models," explains Thomas Cao, professor of technology policy at Tufts University. "The technical detail is that they've come up with a way to do reinforcement learning without supervision. You don't have to hand-label a lot of data. That makes training much more efficient."

By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight.

For the American media, which has drunk the Silicon Valley Kool Aid, the DeepSeek story is a hard one to stomach. For a long time, Wylie argues, while countries in Asia made massive technological breakthroughs, the story commonly told to the American people focused on American tech exceptionalism. 

An alternative approach, Wylie says, would be to see and “acknowledge that China is doing good things we can learn from without meaning that we have to adopt their system. Things can exist in parallel.” But instead, he adds, the mainstream media followed the politicians down the rabbit hole of focusing on the "China threat." 

These geopolitical fears have helped Big Tech shield itself from genuine competition and regulatory scrutiny. The narrative of a Cold War style “AI race” with China has also fed the assumption that a major technological power can be bullied into submission through trade restrictions. 

That assumption has also crumpled. The U.S. has spent the past two years attempting to curtail China's AI development through increasingly strict controls on advanced semiconductors. These restrictions, which began under Biden in 2022 and were significantly expanded last week under Trump, were designed to prevent Chinese companies from accessing the most advanced chips needed for AI development. 

DeepSeek developed its model using older generation chips stockpiled before the restrictions took effect, and its breakthrough has been held up as an example of genuine, bootstrap innovation. But Professor Cao cautions against reading too much into how export controls have catalysed development and innovation at DeepSeek. "If there had been no export control requirements,” he said, “DeepSeek could have been able to do things even more efficiently and faster. We don't see the counterfactual." 

DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to both Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it. 

As millions of Americans downloaded DeepSeek, making it the most downloaded app in the U.S., OpenAI’s Steven Heidel peevishly claimed that using it would mean giving away data to the Chinese Communist Party. Lawmakers too have warned about national security risks and dozens of stories like this one echoed suggestions that the app could be sending U.S. data to China. 

Security concers aside,  what really sets DeepSeek apart from its Western counterparts is not just efficiency of the model, but also the fact that it is open source. Which, counter-intuitively, makes a Beijing-funded app more democratic than its Silicon Valley predecessors. 

In the heated discourse surrounding technological innovation, "open source" has become more than just a technical term—it's a philosophy of transparency. Unlike proprietary models where code is a closely guarded corporate secret, open source invites global scrutiny and collective improvement.

DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it.

At its core, open source means that the source code of a software is made freely available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. When a technology is open source, users can download the entire code, run it on their own servers, and verify every line of its functionality. For consumers and technologists alike, open source means the ability to understand, modify, and improve technology without asking permission. It's a model that prioritizes collective advancement over corporate control. Already, for instance, the Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba has released a new version of its own large language model that it says is an upgrade on DeepSpeak.

Unlike ChatGPT or any other Western AI system, DeepSource can be run locally without giving away any data. "Despite the media fear-mongering, the irony is DeepSeek is now open source and could be implemented in a far more privacy-preserving way than anything offered by Meta or OpenAI,"  Wylie says. “If Sam Altman open sourced OpenAI, we wouldn’t look at it with the same skepticism, he would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize."

The open-source nature of DeepSeek is a huge part of the disruption it has caused. It challenges Silicon Valley's entire proprietary model and challenges our collective assumptions about both AI development and global competition. Not surprisingly, part of Silicon Valley’s response has been to complain that Chinese companies are using American companies’ intellectual property, even as their own large language models have been built by consuming vast amounts of information without permission.

This counterintuitive strategy of openness coming from an authoritarian state also gives China a massive soft power win that it will translate into geopolitical brownie points. Just as TikTok's algorithms outmaneuvered Instagram and YouTube by focusing on accessibility over profit, DeepSeek, which is currently topping iPhone downloads, represents another moment where what's better for users—open-source, efficient, privacy-preserving—challenges what's better for the boardroom.

We are yet to see how DeepSeek will reroute the development of AI, but just as the original Sputnik moment galvanized American scientific innovation during the Cold War, DeepSeek could shake Silicon Valley out of its complacency. For Professor Cao the immediate lesson is that the US must reinvest in fundamental research or risk falling behind. For Wylie, the takeaway of the DeepSeek fallout in the US is more meta: There is no need for a new Cold War, he argues. “There will only be an AI war if we decide to have one.”

Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

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The post DeepSeek shatters Silicon Valley’s invincibility delusion appeared first on Coda Story.

