#nikita your thoughts on the russian five.

[eriecanal]

HIS FAVORITE TEAM WAS THE RED WINGSSSS HIS FAVORITE PLAYER WAS STEVIE...

[swissboyhisch]

MASTERLIST

JAMIE DRYSDALE

Last Call Inspired by "Last Call" by Will Linley.

NIKITA ZADOROV

My Jersey After a little rain comes sun... And thunder. Thunder in the form of a six-foot five Russian defenseman.

That Scar Hurt By The Way In a world where everyone has a soulmate link, you happened to luck out with a pain link.

NATHAN MACKINNON

Lost In Japan Inspired by "Lost In Japan" by Shawn Mendes.

TYLER SEGUIN

Picasso The perfect family... Mum. Dad. And three dogs. With a touch of fluff and uninformed comment.

DYLAN LARKIN

You know I love you right? After bad game, what more could you ask for? Maybe just chinese, Netflix and some good old cuddling.

CONNOR MCDAVID

I’m Your Favourite, Eh? An All-Star Competition and a married couple with a kiddo. What more could you ask for?

I Brought Too Many Sorry Female issues are always a fun time of month. Even worse... running out of pads in a time of need. Luckily someone comes to the rescue, a little too well.

MATTHEW TKACHUK

Surprise Cheerleader Surprises from one party to another during a big Volleyball game.

All-Star Love The NHL All Star weekend is always fun. But bring in a romance… Then that's when it becomes interesting.

GUSTAV NYQUIST

Hey There Delilah Inspired by "Hey There Delilah" by Plain White T's.

NICO HISCHIER

Thanks For The 20 Kiddos Hosting hockey players was normal. Guys that would become brothers. Until him.

Cupid Cousin First game against his old team for your cousin and he wants you there. Luckily some of his ex-teammates are cute.

The Aussie BBQ Experience You finally got to take Nico home to Australia. He got the true experience of an Aussie BBQ.

The Aussie Easter Experience Nico gets to experience an Aussie Easter after being not making the playoffs.

The Aussie Snack Experience As a marketing idea, you get to feature in a video with Nico trying snacks from your home country.

The Aussie Chrissie Experience Since Nico is injured just before Christmas, you head back to Australia for Nico to experience an Aussie Chrissie.

Sorry But I Really Like Her You head to Newark to see your parents new place after avoiding it like the plague. Maybe this time, something with make you want to come back.

We're Not Naked You just wanted some time alone with your partner. Sadly, your brothers are clingy.

Hughes Siblings Acquired (Part 1) Somehow, the New Jersey Devils acquire a player who will fit in well on the team.

Welcome to New Jersey (Part 2) Quinn arrives to New Jersey and has his first training with his brothers and new team.

The Sugar Fix After opening your cafe and bar, a familiar hockey player comes in opening day. Seems like he remembers you too.

JACK HUGHES

Prom Queen Inspired by "Prom Queen" by Molly Kate Kestner.

LUKE HUGHES

Don't Want to Lose You (Part 1) You notice something is wrong with your body. A wrong diagnosis then something you never wanna hear.

Will You Be There When I Wake Up? (Part 2) Two weeks pass and it's time for surgery.

I'd Marry You Tomorrow (Part 3) As a precautionary measure, you follow through with the doctor suggestion to collect eggs. It wasn't as an easy process as you thought.

MACKENZIE BLACKWOOD

Home Inspired by "Home" by Phillip Phillips.

MAT BARZAL

Opening Night For once Mat is your pretty accessory for your big night. Instead of the other way round.

Drunken Mistakes (Part 1) After receiving some bad news, you just wanted to not be alone. After a couple drinks, what most likely is a bad decision, starts to sound too good to miss.

New York Luck (Part 2) After a lovely holiday, your partner breaks up with you and so you turn to your only friend in the city.

CARTER HART

Something In The Orange Inspired by the song "Something In The Orange" by Zach Bryan. Little Miss Klutz Despite you hating your pain link to your soulmate, he had a tendency to look on the brighter side.

BRAYDEN POINT

You’re Not Useless Broken bones and being bed bound can affect you more than physically. Fighting words are thrown between the pair.

STEVEN STAMKOS

WAG Meetings After it's confirmed that the boys will go to playoffs for another season, the WAGs have a meeting to discuss the most exciting part. WAG Jackets.

AUSTON MATTHEWS

My Family A pair of friends reunite with a surprise in store for one of them. Oops, it's a baby.

Bad Day = Cuddles After the worst day you have had in a long time, your boyfriend at home was ready to take care of you.

You're My Favouite A visit to your family goes wrong when Auston meets your Aunt.

MATTHEW KNIES

Halloween Surprise The team's Halloween party seemed like the perfect time to reveal to everyone who you were dating.

MITCH MARNER

God, You’re Amazing A championship game ends up being the best day for multiple people's lives.

Stop Flirting With Marner! A few Leafs spy a figure skater practicing on the ice of the All-Star Arena. After persistent bugging from his friends, one finds himself embarrassing himself to try score a date.

WILLIAM NYLANDER

Flirt With Her Tomorrow A day spent at a stable as a team bonding exercise turns out to be a great place to meet people for some.

Never Letting You Go Again Bumping into exes are always fun. But with a little meddling from a sweet cafe owner who's missed her favourite regulars, some truths are revealed.

ANTHONY BEAUVILLIER

Baking Antics A rainy day means baking and dancing in the kitchen.

Kick Ass Your first time back in a competition and your luck charm definitely helped.

QUINN HUGHES

Support My Girl The final dance concert comes around and you're lucky to have such a supportive family.

SOCIAL MEDIA FIC MASTERLIST

ALL WRITING AND GRAPHICS USED ON THIS POST IS MINE. I CREATED THE VISUALS FOR THIS ON CANVA.

UPDATED: 9/11/23

[zashamalkin]

Translated (by google) text below the cut. 

Several years ago, the star of the Sport channel, Anna Kasterova, gave up her television career for the sake of her family.

Anna's husband Yevgeny Malkin is one of the top US hockey players; he recently knocked out 110 points in the National Hockey League. Moreover, to achieve the record, he needed 43 matches less than Alexander Ovechkin.

Anna shared what it was like to be the wife of a sports star and why she decided to return to work.

About life with a sports star

I'm already used to the constant presence of Eugene's fans in our lives. And I am sympathetic to all kinds of fan manifestations. First, it gives him confidence. Still, feeling like a superman is very important in his profession.

And there were no really awkward situations. I would say that it is more pleasant sensations - when women like your husband, and he is yours. Am I jealous of him? It happens, but it only inflames me even more. In a good way, of course, if you know what I mean.

About the hockey party

When we first moved to the USA, I felt lonely. My husband often traveled with the team, I didn't have much friends in the United States, and I was alone in a big house. I thought that in general I was ready for such cardinal changes, I set myself up, but in fact the first year was difficult.

But the wives of the hockey players in Pittsburgh are very friendly and happy to help. For seven years I have not had a single problem with local girls.

But as far as Russia is concerned, everything is not so simple here. Most of the wives of hockey players with whom I am familiar are educated and intelligent, we have quite secular communication. But here the "tangles" are wound. Personally, I heard unpleasant things about myself, but not in person, of course, for this you need to be very brave.

About career

I do not regret at all that then, five years ago, I decided to devote myself to my family. It is important for me to be close to my husband and son ( Anna and Eugene have a four-year-old son, Nikita - editor's note ). But now I am returning to the profession, I returned to Moscow for a short time. While these are small business trips related to work, in general, my movements still depend on Evgeny's hockey season.

I was waiting for the right moment, I needed an interesting project, a good channel, leadership and team. Everything coincided on Match TV. This opportunity was given to me by Tina Kandelaki . I will always be grateful, she is an incredible woman and a great professional in her field, we are all lucky to work under her supervision.

About family and budget

The son goes to two schools - English and Russian. From me, the emphasis is on education, from dad - on sports, hockey, of course. So far, the three of us are happy with everything, and we plan to expand the composition of the family.

As for money, everything is rational with us. We have everything you need for a comfortable life, but no frills. Eugene is not wasteful, he carefully thinks over large purchases and plans a family budget. He does not refuse me anything, but in terms of spending, we have the same understanding. I also do not like to waste money, because I see how hard it gets to him.

[burning-up-ao3]

Anna Kasterova became the guest of Pavel Strizhevsky in the 3rd ep of the podcast NHL.com/RU*

Podcast "Overboard": the main lessons of episode 3

(*note: I used google translate, so take it fwiw)

Posted by Pavel Strizhevsky @PStrizhevskyNHL

/ Browser NHL.com/en

December 1, 2019

I happened to go to Pittsburgh to record the third episode of the “Overboard” podcast - home to the Penguins center forward Evgeni Malkin and his charming wife Anna Kasterova. Almost an hour-long conversation with a well-known TV presenter on the Rossiya-2 channel turned out to be very saturated: they recalled the love story of Zhenya with Anya, and her own bright career, which Kasterova misses to this day, and about the difficulties of living together with a superstar athlete , and much more. Here are the five most memorable fragments of this interview to me.

1. "At first I perceived Zhenya as just a good cool kid"

Anna retells the story of her acquaintance with her future husband via SMS as if she were still surprised. “In fact, it happened: Zhenya saw me on TV, found the phone and wrote an SMS,” Kasterova smiled. “I can’t say that I feel very good at people, but I knew many athletes well before. They constantly slipped through on the air: football players, hockey players, athletes, that is, I already had some kind of already formed impression of Zhenya Malkin, and when he first wrote, I can’t say that I didn’t know him at all: he was already a serious enough top an athlete who is well-known to everyone, but at that moment I perceived e it’s just like a good cool kid. I’ll not hide that at that time many tried to write to me, to meet through someone else. And these were, let's say, serious personalities. That is, Zhenya had a competition. As a result, probably some kind of intuition worked out. I'm still not a fool, and, of course, I understood what he was pushing towards, but on my part at first it was purely friendly virtual communication. They began to communicate more densely only after the unsuccessful performance of the Russian team at the Olympics in Sochi. After her, Eugene flew to Moscow for one day, was all in a broken and depressed state. He called me and said: "Can I see you? I feel really bad."

2. "At first it was hard, but now Pittsburgh is my home. And Moscow is the guests."

“When the question arose of choosing whether to continue work, a career at home, or he, I seriously thought, weighed everything. I, you know, were not 15 years old. Were there moments when I reflected on this? There were. Any family can’t everything is smooth. There were different moments. When we look after a person, when we have a romantic period, we are alone. And when we start to rub ourselves together and face some everyday issues ... Given that Zhenya is a superstar, he It’s its own specificity of behavior, despite the fact that he is a very kind, sympathetic and wonderful person to, he has his own impulses. Including impulses of aggression - in the sense that he can break out, say something sharp. I was not ready for some things. Plus, given my then depressed state, pregnancy, hormones It’s not easy for me, but he’s done, how could he supported me, and we overcame all this. And now my house is here. And Moscow is already guests. "

[See also: Pittsburgh Has Super Three Again ]

3. "When Nikita was born, Zhenya just matured in a swoop"

“With the advent of Nikita, both of us have changed a lot. First, responsibility. Before, for example, I couldn’t fasten my seatbelt at all. Especially if I could quickly get to the store. Moscow habit, what to do. Here, life is more even , there’s no need to hurry up somewhere, and you have time to pay attention to such a nuance as to fasten your seatbelt in a car. It seems to me that Eugene generally matured in a snap when Nikita was born. Once, for example, from him such phrase was voiced that if we must fly somewhere without Nikita, then we must fly separately, so that, if God forbid, something happens, then not with both parents at once. Probably, he had such hypersensitivity, but it was then that I realized

4. "I still feel part of the profession"

On July 2, Anna posted a post on instagram congratulating her colleagues on the day of sports journalism and admitted that she still misses television work.

“I still maintain relationships with many colleagues, ranging from leading and ending with top management of those holdings in which I worked,” Kasterova says. “Plus, I periodically review the proposals that come in. And, of course, I feel involved in sports journalism I follow both sports and our media, and I’m not losing the mood that in the future some of my projects will be related to the sports industry.

On the other hand, of course, I really miss the profession, and I miss some kind of self-realization. How can I try to compensate for this with some rare interviews or appearances in the frame. But, of course, all this does not make up for the professional loss that has occurred. "

5. Been dreaming of becoming a TV presenter since childhood.

“According to the stories of my mother, grandparents, it was very funny,” recalls Anna. “Grandfather every night at eight or nine o'clock turned on the news on the second or first channel. And I kept parodying these presenters. I remember that my grandmother the bedroom had such a large mirror, and I took something like a microphone and tried to imitate the broadcast, and I really liked it.

My education is more social: I am a psychologist. And it, by the way, subsequently helped me a lot. This, in my opinion, is a very universal entity. But at some point I realized that there was only one life, and I had to try to realize my dreams. Moreover, I have the strength, the young lady I am purposeful and ambitious. It was difficult, but I am proud of my success, because I myself understand what enormous work was done, what I had to go through. And hands fell, and there was no money, and worked just as an intern when you are not put at all. And I took off some construction sites, and at night I went out to shoot ... But nothing, I managed it, and I am very proud of myself. "

You can hear all this and much more from the lips of Anna Kasterova herself in the third episode of the “Overboard” podcast, which you can subscribe to on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Google and other popular platforms.

[thesportssoundoff]

The 2018 UFC Calendar That Remains And One Man’s Stupid Attempt To Book It

Joey

July 23rd

Before we begin, I began this project the day before the UFC's debut in Boise. I figured all things considered it would take me about a week give or take to flesh this whole thing out. It took me a week JUST to get through October. I got to the Denver show on Friday and that was when the UFC dropped all sorts of news about Edgar/Korean Zombie and Mike Perry/Donald Cerrone co-headlining said show. I haven't edited it. I'm not going to edit it. IF ANYTHING, I think not touching what I did before Friday is an important piece of the puzzle. Nothing really puts this project into perspective like having to look at what you did and then something immediately changing that renders it moot. Everything AFTER the UFC in Denver was done pretty much on Sunday night.

The UFC released their schedule this week for the rest of the year. There's a lot of fights upcoming, perhaps more than you can shake a stick at. You're talking 14 events, 7 in the US, 1 in Russia, 1 in China, 2 in South America (Brazil and probably Argentina), 2 in Canada and 1 in the always cool Australia. If you give the UFC it's usual average of 12 fights a show then you're looking at probably 168 fights across the course of four months. We've got 3 in September, 2 in October, 5 in November and 4 in December which is about close-ish to what we got last year. Of course two of those cards are on Fight Pass, one is on Big Fox, five are on PPV and unless I'm mistaken the remaining 6 are on FS1. I did this in the beginning of the year (foolishly I might add) but now with the year coming to a close, I might as well take one final swing at it am I right? Here's my belief on what we're going to get from the UFC to close out 2018 from show to show and as Brock Lesnar once lovingly said "From sea to shining sea!"

September 8th

Dallas, Texas

UFC 228

Main Event: Tyron Woodley vs Colby Covington

Co-Main Event: Valentina Shevchenko vs Nicco Montano

There's really nothing immediately on the docket to feel comfortable about as a headliner.  A natural-ish fit would be Ortega vs Holloway in a rebooking but Holloway's return to action is unknown. Jeremy Stephens, if he beats Aldo of course, could fight Edgar or Ortega for an interim title fight here if need be. Frankie is apparently a week away from being able to train again so an early July to early September set up is plenty of time for a dude who is  well known for his ability to be ready regardless of the circumstances. Already announced we have Zhabit/Yair and Jon Dodson vs Jimmie Rivera plus it seems pretty likely that Montano vs Shevchenko is getting announced soon-ish. That's not a main event and shouldn't be confused as such BUT it could be a respectable #2 on the bill.

September 15th

Moscow, Russia

UFC Fight Night

Main Event: Mark Hunt vs Aleksei Olynik

Co-Main Event: Shamil Abdurakhimov vs Andrei Arlovski

Consider this a mild, tepid dipping of the toe into the Russian fight market. The UFC's first event in Russia is a Fight Pass card; not even cracking the likes of FS1 or a PPV setting. While China got Anderson Silva and Kelvin Gastelum, Russia was getting Fabricio Werdum and Alexey Oleynik. That's still a fine main event but clearly not on the same level as the perceived GOAT and the top MW prospect in the division. That fight got USADA'd and in its place, we got Hunt vs Oleynik which is totally fine. A co-main event of Curtis Blaydes vs Alexander Volkov fell apart with Blaydes being hurt and Volkov opting to get paid to weigh in as a UFC 226 replacement. The UFC cut prices before the event to, in so many words, allow for poor people to get into the event and seats apparently are going to be at your standard UFC Fight Pass levels where they open up the bowl sections and ground floor only. There's been some rumors of the likes of Islam Makachev, Jorge Masvidal, Jimi Manuwa, Petr Yan, Nikita Krylov and Mairbek Taisumov (!) all getting a chance to fight but I'm betting when all's said and done, we're looking at Arlovski and Abdurakhimov being our co-main event of the evening. Or morning depending on where you are.

September 22nd

Sao Paolo, Brazil

UFC Fight Night

Main Event: John Lineker vs Raphael Assuncao

Co-Main Event: Alex "Cowboy" Oliveira vs Neil Magny

The UFC's brazilian ranks are being casually wiped out be it due to injuries, ineffectiveness, fighters leaving or retiring. The last show of the year from Brazil needs A GUY but finding A GUY who can headline is sort of tough in this market. The one thing I hold steadfast is the possibility that they could actually try giving a female fighter a chance to headline (Gadelha vs Calderwood at 125 lbs was something I thought of). I even figured Demian Maia is always like a phone call away as well but I can't think of a guy I'm excited to see him fight (or just a guy for him to fight at all). Gimme Lineker vs Assuncao in a true #1 contender fight since Marlon Moraes' two amazing highlight reel KOs probably vaults him about Raphael even with the loss. Also keep an eye on Formiga vs Pettis here as well since it's a natural "no shit" #1 contender fight at flyweight.

October 6th

Las Vegas, Nevada

UFC 229

Main Event: Conor McGregor vs Khabib Nurmagomedov

Co-Main Event: Holly Holm vs Ketlein Vieira

We've already got the unofficial official announcements of Sean O'Malley and Frankie Edgar/Korean Zombie for Vegas. One of the rumors going around is that the UFC plans on doing something, likely an interim placeholder title, for Holm vs Vieira. If so, you should absolutely do it on THIS card because the only way you're going to get folks excited about that fight is if it's got a McGregor-esque support attached to it. Conor vs Khabib will probably happen this year, if not in October then I'd bet in MSG. Conor vs Khabib IMO is a serious test of what is or isn't a big buyrate these days. The last BIG fight we had was Gennady-Canelo which did (IMO) a somewhat surprisingly meh 1.2 million----and this should beat that and comfortably. If it doesn't then we've got shit to talk about. Conor/Khabib, Holm/Vieira, Edgar/Zombie, O'Malley plus Darren Till (who apparently is a lock for this card) seems like a damn good top 5 to me.

October 27th

Moncton, Canada

Fight Night on FS1

Main Event: Rafael Dos Anjos vs Kamaru Usman

Co-Main Event: Ilir Latifi vs the winner of Glover Teix/Corey Anderson

I don't know what necessarily is in Moncton but the UFC tries in theory to go to new markets and bring special cards. The problem is they always tend to get picked apart due to injuries. As for this card? Well there were rumors that Usman vs RDA was the next fight to make in the Fall sometime and this seems like a fine enough time for it. Usman could also be a sleeper for the 170 lb title picture if there's an injury or whatever. As for the co-main? By all accounts Ilir is expected to be back in the middle of the Fall and so I'm betting this could be a good enough time. Latifi vs the winner of Glover/Corey Anderson isn't a perfect fight but there are worse fights to be co-main events. If anything it's a relevant fight at a division that's still trying to figure out what relevant is. Throw in PVZ vs Rachael Ostovich (come on now it HAS to happen) and Elias Theodorou for good measure for main card related purposes.

