Russian President Putin’s statements from December 2025 suggest serious progress towards peace and possible détente with the USA, but how is the situation being covered in the West in general and the USA in particular? Will Western elites resist peace and sleepwalk into a war they aren’t ready for and can’t hope to survive?
Even if Peace is Achieved, Certain Linguistic Framing Makes it Clear the West has Damaged Relations with Russia
Reuters quoted President Putin as saying, “The ball is entirely in the court of our Western opponents, primarily the leaders of the Kyiv regime, and in this case, first and foremost, their European sponsors. We are ready for both negotiations and a peaceful resolution to the conflict.”
If the Russians now see us as opponents, it is not without reason. This change in pesrpective is not without justification; it makes sense geopolitically; it makes sense in light of American provocations. We have initiated and sustained a proxy war; there have been Western sponsored assassinations and attempts to subvert and undermine Russian society via NGOs. However, if this is the current reality, it is truly unfortunate because it was always unnecessary; it didn’t have to happen. The West didn’t have to embark on this course of action.
Interestingly, the Russian government provided official transcripts of that statement, which are as follows –
“So saying that we reject anything is inappropriate and groundless. The ball is entirely in the court of our Western “opponents,” so to speak, primarily the chiefs of the Kiev regime and, most importantly, their European sponsors. We are ready for talks, and we are ready to conclude the conflict by peaceful means.”
It becomes obvious and apparent that Reuters is engaged in dishonesty, with manipulation of transcripts, subtitles, translations, and omission of key words and contextual framing. President Putin didn’t exactly say that the West are opponents of Russia; he said, “So to speak,” the West are “opponents,” and he stressed that he was using that term loosely, not as the ideal descriptor, but as the most necessary term for lack of a better term. Reuters did not provide the context by which President Putin said, “our western opponents,” and they dropped the words “so to speak,” creating a false impression that President Putin has a firm conviction in the hostility and opposition of Russia and the West.
These are not exactly glaring and blatant falsifications such as would be the case if President Putin said, “We want peace,” and Reuters reported, “He said, ‘We want war.’” But they are still falsifications and distortions. An impression is created that it is official formal institutional policy in the Kremlin to regard the West as enemies, opponents, when President Putin’s actual remarks make it clear that is not exactly the case.
American media outlets, especially legacy corporate media, have a well-earned and deserved reputation for falsifications, whether splicing of audio or the mistranslation of quotes or the omission of key words and context.
American Media Has Not Given Russia Proper Respect
Unfortunately, American media has not given the attention and respect deserved by a speech as significant as the one delivered by President Putin on 19 December 2025.
Indeed, CNN tried to make light of the speech by highlighting its length, stating, “Vladimir Putin’s marathon news conference has just finished. As usual for this annual event, the Russian president spoke for more than four hours.”
It is an unfortunate reality that many of my fellow countrymen (that is to say, Americans) have the attention span of a goldfish, and cannot sit through a four-hour speech, let alone read a book or even manage a three-hour movie. They are able to handle 30-second reels and 5-minute stand-up comedy skits; that’s rapidly becoming the full extent of their intellectual capacity. American media seems to make light of the fact that President Putin spoke for more than four hours, because American media operates on a 30-second attention span and a rapid news cycle. These aren’t people who read Jean Baudrillard on an international flight or who have a deep, engaging conversation with a fellow passenger on a train ride across the EU.
American Media is Neither Serious nor Legitimate
A serious American media outlet would have provided video/audio of President Putin’s speech in its entirety, along with quality English subtitles embedded in the video and a high-quality, accurate English transcript of the entire speech. They then might have provided separate boxes of the most notable dozen or so 2-3 minute highlights, with category descriptors, that might be of the most interest to particular segments of their audience. The entirety of the speech should have been provided by American media, to American audiences, subtitled in English, without commentary, or with commentary being reserved for the end.
Once again, American media reveals itself to be something less than serious, a common theme in the USA. In the United States, it is often understood that if one wants insight into political theory, one must tune into the stand-up comedians, such as old clips of George Carlin from the 1980s-2000s. If one wants to laugh, turn on C-SPAN and listen to the politicians speaking. American media has long since ceased to be informative, and it has also stopped being funny, it is not a tragedy, not a comedy, but rather a farce. In America politicians are not serious intellectuals; they are largely clowns playing to mass audiences who expect amusing soundbites, theatrics, and one-liners.
American politics is some sort of combination of a reality TV show combined with a popularity contest, although oddly enough most American politicians are fairly unpopular, especially when compared with their Russian counterparts.