As a kid, I always bubbled with energy too. I talk at triple speed, and people often have to tell me to slow down. My childhood neighborhood, the Abanotubani district, lies beneath a great gorge in Tbilisi. A huge, ruined fortress overlooks our neighborhood —- for centuries, it served as a stronghold for Tbilisi, protecting it against invaders.

Now, views of the fortress are obscured by an even bigger mansion, built by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in our country. His wealth is about a third of our gross domestic product. Construction on his house began when I was a toddler: a great sea of glass and metal dominating the gorge. I remember looking up and thinking it looked like a Bond villain’s lair. 

Ivanishvili became the biggest philanthropist in Georgia, supporting arts and culture, fixing schools, houses and hospitals. But even as a young kid, I was doubtful that some billionaire was truly going to help our country. 

Protests were the backdrop of my childhood in Georgia. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my dad’s shoulders during the Rose Revolution. I was three. It was a peaceful uprising to oust the then-President Eduard Shevardnadze, ending his reign of chaos that had lasted more than a decade. A man called Mikheil Saakashvili was elected after him and set about trying to rid the country of the corruption that had plagued it for so long. 

While there were problems during Saakashvili’s rule, there was also a huge shift in the country towards democracy and reform. For a while, things felt hopeful. 

Of course, we always lived below our powerful billionaire neighbor — the oligarch Ivanishvili in his spy villain-worthy lair. But I also grew up being aware of another big neighbor, one that sat right above Georgia. On a clear day in the hills above my house in Tbilisi, you could see the Greater Caucasus mountain mange — the natural border with Russia.

I was on vacation in those hills above Tbilisi in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia. I remember the warplanes buzzing overhead and how my mom went into a panicked frenzy. During that war, Russia occupied South Ossetia, a region to the northwest of Tbilisi. I guess that was when I started to absorb the idea that Russia was not our friend. 

When I was 12, a party called Georgian Dream came to power, backed by Ivanishvili, the billionaire who lived above us. Ivanishvili, like many oligarchs from the former Soviet space, has close ties to Putin. My parents felt uneasy about it all and moved the family to Paris, where I spent my teenage years. 

We lived in the bougie 6th arrondissement. Kids at my school had no idea where Georgia was — I was constantly having to explain that I was from the country, not the U.S. state. The country by the black sea — “la mere noire,” I would intone, again and again. It was Georgia for dummies. People would nod, not quite knowing. One girl literally thought Georgia was a place in the Arctic region of Lapland. If I was giving her the benefit of the doubt, I guess she was thinking of the island of South Georgia in Antarctica. Wrong again. I realized it was often easier to just pretend I was French like everyone else. 

As I grew older, though, I became prouder of my roots. I found a group of friends who came from all over. They introduced me to an important part of French life: going to protests. At those protests, I learned a lesson — my voice matters. 

The French really put the “pro” in protests — they do not mess around. While I was in high school, the cops killed a French activist with a police grenade during a protest. It caused uproar across the country, so I tagged along with older kids to blockade our school, barricading it with trash cans for two weeks to push for justice for the guy who was killed. 

I started to learn that protest actually works in a democracy. I would go between Paris and Tbilisi, taking lessons from my French friends and bringing them to Georgia. “You guys go home too soon when you protest. You stand there and think stuff is going to fall out of the sky,” I would tell my Georgian friends. Last year, though, a new law was proposed in Georgia, and things went full chaos-mode. 

It’s called the foreign agents law. It’s a copycat of the same regulation in Russia. It dictates that any institution getting 20% of its money from abroad has to register with a statewide system as an agent of foreign influence. 

In practice, it makes it easier for the state to crush opposition, get rid of foreign-aided projects that make our life better and stamp out free expression by creating scapegoats. It gives the government arbitrary reasons to arrest anyone they deem a “foreign influence operation.” 

Loads of my friends in Tbilisi work on projects that would be deemed a “foreign agent” by this new law. Whether they work in plastic recycling programs, as independent journalists or as human rights lawyers, they now face extra interrogation by the state. It’s basically a tool for political repression. 

The law’s proposal last year lit a flame under us in Tbilisi. We organized big protests and for a while, it worked — the government didn’t press ahead. But this year, they tried again. 

On April 3, the Georgian Dream party announced plans to bring back the bill. I felt a mixture of anger and hopelessness when I heard. Here we go again, I thought. Here’s undeniable proof of our government blindly trying to follow Russia's lead. I got ready to fight. 

Maybe if you had the privilege of growing up in a first-world country, you don’t understand, but for us this law means the difference between having a functioning democracy and existing as a puppet for Russia. It means losing our freedom of speech. 