November 3rd

New York, New York

UFC 230

Main Event: Jon Jones vs Daniel Cormier

Co-Main Event: Brian Ortega vs the Jeremy Stephens/Jose Aldo winner or Max Holloway Third title fight: Cody Garbrandt/TJ Dillashaw winner vs Marlon Moraes Yoel Romero vs Ovince St. Preux Chris Weidman vs Paolo Costa

I'm betting that we're going to get the Jon Jones news any day now of a one year suspension redacted to July. If so, I'm betting the UFC puts Jones vs DC together with Cormier knowing that win or lose, the Brock fight awaits. DC seems really open to fighting at 205 lbs in the interim while he waits for Brock so I'm guessing/betting that if it's not Jones then it's a Shogun or a Gus here in this spot. The co-main event is a little more....prickly. Until I hear something about Max Holloway, I'm going to continue to believe that the rumors about him suffering something traumatic during his weight cut are true enough for me to not think we see him again this year. That means Ortega's going to have to fight somebody for the belt and if so, the winner of Stephens/Aldo lines up pretty damn well time wise. If Stephens knocks off Aldo then he'll have earned this shot no questions asked. The third title fight (because MSG tradition says three) was a toss up between Mighty Mouse coming back, the rumored Nunes/Cyborg fight or the TJ/Cody winner. Marlon Moraes is coming off of TWO 1st round finishes of the highest order and I think that puts him above Assuncao who has a better overall resume (and the win tie breaker) but no flashy "This is my title shot" moment. Moraes has that. As for the rest of the main card? Yoel Romero vs Gus seems like THE perfect fight to make but Gustafsson is seemingly not up for a Romero clash. That could in turn open the door for Romero vs OSP since they seem to gel up timeline wise (Romero had surgery, OSP has a family matter he's dealing with). Chris Weidman vs Paolo Costa is a rumored fight the UFC wants to put together for MSG and I'd be totally okay with that fight for both guys.  Throw in some "names" on the undercard and this card could/should be the 2nd biggest show of the year. If Jones vs DC III with two title fights doesn't get people excited then I'm not sure what else there is to offer y'all.

November 10th

Denver, Colorado

25th Anniversary Fight Night

Main Event: Tony Ferguson vs Dustin Poirier/Eddie Alvarez loser

Co-Main Event: Donald Cerrone vs Mike Perry (at 170)/Kevin Lee (at 155)

The UFC has built a whole marketing promotion for this one so this show might get a big damn deal. Tony Ferguson vs the loser of Poirier/Alvarez seems like a natural-ish fit for this card given that Ferguson is expected to be back by the end of 2018. Ferguson isn't getting the Khabib/Conor winner and I get the feeling that if Poirier wins, he's getting the title shot. This is a damn important stay busy fight at lightweight for both guys. As for Cerrone vs Perry? Donald Cerrone is a big deal in Colorado and if he stays at WW, this is a damn good fight for him. Otherwise? I like Cerrone vs Kevin Lee as a fight if Cerrone TRULY wants to try 155 lbs again. He shouldn't but if he does? Good fit for me. I like this fight a bunch. Throw in Sage Northcutt (!!!!!!!), Chad Mendes vs Mirsad Bektic, Do Bronz Oliveira vs David Teymur, Cat Zingano vs Rocky Pennington and the Rivera/Dodson winner vs Alejandro Perez and we're off to the races!

November 17th

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Fight Night

Main Event: Santiago Ponzinibbio vs Leon Edwards

Co-Main EVent: Dominick Reyes vs Jan Blachowicz

Take two! The UFC heads into Argentina (after flirting with a November 2017/Feb 2018 visit) and with Ponz healthy and ready to go, I'd imagine Argentina is about to experience a Ponzi Scheme. Ya like that? I like it. Ponzinnibio vs Edwards feels like a great piece of matchmaking given their respective winning streaks and the fact that Till, Covington and Usman have all leapfrogged them in the division. Good easy work here. The co-main is more about finding out what Dominick Reyes CAN'T do at this point. I've seen him steamroll dudes with enough ease to get a little curious/froggy as to what necessarily else he's got for us. I am, dare I say, intrigued. Jan has proven himself again after an up and down UFC run. The time is now and it'll never be more ready than now for thesetwo. Blachowicz might even be overqualified for the job but who cares? There's plenty of fun developing Latin American talent to find a spot for on this show, like Julio Arce, Moggly Benitez, Vicente Luque (Brazilian with Chilean roots), the eternally underrated Enrique Barzola and some of the other fine Latin American fighters in the UFC and trying to get into the UFC.

November 24th

Shanghai, China

UFC Fight Night (likely on Fight Pass)

Main Event: Francis Ngannou vs Marcin Tybura

Co-Main Event: Walt Harris vs the Arlovski/Shamil Adburahkhimov winner

Would the UFC try to run back Anderson Silva in China? I'm not sure they wouldn't consider it. As more and more decent Chinese fighters start to filter into the UFC, the Chinese market seems to actually be on the verge of finally breaking through.  If there's one thing the UFC is frequently "good" at; it's sending big dudes to foreign markets to try and appeal to casual audiences with size. With the likes of Song Yadong, Li Jingliang, Guan Wang, Kenan Song and some of the Chinese female mixed martial artists at the ready; the undercard should be loaded up with local-ish talent who can be relied upon for undercard support. With that being laid down? Go big at the top. I can't think of a more direct message to send to Francis Ngannou than to put him on a Fight Pass event while still getting max value out of him with a big main event for an international crowd. Ngannou vs Tybura is a fine test for Francis and it trumps a rumored JDS fight which doesn't make a whole bunch of sense given that JDS is coming off his first win in forever while Ngannou has dropped two in a row.  Throw in a Yushin Okami fight as well just to confirm you hate your audience. We all know you do! Also would be totally down for Li Jingliang vs Chad Laprise or someone of that ilk.

November 30th

Las Vegas, Nevada

TUF Finale

Main Event: Derrick Lewis vs Justin Willis

Co-Main Event: One of the TUF Finales (below that though and another TUF finale, Brad Tavares vs Thiago Marreta)

If big dudes throwing punches isn't your thing then November might be a rough month for y'all. I ALMOST went with JDS here but I'll pass on that one to be honest. Lewis vs Justin Willis is a good test for Willis and with a lengthy stretch of time off, the Black Beast can maybe get his back right. Wouldn't be opposed to Mark Hunt vs Lewis II either. This is the last TUF of all time and it features HWs so might as well give them a HW fight too.

December 1st

Adelaide, Australia

Fight Night

Main Event: Israel Adesanya vs Derek Brunson

Co-Main Event: Alexander Volkanovski vs Josh Emmett

The Australian/Kiwi/NZ fighter's revolution is still off and popping. Right on time too as the UFC is heading to Australia in December with dudes like Tai Tuavasa, Dan Hooker, Alexander Volkanovski, Jessica Rose Clark and Israel Adesanya at the top of the run. RIGHT off the jump we've got a problem as Yoel Romero and Luke Rockhold are out of the division, Weidman and Costa are matched up, Jacare and Brunson are matched up and you've got Gastelum waiting on Whittaker. That in turn leads us to Adesanya vs Derek Brunson win or lose vs Shoeface. At this point I feel like Adesanya has been sped up so fast that it's basically a lock that he'll take on a Brunson type next. That brings us to the co-main where it's time for Volkanovski to get a bigger name. Dude's earned this shot. Volkanovski vs Emmett makes sense or even Volkanovski vs Lamas, Bektic or any of THOSE guys would be damn cool. Throw in Tai Tuavasa vs a fun punching bag and you've got one hell of a top three and Tyson Pedro vs Devin Clark too.

December 8th

Toronto, Canada

UFC 231

Main Event: Rose Namajunas vs Karolina Kowalkiewicz/Jessica Andrade winner

Co-Main Event: Junior Dos Santos vs Mark Hunt 2 Anderson Silva vs Uriah Hall Stephen Thompson vs Gunnar Nelson Jordan Mein vs Michael Chiesa

The UFC is going to try and give Toronto something special. This SEEMED on paper like the perfect spot to roll out the Whittaker vs Gaselum title fight but Rob is out into February. An interim fight here doesn't make much sense I guess. The best option is probably the most likely option and that's going to be a 115 lb title fight at the top of the bill. In the mean time and in between time, I'm a big fan of the idea of giving the strawweight division EVERY chance to succeed. Maybe a 115 lb title fight won't draw a major crowd on its own but JDS vs Mark Hunt 2 and Anderson Silva (!) makes for a damn fine balance of options across the board for a main card. Throw in two good WW fights plus every Canadian under the sun in the prelim spots and I think we're good to go here!

December 15th

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

UFC on Fox

Main Event: Alexander Gustafsson vs Luke Rockhold

Co-Main Event: Anthony Pettis vs Al Iaquinta

Outside of just popping a number for old time's sake, the UFC really has no incentive to do anything "big" here. It's a finale for Fox, one last chance for them and the UFC to put on a good show before Fox goes into bed with pro bowling and the UFC moves on to ESPN. The main event is a fine enough rebooking as Rockhold's debut at 205 vs Alexander Gustafsson still SEEMS like a pretty great idea. It's not a Milwaukee showcase without Anthony Pettis as the dude looks to continue his career rebuild at 155 lbs. I'm not entirely all in on yet on his return BUT I'm loving the idea of it. I ALMOST went with Mighty Mouse here vs Sergio Pettis as the main event but I don't know if that fight happens on Fox since there's really no major incentive for it to be on Fox. Throw in Mackenzie Dern vs Jessica Aguilar in a showcase fight/test for Dern and Edson Barboza vs David Teymur and we should be fine enough to go here.

December 29th

Las Vegas, Nevada

UFC 229

Main Event: Amanda Nunes vs Cris Cyborg

Co-Main Event: TJ/Cody loser vs Dominick Cruz

Carlos Condit vs Robbie Lawler Cynthia Calvillo vs Michelle Waterson Khalil Rountree vs Jimi Manuwa

And so we might as well end the year hot. With the final show in Vegas, it sure seems like some form of Nunes vs Cyborg is happening. In truth it's the biggest fight that WMMA can conjure up currently so I have no issue with that. Beyond that though? I think no fight is going to sell like that one will so you might as well support the undercard for thee last remaining WMMA anti-fans. Don't want to see Nunes vs Cyborg? Well how about a rematch of the best WW fight ever @ your mom about it? Lawler should be back by then and Condit has already said he wants one more go of it at 170 lbs. If ANY fight is going to get people up for one last final run, it's that one. TJ or Cody vs Dom Cruz buys us some time for Assuncao and company to maybe get a title fight in the interim. That and TJ vs Cruz 2 still has some high upside appeal to me. Calvillo vs Waterson may not appeal to everybody but Waterson is usually in a fun fight and I'm still high up on Calvillo's upside. Khalil Rountree probably fights four times between now and this show but I really think Rountree vs Manuwa can be a bonkers striking battle. Throw in Zhabit Magomedsharipov, Claudia Gadelha vs Felice Herrig, some combination of DWTCS guys, a HW fight of a high caliber and plenty of fake rumors about a second title fight and we're off to the races!

[rrrawrf-writes]

6 or 21 or 49? or two of three? or all?

THIS IS SO FREAKING LONG AND I ONLY DID TWO OF THEM

49. “Safety first. What are you? FIVE?”

6. “I need a place to stay.”

for this thing from like a month or more ago (i’ll take more requests if anyone wants to send me some :K). hey so jess, remember when we were talking about how eli would recruit an ex-KGB dude and make him an honorary uncle?

you’re welcome.

“Get your seatbelt on, Tati,” Eli said, working to strap Nikita into her booster seat even while she kept trying to float away. “Nikita, this isn’t funny, you need to stop.”

Her snickers stated that she clearly thought otherwise. By the time Eli was done securing one girl, though, his other still hadn’t put her seatbelt on. He frowned at Tatiana from the other side of the car.

“I don’t want to, the seatbelt hurts my neck,” Tati complained, kicking her feet against the driver’s seat in front of her.

“Use the, uh, the frog thing. The seatbelt adjuster.”

“That hurts my neck too!”

“Everything hurts your neck,” Eli muttered under his breath, in Russian so that Tati wouldn’t understand. “The frog is all we have, sweetheart. Safety first, remember? What are you, five?”

“I’m eight!” Tati shouted, far louder than necessary.

“I’m five!” Nikita said eagerly, sticking five fingers into Eli’s face.

“No, you aren’t,” Tati huffed, “you’re six.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Eli grinned and leaned his elbow on the back of the seat in front of Nikita. “Well, if you aren’t five, you need to get your seatbelt on, ‘cause otherwise I’m gonna have to put you back in a car seat. Like a five-year-old.”

“Noooo!”

While Tatiana scrambled for her seatbelt, Eli reached across Nikita’s lap to triple-check Siope’s carseat, jiggling to make sure it was secure in the middle seat. It still astonished him how quiet the eighteen-month-old was, even a year after adopting him. Siope sat there in his car seat, staring at his adopted sisters and sucking on his fingers.

Eli finally backed out of the SUV, pushing the back door close on Nikita trying to put a neon green barrette in her thick black hair. He moved around the front of the car, and stopped short at the sudden view of a man leaning against the driver’s side door.

He hadn’t been there a second ago.

Alexei was a grey, grizzled older man, and yet, Eli knew from experience that he, himself, could never keep up with the veteran agent. About six inches shorter than Eli, Alexei had salt-and-pepper hair and a short-cropped beard, and a sly, crooked grin Eli had been wild about when they worked together.

Right now, though, his first instinct was to punch it off Alexei’s face, and then throw him on the first plane back to Moscow.

“What are you doing here,” Eli hissed. Alexei shouldn’t be here - he shouldn’t even know Eli was here -

Alexei crossed his arms over his chest. “Wow. The pink hair looks good on you, Sasha.”

“Get out of here.”

“I just got here.”

“And now you’re leaving.” Eli stormed forward, even though he knew it was fruitless. Alexei’s ice-blue eyes - which were never still, always on the lookout for danger - flicked back to Eli, and then Alexei flashed out of existence.

He reappeared just a couple feet away, near the end of the SUV, and grinned cheekily, leaning his elbow against the vehicle. “I have some business to do here, Sasha, and you’re going to help me.”

“No, I’m not.”

Alexei’s smile was warm and indulgent, as if speaking to a small child. He had to look up to meet Eli’s gaze, and yet, Eli felt like a rookie all over again, scrambling to keep up with the veterans who knew what they were doing.

“…You crossed a line,” Eli said flatly, breaking the short silence. “Our lives are our own, Alexei.”

“You told me to look you up if I ever ended up here in America,” Alexei reminded him, bracing a foot against the care tire.

“I told you to call, not track me down like this!”

“Eh.” Alexei gave an expressive shrug. “Semantics. With an attitude like that, I would have expected you to be living in a castle with a moat, Sasha, not this cute little neighborhood.”

His Russian accent was heavy, and Eli could already feeling his own thickening in reply. “I won’t tell you again, Alexei. Leave.”

Alexei cut him a look, then placed a hand on one hip, nudging the edge of his open jacket back. Eli caught a perfect glance of a pistol, comfortably nestled on his hip, and then Alexei disappeared.

He didn’t need Tatiana’s sudden shriek to know where Alexei had disappeared to.

Eli wrenched the back door to his car open again. Alexei sat in the last row of seats, his elbows propped on the back of the middle row. He flashed Eli a grin.

“Daddy, who is that?” Tati demanded, at twice her normal volume - which was already pretty close to unbearable. Eli wanted to yell, too.

“Get out,” he snarled, and not even he was sure who he was talking to: Alexei, or his kids.

“Don’t be like that.” Alexei gave Eli a warm look. “I didn’t know you had such a full house, Sasha.”

He spoke in Russian now.

“Alexei,” Eli started, his voice a low growl, but the other man cut him off.

“Get in the car and drive, Sasha.”

Eli got in the car.His hands shook as he gripped the steering wheel. “What’s wrong?” Tatiana kept asking, and soon Nikita began to pick up on her sister’s fretting and started pulling at her booster seat straps. Siope just chewed on his stuffed puppy.

“It’s fine, Tati,” Eli finally gritted out, pulling away from the curb. “He’s -”

Eli could not even force the word friend out, even though he and Alexei had been surprisingly close, for a Russian agent and a bodyguard-for-hire. This was why people were always telling him to stop making friends, Eli thought. “We’re just giving him a ride.”

Eli’s phone, sitting in the cupholder, jingled with a text message. Alexei glanced in Eli’s rearview mirror, and said, “Please hand that here.”

Eli set his jaw. One of Alexei’s hands disappeared from view, and swearing under his breath, Eli grabbed the phone and awkwardly held it out towards the back when they reached the next stop sign. Alexei leaned forward to grab it with a benign smile and a cheerful “Спасибо, Sasha.”

“Daddy,” Tatiana whined for the thousandth time in the last two minutes. “Dad, I gotta go to school, I got a project.”

“No, I know, we’re going there first,” Eli said, and then shifted gears back into Russian. “Are you alone?”

“Yes,” Alexei said, but Eli didn’t really trust him. He left his stomach behind as he drove down the street.

When they pulled up to the school, Tati had abandoned her fears, and was enthusiastically explaining all about her school project to Alexei.

He listened gravely, his arms crossed neatly along the back of the seat, hands always empty, and always in sight. Had the circumstances been different, Eli would have been pleasantly surprised and even heartwarmed by Alexei paying such serious attention to Nikita reciting all the states (that she could remember), and even applauding her at the end of it. But now, all Eli felt was a sickening rage.

He barely kept his voice level when they reached the school. Alexei whistled as Eli curbed the minivan, earning a sour look from a nearby mother dropping off her own child. The — Russian’s arrival had made them almost late - the warning bell rang as Eli buttoned up Nikita’s weighted jacket.

“ByeDadloveyou!” Tati blurted, all in a rush. She gave Eli’s knees a quick hug, then grabbed Nikita by the hand and dragged her towards the school. Eli didn’t have a chance to stop them, to speak, to do anything more than hope desperately that Alexei would leave them alone.

“Private school,” Alexei noted, as Eli got back into the car, slamming the door shut. “Interesting.”

Eli glared at him in the rearview mirror. Alexei was leaning over Siope’s carseat with half a smile. He reached down to brush a lock of Siope’s curly black hair out of the toddler’s eyes.

For a moment, Eli couldn’t breathe.

“Alexei,” he said softly. “If you touch my children again, I will kill you.”

Alexei looked up, startlement on his face for a split second. After a moment, he nodded.

“Get in the front seat.”

Obediently, Alexei flickered himself into the shotgun seat, his blue eyes shooting Eli a quick, wary look.

“Where are we going?” Eli bit out, staring straight ahead. Alexei slouched in his seat, making himself comfortable.

“Denver.”

Eli sent him another look. “Alexei - I can’t go that far, I gotta pick up the girls -”

“It’s been handled.” Alexei held up Eli’s phone. “Your husband is picking them up.”

“You texted Daniel?” Eli yelped, and very nearly ran a stop sign. He slammed on the brakes, driving a surprised oof out of Alexei. A couple joggers crossing the street shot him a dirty look.

“Was that wrong?” Alexei asked innocently. “I thought -”

“We’re getting divorced!” Eli kept his foot firmly on the brakes and snatched at his phone. “Give that to me!”

Alexei stuck his hand out the window, holding the phone out of reach. “Who should I contact, then?”

Eli seethed. How did Alexei even know about Daniel? “Text Rebecca. Tell her -”

“I got it,” Alexei said, already tapping away at the phone. “I do not need you sending out any secret messages to your compatriots, Sasha.”

Eli clenched his jaw. “Make sure you tell Daniel he’s not needed.”

“Specifically like that?”

Eli glared at him.

“He wants to go out for dinner on Sunday,” Alexei added.

“No.”

“I told him six was fine.”

Siope fell asleep during the drive. Eli, who, according to everyone else at work, drove like a grandma, went even slower than usual. The drivers whipping around him seemed far more upset about his snail’s pace than Alexei, who merely followed Siope’s lead.

He woke up the instant when Eli slowed to take the next exit to Denver. Eli glanced sidelong at him, then said, “You need to tell me what’s going on.”

Alexei sighed. “I am tracking someone,” he said, taking off his grey cap to run his fingers through his hair. “Some…thing.”

“In Denver?”

Alexei shrugged. “Eh, probably.”

“Probably?” Eli repeated. “What if it’s not?”

“Then we’ll go find it.”

“We?” Eli stared at Alexei. “What if I don’t want to be your driver?”

“What makes you think you have a choice?” Alexei replied in a warm tone. He turned his head just enough to glance into the backseat, and Eli forgot how to breathe again.

He didn’t say another word to Alexei as they reached the city. Alexei reached down into the bag at his feet, pulling out a weird device that looked like a handheld game console cobbled together from decades-old computer pieces. He kept the screen angled from Eli, and hit a button along one side.