American Media Has a Long History of Rampant Dishonesty
Perhaps my fellow Americans recall when NBC spliced and modified audio of the 911 police call made by George Zimmerman during the incident with Trayvon Martin in 2011 in Florida. NBC claimed (falsely) that Mr. Zimmerman used racial slurs to describe Trayvon Martin, and NBC also edited out audio to change this exchange:
Zimmerman: “He looks suspicious. He’s up to no good; he’s walking around looking in windows of homes.”
Police dispatcher: “What race is he? Can you tell?”
Zimmerman: “He looks black.”
To this:
Zimmerman: “He looks suspicious. He’s black.”
This is a fundamentally dishonest media that wants to promote narratives of division, hate, and strife. Whether editing and splicing audio of domestic issues in the USA or portraying remarks by President Putin out of context and framed in unproductive ways.
Perhaps no institution has damaged the United States more than the legacy corporate media. No institution is more irresponsible or dangerous to the American people and nation. American media should be held fully accountable for the lies they have told and the damage they have inflicted on the nation and population.
There can be no legitimate reason for any major media outlet to splice and modify audio, hoping to achieve racial division, strife, and conflict. Promoting division and strife is not a legitimate use of private corporate resources. A media outlet promoting domestic strife should be suppressed; it should not be allowed to hide behind a supposed “freedom of the press.” Freedom to do what? Lie, modify audio, subvert social cohesion, undermine national morale, inflame prejudices, and stir up race riots? No serious society would tolerate this state of affairs, let alone insist on maintaining mechanisms to allow it to legally take place without criminal penalties.
It is a sad reality many Americans may have to grapple with and come to terms with: the American government is complicit in allowing mass manipulation by subversive media influence, while governments that are condemned as “authoritarian” by these subversive media corporate lords, governments such as Belarus and Russia, are condemned precisely because they do not allow subversives to have access to public platforms to manipulate the masses.
American Media Distorts Reality
In a certain sense it doesn’t matter what the reality is in Eastern Europe; it doesn’t matter if Russia is a peaceful power, a warmongering scheming power, a normal power that desires peace but sometimes wages war when necessary—none of this is actually relevant in the framework of American media, because American media has a largely unified narrative of “Russia is an evil imperialist tyrannical authoritarian regime that wants to invade every single nation it neighbors.” Without a doubt an absurd narrative, but that is their narrative. It is important to understand this because that is the lens through which American media filters information about Russia and the lens through which they project information about Russia.
America media reads from the same script when they report on Belarus or Russia. “Lukashenko is a dictator; dictators are bad; therefore, Lukashenko is bad,” is the standard line for Belarus. “Putin is bad, Russia is bad, Russia caused World War One, World War Two, and Russia probably caused the Punic Wars, but we don’t yet know how to formally blame them. Stay tuned for next season when maybe we will have the answer. Everything Russia does is wrong; Russia is evil” is the standard line for Russia.
If President Putin stopped his motorcade to get out and retrieve a scared and confused stray dog from the side of the road, American media would report something such as, “President Putin stops to kidnap a dog from a public street, stealing a puppy from a boy so the dog could be raised as an attack dog to terrorize inmates in Siberian prisons.” This is about the level of distortion Americans often have to expect from legacy corporate mass media in the USA.
The less dishonest American corporate media remove a few words, modify the framing, ignore the context, but still present distorted images.
There is what is happening in Eastern Europe and what Americans are being told about what is happening.
If President Putin says he and the Russian people want peace, American media reports, “Putin says he wants peace, but he is a liar; if he wanted peace, he would surrender to Ukraine and resign and allow NATO to expand anywhere. Russia is planning more war; Russia wants war.” If President Trump makes an overture for peace, American media says he is an “agent of the Kremlin” or has been “hypnotized and charmed by Putin.”
American Media is Unlikely to Stop Lying
The American media makes its lies blatantly transparent because they no longer have the slightest respect for the American public, and they don’t believe the American public has the ability to discern truth from falsehood.
Attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the communist Soviet Union, “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but the pillar industry of this country.”
I don’t know if Solzhenitsyn actually said it, but it does sound like something he might have said, and it fits; it makes sense.
We could today rightly apply that statement and that logic to the modern Western press, especially in the United States. In an era where truth is a scarce commodity, precious little comes across the airwaves from the USA.
Russia wants peace, a dignified, honorable peace, one that represents the reality of the military situation on the ground. The West claims it wants peace, but it expects a peace that does not take reality into account. Ukraine has effectively been defeated and is not in a position to dictate terms. The West has been checked and held back in Ukraine despite pouring hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of mercenaries and contractors into Ukraine. The question is whether peace will result before more Ukrainians are sacrificed in a pointless lost cause that never should have been allowed to happen in the first place.
Bryan Anthony Reo is a licensed attorney based in Ohio and an analyst of military history, geopolitics, and international relations
Follow new articles on our Telegram channel