On the morning of April 15, the protests began. 

My friends and I have joined the demonstrations every day, trying to put the lessons I’d learned in France into practice. I believe that if we can inspire enough people to get out on the streets, we can overwhelm the brutality we are fighting against. For now, the state is fighting back hard, with tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon and by simply beating protesters to a pulp. I’m worried things are going to descend into even more violence, though I hope we can avoid it.

On the night of April 30, I put on a gas mask and assigned myself a task: deactivate as many tear gas canisters as I could. There’s a couple of ways to do this. You can put a plastic cup over the canister before it starts to smoke, which snuffs it out. Or, if it’s smoking already, you can dunk the canister in a bucket of water.

Things escalated fast that night. Protesters surged onto Tbilisi’s main street, Rustaveli Avenue, and as they did, police unleashed a torrent of tear gas canisters onto us from the side streets, scattering the crowd. I ran forwards into the impact zone, grabbing the canisters and submerging them into bottles of water that I had previously set out. It was a race to get to the canisters before they started spinning out of control. 

The police began advancing from the side streets and blasting everyone in the area with water cannon, throwing them to the ground. They didn’t care if they hit protesters or journalists — and they hit both. Officers also beat up anyone they could get their hands on. A no man's land emerged between the protesters and the police. In the buffer zone were journalists — and me. Along with dealing with the tear gas, I was also taking pictures — using loads of flash to annoy the officers — just for my own personal project. I managed to capture several instances of how police laid into the protestors. 

It was time to build barricades, French style, and invoke the lessons I had learned in Paris. I started dragging metal barrier fences together and getting people to help. I then told people to gather up trash cans, just like we did in high school. Five guys started to help me. From that moment on, I was standing in the buffer zone in front of the barricades, directing people like an orchestra conductor. I got them to add umbrellas to the structure — a tactic inspired not by the French, but by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong — to protect from the water cannon. 

The crowd of police just watched as I directed the resistance. They recorded everything, sussing me out. Then, they mobilized the arresting squad. The police surged forward, grabbing anyone they could — journalists, protesters, they didn’t care. I started to run, but my fashion-victim status let me down, badly. I was wearing my cute new purple Adidas Sambas. But those shoes have no grip, as anyone who owns a pair knows. I slipped on the wet ground. 

A bunch of masked police jumped on me and began beating me mercilessly. At one point I nearly scrambled away, but again my sartorial choices screwed me over. My blazer was tied around my waist and they grabbed it and pulled me back.

By law in Georgia, all police officers have to wear a visible badge number. But during the protests, police hide their badges and mask up with balaclavas, so it’s difficult to prosecute them for brutality down the line.  

They started hitting the back of my head hard, and all I could do was protect my eyes and curl into the fetal position. They dragged me behind the police line and continued laying into me. Then they surrounded me, taunting me, telling me to hit myself and say that I was a little bitch. My legs were like jelly and I could barely stand. I did whatever they ordered, desperate, until they threw me into a van. Already, there was a lump the size of a bar of soap on the back of my head, with deep blue panda rings forming around my eyes. 

They hauled me to prison, but it took them six hours to get me inside. There was already a queue of other protesters they’d caught. My captors waited in the van with me, watching Russian TikToks for hours on end. Honestly, that was almost worse than the beating.  

The atmosphere inside the cells was desperate. People were silently pacing up and down, their spirits hitting rock bottom. Police were bringing in more protesters all the time, their radios crackling. I was in a cell with three other guys. “They beat me like a dog,” one of them said, showing me a bootprint-shaped bruise on his back. I realized we had to get the morale up, fast — and show the guards they couldn’t break us. 

We sang all the songs we could think of — “Bella Ciao,” the European anthem, a bunch of Georgian songs. At one point I even sang the Marseillaise. The police told us to shut up. We kept singing, and cracked terrible jokes that this was a five-star digital detox. 

I got out of jail because a lawyer helped me, pro bono. She works for the Human Rights Center, a group of lawyers here in Georgia that under the new law would be at the top of the state’s list of “foreign agents.” That lawyer, she probably weighs 120 pounds, isn’t much more than 5 feet tall, and she’s formidable. When she goes into the police station, you see the fear in their eyes. She’s the best. If it wasn’t for her and her organization, I would still be in jail. This Russian law wants to take away our access to human rights lawyers like her. 

Two weeks on, and my concussion is getting better, day by day. The nausea has eased and the daily headaches are becoming less intense. 