A quiet, but piercingly high, tone emitted from the device. It slid higher in pitch, until Eli could no longer hear it - but then Siope suddenly jerked awake and started whimpering.

“What is that thing?” Eli demanded. He reached down between the front seats, rummaging blindly through a diaper bag for one of Siope’s other toys. “What’s it doing?”

“He can probably still hear the tone,” Alexei mused. “Take a right.”

“What is it doing?” Eli repeated, leaning back and driving with one hand as he tossed the toy into Siope’s lap. “Is it hurting him?”

“Tracking,” Alexei grunted, “but it must be activated to be trackable. Go faster, Sasha, you drive like my great-aunt.”

Eli scowled. “What are you tracking?” he asked, but Alexei’s only answer was, “Go left.”

They meandered through the city for some time. Siope’s fussing finally calmed, and Alexei had just directed Eli onto a quiet street when he said, “We are close. Get ready.”

“For what?” Eli complained. “You haven’t told me anything, Alexei.”

It was a very nice section of the business district: office buildings surrounded a tiny park that was barely more than a median for the cul-de-sac. Parking lots were hidden from view, and only a scattering of vehicles parked along the curb. Alexei stuck to his tradition of keeping information to himself, his eyes fixed on the screen of his device.

“This is a sluggish one,” he commented, as Eli crawled the minivan down the street and towards the exit to a busier section of town. An unmarked moving van sat along the curb just ahead of them. As Eli drove closer, it exploded.

He slammed on the brakes. The car skidded to a stop, and Eli’s first instinct was to throw it in reverse and back up.

“Alexei,” he snarled - but Alexei was gone. Stomach dropping, Eli looked into the back seat.

Siope was gone, too, carseat and all. Eli swore viciously, just as something massive dropped onto the hood of his vehicle, crumpling it into scrap metal.

Eli had no idea what he was looking at. A massive - thing - crouched on the front of his car, a bristling mass of machinery, flesh, and fur.Eli blankly thought it might have been a bear, once.

The might-once-have-been-a-bear smashed its giant paws through the windshield and ripped Eli out of the car.

He hit the ground, hard, on his back, and stared up at the blue sky for one stunned moment. He’d reflexively changed to metal sometime before impact, but there were gouges in his skin around his collarbone, from where the monster had grabbed him. He hadn’t been quite fast enough.

The monster was still smashing about on top of his van, reducing it to nothing more than a heap of trash.

“I’m gonna kill you, ‘Lex,” Eli muttered, picking himself up off the ground. He brushed his titanium earring, switching from steel, and then threw himself at the weird animal/machine.

The two of them tumbled off the car and onto the sidewalk that ran along the park. Eli rolled away from the beast, scrambling to his feet. Ignoring the sharp flashes of pain from the scratches on his chest, he barrelled into the monster again, before it could properly right itself.

This time, instead of blindly using himself as a wrecking ball, Eli grappled for a handhold, and found one in a bunch of wires looping out of the beast’s arm.

“This is disgusting,” Eli muttered, as the bear-machine roared at him and tried to shake him off. He tore the wires out of the thing’s skin.

Blood and oil spurted out. The awful machine-flesh beast let out a tremendous roar of pain that rattled Eli’s brain in his skull, before it reared up on its back legs and threw him off.

He landed on his side, cracking the cement on impact, but rolled up to his feet before he had even lost momentum. Eli brushed his fingers over his bloodied chest, grimacing, but the cuts weren’t deep, and it seemed like the bear-machine couldn’t cut his skin in this form, even when Eli was pretty sure the thing had serrated knives for claws.

The beast roared at him again, its voice tinny and unearthly. It lumbered towards him on all fours, dripping blood and glistening black oil all down its forearm. Eli braced himself to meet it - but then a peppering of gunshots rang out, smattering against the beast’s side.

It reared to face this new threat, snarling, but even bullets didn’t seem to have much effect. Alexei stood across the street, a pistol in each hand, and grinned at Eli before he disappeared.

He flashed back on the other side of the bear, under a tree, and shot at it again. It turned in confusion, and snarled again. While it changed direction to chase after Alexei instead - thankfully it couldn’t seem to go even half as fast as an actual bear - Eli barreled into its side.

He didn’t realize that the freaky machine had gotten bigger until they were rolling over each other in the grass, the monster roaring and trying to carve him to pieces. Its sharp claws scraped against his metallic skin, slicing through his jacket like butter. Eli ended up beneath it, and struggled for breath as the bear took his arm in its mouth and bit down.

It did nothing except make Eli incredibly grossed out, as blood and saliva coated him. He struggled to shove the thing off, and then he found himself being lifted off the ground. The beast stood on its hind legs, swung its head, and threw Eli into the third floor of an office building.

He smashed through the glass windows, several cubicles, and a ceiling support. People were screaming and scrambling to get out of the path of destruction; one woman cowering behind a water cooler asked in a shrill voice, “Are - Are you okay?”

“M’ fine,” Eli growled. He really was - he might have a few bruises, but nothing worse than that. He swiped some of the blood and grease off his face, then moved to the gaping hole in the wall of glass windows that he had created.

He could see Alexei below, infuriating the beast with scattered gunshots. It didn’t seem to be very useful, and Eli wanted to throttle him. How could Alexei drag him and his son on a hunt like this, without even a plan to stop whatever this damn thing even was!

He was about to drop out of the building, when the shards of glass all around him suddenly lit up with brilliant rainbow lights, almost blinding.

“Gemglow!” someone said behind him. Eli could see her, after a moment of searching: Diamonique stood on someone’s car, now looking a little dented from the fight between the monster and the constantly-disappearing Alexei. Her trademark spears of crystal hovered around her in the air, glowing vibrant colors. The shards of broken window around Eli’s feet soon joined them, one particularly large piece of glass slicing carelessly along his jacket sleeve and ripping it open.

Alexei must have seen Diamonique, too, because he stopped his constant flickering, right in front of a thick-boled tree in the middle of the little park. The monster - it was definitely bigger now, as big as Eli’s van used to be - rushed him. Alexei emptied both his guns into the monster’s face as it barreled towards him, but the thing didn’t so much as flinch. Alexei teleported at the last second.

The monster crashed into the tree. Diamonique’s horde of crystal and glass shards came down upon it like a guillotine.

“What just happened?” Diamonique demanded, storming up to Eli. He meandered across the street, listening to the sirens in the distance, and brushed stubborn bits of glass still caught in his jacket. “What the freak is that? Who’s that guy? Did you do this!”

“I dunno,” was Eli’s tired answer to all of the above. He ran a hand through his hair, and eyed the harness Diamonique wore, studded with crystals that could allow her to lift herself in the air. “You off cape probation, then?”

“Don’t change the subject,” she snapped up at him. “I’m totally authorized to arrest you now, you know that? What’s he doing?”

Alexei was on top of the massive heap of fur and bones and chunks of machinery, a wicked-looking pocketknife in hand. The beast bristled with the bloodied chunks of glass and crystal Diamonique had used to kill the thing; she’d had to strike it several times. As they watched, Alexei leaned down to slice open several thick tubes looping out of the beast’s spinal cord and neck.

He hopped down and glanced at them over his shoulder. “Get back,” Alexei advised, flapping a hand at them. He clicked open a lighter with the other, and Eli understood.

“What are you doing?” Diamonique snapped, in her best I’m the cape and I know what I’m doing voice. Eli turned on his heel, grabbed the back of her repurposed climbing harness, and dragged her back several steps.

The bear-machine erupted into flames. The heat washed over them, and Eli turned his head from the sight, and a sudden gut-wrenching stench. Alexei teleported away from the fire before it could reach him, and made the fatal mistake of reappearing within Eli’s reach.

Alexei was too busy admiring his handiwork to escape before Eli laid hands on him. He slammed Alexei up against the side of the nearest building, while Diamonique shouted at them in confusion and anger.

“Where’s Siope!” Eli shouted in Alexei’s face, holding the smaller man well off the ground. Alexei blinked down at him, and when he didn’t immediately answer, Eli snarled and pulled him away from the wall. Only to slam him against the bricks again.

Alexei gasped for breath, wrapping his hands around Eli’s thick wrists. Diamonique skidded to a stop next to them, her mouth opening.

She disappeared. So did everything else around Eli, except for Alexei. Before he could register the absolute nothingness surrounding them, the world snapped back into place.

Eli dropped Alexei, nauseous and woozy. Staggering back, he knocked over a dumpster that definitely hadn’t been there before, and caught himself on a rusty chain link fence. They were in another alley, or sorts, but it was neat and clean, the sort of tiny sidestreet homeless people were evicted from with prejudice. Even before Eli’s brain could register the fact that Alexei had whisked him clear across the city, Eli recognized Siope’s crying.

He whirled around so quickly that he almost fell over. Eli bumped up against the wall of an apartment building, and found Siope’s car seat tucked between the wall and an overgrown, half-dead bush.

Siope was a very quiet eighteen-month-old, most of the time - but when he cried, he howled. He was screaming now, terrified sobs that stopped Eli’s heart as he pulled the car seat out of the bush.

“You left him here?” Eli snarled over at Alexei. He lifted Siope from the seat, fumbling at the buckles, and the toddler’s cries turned from wordless sobs to “Dadadadadadadada-”

“I was keeping him from danger,” Alexei defended himself.

“You left him out here alone!”

“Would you have preferred he died in that car?”

Eli was about to shout back that he’d prefer that Alexei had never shown up in the first place, but then Siope took a deep breath and shrieked. Furious, Eli turned his back to Alexei and dropped down onto the curb. Siope wrapped his hands in Eli’s shirt, heedless of the blood and oil that covered it, and sobbed.

Daniel was right, Eli thought in despair. He was right, Eli was going to get his children killed. He shouldn’t be a father, he’d done too much wrong, and any family he had would suffer for it -

Alexei sat down next to him. Eli turned his face away, but not before Alexei had seen the tears rolling down his cheeks.

“…You were scared,” Alexei murmured, once Siope’s wailing had dwindled to an occasional whimper. Eli closed his eyes.

“I am scared,” he said, finally. “Terrified.”

“I have never seen you scared.”

Alexei had never seen Eli with his children, either. Eli rocked Siope back and forth, dully aware that he really shouldn’t let the toddler get all this grime all over him. One more way he was an awful excuse for a parent. He wished Alexei would do what he was best at, and disappear. It was another long moment before the other man asked, “Did you really think I would hurt them?”

Eli shot him a withering look, too angry to even speak. Alexei winced and looked down at his hands.

In a strained voice, Eli said, “You don’t - You never make threats you don’t follow through on, Alexei.”

“Well.” Alexei looked away. “What a monster I have become.”

Eli didn’t answer. Siope was finally starting to calm down, enough for Eli to dig out the packet of diaper wipes. He started to scrub some of the gunk and blood off of Siope’s hands and face that the toddler had smeared all over himself. In another few minutes, Siope had cried himself more or less to sleep. He slept a lot, and sometimes Eli worried. But right now, it was a blessing for his eardrums.

He leaned over to settle Siope in the car seat once more. Eli’s intention was to leave - but before he could stand, he felt a tap on his arm, and looked over. Alexei handed him one of his pistols.

Eli stared at it. Alexei said, voice hollow, “You should always follow through on your threats.”

If you touch my children again, I will kill you.

A wave of exasperation crashed suddenly over Eli. “I’m not going to shoot you, Alexei,” he snapped. Regarding him through narrow eyes, Eli added, “You never followed through on your threat.”

Alexei gave him a haggard smile. “I never threatened your children, Sasha. I implied.”

“That’s the same thing!”

“Eh.” Alexei shrugged one shoulder. “Semantics.”

Eli stared at him, then abruptly let out a bark of laughter. It was a ragged, hysterical sound, one that even he didn’t recognize as a laugh. Alexei looked alarmed. Eli clamped a hand over his mouth and screwed his eyes shut, hunching over. He suddenly hurt. All his bruises and scrapes made themselves individually made themselves known, but more than that, he felt exhausted.

“Sasha.” Alexei placed a hesitant hand on Eli’s shoulder. “Why are you so scared?”

Eli looked down at the car seat between his feet, and the child inside it, quietly whimpering himself to sleep. Alexei followed his gaze. This close, Eli felt his sigh, more than heard it.

“What was that thing?” Eli asked, rather than voice his fears aloud. Alexei accepted the change of topic with a nod.

“Some idiot genius,” he said, with extreme disgust. “He lost his funding, but his experiments were continued. And,” Alexei rubbed his eyes with one hand, “they were all stolen.”

Eli arched his eyebrows. “You’re hunting them down?”

Alexei gave one short jerk of his head.

“Shouldn’t they have given you some backup?”

“They,” Alexei said, enunciating his words very carefully, “are the ones who stole them in the first place.”

Eli looked at him. “…You’re kidding.”

A shrug. “I saw what one of those things did before. We are very lucky this one was still small.”

“It crushed my van.”

“Yes.” Alexei ran a hand over his hair. “I am very sorry for that. I cannot compensate you.”

“Of course not.” It wasn’t Eli’s only car, of course, but it had loads more room than his sedan. He sighed and propped his chin in his hand. “You should’ve given me some warning. You should’ve called, Alexei. I would’ve helped, even without the implied threats.”

It was Alexei’s turn to hunch up his shoulders. He looked away again, digging the fingernails of one hand into the back of the other. Eli looked down at the pistol he still held, then set it down next to Siope’s car seat, and reached over to push his fingers through Alexei’s wringing hands. The man stiffened, but then he let Eli hold his hand.

“So, you’re here on some suicide mission? How many are there, anyway?”

“Five more, now.”

Eli let out a low whistle. “D’you have any assets for this?”

Alexei lifted one shoulder. “Some,” he said. He hesitated, then admitted, “I… I need a place to stay.”

Of course he did. Eli stared at the ground, slowly rubbing his thumb over the back of Alexei’s hand.

“If you don’t mind rooming with my boss and my gun-crazy coworker,” he said slowly, “I have space in the basement.”

Alexei looked at Eli, but the bigger man was determinedly staring at nothing in particular, his face a little red.

“With your children?”

“My non-implied threat still stands. Besides, Kawai’s the worst nanny, but the best security. She’ll murder you before I ever get the chance.”

Alexei let out a shaky laugh. “I thought I told you to stop being so soft.”

Snorting, Eli bumped his shoulder into Alexei. “Yeah, so did everyone else.”

[afvrocado]

Nikita,

I frequent the place we first met.

Remember that restaurant?

When the waiter led me to you, I couldn't stop thinking it was such a crazy idea I was doing - dating someone out of an app.

Table A22, there you were.

Simple, with the rolled up sleeves of your black pullover. Sleek was your hair done.

You looked stunning so.... Wow, Zac Efron.

I thought I was having dinner with Efron.

Anson, Enggor, Anson, Enggor.

Remember that place?

The one that got me going mindfucked because you lived literally next to the office building I was working at.

You got me thinking how should I ditch work without being seen.

Well, it sure did make me look forward to go to work everyday.

Because that's where you were.

Where I'd bump into you everyday after work, when you'd be on your way back from the gym.

Suits.

You introduced me to that series I got hooked on to which you made me promise not to google the episodes' summaries.

And we'd spend so much time watching episode after episode till we'd fall asleep.

You liked Harvey Spectre but really, we both knew Louis Litt won our hearts.

Remember our favourite rooftop?

That very place you showed me how a kiss feels like.

You showed me what a first kiss feels like.

That very place you held my hands, interlacing our fingers.

The first time someone holds me such a way, pulled me close to your sinful physique.

And that beautiful view of the city, the atmosphere of cool air from the 72nd floor.

"I know you're watching me Ain."

Remember that time when my eyelashes were so plastic it annoyed the crap out of you?

They'd sweep on your chest, that's how you knew I wasn't asleep.

I was amazed - so this is how it feels like to be so close to someone, to be held in great arms.

Saturday morning was my favourite.

Remember you woke up early for gym?

I'd wake up a little after you left and clean up your messy place thinking, "Boys".

You'd be annoyed because you prefered to be labelled "man". Sexy one.

Oh, you'd come back all sweaty and made sure you get that all over me - disgusting.

Remember bagel pizza?

You'd go out again and brought home breakfast.

You asked me to choose but I couldn't decide so you got me bagel pizzas.

Oh I remember this vividly. That littlest thing you did for me.

"Bad news is it's ham, but good news is that I got it substituted to beef."

You remembered so well.

I remember that weekend.

We'd have breakfast and watch Suits -

And we fell asleep after a good nice shower.

We fell asleep the whole afternoon.

You hate waiting.

Remember you had to, when I lost my way to level 33?

I knew your patience was running thin but I made it up to you yeah. That I haven't thank you enough.

You knew I love seafood, that you ordered me one - which you stole half of them from my plate.

So much for soup only.

You always organised such impromptu dinners at such places I've never stepped foot to.

Cupcakes cupcakes cheat day.

Remember I made you cheat a day with cupcakes?

You told me you were sort of broke and couldn't afford to take me to anywhere fancy.

If only you knew, it doesn't matter to me.

We still had proper food.

And I was so happy to buy you food tho you reluctantly allowed me to.

Ridiculous.

Pizzeria Mozza and Russian Earl Grey.

Remember that when you couldn't make a date on Monday and you sent me a looooongass text promising you'd make it up?

It was adorable. And you remembered we were talking about pizzas which is why you picked that place.

And topped it off with introducing me to your favourite Russian earl grey (because a Russian lives up to his name).

Ridiculous but I loved it.

"Ain, come on. Come here."

Remember when we were walking back and you stopped in your path, called out my name?

I loved it when you call my name.

And you still call me by my name.

Sometimes kiddo - but really we're not even five years apart. Silly.

Well you made me take a few steps back just to sweep me off the ground.

Embarassing much.

I remembered one of the last nights we spent on that rooftop.

You held me so close against your perfectly built body.

I thought I've met prince charming, I never knew my first one was such a sweetheart.

And you'll always be my sweetheart.

[mizbabygirl]

Inside the Blackhawks' polyglot culture (from the Chicago Tribune) [04\19\2017]

A few months ago, Blackhawks forward Dennis Rasmussen was out to dinner with teammates Artem Anisimov, Artemi Panarin, Marian Hossa and Richard Panik.

Anisimov and Panarin are native Russians. Hossa and Panik are from Slovakia. At one point during the evening, those four began having separate conversations in their native languages. It left Rasmussen, who is from Sweden, sitting there clueless.

"I thought I was at the wrong table," Rasmussen said. "They were laughing at me too because I was just quiet the whole dinner."

Walk around the Hawks dressing room and you might hear conversations in Swedish, Russian, Czech, Slovakian and English. You also might hear conversations bounce from one language to another. It's like that in every NHL locker room.

That makes playing for a hockey team unlike almost any other workplace.

Many Hawks players talk to each other in multiple languages  and sometimes they do so to gain a strategic advantage on an opponent.

"You just need to think fast on the bench and talk fast with what you want to say and just say it — whatever language it is," Anisimov said.

During the World Cup of Hockey in September, defenseman Niklas Hjalmarsson played for Team Sweden. Everybody spoke Swedish, so speaking English wasn't required, but he caught himself sometimes talking to teammates on the ice in English.

"Sometimes it's in the backbone to scream in English too. It goes both ways sometimes," Hjalmarsson said. "It's much more natural now to scream in English. This is my 10th year now so it's pretty deep in my brain."

Hjalmarsson and other Hawks who speak different languages said they are sometimes able to use the difference in language to their advantage. For instance, if Hjalmarsson is involved in a faceoff with Marcus Kruger or Rasmussen, and they notice that nobody on the other team is Swedish, they will communicate with each other in Swedish.

"It's a huge advantage for Swedish players and Russian players," said Lightning winger Nikita Kucherov, who is Russian.

The same applies to Czechs and Slovaks.

Anisimov has been linemates with Panarin since the two came to the Hawks before the start of last season. Panarin didn't know much English upon arrival, and though he has learned some over the last year and a half, Anisimov still communicates with him in Russian, especially on faceoffs.

"You just look on the ice who you're against and you just go from there," Anisimov said. "You can say 'Go this way,' or 'I'm going to try and win it to your side' or 'It's going to be tight and you need to come and pick up the puck.’ Those kind of things. It's a little thing but a hockey game is all little things."

Anisimov and Panarin's other linemate, Patrick Kane, still hasn't quite picked up what they're saying.

"Sometimes I'm caught in between there on the bench, too," Kane said. "Those guys are speaking back and forth in Russian, I just have to kind of move on the bench to get out of the way. I think if we're doing a faceoff or something, usually, I sometimes, it might be I communicate with Anisimov in English and he might have to talk to Panarin in Russian. That's the way it works out sometimes."

