The Kremlin's Good Weekend: The Far Right Wins, Washington Courts Putin
The pattern is not hard to read if you refuse to look away. Over a single weekend the authoritarian right gained ground on every front, while the powers nominally arrayed against it chose accommodation over resistance. In the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the far-right, anti-immigration AfD won a state election, a result NPR called an electoral victory in a key state. The far-right leader who won then thanked Elon Musk for his support, and Moscow was quick to praise the outcome.
That last detail is the tell. When the world's richest man and the government in Russia cheer the same nationalist project in Germany, the alignment is not coincidence — it is the shape power is taking. Musk's backing and the Kremlin's approval flow to the same forces: the ones that campaign against migrants and against every institution that still constrains capital. Musk and the Kremlin want the same Europe, and this weekend they took a little more of it.
The diplomatic track tells the same story from the other side. Ukraine says it hit oil-processing plants in Russia's Perm region and Tatarstan overnight, resuming its strikes deep inside Russian territory — and it did so, by Bloomberg's account, only after US envoys had visited Moscow over the weekend. The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had let the peace process enter such a freeze that a trip to Kyiv was just an initial step, with any new talks happening alongside escalating fighting. Read those facts together: while Washington's men were in the Russian capital, Kyiv concluded it had to keep hitting refineries itself, because the diplomacy conducted in its name is not built to protect it.
What is that diplomacy? Not neutral peacemaking. Newsweek described the effort led by US envoy Witkoff as a "cringeworthy courtship of Putin" that, in its words, "will not bring peace." Washington has sent envoys to flatter the head of a state waging a war of aggression rather than confront him. The flattery is the policy, and the freeze it buys is paid for in Ukrainian lives.
Connect the threads and the argument writes itself. On one end, a state election won by a far-right party that Moscow openly celebrates and Elon Musk openly backed. On the other, Washington's emissaries in Moscow offering Putin the sickly-sweet nothings Newsweek named. In between, a Ukrainian military left to strike Russian oil infrastructure on its own because the great-power negotiation over its head was never designed to end the war on terms Kyiv could survive. This is not three stories. It is one movement of power — the transatlantic right and the Kremlin converging, each strengthening the other, each treating the accommodation of authoritarian force as the natural order.
Who pays is never in doubt. It is paid by the Ukrainians who wake to the war still grinding on while envoys trade compliments and the fighting escalates. It is paid by the migrants and working people in eastern Germany, where a party that ran on hostility to them just won. It is paid, everywhere, by the ordinary people told that the men with the money and the missiles have simply reached an understanding, and that there is nothing to be done. There is. The first thing is to name what happened this weekend for what it was: not a run of unrelated headlines, but capital and reaction shaking hands over the heads of everyone below.