I’m back on the streets. At these protests, the energy feels different. There’s a crazy electricity in the air. Everyone is singing, fighting, determined not to lose their country. A lot of the protesters are my age — Gen Z. We don’t remember the chaos and corruption of the 1990s. We’re not worn down, like older people, by decades of protesting. We’re also more savvy than our parents’ generation about fact-checking. We don’t just swallow the stream of propaganda that’s fed to us. We’re ready to fight. I spoke with my uncle on the phone about it yesterday morning, just before the law was passed — he told me “my hopes are in Gen Z and a miracle.” 

By Luka Gviniashvili as told to Isobel Cockerell

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of the lawyer's association that advised Gviniashvili. It was the Human Rights Center, not the Young Lawyer's Association.

The post I’m protesting Georgia’s ‘Russian law.’ The police beat me up mercilessly appeared first on Coda Story.

The blame, she said, lay with a string of U.S. government-funded bio-laboratories in the two countries, chief among them a multi-million dollar facility on the outskirts of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Its work was so tightly under wraps, she reported, that residents had dubbed it “a secret Pentagon station.” The on-screen graphic read: “nest of viruses.”

But Kremlin-controlled Rossiya 24 failed to mention that the bacteria responsible for the spate of swine deaths had been identified and contained — by vets working in conjunction with scientists from what is better known in Georgia as the “Lugar Lab.”

Welcome to one of the more obscure frontlines in Russia’s information war with the West.

The American and Georgian governments say the lab’s primary mission is to detect and tackle disease outbreaks. But the Kremlin refuses to accept that the U.S. government has spent $350 million of taxpayers’ money to build a research center on Russia’s doorstep simply to deal with public health hazards.

Ever since it opened seven years ago, it has been under attack from Russian government officials and the Kremlin’s network of supportive media outlets. It is a microcosm of Moscow’s wider disinformation efforts, say those tracking Russian information campaigns — using “black propaganda” about the lab to spread fear and divide public opinion in pro-Western Georgia, while also targeting the United States. The charge sheet keeps changing, but the Kremlin’s core accusation is that the U.S. military is doing biological weapons research on its border.

This information frontline has been heating up once more, as the Kremlin has pushed back at accusations it used a chemical weapon to try to kill a former Russian double agent in the U.K. Just last week, in a press briefing dominated by the case, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova singled out the Lugar Lab by name, saying that the presence of a Pentagon-financed laboratory “at the borders of Russia causes particular concern for us.”

It is the latest example of an old pattern, according to Sophie Gelava of the Tbilisi-based Media Development Foundation (MDF), which monitors Russian statements about the lab. The Kremlin has been “actively spreading black propaganda against the laboratory since the day it was established,” she says.

Allegations about the lab are disseminated through a wide variety of media outlets, in the Russian, English and Georgian languages, feeding suspicion and distrust as they are picked up and recycled through social media.

The Kremlin-controlled news agency Sputnik portrayed it as part of a U.S. effort to encircle the country with bio-weapons facilities. Earlier this year, the pro-Russian New Eastern Outlook site claimed the lab was a “front” for testing new viruses and bacteria on the Georgian people. The operation would have “impressed” the Nazi concentration camp doctor Joseph Mengele, the writer added. A pro-Kremlin Georgian language site recently repeated an old charge that the lab was linked to local outbreaks measles and other diseases.

So we asked if we could see the lab for ourselves.

Its official name is the Richard G. Lugar Center for Public Health Research, and it is housed in a specially-built complex just off the main road to Tbilisi’s international airport. It is equipped to what’s known as Bio-Safety Level III (BSL III) standards, which means it can handle all but a handful of the most dangerous known microbes, including anthrax and the bacteria that causes bubonic plague.

Our credentials were checked before our visit, and we were searched when we entered the complex — though the security precautions hardly seemed out of the ordinary.

As part of our tour, we were shown what is regarded as the lab’s most sensitive area, its store of “Especially Dangerous Pathogens” (EDPs), a high-security repository of lethal bacteria and viruses collected by scientists. It is known as the “pathogen museum.” Even though many of these EDP samples were originally procured in Soviet times, some Russian media reports have speculated that this store is the basis of a bio-weapons arsenal. Its work was so tightly under wraps, that residents had dubbed it “a secret Pentagon station.” — Russian TV reporter.

On one Russian point there is no dispute. The Tbilisi laboratory, as well as an associated network of smaller monitoring facilities across the country, was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. It still contributes to the running costs, and although the majority of the staff are Georgian, a small number of American scientists employed by the Pentagon’s medical research arm still work there, which the Kremlin has called “disturbing.”