The Russians' arrivals with the Hawks in the 2015-16 season meant some of the Eastern Europeans on the team had to dust off as much Russian as they could remember. Hossa said he studied a Russian for about "a half a year" in school before switching to English when he was young. Defenseman Michal Rozsival, who is from the Czech Republic, said it was mandatory to study Russian when he was growing up.

"I try to see what I remember, if I can actually talk to them and get my point across, but it's not much. Mostly it's just English," Rozsival said.

The Czechs and Slovaks can communicate easily with each other because "it's almost the same language," according to Hossa, but Russian has fewer similarities, although it has just enough for them to get by with Panarin and Anisimov.

"When the game is going the right way I know a few words in Russian so I throw it out there sometimes and they have a good laugh," Hossa said. "But most of the time it's in English."

Communication is varied when the Hawks are on the bench.

Typically who is sitting where dictates what language the players speak. If, for instance, Hjalmarsson and Rasmussen are sitting next to each other, they will communicate in Swedish, but if there are people between them on the bench and they want to speak with each other, they will talk in English.

"You speak English to make sure everyone understands what you're talking about and they don't think you're talking (expletive) about them," Hjalmarsson said. "You just don't want to be rude and not make the other guys understand what you're talking about."

Among the Hawks' roster, there are five different primary languages spoken by over 20 players. English is the universal language, but it's not always easy for newcomers to pick up, like Panarin and Czech defenseman Michal Kempny, both of whom do not conduct media interviews in English.

But when it comes to communicating with their teammates, they find a way. Kempny, who often played with Brent Seabrook during the season, joked Seabrook "didn't want to learn" any Czech words and so had to find a way to communicate with him while Kane said he and Panarin had improved their communication over the last two seasons.

"His English is pretty good — probably more than he'd ever let on to you guys," Kane said. "But I think it's pretty easy to communicate with him. If there's something you don't understand, you might take a second or two to explain it out, maybe with hand motions. You figure it out. It's pretty easy. I almost find I'm talking in English in a Russian accent for him to better understand me sometimes."

[ladystylestores]

Your Thursday Briefing – The New York Times

The world is learning to live with a deadly virus

China is testing restaurant workers and delivery drivers block by block. South Korea tells people to carry two types of masks for different risky social situations. Britain is targeting local outbreaks in a strategy that Prime Minister Boris Johnson calls “Whac-a-Mole.”

As mass infections strike even in places that had seemed to tame the coronavirus, officials are adjusting to the reality that the virus is here to stay. They are turning to targeted and fast-but-flexible approaches, rather than nationwide lockdowns, to stop third or fourth waves.

While the details differ, the strategies all require some mix of intensive tracking, lightning-fast response times, border management and constant reminders to their citizens.

Quotable: “It’s always going to be with us,” said Simon James Thornley, an epidemiologist from New Zealand. “I don’t think we can eliminate the virus long term. We are going to need to learn to live with the virus.”

How one French city acknowledges past slavery

The killing of George Floyd in police custody has invigorated the debate over Europe’s brutal, lucrative history in Africa, and has led to the recent toppling of statues of colonial-era figures.

Many European cities have preferred to remain silent about their ugly histories. But Bordeaux, France, has put up plaques to acknowledge and explain slavery, which financed the famed 18th-century facades that helped it become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Last year, a statue of Modeste Testas, an enslaved woman, was erected on the riverbank. This month, the city installed plaques on five streets named after prominent figures involved in the slave trade.

Context: The wealth behind the refined facade of much of Europe, the world’s most-visited tourist region, was generated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonization of the African continent. But decades after most African nations gained independence, there has been no complete reckoning with that history — one connected to enduring racism and fear of migration.

In the U.S.: The three white men accused of killing Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was shot dead after being chased in a neighborhood in Georgia, have been indicted on murder charges, the case’s prosecutor said on Wednesday.

Russia holds a mostly mask-free victory parade

Tens of thousands turned out for the annual celebration of Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany on Wednesday, despite the country’s unfinished battle with the coronavirus.

The military parade had been delayed for six weeks by the pandemic, but very few people, including aging veterans in their 80s and 90s, wore masks as they watched 14,000 troops march in tight formation.

President Vladimir Putin is hoping the Moscow parade, one of dozens, will help lift his approval ratings, which have sunk to their lowest level since he came to power 20 years ago.

Details: Though the outbreak is slowing, Russia is the world’s third hardest-hit country with nearly 600,000 cases.

If you have some time, this is worth it

What is owed

The masses who have taken to U.S. streets to protest against racism and police violence are multiracial and multigenerational, helping make this uprising feel different, writes Nikole Hannah-Jones in The Times Magazine.

But if black lives are to matter, the nation must pay reparations to black Americans for true justice to balance the assets that white people have accrued over generations: “Wealth, not income, is the means to security in America.”

Here’s what else is happening

Kosovo: President Hashim Thaci, a guerrilla leader during Kosovo’s battle with Serbia in the 1990s, was indicted on 10 counts of war crimes on Wednesday in a special court in the Netherlands. Prosecutors accused him and other former fighters of being “responsible for nearly 100 murders.”

In memoriam: Sergei Khrushchev, a former Soviet rocket scientist and the son of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier during the Cold War, died on June 18 at the age of 84.

Pakistan crash: The pilots of a Pakistani airliner that crashed last month in Karachi were busy talking about the coronavirus, and repeatedly ignored directions from air traffic controllers before their plane went down, killing 98 people, officials said Wednesday.

U.S. presidential election: Former Vice President Joe Biden has a 14-point lead on President Trump in the 2020 race, according to a new poll of voters by The New York Times and Siena College. The poll showed broad dissatisfaction with Mr. Trump’s handling of the pandemic and racial-justice protests.

Snapshot: With their colossal limestone walls and green valleys, Italy’s Dolomites showcase some of the world’s most majestic scenery. The photojournalist Monica Goya explored the World Heritage Site, above, on a hike last year.

Museums on TikTok: The Uffizi Gallery in Florence has begun sharing unusually irreverent videos on the social media site, hoping to transform its image from a dusty home of Renaissance art to a place for Italy’s teenagers to explore.

What we’re listening to: This episode of the podcast “Reply All.” Sanam Yar, of the newsletters team, writes: “This episode digs into the trend of black people across the U.S. receiving random, unsolicited Venmo payments from white acquaintances as a bizarre form of reparations.”

Now, a break from the news

Cook: You can go wild with the garnishes for this yogurt-based cucumber soup seasoned with garlic and herbs.

Read: For almost a century, Christopher Nicolson’s family had fished for salmon in Alaska. Read how the pandemic has upended a family tradition and his source of income.

Do: Spending some of this season outside? We have apps to help with maps, trails, pit stops and pizza. Try a Duchenne smile, one that lights up the face, now that masks hide our mouths. And for kids in need of outdoor time, even a little goes a long way.

At Home has our full collection of ideas on what to read, cook, watch, and do while staying safe at home.

And now for the Back Story on …

A Russian family’s work in virology

Years ago, a married pair of Russian virologists tested the polio vaccine on their children, who all grew up and also became virologists. A side effect they found is now sparking hope for a defense against the coronavirus. Andrew Kramer, a correspondent in our Moscow bureau, talked to us about his reporting.

What did you learn from the Chumakov family?

When I talked to one of the brothers, Alexei, he mentioned that another brother was now experimenting with a polio vaccine on himself as a potential protective measure against the coronavirus. I had read about the tuberculosis vaccine that’s being tried as a so-called repurposed vaccine approach to the coronavirus. I started looking into the polio vaccine in that context, and it turns out there are also some very serious, established researchers in the United States who are backing this approach.

That convinced me that it was a serious scientific idea, and it was very tightly tangled up with the story of this family.

How would the polio vaccine work as a treatment for the coronavirus?

The idea is that a viral infection causes a reaction in the body and a release of something called interferons that interfere with viral replication. Before the immune system develops a specific antibody, there’s this innate immune system, researchers told me. If you have an active viral infection in your intestinal system, like polio virus, it would release all these interferons that interfere with the replication of other viruses.

Some viruses can have a beneficial effect on immunity, similar to the way that microbes in your gut are part of your natural healthy state.

Why did the Chumakov brothers decide to go into virology?

Another of the brothers, Peter, said when he was growing up, everyone around him was a scientist. He thought all adults were scientists. The story is a little window into a part of the Soviet Union that not a lot of people see: There was a large repressive police state, but there was also a lot of emphasis on science. Epidemiology and vaccine science were valued.

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Isabella

Thank you To Melissa Clark for the recipe, and to Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the rest of the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S. • We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about what it’s been like to be unemployed in the U.S. for the past few months. • Here’s today’s Mini Crossword puzzle, and a clue: Urban green space (four letters). You can find all our puzzles here. • Ashley Southall is The Times’s new police bureau chief in New York City.

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[connorrenwick]

Design Milk Travels to… Tbilisi, Georgia

The Georgian capital of Tbilisi is currently experiencing a boon in tourism, catering to Russian and European tourists drawn to the city’s colorful pastiche of dilapidated, yet captivating architecture peeling away toward inevitable modernization. A waft of international capital and cosmopolitan luxury perfumes the air everywhere today, but at the moment, the city still retains a distinct character proudly expressive of its own history of place, time, and people. If there’s anywhere in the world to go today – before it changes – it’s Tbilisi.

WHERE TO STAY

All photos: Adjara Group, Stamba Hotel

The Stamba Hotel is indicative of the transformation descending upon Tbilisi’s most historic quarters. Situated in the main thoroughfare of Kostava Street in the Vera district of Tbilisi, the Adjara Group utilized the three R’s – retain, restore, and repurpose – to give new purpose to this former Soviet-era publishing house. The design here is as lofty as the hotel’s five-story atrium, with nostalgic nods to the “roaring ’20s and glamorous ’30s” offset by contemporary details like handmade ceramic tiles by London-based studio Pataki.

Color and texture play in contrast to the industrial heritage of the original structure.

Bespoke libraries continue to be a popular feature offered by the newest and most luxurious hotels. The Stamba’s collection claims 80,000 books for guests.

“Oh, you’re a design writer? Then you should go to The Rooms Hotel Tbilisi!” – advice offered numerous times by locals when conversation steered toward what brought us to Georgia. Praised for its vibrant nightlife, retro design-centric ambiance, and the local young and beautiful set that descends upon the hotel every evening, The Rooms has been the place to eat, drink, and most definitely be merry for years now (laying claim as the first design hotel in the city), and it still wears its 1930s New York x Georgian industrial past well.

Rooms worthy of a Wes Anderson film are simply furnished, yet romantic and chic. Photos: Rooms Hotel

If you’re looking for a getaway outside the hustle and bustle of Tbilisi, the Radisson Collection Hotel, Tsinandali Estate Georgia – a former estate and winery turned luxe getaway in the Georgian wine region of Kakheti – should fit the bill rather luxuriously. Spanish designers Christina Gabas and Damian Figueras were not averse to using modern swaths of colors and texture to complement the synthesis of historic structure to its contemporary additions. The hotel’s 141 rooms and suites are surprisingly intimate in relation to the grand scale of the hotel’s walkways, rooftop pool and spa, concert venue, verdant park grounds, and other public spaces, each guest room decorated with seasonal cues of the region’s viticulture-focused landscape. It may take 1.5 hours to get here from Tbilisi, but the drive to and from offers a glimpse of the country’s exceptional and varied landscape.

Sumptuous colors and organic textures within the room mirror the Caucasus mountains, local wine and vineyards and the surrounding park grounds. Photo: Gregory Han

Photo: Gregory Han

Architects John Fotiadis, Christina Gabas and Damien Figueras worked to merge new and old. Interior design is credited to designer Ingo Maurer and Georgian artist and sculptor Tamara Kvesitadze.

Photo: Gregory Han

Photo: Gregory Han

Notable mentions: Fabrika Hostel \\\ Radisson Blu Iveria Hotel \\\ Shota @Rustaveli Boutique Hotel \\\ Timber Boutique Hotel \\\ Tbilisi Marriott Hotel

WHERE TO VISIT

The Mother of Georgia, Kartlis Deda, a 20-meter-tall aluminum statue designed by sculptor and Tbilisi native, Elguja Amashukeli stands sentry over the city, rewarding those who trek to the top by stairway. Photo: Gregory Han

Architecturally speaking, Tbilisi may top my list for its surprising diversity of styles and states. Walking here is fairly easy, though sections can be arduously steep (taxis are everywhere for those not seeking to return with firmer glutes and calves), with the heart of the city offering countless moments of serendipitous pleasures for the architecturally minded. Derelict doorways in the city’s heart are as likely to reveal the ornamental flourishes of Tbilisi’s bourgeoisie Art Nouveau past as they might expose a small cadres of cats suspiciously eyeing your intrusion. The seemingly abandoned building? Past the gates and around the corner, a world class restaurant with a romantic courtyard garden welcomes the hungry.

The curious (and polite) are rewarded in Tbilisi. Photo: Gregory Han

Remnants of Soviet era, post-constructivist construction also remain brutally evident with their characteristic concrete edifices; many have been reclaimed and reborn to serve in public and governmental capacities today. Weathered cobblestone streets and steep stairways in the historical section of Dzveli Tbilisi wind past bric-brac wooden residences defiantly ignorant to both gravity and age, many painted with a delightful impunity, festooned with family laundry blowing in the wind like flags. The local government has made efforts to protect these distinct residential dwellings, but concerns remain as development has become rampant.

The Bank of Georgia headquarters. Photo: Matt Bateman (CC BY-SA 4.0)

If wandering without plans or guidance seems daunting, hiring a guide is not a bad investment for either extended, but especially, shorter visits. We hired art historian Nikita Ivanov to lead us out from the capital for a day trip to a hermitage nestled into a mountainside at the border of Azerbaijan. His wealth of knowledge about Georgia’s past – buildings and culture – colored our entire drive out and back with details we’d otherwise have overlooked or been completely ignorant about (e.g. the numerous Soviet-style murals hidden on sides of buildings on the outskirts of the city center). I can’t recommend his services enough.

Visitors can’t help notice curiously contemporary CAD-designed structures credited to Italian architects Massimiliano Fuksas and Michele de Lucchi, The totally tubular reinforced concrete and steel paneled buildings can be found along the Rhike Park Music Theatre and Exhibition Hall sitting finished, yet unopened. Photo: Studio Fuksas

The Tbilisi Emergency and Operative Response Center. Photo: Malkhaz Tchubabria (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Palace of Rituals. Photo: Carl Ha (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Notable mentions: The Bridge of Peace \\\  Leaning Tower of Tbilisi \\\ National Botanical Garden of Georgia \\\ Tbilisi Architecture Biennial

WHERE TO SHOP

To be honest, shopping rated low on our list of things to do during our first visit to Georgia. This is not to say we didn’t visit numerous shops, but those that caught our attention were dedicated to the region’s renowned wines, aromatic spice blends, and handcrafted items. The Dezerter Bazaar is not to be missed by anyone with an inkling of interest in the region’s foods (a visit that added a great deal of depth to this documentary about farmers serving the market), while Khurjini offers anyone who can get past the talkative cat out front an assemblage of local homemade spirits, spices, Georgian sweets, teas, and other treats presented with an artistic flair.

Local honey, preserves, sauces, and the infamous local vodka chacha are all found at Khurjini to weigh down your check-in luggage. Photo: Gregory Han

But if shopping is an imperative, there is one recommended destination for modern design fostered by the local scene: Fabrika. Housed with a former Soviet-era sewing factory, Fabrika was reborn to operate as a multi-functional space for art, design, food, music, and retail endeavors. The list of occupants (referred to as “residents”) represents Tbilisi’s contemporary urban culture of creatives doing creative things. A few below:

Margo Skate Shop

Funduki specializes in eco-friendly DIY furniture designed to be assembled without glue or screws. Chairs, stools, shelves and tables are assembled and dismantled like pieces of a puzzle, flat-packed for easy return home.

Plant Shop inside Fabrika

Notable mentions: The Dezerter Bazaar \\\ Tbilisi Flea Market

FINAL THOUGHTS

When I informed friends I was planning to embark on a trip to Tbilisi, Georgia, most often I was greeted with recommendations about the Peach State. Other times, incredulous expressions accompanied with a “why there?” was the response. Such is the blind spot most Americans harbor about the distant nation cradled within the Caucasus, situated at the gateway between Europe and Asia. A shame, as Tbilisi proved itself an achingly beautiful urban capital yet to be fully enveloped by the sense of “like everywhere else”. Nowhere else have I been prone to unwittingly impersonate a young Keanu with my endless successions of “whoa!”, so taken by a most excellent adventure.

Photo: Gregory Han

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[thrashermaxey]

21 Fantasy Hockey Rambles

  Every Sunday, we'll share 21 Fantasy Rambles – formerly 20 Fantasy Thoughts – from our writers at DobberHockey. These thoughts are curated from the past week's ‘Daily Ramblings’.

Writers: Michael Clifford, Ian Gooding, Cam Robinson, and Dobber

  1. Thirty-two-year-old Alex Radulov equaled his career-high 72 points from a season ago, but he’s done so in 12 fewer games. This is one vet that I’m okay buying in on next season. Dallas rides the big horses and that won’t be changing next year. Another 70-point season seems very doable. (apr3)

  2. Soon-to-be RFA Jacob Trouba will once again be a topic of discussion this offseason. The Jets will need to make some changes as their cap structure shifts with Patrik Laine (RFA), Kyle Connor (RFA) and Tyler Myers (UFA) also in need of new deals this summer. It will be interesting to see if the Jets can manage to lock Trouba down to a long-term deal after consecutive bridge-deals, or if the trade-market finally opens up for the 25-year-old. (apr3)

  3. The Sharks are the first team with four 30-goal scorers (Joe Pavelski, Tomas Hertl, Timo Meier, Evander Kane) since the 2008-09 Red Wings and Flyers. The latter scored his 30th on Saturday, which is the first time since 2011-12 that he has reached that total.

Erik Karlsson returned for the Sharks on Saturday after missing the past 17 games with a groin injury. He was held without a point but was a plus-3 in 22 minutes. He should be available as normal for playoff pools. (apr7)

  4. A late-season callup, rookie Sam Steel ended the season on a high note, posting eight points (5g-3a) over his last seven games. Expect the former WHL scoring star to be on the Ducks’ roster on a full-time basis next season, as he had already posted solid numbers in the AHL (39 points in 50 games). (apr6)

  5. You may have been disappointed in Jakob Silfverberg this season. However, with his goal on Friday, he set a career high in goals with 24. He still hasn’t reached 50 points in his career and it may not happen next season with the Ducks’ scoring attack mainly either on the back nine (Corey Perry, Ryan Getzlaf), or just getting started (Sam Steel, Troy Terry, Max Jones). (apr6)

  6. Five shutouts this season for Jaroslav Halak, which is not bad for a backup goalie. Moreover, entering weekend action, his ratios (2.34 GAA, .922 SV%) were among the top 10 among goalies who played at least 30 games.

Halak is signed for another year in Boston, which might be something to think about when valuing Tuukka Rask next year. Rask has won 27 games and played in just 46 games this season, which are his lowest totals in six campaigns. (apr5)

  7. Alex Pietrangelo, the father of triplets, has reached the 40-point mark for the third consecutive season and fifth time in six seasons. Obviously, 41 points is a dip from last year’s 54, which Dobber (who is a father himself) warned you about before the season. Pietrangelo’s second-half production (28 points in in 43 games, 0.58 Pts/GP) has been noticeably better than his first-half production (13 points in 28 games, 0.46 Pts/GP), which may be related to the Blues’ remarkable second-half surge. Or, maybe it’s because he’s adjusted to life as a busy dad. (apr5)

  8. Yes, the ‘bunch of jerks’ punched their 2019 playoff ticket. Even though the Canes won’t be providing any victory celebrations after any home playoff wins, I have a feeling that they’ll be a popular underdog to pull for. Petr Mrazek stopped 36 of 37 shots to earn the playoff-clinching victory against New Jersey on Thursday.