But the Lugar Lab network has its origins in an American initiative aimed at neutralizing the potential threat from the leftovers of the Soviet-era Kremlin’s biological and chemical weapons research. (Former U.S. Senator Richard Lugar played a lead role in creating the program, and he opened the lab.) The anthrax scare that followed the 9/11 attacks was another later driver, spurring the U.S. government into extra spending on early warning and detection efforts for biological threats.

The so-called Cooperative Biological Engagement Program or CBEP is run by the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. And one of its initial priorities for the Lugar Lab, according to both current and former staff, was to use it to secure viral and bacterial EDPs left behind by Soviet scientists.

Many of these samples — now inside the lab’s “pathogen museum” — were previously kept in an old, Soviet-era research institute in the middle of Tbilisi, posing a significant potential risk to the public. Far safer, say Lugar Lab staff, to store these and other pathogen samples in a purpose-built facility on the outskirts of the city. But Russian media reports alleging that the U.S.-funded lab is creating biological weapons don’t mention this back story.

And according to its director, Paata Imnadze, the Lugar Lab is in effect continuing a public service previously carried out by the Soviet-era institute — detecting and tackling disease outbreaks.

“Monitoring of infectious diseases has been done in Georgia since 1937,” said Imnadze. “Here we do exactly the same work that we did in the old center, except in a much safer environment.”

Georgia faces a wide range of disease threats, he explained as he gave us a tour of the lab, including brucellosis — a serious threat to livestock — as well as cases of anthrax and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.

What’s more, he says, Georgia is far from alone among former Soviet states in having this kind of laboratory. Russia itself has its own similarly-equipped facilities, and at least one declared lab with the top BSL-IV safety rating, which can handle the deadliest microbes, such as Ebola. This frontline is heating up once more, as the Kremlin has pushed back against accusations it used a chemical weapon to try to kill a Russian spy in Britain.

With his salt-and-pepper hair and moustache, Imnadze is a familiar face on local television. For many years, he has been the Georgian government’s designated speaker on viral infections and other health issues, urging people to get flu shots, or to go easy on their antibiotic use. And he scoffs at charges that he is, in effect, overseeing a secret germ-warfare center, calling them “a product of ignorance, and the workings of the security services of a certain country.”

Since 2013, the Lugar Lab has been run by Georgia’s National Center for Disease Control (NCDC), the equivalent of America’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC). And the U.S. presence has dropped significantly in recent years, according to staff there.

There are currently nine Americans working in the lab, employed by the Pentagon-run, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR). In an interview, the head of the team, Colonel Paul Kwon, said their research has focused on areas such as sexually-transmitted diseases, naturally-occurring illnesses and emerging patterns of microbial drug resistance.

Kwon, who is a physician himself, said his agency is involved simply because it has much greater capacity and “reach” than its civilian counterpart, the CDC. The Lugar Lab is one of several similar “global partnerships,” he said, citing other examples of U.S.-funded disease research centers in Kenya and Thailand.

In a follow up statement, Kristin Roberts, a spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Georgia, said “the work of the Army scientists primarily aims to protect U.S. soldiers from infectious disease as they exercise and train,” adding that “there is a broader applicability of their research for the greater good of society.”

Nonetheless, some insiders say they are not surprised the Russians have complained so much about the Lugar Lab. “We would do the same if they built a facility like this in Cuba or on the border in Mexico,” said an American source who has previously worked in the lab, but did not want to be identified in case it compromised work relationships.'

In effect, the source said, the lab and its network give the U.S. a strategically-placed early warning system for disease outbreaks, providing “an outer ring of security,” far from American shores. But for Georgia’s requirements, the source added, the Lugar Lab “was overbuilt.”

However, he dismissed Russian allegations that it is a front for conducting covert biological weapons work. “I’ve been in every room in that lab, and I don’t believe there is any secret research going on there.” It’s also a very complex process creating viable biological weapons, he added. “Just having a store of pathogens is not enough.”

Imnadze has a theory that the Russians can’t abide having an American-funded success story on their doorstep, which also gives Western-leaning Georgia greater distance from Moscow’s embrace. “In the past, we had to ask them [Russians] for help when we didn’t know what kind of disease we were dealing with,” said Imnadze. “Now people from all over come to us.”

Our visit was far from the first time the lab has tried to address Russian-inspired allegations about its work. Several years ago, they opened their doors to a group of doubting Russian journalists. “If this was a secret weapon facility, would we be so open to everyone?,” asked Imnadze. Perhaps most striking of all, he said “we’ve had Russian scientists working here too.”

Requests for comment were sent to both the Russian journalists and a scientist who had worked in the lab, but no one responded. “The operation would have ‘impressed’ the Nazi concentration camp doctor Joseph Mengele.”

The Americans have reached out to Russia too, through diplomatic channels, to try to explain the lab’s work, according to Debra Yourick, a WRAIR spokeswoman in the U.S.

But it is very hard to respond “meaningfully,” she said, adding that if the American or Georgian governments do react to what she called some of the “nonsense in the media, you actually give it some validity.” And the rumors keep coming.

Earlier this year, Moscow tagged the lab to the spread of the so-called “stink-bug,” a pest that has wreaked havoc on crops in Georgia and the surrounding region. “We cannot exclude the possibility..that it [the stink-bug] could be a biological weapon,” said Yuliya Melano, an official with the veterinary division of Russia’s agriculture ministry.

Two years ago, a Russian official claimed that the Americans could use the lab to infect mosquitoes with Zika virus and release them over the border into Russia. It has also been blamed for outbreaks of human and animal flu in the breakaway Georgian territory of South Ossetia — currently under de facto Russian occupation.

An eccentric American living in Tbilisi has helped feed the rumor mill, claiming that the lab is being used to test killer viruses and bacteria on humans. “Georgians are being used as white rats,” declared Jeffrey Silverman in an interview with Patrioti TV, a Georgian news outfit that advocates close ties with Russia. Though he has been widely discredited as a conspiracist, he has regularly been interviewed by the Russian media — including in this 2015 Rossiya 24 report — and his claims are often picked up and recycled by alternative news sites.

The MDF monitoring team has drawn up a diagram of the recurrent themes in Kremlin statements and Russian media reports. They include stories predicting confrontation between Moscow and Tbilisi, and even claims that the lab was used to make chemical weapons deployed in Syria. It is not clear that the Russians actually believe their own allegations though.

Even if the claims shift, the strategy is the same according to Sophie Gelava, depicting the lab as secretive and dangerous “so often that people start believing it.”

Now the MDF team has a growing list of examples of Russian officials or media outlets trying to use the Lugar Lab as a diversionary issue in the public relations battle over the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

“US laboratory for biological weapons found in Georgia,” read one recent Russian headline — as if it had never been covered in the Russian media before. Perhaps the “Novichok” agent used in the March 4 attack in Salisbury was stored in “Georgia and Ukraine” suggested Russian Senator Franz Klintsevich, in a statement reported by the Kremlin’s global RT network.

There are indications too that Russian government denunciations of the lab come from a standard set of talking points. As Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova read out her statement on the lab last week, her language bore striking similarities with remarks she made about it last year, and again she added the detail that it is near “Alekseevka” village.

“The intensity of these stories [about the lab] and the channels of distribution indicate that all of this is orchestrated directly from the Kremlin,” says Nodar Tangiashvili of East-West Management Institute, a U.S. non-profit organization which helps fund the MDF monitors.

Yet those associated with the lab doubt the Russians really believe all their own allegations, because they are sure their intelligence services have their own picture of what really goes on inside. “They must have had their own agents in there at some point,” said the American source.

The man whose name is on the door takes a similar line. “Both civilian and military United States personnel have conducted research at the lab for many years,” said former U.S. Senator Richard Lugar in an email “and these research activities were well known to the Russians.”

What is more, he added, Russia has “gained some benefit in knowing that the lab in Tbilisi is on the constant look-out for substances that threaten populations of any country in the area.”

Despite the caustic statements and reports, the Kremlin has not put any pressure on the Georgian or U.S. governments to close it down.

The lab seems to serve as a useful tool Moscow can brandish when needed. When the Kremlin brought up the Lugar Lab last year, it came after a confrontation with the U.S. government, which had accused Russia of failing to comply with international arms control commitments.

And since the Skripal poisoning affair, Russia is now under even more pressure over allegations that it has been hiding a secret chemical and biological warfare program of its own.

But while the U.S military has been keen to reduce its involvement and “footprint”, it does not want to pull back entirely, according to the American source, and thereby risk losing its early warning capability for disease outbreaks.

So be prepared for this arcane information battle over the Lugar Lab to keep on going. When Russian claims that it’s a germ warfare facility came up again, the American source laughed.

“Did they show you the basement?” he smiled, before answering the question.

“There is no basement.”

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