Mrazek enjoyed quite a run recently, posting an 11-2-0 record with a 1.68 GAA and a .944 SV% since mid-February. Both he and Curtis McElhinney will be UFAs at the end of the season. Since the Canes are a top-10 team in goaltending, I would have to believe they would bring back at least one of these goalies next season and maybe even both. If you need to pick a Canes’ goalie for your playoff pool, it’s probably Mrazek, although he and McElhinney have basically been splitting starts for the past few weeks. (apr5)

  9. A favourite of many before he stepped foot into the NHL because of solid production in the AHL, Yanni Gourde made the most of his 2017-18 with 25 goals and 64 points. He was a top-100 player in almost any fantasy setup and with him skating on what looked to be a high-powered squad on the verge of multi-year dominance, there was a lot of hope that the 60-plus points would be the norm.

Gourde finished the season with 48 points in 80 games. So, what went wrong?

It should be noted there’s nothing wrong with his goal scoring. He managed 22 goals this year after a season that featured 25 tallies. He does need to shoot more, though – late this past week, he was 200th out of 267 forwards in shot rate at five-on-five – but there is nothing wrong with his goal scoring. It’s his assists, of which there are 14 fewer this year than last, that are the issue.

Realistically, a guy with over 20 goals and pushing 50 points who doesn’t get prime PP minutes and is playing under 16 minutes a night, is a productive guy. It was just below the expectation he set for himself. Can he rebound? That’ll be something else for another day. (apr4)

  10. Mats Zuccarello is a very important player to the Dallas Stars. With him in the lineup, it gives the team two legitimate scoring lines teams need to worry about, something teams didn’t need to fret over before the trade. He just needs to stay in the lineup. (apr4)

* Our interactive playoff draft list is ready for download now! Don’t wait until five minutes before your draft or deadline to purchase it. If you haven’t already preordered it, get yours today! If you have already purchased it, jump right in and enjoy!!

11. We don’t know the exact severity of Connor McDavid’s leg injury sustained on Saturday, or the timeline for recovery, but at least it sounds as if we don’t have to worry about him not being ready for next season.

On the surface, it might not seem like a big deal because the Oilers won’t play games that matter again until October. However, significant injuries will interrupt previously scheduled offseason training plans. Consider Brock Boeser’s slow start this season as an example, after he recovered from a significant back injury and a lingering wrist issue.

McDavid may not have led the league in scoring (he finished second) but he is the only player not to go two consecutive games without a point, which is remarkably reliable. (apr7)

  12. Nikita Kucherov finished the season with 128 points, which is the highest single-season total ever for a Russian-born player.

Kucherov performance earns him the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s leading scorer and he should be considered the fantasy MVP in pure points leagues, as well as many multicategory formats. Expect him to be the top-ranked player in fantasy playoff drafts as the Lightning should be considered the favorite to win the Stanley Cup. Or, to Don Cherry or Brian Burke (can’t remember which one), they’re the easy pick to win. (apr7)

  13. Jake DeBrusk brought his season-ending totals to 27 goals and 42 points in 68 games. He’s producing legitimate top-six metrics in his second season and you’d have to expect there is more to come.

He sees top power-play deployment on a high-end team. He has developed nice chemistry to David Krejci on line two, and despite a conversion rate that will likely slip next season, he’s displaying an ability to find the back of the net on a consistent basis. The breakout may not be next season, but I see a 65-point season in his future. (apr3)

  14. It’s been a terrific late-career jump by Zach Parise, who ended the season with 28 goals and 61 points. This was also as healthy as the 34-year-old has been in the last six campaigns. Don’t expect this to be replicated in 2019-20. (apr3)

  15. There wasn’t much doubt that Alex DeBrincat would be a productive NHLer. The only people who had doubts were apparently almost every NHL general manager outside of Chicago. I don’t think that even the most ardent DeBrincat supporters would imagine that he would be a 40-goal scorer in his second season, however.

This is a guy who could be at 35 goals and we’d still marvel. Even with some regression built in, DeBrincat has shown that he’s an offensive player to be feared for years to come. (apr2)

  16. The Golden Knights signed college defenseman Jimmy Schuldt to a one-year contract. He’ll be a restricted free agent after this season, at which point I imagine Vegas will give him a two- or three-year deal. Our own Brad Phillips wrote on Schuldt about a year ago. I recommend giving it a read here. (apr4)

    17. Fantasy hockey owners (and Red Wings fans) had been waiting for Anthony Mantha to break out for years. He put up 24 goals in 2017-18 but fantasy owners were still a little leery heading into this season. We knew the Red Wings would be bad and we had no confirmation that Mantha would spend the season alongside Dylan Larkin.

Well, the Red Wings were bad but Mantha was mostly attached to Larkin and the result was 25 goals and 48 points in 67 games.

The Red Wings’ rebuild is starting to round into form. They have Larkin, they have Mantha, Tyler Bertuzzi looks like a solid second-line option, Andreas Athanasiou looks like a lethal goal scorer, Filip Hronek has had a very good first year, Dennis Cholowski looked solid when he was with the team, and they have Filip Zadina waiting in the, ahem, wings. What was a bad team is slowly getting better and Mantha is a big part of that. Expect more of the same next year. (apr2)

    18. It’s pretty easy to remember that just a couple years ago, there were doubts as to whether Ryan Pulock would reach his ceiling as a fantasy option. He had done very well in the AHL but was a first-round pick who, by his age-23 season, had played precisely 16 games in the NHL, including just one contest in the 2016-17 campaign.

Pulock broke out with 10 goals and 32 points for the Islanders in 2017-18, doing so playing less than 18:30 a night. The question was if this guy, who just a year prior had concerns about his future, could follow up the breakout, especially when considering John Tavares moving on. 

Well, Pulock finished with nine goals and 37 points, averaging 2.2 shots per game, and he done so while being the secondary option on the power play to Nick Leddy and playing for a mid-pack five-on-five scoring team.

There’s nothing out of line in his underlying numbers, either. His Individual Points Percentage (IPP) at five-on-five is normal and his on-ice shooting percentage is a tad high but certainly not extreme. His shot rate per minute has declined by 20 percent, but the team is playing much more defensively this year than last, so it’s not a huge concern, especially for a guy in his second season.

If we want Pulock to take that next step, he needs power-play time. He has nine power-play points compared to Leddy’s 10, and Pulock has done that largely on the second unit. My hope is that 2019-20 is the year Pulock finally takes the reigns of the top power play and pushes for 50 points. Regardless, he proved this year that he’s a reliable fantasy option. (apr2)

  19. Drake Caggiula’s fantasy hockey value appears to have improved with the Hawks, although not to the point where you should add him in anything more than the deepest of leagues. That’s even with him playing on the Patrick Kane/Jonathan Toews line, although that line combination certainly makes the idea of adding him tempting.

Caggiula will be entering his fourth NHL season next year, so perhaps a full season in Chicago with those linemates can result in some sort of breakout. (apr6)

    20. One player I’ve been waiting years for a breakout is Brendan Gallagher, and it finally came in 2017-18 with his 30-goal campaign. Sure, he had a 24-goal season a few years back and had a very good season in 2015-16 but he only played 53 games. The full breakout came last year but the fantasy market didn’t really believe his breakout as his ADP came outside the top-175 players in standard Yahoo! leagues. This year, with his 33 goals, 302 shots, and 126 hits, he was a top-50 player in this setup.

The reason I had been waiting years for Gallagher were superlative shot rates and the fact a lot of his shots came from around the crease. Those guys typically have a solid floor (think of Patric Hornqvist) but have the upside to be great fantasy assets if shooting percentage ever favors them. With back-to-back seasons shooting over 11 percent (10.9 to be exact for 2018-19), that favor is here, and fantasy owners are reaping the rewards.

The thing is, Gallagher’s still not getting much ice time. His 16:24 per game overall this year is lower than both his 2014-15 and 2015-16 marks. Imagine what he could do if he were ever given the ice time a top-line forward like him deserves? (apr2)

  20. Tyler Bertuzzi continues to roll. For Little Bert (I had called his Uncle Todd ‘Big Bert’ so…), it is now three consecutive three-point games. Very much draftable in the fall and if this line continues to click even at a normal rate, the two offensive guns could really drag Little Bert’s points upward. Very bullish on this guy because of his linemates. I hate drafting and making decisions based on linemates, but I do make exceptions when they clearly work and I have a strong hunch that the line will continue for more than just a few months. That’s where I’m at with Bertuzzi. (apr1)

  21. Oliver Bjorkstrand capped off 2018-19 with nine goals in his last 10 contests. It’s been a disappointing season for Bjorkstrand but suddenly surging late to top 20 goals is a promising consolation. Coach John Tortorella must be thrilled with the fact that Bjorkstrand had 32 SOG over his last eight games. Bjorkstrand turns 24 this week. With the exodus of players likely happening in the Jackets’ offseason, I think it’s very likely that Bjorkstrand finds himself on the top line next season and is a very strong sleeper candidate. (apr1)

  Have a good week, folks!!

  from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-home/21-fantasy-hockey-rambles/21-fantasy-hockey-rambles-12/

[burning-up-ao3]

20 Penguins Thoughts: Teammates' concern for Patric Hornqvist is real

January 15, 2019 8:17 AMBy Jason Mackey / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

SAN JOSE, Calif. — It’s a text message that Kris Letang doesn’t want to send.

Not because he doesn’t care — he does.

More how he knows it’ll be received.

But like many Penguins who’ve experienced multiple concussions, Letang knows exactly what Patric Hornqvist, who’s had five of them since December 2014, is going through. And Letang, while he cares an awful lot, doesn’t want to be burdensome.

“I’ve been through that,” Letang said. “The last thing I wanted was everybody texting me. That’s why I try to leave him alone. If you’re too [in his face], he might feel like he has to come back quicker. He might not make a good decision.”

Injuries in contact sports are inevitable. Even ones to your brain.

“It’s part of our sport,” Letang said. “We know what we signed up for.”

But with yet another one happening to Hornqvist, something has become clear when discussing the situation with his teammates: This isn’t the same as someone recovering from a knee injury or even his first or second concussion; Penguins players are genuinely concerned about Hornqvist’s head.

“When it’s a good friend and someone we all love and is important to us, you worry about it,” Matt Cullen said. “The positive is we have some pretty good people in place as far as taking your time off and allowing things to heal up and doing the best you can to control those things. Aside from that, we all just hope he’s alright.”

2. Hornqvist, who was concussed last Tuesday against the Panthers, has been skating on his own back in Pittsburgh, which is obviously a good sign.

While the Penguins look forward to getting Hornqvist back, they also don’t want him to rush anything, for fear that he comes back too soon and jeopardizes his long-term health.

“You have to be careful,” Sidney Crosby said. “He has to make sure he’s ready when he comes back.

“He’s been smart about it, though. Especially the way he plays and how tough he plays, he has to make sure he’s feeling good.”

There’s a pretty good reason Hornqvist should take this slow, too.

Actually a couple of them.

“He’s got a family and kids (daughters Isabella and Vendela),” Cullen said. “That’s the first thing that you worry about for him. … Our thoughts are all with him, that’s for sure.”

Mostly, the Penguins just want Hornqvist to be able to be himself again.

“He’s a heart-and-soul guy,” Cullen said. “He’s one of the most important guys in this room as far as keeping the team on the right track. He just brings so much life and energy to our group. He’s one of those guys that makes it really fun for all of us. It’s a lot different when he’s not here.”

3. The other thing area of concern — and this is probably more outside of the Penguins dressing room than inside of it — is Hornqvist’s style of play.

The same rough-and-tumble style that has made Hornqvist so good at what he does — enough for 20 or more goals in every full season he’s played and a $5.3-million-a-year contract through 2023 — is the same one that doesn’t age well.

When Hornqvist does come back, it’s easy to say that he should change. For his own health and career, sure, but also for his family. But can he? Crosby thinks that will be tough.

“You can’t adjust to a puck in the face,” Crosby said, referencing what caused Hornqvist’s latest concussion. “What are you going to do? He had one off his head in warmup. They’re fluke things.”

Which, again, is why Crosby doesn’t think Hornqvist can or will change his game whenever he does get back.

“He only knows one way to play,” Crosby said. “That’s the way he plays the game. Sometimes those things can happen. The way he competes and the way he plays, I don’t see him changing that.”

4. Hornqvist has said repeatedly that he’s not going to change his game, often reasoning that he can’t or he’ll be out of the league.

It sounds harsh, but Letang understands where Hornqvist is coming from.

The Penguins asked Letang to change his game last season — OK, tweak — to take fewer dangerous hits, but it wound up being one of the things that contributed to an off-year for him in 2017-18.

“You can’t really change your game, honestly,” Letang said. “Certain players have played their whole life like that. That’s why they have those contracts and why they’ve had so much success. If you change that, you might become ineffective.”

5. I hope Hornqvist can do something. For his health and for his family.

Staying objective as a reporter is one thing, but you root for everybody — player or not — to avoid serious brain injuries.

As Cullen said on concussions, “There’s still so much we don’t know.” He’s right. But we do know this: They’re scary. Especially when they occur with the frequency that they have with Hornqvist.

“I feel for him,” Matt Murray said. “It’s a tough situation. It’s not an injury that’s fun to deal with, obviously. I can’t speak to how he’s feeling or anything like that. I just wish him all the best, like the rest of us here. Personally, not anything to do with hockey, you wish that he’s feeling good.”

6. The NHL and NHLPA met recently to discuss the current CBA, which runs through 2022, although the league and players have the option to terminate it this September (to be made effective Sept. 15, 2020).

From the league’s perspective, commissioner Gary Bettman would seemingly like to hold another World Cup of Hockey in 2020, and that could play a part in whether or not there’s labor peace through 2020 and beyond.

While Crosby said he didn’t want to comment specifically on negotiations “because it can change so many times,” he said he would be in favor of another World Cup. Crosby also would love to play in the 2022 Beijing Games.

“I’m good with both,” Crosby said. “I’ve had good experiences in both. I don’t know about the timing of it and how it fits in with everything. They did a great job in Toronto [in 2016]. Definitely the two Olympics I’ve been involved with, I thought they were awesome. We’ll see what happens.”

7. Crosby said much must still be determined with how the event would be structured — he brought up the possibility of another Team Europe and the under-23 squad as variables — in addition to the length of time it would require out of players.

But Crosby did really enjoy the last World Cup, held in Toronto in 2016, and would be all for doing it again. Maybe both, if the NHL and NHLPA could swing it.

“I think it was a big thing,” Crosby said. “We’ll have to see how it works out. I don’t know if it’s going to be the same format or how that’s going to shake out. The length of time, too, and when they do it. It’s something they have to figure out. I think they’re both [meaning the Olympics, too] are pretty good events.”

8. My two cents: I think the NHL is more in favor of the World Cup, while the players would probably rather go to the Olympics. They see the latter as a bigger stage, and they’re probably right.

Bettman has said before he worries about the disruption to the NHL season, but with the 2022 Games being in Beijing, that’s a major business opportunity for the league.

Would it be the worst thing if they did both? As long as the players would be on board, I don’t see an issue. I think it could be a lot of fun.

9. With Washington’s Alex Ovechkin set to pass Sergei Fedorov in career points by a Russian-born player — he’s six away after Monday’s game — I thought it would be a good time to ask Malkin about hockey in his home country and sort of the state of the Russian player.

Malkin said he’s “proud” of what some of his countrymen have been able to do, name-checking Ovechkin (on pace for an eighth season of 50 or more goals) and Tampa Bay forward Nikita Kucherov (NHL-best 75 points in 46 games).

There’s also other highly skilled players in Artemi Panarin, Evgeny Kuznetsov and Vladimir Tarasenko, plus some solid defensemen (Ivan Provorov and Dmitry Orlov spring to mind) and a pair of Vezina Trophy winners/finalists in Sergei Bobrovsky and Andrei Vasilevskiy.

“Russia loves hockey, first of all,” Malkin said. “When the national team plays, everyone watches on TV. Russia has always had so many good players — Fedorov, [Igor] Larionov. Lots of huge names.”

10. Malkin also lobbied for Russian players to come to the NHL and stay, believing it’s the best league in the world.

“If you have a chance, you need to come to NHL and try,” Malkin said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re 20 years old or 25. Just try. It’s No. 1, for sure. Every best player plays here, for sure.

“If you [want] to be better and you want a challenge against the best players, you be here. Be better every day, play against good teams. Of course I’m proud of Ovechkin and Kucherov are doing right now.”

11. I dug into some recent numbers of current Russian NHL players, and it’s roughly the same this season as it has been for the past couple years. Maybe a tad better.

Thirty-eight Russian-born players have played at least one game in the NHL this season. That number was 39 in 2017-18 and 42 and 41 in the two years before that.

Last year actually saw Russian players produce more offense than they have in quite some time, with those 39 players combining to score 428 goals and register 1,048 points.

This season, Russian-born skaters should meet or exceed those numbers. Russian players currently have 204 goals and 586 points a handful of games past the halfway point of the NHL season.

12. In talking to Malkin, I realized that I had ever asked him who he idolized while growing up in Magnitogorsk.

He cited watching Detroit and the Russian Five in the late 1990s — Fedorov, Larionov, Slava Fetisov, Vyacheslav Kozlov and Vladimir Konstantinov.

“I don’t know. It’s a hard question,” Malkin said with a smile. “I watched Detroit, Russian Five. You always hear, ‘Russian Five, Russian Five.’

“My style is more [like] Fedorov. Best player so far. He plays center. He plays wing. He can do everything. He’s a really, really smart guy and a smart player.”

13. Ever wonder why they call Marcus Pettersson “Dragon?”

Yes, seriously, that’s his nickname dating back to his time in Anaheim.

On Friday, before Pettersson played his first game at Honda Center since being traded to Pittsburgh, I asked him where the nickname came from.

Turns out it originated in Sweden. Pettersson had a high school basketball coach that called him and another kid “Dragons.” For no apparent reason, either.

Then one day in Anaheim, and perhaps because he’s tall and lanky, someone asked Pettersson if he ever played hoops.

Pettersson has always been kind of so-so on the sport but relayed the story from his home country.

“I just told the story as a joke, and they thought it was hilarious,” Pettersson said.

14. Turns out Derek Grant, a teammate of Pettersson’s in Anaheim who was there for the original story, retold it in Pittsburgh, and the nickname has remerged.

“I didn’t think it would stick,” Pettersson said. “Somehow it did.”

15. I talked to goaltending coach Mike Buckley about a few things in Anaheim, most notably what has helped Matt Murray get right again after returning from injury.

He brought up the team’s overall play and the emergence of Casey DeSmith as reasons why — the latter because he’s been able to shoulder some of the load and also the competitive environment it has helped create with Murray.

One of the things that outsiders have brought up relative to Murray is how he’s been taller in his net. Buckley said no tactical adjustment has been made, though he does think it may be at least a little bit true.

“He’s more confident,” Buckley said, smiling and standing up straight.

16. Another thing Buckley should get credit for this season is the emergence of DeSmith.

Both are New Hampshire guys and, like Murray, have a pretty good history together.

The biggest thing that has led to DeSmith’s breakout year, Buckley said, is how much better he’s been able to read the game. It’s similar to what has made Murray so successful.

“That’s where he’s made the biggest jump,” Buckley said. “He’s always been a pretty good play-reader and has anticipated well. But to catch up with how quickly it happens at this level, that was a big jump for him. I think he’s really adapted well with that.”

17. I also asked Buckley how the Penguins plan to manage the dynamic of Murray and DeSmith and what that might mean for each guy if both are playing as well as they have recently.

“I think it’s one game at a time,” Buckley said. “I think that healthy competition … keep that going right up until playoffs.”

If DeSmith can get this out of Murray simply by playing well, I think it makes his new extension — worth $1.25 million per season — even more of a bargain.

18. I don’t think it will take until Feb. 10 for Justin Schultz to come back.

That would be his original target date given the four-month timeline we were originally given, but the fact that he skated in full equipment for the first time last Friday likely bodes well for him joining the team soon.

The only complicating factor here is that, after this road trip, the Penguins have another week off because of their bye week and the All-Star Game.

Hard to imagine Schultz not being back with the team out of the break, if not before.

19. What will Jim Rutherford do at the trade deadline? Let’s use some deductive reasoning.

I have a tough time seeing Rutherford letting this deadline pass and not combining a good young goalie (Tristan Jarry) and a defenseman (they have nine) and doing something to help the NHL club. Rutherford is in win-now mode. He has a terrific opportunity to improve his team.

What needs to be better? Easy: third-line center. Their wings are fine. Defense has been good, too, and it’s about to get much better. They’re set at goalie, and they have three fourth-line centers.

It’s literally the only piece of this team that’s incomplete. I just don’t see how Rutherford can look at Tampa, Toronto and Washington and think the Penguins are getting enough from that position.

20. San Jose is my absolutely favorite road city. We get asked this question a lot — where do you like to go on the road? Well, here. And north of here.

Heaven for me came Wednesday. As soon as I landed in San Jose, I hopped onto a train bound for San Francisco and eventually wound up at Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead/hippie Mecca.

Spent the afternoon and evening walking around and listening to music, doing some shopping and had dinner at Magnolia Brewery … just an amazing time.

If you’re a fan of the Dead’s music, or just a different-looking scene, I can’t recommend the Haight enough. And San Francisco, in general. What an awesome place.

Jason Mackey: jmackey@post-gazette.com and Twitter @JMackeyPG.

First Published January 15, 2019 8:00 AM

[blogwonderwebsites]

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far http://www.nature-business.com/nature-the-plot-to-subvert-an-election-unraveling-the-russia-story-so-far/

Nature

On an October afternoon before the 2016 election, a huge banner was unfurled from the Manhattan Bridge in New York City: Vladimir V. Putin against a Russian-flag background, and the unlikely word “Peacemaker” below. It was a daredevil happy birthday to the Russian president, who was turning 64.

In November, shortly after Donald J. Trump eked out a victory that Moscow had worked to assist, an even bigger banner appeared, this time on the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington: the face of President Barack Obama and “Goodbye Murderer” in big red letters.

The police never identified who had hung the banners, but there were clues. The earliest promoters of the images on Twitter were American-sounding accounts, including @LeroyLovesUSA, later exposed as Russian fakes operated from St. Petersburg to influence American voters.

The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history.

For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

But to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.

To many Americans, the intervention seemed to be a surprise attack, a stealth cyberage Pearl Harbor, carried out by an inexplicably sinister Russia. For Mr. Putin, however, it was long-overdue payback, a justified response to years of “provocations” from the United States.

And there is a plausible case that Mr. Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved. In an election with an extraordinarily close margin, the repeated disruption of the Clinton campaign by emails published on WikiLeaks and the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference, a possibility Mr. Trump flatly rejects.

As Mr. Trump emerged in spring 2016 as the improbable favorite for the Republican nomination, the Russian operation accelerated on three fronts — the hacking and leaking of Democratic documents; massive fraud on Facebook and Twitter; and outreach to Trump campaign associates.

Consider 10 days in March. On March 15 of that year, Mr. Trump won five primaries, closing in on his party’s nomination, and crowed that he had become “the biggest political story anywhere in the world.” That same day in Moscow, a veteran hacker named Ivan Yermakov, a Russian military intelligence officer working for a secret outfit called Unit 26165, began probing the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. In St. Petersburg, shift workers posted on Facebook and Twitter at a feverish pace, posing as Americans and following instructions to attack Mrs. Clinton.

On March 21 in Washington, Mr. Trump announced his foreign policy team, a group of fringe figures whose advocacy of warmer relations with Russia ran counter to Republican orthodoxy. Meanwhile, Unit 26165 was poring over the bounty from a separate attack it had just carried out: 50,000 emails stolen from the Clinton campaign’s chairman.

On March 24, one of the members of the Trump foreign policy team, George Papadopoulos, sat in the cafe of an upscale London hotel with a Russian woman who introduced herself as Mr. Putin’s niece and offered to help set up a meeting between the Russian president and Mr. Trump. The woman and the adviser exchanged frequent messages in the weeks that followed. Today, Mr. Padadopoulos is unsure that those messages came from the person he met in the cafe.

The Russian intervention was essentially a hijacking — of American companies like Facebook and Twitter; of American citizens’ feelings about immigration and race; of American journalists eager for scoops, however modest; of the naïve, or perhaps not so naïve, ambitions of Mr. Trump’s advisers. The Russian trolls, hackers and agents totaled barely 100, and their task was to steer millions of American voters. They knew it would take a village to sabotage an election.

Russians or suspected Russian agents — including oligarchs, diplomats, former military officers and shadowy intermediaries — had dozens of contacts during the campaign with Mr. Trump’s associates. They reached out through email, Facebook and Twitter. They sought introductions through trusted business connections of Mr. Trump’s, obscure academic institutions, veterans groups and the National Rifle Association.

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They met Trump campaign aides in Moscow, London, New York and Louisville, Ky. One claimed the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton; another Russian, the Trump campaign was told, would deliver it. In May and June alone, the Trump campaign fielded at least four invitations to meet with Russian intermediaries or officials.

In nearly every case, the Trump aides and associates seemed enthusiastic about their exchanges with the Russians. Over months of such probing, it seems that no one alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the foreign overtures.

Mr. Trump’s position on the Russian contacts has evolved over time: first, that there were none; then, that they did not amount to collusion; next, that in any case collusion was not a crime. That is mere semantics — conspiracy is the technical legal term for abetting the Russians in breaking American laws, such as those outlawing computer hacking and banning foreign assistance to a campaign.

Whether Mr. Trump or any of his associates conspired with the Russians is a central question of the investigation by Mr. Mueller, who has already charged 26 Russians and won convictions or guilty pleas from the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn; the former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, and his deputy, Rick Gates; and from Mr. Papadopoulos. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, has pleaded guilty in a separate case.

But none of the convictions to date involve conspiracy. There remains an alternative explanation to the collusion theory: that the Trump aides, far from certain their candidate would win, were happy to meet the Russians because they thought it might lead to moneymaking deals after the election. “Black Caviar,” read the subject line of an email Mr. Manafort got in July 2016 from his associate in Kiev, Ukraine, hinting at the possibility of new largess from a Russian oligarch with whom they had done business.

Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School and the great-granddaughter of the Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, said that what Russia pulled off, through creativity and sheer luck, would have been the envy of Mr. Putin’s predecessors: puncturing the American sense of superiority and insisting on Russia’s power and place in the world.

“This operation was to show the Americans — that you bastards are just as screwed up as the rest of us,” Professor Khrushcheva said. “Putin fulfilled the dream of every Soviet leader — to stick it to the United States. I think this will be studied by the K.G.B.’s successors for a very long time.”

Nature A Timeline of Parallel Threads

Direct contacts

with Russians by

Trump officials

JUNE 16, 2015

Trump announces

candidacy

Time

2016

Russian social

media fraud

Denials of

wrongdoing by

Trump and associates

MAY 26, 2016

Trump clinches

nomination

NOV. 8, 2016

Trump wins

election

Federal

investigation of

Russian meddling

JAN. 20, 2017

Inauguration

Continuing…

JUNE 2015

Trump

announces

candidacy

Direct contacts

with Russians

Time

Russian

social media

fraud

2016

MAY 2016

Trump clinches

nomination

ELECTION

INAUGURATION

Denials of

wrongdoing by

Trump and associates

By The New York Times

See the full timeline of events.

The Russian leader thought the United States, and Hillary Clinton, had sought to undermine his presidency.

The first Russian advance party was tiny: two women on a whirlwind American tour. Hitting nine states in three weeks in summer 2014, Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova were supposed to “gather intelligence” to help them mimic Americans on Facebook and Twitter. They snapped photos and chatted up strangers from California to New York, on a sort of Russian “Thelma & Louise” road trip for the era of social media.

Even then, federal prosecutors would later say, the Russian government was thinking about the next United States presidential election — perhaps ahead of most Americans. Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova had been dispatched by their employer, an online propaganda factory in St. Petersburg, to prepare to influence American voters.

But why did Mr. Putin care about the election, then more than two years away? He was seething. The United States, in his view, had bullied and interfered with Russia for long enough. It was high time to fight back.

His motives were rooted in Russia’s ambivalence toward the West, captured in the history of St. Petersburg, Russia’s spectacular northern city and Mr. Putin’s hometown. Peter the Great, the brutal but westward-looking 18th-century czar, had brought in the best Italian architects to construct Russia’s “window on Europe” in a swamp.

Czar Peter’s portrait replaced Vladimir Lenin’s in Mr. Putin’s office when he took a job working for the city’s mayor in the early 1990s. Twenty-five years later, the internet offered a different kind of window on the West — a portal that could be used for a virtual invasion.

Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, had described the breakup of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, a remarkable statement from a man whose country experienced revolution, civil war, bloody purges and the deaths of 27 million people in World War II. Like many of his fellow citizens, Mr. Putin was nostalgic for Russia’s lost superpower status. And he resented what he saw as American arrogance.

The Russian leader believed the United States had relentlessly sought to undermine Russian sovereignty and his own legitimacy. The United States had backed democratic, anti-Russian forces in the so-called color revolutions on Russia’s borders, in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. It had funded pro-democracy Russian activists through American organizations with millions in State Department grants each year.

With little evidence, Mr. Putin believed this American meddling helped produce street demonstrations in Moscow and other cities in 2011, with crowds complaining of a rigged parliamentary election and chanting, “Putin’s a thief!”

And Mrs. Clinton, then secretary of state, cheered the protesters on. Russians, she said, “deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted, and that means they deserve free, fair, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.”

Mr. Putin blamed Mrs. Clinton for the turmoil, claiming that when she spoke out, his political enemies “heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.”

The two tangled again the next year when Mr. Putin pushed for a “Eurasian Union” that would in effect compete with the European Union. Mrs. Clinton sharply dismissed the notion, calling it a scheme to “re-Sovietize the region” and saying the United States would try to block it.

By 2013, with his initial hopes for a “reset” of Russian relations dashed, Mr. Obama, like his top diplomat, no longer bothered to be diplomatic. He criticized Russia’s anti-gay legislation, part of Mr. Putin’s effort to become a global champion for conservative values, and gave a biting description of the Russian leader: “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” Mr. Putin was reported to be furious.

The White House via YouTube

After Russian troops seized Crimea and carried out a stealth invasion of Ukraine in 2014, relations grew openly hostile. American support for the new government in Kiev and condemnation of Russian behavior heightened Mr. Putin’s rage at being told what he could do and not do in what he considered his own backyard.

If Russia had only a fraction of the United States’ military might and nothing like its economic power, it had honed its abilities in hacking and influence operations through attacks in Eastern Europe. And it could turn these weapons on America to even the score.

By making mischief in the 2016 election, Mr. Putin could wreak revenge on his enemy, Mrs. Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee, damaging if not defeating her. He could highlight the polarized state of American democracy, making it a less appealing model for Russians and their neighbors. And he could send a message that Russia would not meekly submit to a domineering America.

Hence the two Russian women who toured the United States in 2014, keyboard warriors granted the unusual privilege of real-world travel, hitting both coasts, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas. At that point, according to a Russian document cited by the special counsel, Mr. Putin’s intentions for 2016 were already explicit: to “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.”

In the intervening two years, Mr. Putin’s ire at America only increased. He blamed the United States for pushing for a full investigation of illicit doping by Russian athletes, which would lead to mass suspensions of the country’s Olympic stars. And when the leaked Panama Papers were published in April 2016, revealing that a cellist who was Mr. Putin’s close friend had secret accounts that had handled $2 billion, he charged that it was a smear operation by the United States.

“Who is behind these provocations?” he asked. “We know that among them are employees of official American institutions.”

Then something unexpected happened. Of the more than 20 major-party candidates running for the American presidency, only Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed admiration for Mr. Putin as a “strong” leader and brushed off criticism of Russia. Only he had little interest in the traditional American preoccupation with democracy and human rights. Only he had explored business interests in Russia for years, repeatedly pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow and bringing his beauty pageant there in 2013.

“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow,” the future candidate tweeted at the time, adding wistfully, “if so, will he become my new best friend?”

If Mr. Putin had been designing his ideal leader for the United States, he could hardly have done better than Donald Trump.

For some years, Mr. Trump had attracted attention from Russian conservatives with Kremlin ties. A Putin ally named Konstantin Rykov had begun promoting Mr. Trump as a future president in 2012 and created a Russian-language website three years later to support his candidacy. A Russian think tank, Katehon, had begun running analyses pushing Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump as a candidate was “tough, rough, says what he thinks, rude, emotional and, apparently, candid,” wrote Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist philosopher considered a major influence on Mr. Putin, in February 2016. Mr. Dugin declared that Mr. Trump probably had “no chance of winning” against the “quite annoying” Mrs. Clinton, but added a postscript: “We want to put trust in Donald Trump. Vote for Trump, and see what will happen.”

Against all expectations, Republicans across the country began to do just that, and soon Mr. Trump was beating the crowd of mainstream Republicans. Mr. Putin, said Yuval Weber, a Russia scholar, “found for the first time since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. that he has a prospective president of the United States who fundamentally views international issues from the Russian point of view.”

Asked about the surging Mr. Trump in December 2015, Mr. Putin said he was “a talent, without any doubt,” and “absolutely the leader in the presidential race.” He also applied to the candidate the Russian word yarkii, which means “colorful” or “flamboyant” but which some reports mistranslated as “brilliant,” an assessment that Mr. Trump immediately began repeating.

“It’s always a great honor to be so nicely complimented,” Mr. Trump said, “by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

As Donald J. Trump emerged as the favorite for the nomination, his campaign brought on aides tied to Russia.

Mr. Trump had steamrollered his primary opponents in part by taking aim at Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. The post-9/11 wars were foolish and costly, he would often say at campaign events. America’s allies were deadbeats and freeloaders, he told supporters, who cheered in agreement. Russia was not an existential threat, he said, but a potential ally in beating back terrorist groups.

In early March 2016, the establishment struck back. In an open letter, dozens of the party’s national security luminaries vowed publicly to try to stop the election of a candidate “so utterly unfitted to the office.”

They took particular umbrage at Mr. Trump’s remarks about the Russian president, writing that his “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.”

But Mr. Trump was not cowed. He soon signed on new advisers and aides, including some who had been pushed to the fringe of a political party that had long lionized President Ronald Reagan for staring down Soviet leaders at the height of the Cold War.

To the Kremlin, they must have looked like a dream team.

Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had long viewed Russia as a natural ally in what he saw as a “world war” against radical Islam. In June 2013, when he was D.I.A. chief, he sat inside the imposing headquarters of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, and chatted with officers. Two years later, he sat at Mr. Putin’s elbow at a gala dinner in Moscow.

Mr. Manafort, a longtime Republican lobbyist, had earned millions working for a pro-Kremlin leader in Ukraine and had a history of business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Mr. Putin. He was nearly broke when he joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 — hired to help prevent a mass defection of convention delegates — and yet he offered to work on the campaign unpaid.

Carter Page, a businessman who spent several years working in Moscow, was virtually unknown in Washington when Mr. Trump appointed him a foreign policy adviser. But the S.V.R., Russia’s foreign intelligence service, knew who he was.

In 2013, Mr. Page met in New York with a Russian spy posing as an attaché at the United Nations and passed along energy industry documents in hopes of securing lucrative deals in Moscow.

The F.B.I., which had been tracking Russian spies when Mr. Page came on the bureau’s radar, determined that he had no idea he was meeting with a Russian agent.

“I promised him a lot,” said the spy, Victor Podobnyy, speaking to another Russian intelligence officer about his dealings with Mr. Page, according to an F.B.I. transcript. “How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor.”

The new team was in place by the end of March, and Mr. Trump had a new message that was strikingly similar to one of Mr. Putin’s most ardent talking points.

“I think NATO’s obsolete,” Mr. Trump said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

“NATO’s not meant for terrorism,” he went on to say. “NATO doesn’t have the right countries in it for terrorism.”

By then, the Russian intelligence operation to intervene in the American election — including efforts to infiltrate and influence the Trump campaign — had begun.

Mr. Papadopoulos, the 28-year-old campaign adviser, did not know this when he met in the cafe of the London hotel with Mr. Putin’s “niece” (he has no niece) and an obscure Maltese professor in late March. The academic had taken an interest in Mr. Papadopoulos when he joined the campaign.

F.B.I. agents have identified the professor, Joseph Mifsud, as a likely cutout for Russian intelligence, sent to establish contact with Mr. Papadopoulos and possibly get information about the direction of the Trump campaign. He disappeared after his name surfaced last October, and his whereabouts is unknown. At one point he changed his WhatsApp status to a simple, if cryptic, message: “Alive.”

Professor Mifsud arranged an email introduction between Mr. Papadopoulos and a Russian foreign ministry official. The American also exchanged emails with Olga Polonskaya, the woman in the cafe. “We are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” she wrote in one message, and the two discussed a possible meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.

Over time, though, Mr. Papadopoulos came to question whether the messages were actually from Ms. Polonskaya. The woman he had met in the cafe barely spoke English. The emails he received were in nearly perfect English.

“I even remember sending her a message asking if I’m speaking to the same person I met in London because the conversations were so strange,” he said during an interview this month.

In late April, Mr. Trump gave his first major foreign policy address in the ballroom of a historic Washington hotel. Some of the speech was a familiar litany of Republican policy positions — hawkish warnings to Iran and pledges to be tough on terrorism. But midway through the speech, as Russia’s ambassador to the United States watched from the front seats, Mr. Trump pivoted and said the United States and Russia should look for areas of mutual interest.

“Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility, must end, and ideally will end soon,” he said.

The Associated Press

“That’s the signal to meet,” Mr. Papadopoulos wrote in an email to his Russian foreign ministry contact that evening, meaning that Mr. Trump’s favorable comments about Russia suggested he might be interested in meeting Mr. Putin.

Just one day earlier, Professor Mifsud had told the campaign aide about a possible gift from Moscow: thousands of hacked emails that might damage Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy.

It was a breathtaking revelation. But there was no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos — while ambitious and eager for advancement in the bare-bones campaign — passed the information along to anyone inside the Trump circle.

More than two years later, Mr. Papadopoulos says he has “no recollection” of telling anyone in the campaign about the emails. He said he was supposed to have a phone call that day with Stephen Miller, a top campaign adviser, but it was postponed. If the two men had talked, Mr. Papadopoulos said, he might have shared the information.

“How fate works sometimes, I guess,” said Mr. Papadopoulos, who has been sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I.

As Mr. Trump continued to win primaries and vacuum up convention delegates late in the spring, the Russians made multiple attempts to establish contact with campaign officials.

A Republican operative connected to the N.R.A. tried to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and a Russian central banker at an N.R.A. convention in Kentucky in May. “Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” wrote the operative, Paul Erickson, in an email with the subject “Kremlin connection.” “Ever since Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, all senior Russian leaders consider her beyond redemption.”

Mr. Page, the foreign policy adviser, was invited to deliver the commencement address at the prestigious New Economic School in Moscow. That invitation now appears to have been an effort both to gain information about the Trump campaign and to influence it by feting Mr. Page in the Russian capital. Russian television that year was describing him as a “famous American economist,” but he was an obscure figure in this country.

At that time, the last American to give the commencement speech was Mr. Obama, who used the opportunity to criticize Russia for its treatment of Georgia and Ukraine.

Mr. Page, though, criticized the “hypocrisy” of the United States and its NATO allies for lecturing Russia about bullying its neighbors, which were former Soviet republics, while the Westerners were taking “proactive steps to encourage regime change overseas.” During his time in Moscow, Mr. Page met with at least one top Russian official and numerous business leaders.

And there was the now infamous June 2016 approach to Donald Trump Jr. by Russians whom he and his father had known from their days taking the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. The Russians met at Trump Tower in Manhattan with top campaign officials after promising damaging information on Mrs. Clinton.

See the timeline of events that surround the Trump Tower meeting.

What exactly transpired during the meeting is still a mystery, but it appears that the Russians pulled a bait-and-switch. They used the session to push for an end to the crippling economic sanctions that Mr. Obama had imposed on Russia.

Donald Trump Jr. has said how disappointed he and other campaign advisers were that they didn’t get what the Russians had promised. The campaign’s reaction to the Russian attempts to discredit Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was not to rebuff them or call law enforcement — it was to try to exploit them.

Experts who have studied Russian operations for decades see the catalog of contacts and communications between Russians and Mr. Trump’s advisers as a loosely coordinated effort by Russian intelligence both to get insight into the campaign and to influence it.

“The Russians aren’t reckless, and I don’t see them going through with this effort without thinking they had a willing partner in the dance,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former C.I.A. officer who served as the spy agency’s station chief in Moscow.

By midsummer 2016, the Russian contacts sounded alarms inside the F.B.I., where agents had received a tip about Mr. Papadopoulos and puzzled over Mr. Page’s Moscow visit. The bureau sent a trusted informant to help understand what was happening: Stefan Halper, a former Nixon and Reagan adviser and professor at Cambridge University, reached out to Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos under false pretenses.

American officials have defended Professor Halper’s work, saying the use of such a confidential informant is routine in a counterintelligence investigation. Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress and the media have called him something different: a “spy” sent by the Obama administration to infiltrate the campaign.

Eventually, Mr. Trump would use such episodes as a foundation for his view that America’s law enforcement agencies had been aligned against him from the beginning — ammunition for a looming war with the “deep state.” This idea would consume Mr. Trump after he became president, feeding his sense of grievance that the legitimacy of his victory was under attack and shaping his decisions as he tried to blunt the widening Russia investigation.

The long-promised “dirt” the Russians had on Mrs. Clinton would soon be made public. Three days after the Trump Tower meeting, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, appeared on a British Sunday television show.

He said that his website would soon be publishing a raft of emails related to Mrs. Clinton. And he said something at once ominous and prescient: “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”

Using a hacker persona, Russian military intelligence officers began to reveal documents stolen from the Democrats.

A website made its splashy debut three days later, presenting a jaunty hacker who called himself Guccifer 2.0. He had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, Guccifer said, offering as proof a selection of purloined documents.

“Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into the DNC’s network,” Guccifer wrote on June 15. “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks,” he added — which seemed to explain Mr. Assange’s boast.

Russian intelligence had worked fast. Just the day before, D.N.C. officials and their cybersecurity contractor, CrowdStrike, had announced that Russian hackers had penetrated the committee’s computer network.

Overnight, Russian military intelligence officers set up the website and created the Guccifer persona to counter the D.N.C. accusations. Guccifer — a name borrowed from a real Romanian hacker — was presented as a jovial Romanian, a “lone hacker,” who in his posts wanted to make one thing very clear: He had nothing whatsoever to do with Russia.

“It seems the guys from CrowdStrike and the DNC,” he wrote, “would say I’m a Russian bear even if I were a catholic nun.”

In fact, beyond the conclusions of CrowdStrike and the F.B.I., there were clues from the start that Guccifer’s posts came from Moscow: The name of the founder of the Soviet secret police was embedded in Guccifer’s documents, written using a Russian version of Microsoft Word.

Yet the Guccifer gambit would prove remarkably effective at creating doubt about Russia’s responsibility for the hack. Republican operatives working on congressional campaigns emailed “Guccifer” and received hacked documents relevant to their races. For journalists, the claims of the supposed “lone hacker” made the role of Russian intelligence seem to be a disputed allegation rather than a proven fact.

Today there is no doubt who hacked the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign. A detailed indictment of 12 officers of Russia’s military intelligence agency, filed in July by Mr. Mueller, documents their every move, including their break-in techniques, their tricks to hide inside the Democrats’ networks and even their Google searches.

See the timeline of hacking that led to the indictment.

The agency, now called the Main Directorate but often referred to by its former abbreviation, the G.R.U., proved agile, brazen and not terribly discreet — the same pattern it would show two years later in the nerve-agent poisoning in England of its former officer, the defector Sergei V. Skripal.

The hacking might have drawn little attention had the G.R.U. stopped there, simply stealing emails to peruse for intelligence clues. But the Russians’ decision to leak the emails to undercut Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy was a huge escalation.

The Russian officers’ political skills proved equal to their hacking expertise. They deftly manipulated a long list of Americans and Europeans, many of whom embraced Guccifer’s tall tale and took seriously the claim that the other Russian false front, DCLeaks.com, was run by American “hacktivists.”

“Guccifer 2.0” addressed a cybersecurity conference in London via messages to one of the organizers. The purported Romanian jousted with a suspicious reporter for Motherboard, insisting: “I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia.” When Twitter suspended the DCLeaks account, the Fox News host Lou Dobbs accused the company of “Leftist Fascism.” The account was swiftly reinstated.

But the Russians’ masterstroke was to enlist, via the Guccifer persona, the help of WikiLeaks. Neither of the Russians’ websites, Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks.com, had much reach. But WikiLeaks had a large global audience. Its editor, Mr. Assange, shared Mr. Putin’s hatred of Mrs. Clinton and had a soft spot for Russia.

Mr. Assange assisted with the subterfuge. He repeatedly denied that he’d received the documents from Russia; whether he was really taken in by the “Guccifer” ruse is uncertain.

Fox News via YouTube

But he also obscured the Russian role by fueling a right-wing conspiracy theory he knew to be false. He offered a $20,000 reward for information about the murder in Washington of Seth Rich, a young D.N.C. staffer shot to death in an apparent bungled street robbery. Trump supporters were suggesting Mr. Rich had leaked the D.N.C. emails and been killed in retaliation, and Mr. Assange played along.

In a discussion about WikiLeaks’ sources on Dutch television in August 2016, Mr. Assange suddenly brought up Mr. Rich’s killing.

“That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?” the interviewer said. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting that our sources take risks,” Mr. Assange said — and then declined to say if Mr. Rich was a source.

Such misleading interviews helped camouflage the Russian origin of the leak, and WikiLeaks’ adept timing gave the emails big impact. After some technical problems, according to Mr. Mueller’s indictment, “Guccifer” passed the entire archive of D.N.C. emails to WikiLeaks. The website published 19,252 of them on July 22, 2016 — three days before the Democratic National Convention.

The Russians’ work detonated with powerful political effect. The emails’ exposure of D.N.C. staffers’ support for Mrs. Clinton and scorn for Senator Bernie Sanders, her chief rival, forced the committee’s chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to resign. The resentment of the Sanders delegates deepened, leaving the party even more bitterly divided as it turned to the general election.

Unknown to the feuding Democratic delegates, a cyberdrama had been playing out in secret for weeks, as CrowdStrike experts tried to root out the Russian hackers who had penetrated the D.N.C. and its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Robert S. Johnston, a lead investigator for CrowdStrike, said the Russian hackers, uniformed officers of military intelligence, were “like a thunderstorm moving through the system — very, very noisy.”

CrowdStrike had begun watching the Russians in April, asking D.N.C. staffers to keep quiet about the intrusion. “We only talked over Signal,” an encrypted text and call service, said Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and veteran of the United States Cyber Command who is now chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Adlumin. Only by following the hackers for several weeks could CrowdStrike be certain it had found the Russians’ tools and blocked their access.

But somehow, possibly by intercepting communications inside the D.N.C. or the F.B.I., which was investigating the breach, the G.R.U. officers learned they had been spotted. On May 31, two weeks before the public disclosure of the hack, Ivan Yermakov, a G.R.U. hacker who had used American-sounding online personas — “Kate S. Milton,” “James McMorgans” and “Karen W. Millen” — suddenly began searching online for information about CrowdStrike. He sought to find out what the cybersleuths knew about the Russians’ main tool, a nasty piece of malware called X-Agent, the indictment noted.

After that, the spy-versus-spy contest escalated. “We knew it was the Russians, and they knew we knew,” Mr. Johnston said. “I would say it was the cyber equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.”

The candidate favored by the Russians alternated between denying their help and seeming to welcome it. On June 15, the day after the D.N.C. hack was disclosed, the Trump campaign pitched in with a novel idea to deflect blame from the Russians: The D.N.C. had somehow hacked itself.

“We believe it was the D.N.C. that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate,” the statement said. Later, Mr. Trump tried out other alternative theories: Perhaps the hack had been carried out by “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” or a “some guy in his home in New Jersey,” or the Chinese, or almost anyone.

But at other times, he appeared to accept that Russia was responsible.

“The new joke in town,” Mr. Trump tweeted on July 25, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

And two days later, he famously invited the Russians to try to retrieve 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton had deleted from her computer server on the basis that they involved personal matters and not State Department business.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a Florida news conference. The Mueller investigation discovered that the Russians were evidently listening: The same day as the news conference, the G.R.U. hackers began sending so-called spearphishing emails to accounts associated with Mrs. Clinton’s personal office.

The Associated Press

Mr. Trump’s pronouncements stood in striking contrast to the responses of past presidential candidates who had been offered assistance by foreign powers. In 1960, both Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy refused quiet offers of help from Khrushchev.

“Because we know the ideas of Mr. Stevenson, we in our hearts all favor him,” Khrushchev said in a message passed on by the Soviet ambassador. “Could the Soviet press assist Mr. Stevenson’s personal success? How?”

Mr. Stevenson declined the offer, in language that reflected the broad American political consensus about foreign election interference. “I believe I made it clear to him,” Mr. Stevenson wrote, “that I considered the offer of such assistance highly improper, indiscreet and dangerous to all concerned.”

Russia did not deliver on Mr. Trump’s request for Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. But it had obtained something just as useful: 50,000 emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, stolen via a phishing attack by the G.R.U. Roger Stone, a political operative and longtime Trump friend, seemed to have advance word. “Trust me,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug. 25, it would soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

But WikiLeaks withheld the Podesta emails for months after receiving them from “Guccifer” in June, evidently waiting for the right moment to have the biggest impact on the race. The time came on Oct. 7, amid two blows to the Trump campaign.

See the timeline of events that surround the release of the emails.

That day, American intelligence agencies made their first official statement that the Russian government, with the approval of its “senior-most officials,” was behind the hacking and leaking of the Democratic emails.

And then came a potentially lethal disclosure for the Trump campaign: the shocking “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump bragged of groping and sexually assaulting women. The candidate desperately needed to change the subject — and that was the moment WikiLeaks posted the first of thousands of Mr. Podesta’s emails.

They were invaluable for political journalists, offering embarrassing comments from staffers about Mrs. Clinton’s shortcomings and the full texts of her highly paid speeches to banks and corporations, which she had refused to release. WikiLeaks assisted by highlighting interesting tidbits in yellow.

Soon, Mr. Trump was delighting his supporters by reading from the stolen emails on the campaign trail. “Now, this just came out,” he told a fired-up crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in October, brandishing a page of highlights. “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!”

“Crooked Hillary” had said “behind closed doors,” Mr. Trump declared, that terrorism was “not a threat”; that she had “a great relationship with the financial industry”; that ISIS might infiltrate groups of refugees coming to the United States; that a politician needed to have “both a public and private position” on policies; and on and on.

The quotes were taken out of context, of course, and subjected to the most damaging interpretation. But they seemed to offer a glimpse of Mrs. Clinton’s hidden views.

For the last month of the campaign, in daily releases that kept the Clinton team on the defensive, WikiLeaks delivered the Russians’ gift. If the July D.N.C. dump had been an explosion, the October series was more like unrelenting sniper fire. Whether the timing was decided by the Russians or by Mr. Assange, it proved devastatingly effective.

Russian trolls, using fake accounts on social media, reached nearly as many Americans as would vote in the election.

David Michael Smith, a Houston political scientist and activist, spotted the alarming call on Facebook. A group called Heart of Texas was suddenly urging Texans to come at noon on May 21, 2016, to protest a 14-year-old Islamic center in downtown Houston.

“Stop Islamization of Texas,” the post declared, with a photo of the Islamic Da’wah Center, which it called a “shrine of hatred.” It invited protesters to prepare for battle: “Feel free to bring along your firearms, concealed or not!”

“We immediately asked, ‘What the blank is the Heart of Texas’?’” recalled Mr. Smith, who started calling friends to organize a counterprotest.

Months later, he would find out.

Heart of Texas, which garnered a quarter-million followers on Facebook, was one of 470 Facebook pages created 5,000 miles from Houston at the Internet Research Agency, the oddly named St. Petersburg company that would become the world’s most famous manipulator of social media. The two Russian employees who had visited Texas during that 2014 American tour, Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova, evidently had returned home with big ideas about how to exploit the emotional chasms in American politics and culture.

Just as the Russians’ Guccifer character had reached out to American activists, journalists and WikiLeaks, the Russian online trolls understood that their real political power would come from mobilizing Americans. The Russian company’s formula was simple: tap into a simmering strain of opinion in the United States and pour on the fuel.

Consider the Texas protest. After the Russians put up the “Stop Islamization” Facebook post, several dozen like-minded Texans added their own incendiary comments. “Allah Sucks,” wrote one, adding a threat to kill any Muslim who tried to visit him. Another wrote of the Islamic center, “Need to Blow this place up.”

A dozen yelling white supremacists turned out for the protest, at least two of them with assault rifles and a third with a pistol. Others held Confederate flags and a “White Lives Matter” banner.

Houston police managed to keep them away from a much larger crowd of counterprotesters — some of whom had responded to a second Russian Facebook call. In a blatant attempt to create a confrontation, another Internet Research Agency page, this one called United Muslims of America, had asked people to rally at exactly the same time and place to “Save Islamic Knowledge.”

The event had no lasting consequences, though clearly it could have ended in tragedy. Still, it demonstrated that young Russians tapping on keyboards in 12-hour shifts could act as puppet masters for unsuspecting Americans many time zones away.

When Facebook first acknowledged last year the Russian intrusion on its platform, it seemed modest in scale. The $100,000 spent on ads was a trivial sum compared with the tens of millions spent on Facebook by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns.

See the timeline of events that shows Russia’s social media campaign.

But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Nature Tweets from Russian Trolls, by Day

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Election Day

March

April

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

Election Day

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

March

April

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

March

April

May

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

June

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Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

By The New York Times

And Facebook was only the biggest of the engines powering the Russian messages.

On Instagram, there were 170 ersatz Russian accounts that posted 120,000 times and reached about 20 million people. Twitter reported that in the 10 weeks before the election some 3,814 Internet Research Agency accounts interacted with 1.4 million people — and that another 50,258 automated “bot” accounts that the company judged to be Russia-linked tweeted about the election. The trolls created at least two podcasts, posted Vine videos, blogged on Tumblr, sought donations via PayPal and even exploited the Pokémon Go craze.

Without American social media companies, the Russian influence campaign could not have operated. The St. Petersburg trolls tapped the power of Silicon Valley for their stealth intervention in American democracy.

Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who has studied three million Internet Research Agency tweets, said he was “impressed with both their level of absurdist creativity and keen understanding of American psychology.” They knew “exactly what buttons to press” and operated with “industrial efficiency,” he said.

The Russian troll operation had gotten its start two years before, focusing at first on government targets closer to home.

In 2014, Vitaly Bespalov, then 23, finished a journalism degree in the Siberian city of Tyumen and signed on as a “content manager” at the Internet Research Agency, which looked vaguely like a digital marketing firm and offered a relatively generous salary of $1,000 a month.

Mr. Bespalov was surprised to discover that his job was to write or swipe stories to post on counterfeit Ukrainian websites, spinning the conflict there to fit the Russian government’s view. He had to be sure always to use the word “terrorists” for the Ukrainian fighters opposed to the Russian invasion that was tearing the country apart.

“My first days on the job I was in shock — I had no idea what kind of an operation this was,” Mr. Bespalov said in a recent interview while vacationing in Ukraine: his first visit to the country about which he had written so many bogus stories.

He was put off by the company’s work but said he chose to stick around for several months, in part to study its operations. “It was very monotonous and boring,” Mr. Bespalov said. “It seemed that almost no one liked this work. But almost nobody quit, because everyone needed the money.”

Soon he began hearing about a new, secretive department inside the St. Petersburg company that was recruiting English speakers to focus on the United States.

Like Peter the Great, the Internet Research Agency borrowed Western technology while shunning Western notions of democracy. As Mr. Bespalov quickly realized, the company was not a normal business but a well-compensated tool of the Russian state. It was owned by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who overcame an early prison sentence for robbery to create a thriving catering business. He then built a fortune as a loyal contractor willing to provide internet trolls, mercenary soldiers or anything else required by his patron, Mr. Putin.

In the company’s new department, some 80 young English speakers worked in shifts to feed Facebook pages and Twitter accounts imitating the snark and fury of outraged Americans. They stole photos, favoring attractive young women, for their Twitter profiles. They copied or created sharp poster-like commentaries on American life and politics, only occasionally slipping up with grammatical mistakes. They focused their efforts on pages that touched American nerves, with names like “Guns4Life,” “Pray for Police,” “Stop All Invaders,” “South United” and — mimicking Mr. Trump — “America First.”

If Mr. Trump was borrowing the hacked emails from the Russians for his stump speeches, the online trolls in St. Petersburg returned the favor, picking up the candidate’s populist rhetoric. Even pages that seemed nominally hostile to him often worked in his favor: “Woke Blacks” critiqued Mrs. Clinton for alleged hostility to African-Americans; “United Muslims of America” showed her with a woman in a head scarf and a slogan — “Support Hillary, Save American Muslims” — that seemed aimed at generating a backlash.

The Russians managed to call a dozen or more rallies like the one in Houston, sometimes paying unwitting American activists for their help via money transfer. The same method may have been used to get the bridge banners of Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama hung.

An Internet Research Agency Twitter account, @cassishere, posted a photo of the Putin banner on the Manhattan Bridge, winning a credit from The New York Daily News. In Washington, the Russian account @LeroyLovesUSA tweeted about suspending the Obama banner, then added more tweets with critiques of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy in stilted English.

Facebook, reluctant to step into the divisive politics of the Trump presidency, did not acknowledge the Russian intrusion until nearly a year after the election, asserting that Russia had chiefly aimed at sowing division. A closer look suggested a more focused goal: damaging Mrs. Clinton and promoting Mr. Trump.

Many of the Facebook memes portrayed Mrs. Clinton as angry, corrupt or crazed. Mr. Trump was depicted as his campaign preferred: strong, decisive, courageous, willing to shun political correctness to tell hard truths. The Russian operation also boosted Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who had dined with Mr. Putin in Moscow, to draw votes from Mrs. Clinton. It encouraged supporters of Mr. Sanders to withhold their votes from Mrs. Clinton even after he endorsed her.

The impact is impossible to gauge; the Internet Research Agency was a Kremlin fire hose of influence wielded amid a hurricane of a presidential election. Christopher Painter, who had served under President George W. Bush at the Justice Department and as the State Department’s coordinator for cyberissues from 2011 to 2017, said the propaganda flood and the leaked emails certainly affected the vote. But no one can say whether it made the difference in an election decided by the tiniest of margins, fewer than 100,000 votes in three states.

“It’s impossible to know how much voter suppression it caused, discouraging people from coming out,” Mr. Painter said. “It’s impossible to know how many votes it changed.”

He added that “people don’t like to admit they’ve been fooled” — hence the strenuous efforts from Mr. Trump and his supporters to deny or dismiss the significance of the Russian interference.

A case in point would be Harry Miller, a devoted Trump supporter in Florida who was paid to organize a rally in which a woman portraying Mrs. Clinton sat behind bars on the back of his pickup truck. It turned out that the people who had ordered up the rally, “Matt Skiber” and “Joshua Milton,” were pseudonyms for Russians at the Internet Research Agency, according to the Mueller indictment.

But don’t tell that to Mr. Miller. Contacted via Twitter, he insisted that he had not been manipulated by Russian trolls.

“They were not Russians, and you know it,” Mr. Miller wrote, adding, “If you don’t then you are the one snookered.”

The president has created doubts about the investigation and an affinity for Russia among his supporters.

The White House statement released at 7:21 p.m. on May 17, 2017, was measured, even anodyne. Reacting to the news that Mr. Mueller had been appointed special counsel for the Russia investigation, the statement quoted Mr. Trump saying that he was “looking forward to this matter concluding quickly,” and that in the meantime he would be fighting “for the people and issues that matter most to the future of our country.”

Exactly 12 hours and 31 minutes later, early in the morning without his staff around him, he told the world what he really thought.

“This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!” he wrote in a tweet.

It had been little more than a week since the president had fired his F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but the “Russia thing” wasn’t going away. Now the president was up against someone who could become even more formidable — a careful, tenacious former Marine whose stewardship of the F.B.I. during the Bush and Obama years had been praised by Washington’s establishment.

Mr. Trump’s instinct was to fire Mr. Mueller, but he settled for a different strategy. He has used all his power to try to discredit the special counsel’s investigation.

Revelation upon revelation about Russian encounters with Trump associates has followed in the months since Mr. Mueller was appointed, intensifying the fear in the White House. Mr. Trump has used his Twitter pulpit to repeatedly assault the Mueller inquiry, and has made scathing remarks at rallies about claims of Russian interference. “It’s a hoax, O.K.?” he told a Pennsylvania crowd last month. The attacks have had an impact on how Americans view the country’s national security apparatus, how they view the Russia story, even how they view Russia itself.

See the full timeline of Mr. Trump’s repeated denials and attacks.

The strategy has helped sow doubts about the special counsel’s work in part because Mr. Mueller and his prosecutors only rarely go public with the evidence they have been steadily gathering in secret interviews and closed-door sessions of a grand jury.

During a period of 146 days over this year — between the Feb. 16 indictment of the Internet Research Agency operatives and the July 13 indictment of Russian intelligence officers — Mr. Mueller’s office was effectively silent. The president was not, sending at least 94 tweets that denied he had been involved in “collusion,” called the Russian interference a “hoax” or labeled the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt.”

Indictment of Internet

Research Agency operatives

Indictment of Russian

intelligence officers

Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

April

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Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

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Indictment of Internet

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April

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intelligence officers

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Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

Indictment of Internet

Research Agency operatives

Indictment of Russian

intelligence officers

April

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April

July

Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

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Indictment of Internet

Research Agency operatives

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Indictment of Russian

intelligence officers

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By July, one poll showed that 45 percent of Americans disapproved of how Mr. Mueller was handling the investigation, a 14-point increase from January. The shift was even more dramatic among Republican voters: from 49 percent to 78 percent. More recent polls, conducted since the indictment of the G.R.U. officers and Mr. Manafort’s conviction, have shown a reversal of the trend.

The president’s aides hardly make a secret of their goal to discredit the investigation before a jury of the public. There is little expectation that Mr. Mueller would ignore Justice Department guidelines and try to indict a sitting president, so Mr. Trump’s lawyers see Congress and impeachment as the only threat. Turn the public against impeachment, the thinking goes, and Congress is less likely to act.

“Mueller is now slightly more distrusted than trusted, and Trump is a little ahead of the game,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s omnipresent lawyer, told The New York Times last month, without citing any data to buttress his assertion.

“So I think we’ve done really well,” he said. “And my client’s happy.”

Mr. Trump’s frustration with the Russian investigation is not surprising. He is right that no public evidence has emerged showing that his campaign conspired with Russia in the election interference or accepted Russian money. But the inquiry has buffeted his presidency, provoked concern that his attempts to thwart the investigation amount to obstruction of justice and fed his suspicion that the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies — what he calls “the deep state” — are conspiring against him.

The Associated Press

The desire of the president to make deals with Mr. Putin, and the longstanding skepticism of the intelligence community about Russian intentions and actions, might have made a clash inevitable. But Mr. Trump appears to have had success in persuading some Americans that the spy and law enforcement agencies are corrupt and hyperpartisan. He has scrambled alliances that solidified over decades, including the Republican Party’s reflexive support of the national security agencies. A president in open war with the F.B.I., once inconceivable, is now part of the daily news cycle.

Mr. Trump began laying the foundation immediately after he won the presidency, when he questioned the intelligence agencies’ findings that Russia had disrupted the election, and likened America’s spies to Nazis. Since taking office, he has worked with partners in Congress to cast the agencies as part of an insurgency against the White House.

It continued in July, when he stood next to Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland, and declared that he trusted the Russian president’s assurances that Moscow was innocent of interfering in the 2016 election.

And it continues today. Early one morning last week, hours before flying to Pennsylvania to honor the victims of the flight that crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, the president fired off a tweet that appeared to quote something he had seen on Fox News.

“‘We have found nothing to show collusion between President Trump & Russia, absolutely zero, but every day we get more documentation showing collusion between the FBI & DOJ, the Hillary campaign, foreign spies & Russians, incredible.’”

The reshuffling of alliances has seeped into the media, where the president’s reliable allies have been joined by voices on the left to dismiss the Russia story as overblown. They warn of a new Red Scare.

On Fox News, the network where Sean Hannity fulminates nightly about Mr. Mueller and his team, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, a founder of the left-leaning news site The Intercept and a champion of government whistle-blowers, has appeared regularly to dismiss revelations about the investigation and decry officials “willing to leak, even at the expense of committing crimes,” in order to damage Mr. Trump.

Multiple frenzied television segments and hyped news stories have given credence to the concerns of Mr. Greenwald and others about a 21st-century McCarthyism. And critics of the “deep state” were given powerful ammunition after the release of text messages between two F.B.I. officials involved in the Russia investigation, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, that revealed their animosity toward Mr. Trump. The pair, who were involved in a romantic relationship at the time, have been skewered regularly on Mr. Hannity’s show as the “Trump-hating F.B.I. lovebirds.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s glowing words about Mr. Putin and Russia have created a new affinity for Russia — in particular its social conservatism and toughness on terrorism — among Mr. Trump’s most devoted supporters.

During a period of myriad accounts about Russia’s attempts to disrupt the last election, the percentage of Republicans who view Mr. Putin favorably has more than doubled (from 11 percent to 25 percent), according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Democrats are now far more likely than Republicans to see Russia as a threat. An October 2017 poll showed that 63 percent of Democrats and just 38 percent of Republicans said they saw “Russia’s power and influence” as a significant threat to the United States.

Once again, Mr. Trump has flipped the script in the party of Reagan: A country that was once seen as a geopolitical foe is now embraced by many Republicans as a bastion of Christianity and traditional values.

Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, said that despite the country’s relative economic and military weakness, Mr. Putin had often played a poor hand deftly. “Across many dimensions, Putin is using all kinds of instruments of power,” he said.

“It feels to me,” the former ambassador said, “like he’s winning and we’re losing.”

On July 16, the president woke early in Helsinki, hours before he was to sit face to face with Mr. Putin. The meeting came three days after Mr. Mueller indicted the 12 Russian intelligence officers. Once again, Mr. Trump dashed off a tweet.

“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!” he wrote.

Russia’s foreign ministry responded with a simple tweet hours later.

“We agree.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html | Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far, in 2018-09-20 13:43:55

[blogparadiseisland]

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far http://www.nature-business.com/nature-the-plot-to-subvert-an-election-unraveling-the-russia-story-so-far/

Nature

On an October afternoon before the 2016 election, a huge banner was unfurled from the Manhattan Bridge in New York City: Vladimir V. Putin against a Russian-flag background, and the unlikely word “Peacemaker” below. It was a daredevil happy birthday to the Russian president, who was turning 64.

In November, shortly after Donald J. Trump eked out a victory that Moscow had worked to assist, an even bigger banner appeared, this time on the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington: the face of President Barack Obama and “Goodbye Murderer” in big red letters.

The police never identified who had hung the banners, but there were clues. The earliest promoters of the images on Twitter were American-sounding accounts, including @LeroyLovesUSA, later exposed as Russian fakes operated from St. Petersburg to influence American voters.

The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history.

For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

But to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.

To many Americans, the intervention seemed to be a surprise attack, a stealth cyberage Pearl Harbor, carried out by an inexplicably sinister Russia. For Mr. Putin, however, it was long-overdue payback, a justified response to years of “provocations” from the United States.

And there is a plausible case that Mr. Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved. In an election with an extraordinarily close margin, the repeated disruption of the Clinton campaign by emails published on WikiLeaks and the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference, a possibility Mr. Trump flatly rejects.

As Mr. Trump emerged in spring 2016 as the improbable favorite for the Republican nomination, the Russian operation accelerated on three fronts — the hacking and leaking of Democratic documents; massive fraud on Facebook and Twitter; and outreach to Trump campaign associates.

Consider 10 days in March. On March 15 of that year, Mr. Trump won five primaries, closing in on his party’s nomination, and crowed that he had become “the biggest political story anywhere in the world.” That same day in Moscow, a veteran hacker named Ivan Yermakov, a Russian military intelligence officer working for a secret outfit called Unit 26165, began probing the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. In St. Petersburg, shift workers posted on Facebook and Twitter at a feverish pace, posing as Americans and following instructions to attack Mrs. Clinton.

On March 21 in Washington, Mr. Trump announced his foreign policy team, a group of fringe figures whose advocacy of warmer relations with Russia ran counter to Republican orthodoxy. Meanwhile, Unit 26165 was poring over the bounty from a separate attack it had just carried out: 50,000 emails stolen from the Clinton campaign’s chairman.

On March 24, one of the members of the Trump foreign policy team, George Papadopoulos, sat in the cafe of an upscale London hotel with a Russian woman who introduced herself as Mr. Putin’s niece and offered to help set up a meeting between the Russian president and Mr. Trump. The woman and the adviser exchanged frequent messages in the weeks that followed. Today, Mr. Padadopoulos is unsure that those messages came from the person he met in the cafe.

The Russian intervention was essentially a hijacking — of American companies like Facebook and Twitter; of American citizens’ feelings about immigration and race; of American journalists eager for scoops, however modest; of the naïve, or perhaps not so naïve, ambitions of Mr. Trump’s advisers. The Russian trolls, hackers and agents totaled barely 100, and their task was to steer millions of American voters. They knew it would take a village to sabotage an election.

Russians or suspected Russian agents — including oligarchs, diplomats, former military officers and shadowy intermediaries — had dozens of contacts during the campaign with Mr. Trump’s associates. They reached out through email, Facebook and Twitter. They sought introductions through trusted business connections of Mr. Trump’s, obscure academic institutions, veterans groups and the National Rifle Association.

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They met Trump campaign aides in Moscow, London, New York and Louisville, Ky. One claimed the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton; another Russian, the Trump campaign was told, would deliver it. In May and June alone, the Trump campaign fielded at least four invitations to meet with Russian intermediaries or officials.

In nearly every case, the Trump aides and associates seemed enthusiastic about their exchanges with the Russians. Over months of such probing, it seems that no one alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the foreign overtures.

Mr. Trump’s position on the Russian contacts has evolved over time: first, that there were none; then, that they did not amount to collusion; next, that in any case collusion was not a crime. That is mere semantics — conspiracy is the technical legal term for abetting the Russians in breaking American laws, such as those outlawing computer hacking and banning foreign assistance to a campaign.

Whether Mr. Trump or any of his associates conspired with the Russians is a central question of the investigation by Mr. Mueller, who has already charged 26 Russians and won convictions or guilty pleas from the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn; the former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, and his deputy, Rick Gates; and from Mr. Papadopoulos. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, has pleaded guilty in a separate case.

But none of the convictions to date involve conspiracy. There remains an alternative explanation to the collusion theory: that the Trump aides, far from certain their candidate would win, were happy to meet the Russians because they thought it might lead to moneymaking deals after the election. “Black Caviar,” read the subject line of an email Mr. Manafort got in July 2016 from his associate in Kiev, Ukraine, hinting at the possibility of new largess from a Russian oligarch with whom they had done business.

Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School and the great-granddaughter of the Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, said that what Russia pulled off, through creativity and sheer luck, would have been the envy of Mr. Putin’s predecessors: puncturing the American sense of superiority and insisting on Russia’s power and place in the world.

“This operation was to show the Americans — that you bastards are just as screwed up as the rest of us,” Professor Khrushcheva said. “Putin fulfilled the dream of every Soviet leader — to stick it to the United States. I think this will be studied by the K.G.B.’s successors for a very long time.”

Nature A Timeline of Parallel Threads

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ELECTION

INAUGURATION

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By The New York Times

See the full timeline of events.

The Russian leader thought the United States, and Hillary Clinton, had sought to undermine his presidency.

The first Russian advance party was tiny: two women on a whirlwind American tour. Hitting nine states in three weeks in summer 2014, Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova were supposed to “gather intelligence” to help them mimic Americans on Facebook and Twitter. They snapped photos and chatted up strangers from California to New York, on a sort of Russian “Thelma & Louise” road trip for the era of social media.

Even then, federal prosecutors would later say, the Russian government was thinking about the next United States presidential election — perhaps ahead of most Americans. Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova had been dispatched by their employer, an online propaganda factory in St. Petersburg, to prepare to influence American voters.

But why did Mr. Putin care about the election, then more than two years away? He was seething. The United States, in his view, had bullied and interfered with Russia for long enough. It was high time to fight back.

His motives were rooted in Russia’s ambivalence toward the West, captured in the history of St. Petersburg, Russia’s spectacular northern city and Mr. Putin’s hometown. Peter the Great, the brutal but westward-looking 18th-century czar, had brought in the best Italian architects to construct Russia’s “window on Europe” in a swamp.

Czar Peter’s portrait replaced Vladimir Lenin’s in Mr. Putin’s office when he took a job working for the city’s mayor in the early 1990s. Twenty-five years later, the internet offered a different kind of window on the West — a portal that could be used for a virtual invasion.

Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, had described the breakup of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, a remarkable statement from a man whose country experienced revolution, civil war, bloody purges and the deaths of 27 million people in World War II. Like many of his fellow citizens, Mr. Putin was nostalgic for Russia’s lost superpower status. And he resented what he saw as American arrogance.

The Russian leader believed the United States had relentlessly sought to undermine Russian sovereignty and his own legitimacy. The United States had backed democratic, anti-Russian forces in the so-called color revolutions on Russia’s borders, in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. It had funded pro-democracy Russian activists through American organizations with millions in State Department grants each year.

With little evidence, Mr. Putin believed this American meddling helped produce street demonstrations in Moscow and other cities in 2011, with crowds complaining of a rigged parliamentary election and chanting, “Putin’s a thief!”

And Mrs. Clinton, then secretary of state, cheered the protesters on. Russians, she said, “deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted, and that means they deserve free, fair, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.”

Mr. Putin blamed Mrs. Clinton for the turmoil, claiming that when she spoke out, his political enemies “heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.”

The two tangled again the next year when Mr. Putin pushed for a “Eurasian Union” that would in effect compete with the European Union. Mrs. Clinton sharply dismissed the notion, calling it a scheme to “re-Sovietize the region” and saying the United States would try to block it.

By 2013, with his initial hopes for a “reset” of Russian relations dashed, Mr. Obama, like his top diplomat, no longer bothered to be diplomatic. He criticized Russia’s anti-gay legislation, part of Mr. Putin’s effort to become a global champion for conservative values, and gave a biting description of the Russian leader: “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” Mr. Putin was reported to be furious.

The White House via YouTube

After Russian troops seized Crimea and carried out a stealth invasion of Ukraine in 2014, relations grew openly hostile. American support for the new government in Kiev and condemnation of Russian behavior heightened Mr. Putin’s rage at being told what he could do and not do in what he considered his own backyard.

If Russia had only a fraction of the United States’ military might and nothing like its economic power, it had honed its abilities in hacking and influence operations through attacks in Eastern Europe. And it could turn these weapons on America to even the score.

By making mischief in the 2016 election, Mr. Putin could wreak revenge on his enemy, Mrs. Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee, damaging if not defeating her. He could highlight the polarized state of American democracy, making it a less appealing model for Russians and their neighbors. And he could send a message that Russia would not meekly submit to a domineering America.

Hence the two Russian women who toured the United States in 2014, keyboard warriors granted the unusual privilege of real-world travel, hitting both coasts, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas. At that point, according to a Russian document cited by the special counsel, Mr. Putin’s intentions for 2016 were already explicit: to “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.”

In the intervening two years, Mr. Putin’s ire at America only increased. He blamed the United States for pushing for a full investigation of illicit doping by Russian athletes, which would lead to mass suspensions of the country’s Olympic stars. And when the leaked Panama Papers were published in April 2016, revealing that a cellist who was Mr. Putin’s close friend had secret accounts that had handled $2 billion, he charged that it was a smear operation by the United States.

“Who is behind these provocations?” he asked. “We know that among them are employees of official American institutions.”

Then something unexpected happened. Of the more than 20 major-party candidates running for the American presidency, only Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed admiration for Mr. Putin as a “strong” leader and brushed off criticism of Russia. Only he had little interest in the traditional American preoccupation with democracy and human rights. Only he had explored business interests in Russia for years, repeatedly pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow and bringing his beauty pageant there in 2013.

“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow,” the future candidate tweeted at the time, adding wistfully, “if so, will he become my new best friend?”

If Mr. Putin had been designing his ideal leader for the United States, he could hardly have done better than Donald Trump.

For some years, Mr. Trump had attracted attention from Russian conservatives with Kremlin ties. A Putin ally named Konstantin Rykov had begun promoting Mr. Trump as a future president in 2012 and created a Russian-language website three years later to support his candidacy. A Russian think tank, Katehon, had begun running analyses pushing Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump as a candidate was “tough, rough, says what he thinks, rude, emotional and, apparently, candid,” wrote Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist philosopher considered a major influence on Mr. Putin, in February 2016. Mr. Dugin declared that Mr. Trump probably had “no chance of winning” against the “quite annoying” Mrs. Clinton, but added a postscript: “We want to put trust in Donald Trump. Vote for Trump, and see what will happen.”

Against all expectations, Republicans across the country began to do just that, and soon Mr. Trump was beating the crowd of mainstream Republicans. Mr. Putin, said Yuval Weber, a Russia scholar, “found for the first time since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. that he has a prospective president of the United States who fundamentally views international issues from the Russian point of view.”

Asked about the surging Mr. Trump in December 2015, Mr. Putin said he was “a talent, without any doubt,” and “absolutely the leader in the presidential race.” He also applied to the candidate the Russian word yarkii, which means “colorful” or “flamboyant” but which some reports mistranslated as “brilliant,” an assessment that Mr. Trump immediately began repeating.

“It’s always a great honor to be so nicely complimented,” Mr. Trump said, “by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

As Donald J. Trump emerged as the favorite for the nomination, his campaign brought on aides tied to Russia.

Mr. Trump had steamrollered his primary opponents in part by taking aim at Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. The post-9/11 wars were foolish and costly, he would often say at campaign events. America’s allies were deadbeats and freeloaders, he told supporters, who cheered in agreement. Russia was not an existential threat, he said, but a potential ally in beating back terrorist groups.

In early March 2016, the establishment struck back. In an open letter, dozens of the party’s national security luminaries vowed publicly to try to stop the election of a candidate “so utterly unfitted to the office.”

They took particular umbrage at Mr. Trump’s remarks about the Russian president, writing that his “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.”

But Mr. Trump was not cowed. He soon signed on new advisers and aides, including some who had been pushed to the fringe of a political party that had long lionized President Ronald Reagan for staring down Soviet leaders at the height of the Cold War.

To the Kremlin, they must have looked like a dream team.

Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had long viewed Russia as a natural ally in what he saw as a “world war” against radical Islam. In June 2013, when he was D.I.A. chief, he sat inside the imposing headquarters of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, and chatted with officers. Two years later, he sat at Mr. Putin’s elbow at a gala dinner in Moscow.

Mr. Manafort, a longtime Republican lobbyist, had earned millions working for a pro-Kremlin leader in Ukraine and had a history of business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Mr. Putin. He was nearly broke when he joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 — hired to help prevent a mass defection of convention delegates — and yet he offered to work on the campaign unpaid.

Carter Page, a businessman who spent several years working in Moscow, was virtually unknown in Washington when Mr. Trump appointed him a foreign policy adviser. But the S.V.R., Russia’s foreign intelligence service, knew who he was.

In 2013, Mr. Page met in New York with a Russian spy posing as an attaché at the United Nations and passed along energy industry documents in hopes of securing lucrative deals in Moscow.

The F.B.I., which had been tracking Russian spies when Mr. Page came on the bureau’s radar, determined that he had no idea he was meeting with a Russian agent.

“I promised him a lot,” said the spy, Victor Podobnyy, speaking to another Russian intelligence officer about his dealings with Mr. Page, according to an F.B.I. transcript. “How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor.”

The new team was in place by the end of March, and Mr. Trump had a new message that was strikingly similar to one of Mr. Putin’s most ardent talking points.

“I think NATO’s obsolete,” Mr. Trump said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

“NATO’s not meant for terrorism,” he went on to say. “NATO doesn’t have the right countries in it for terrorism.”

By then, the Russian intelligence operation to intervene in the American election — including efforts to infiltrate and influence the Trump campaign — had begun.

Mr. Papadopoulos, the 28-year-old campaign adviser, did not know this when he met in the cafe of the London hotel with Mr. Putin’s “niece” (he has no niece) and an obscure Maltese professor in late March. The academic had taken an interest in Mr. Papadopoulos when he joined the campaign.

F.B.I. agents have identified the professor, Joseph Mifsud, as a likely cutout for Russian intelligence, sent to establish contact with Mr. Papadopoulos and possibly get information about the direction of the Trump campaign. He disappeared after his name surfaced last October, and his whereabouts is unknown. At one point he changed his WhatsApp status to a simple, if cryptic, message: “Alive.”

Professor Mifsud arranged an email introduction between Mr. Papadopoulos and a Russian foreign ministry official. The American also exchanged emails with Olga Polonskaya, the woman in the cafe. “We are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” she wrote in one message, and the two discussed a possible meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.

Over time, though, Mr. Papadopoulos came to question whether the messages were actually from Ms. Polonskaya. The woman he had met in the cafe barely spoke English. The emails he received were in nearly perfect English.

“I even remember sending her a message asking if I’m speaking to the same person I met in London because the conversations were so strange,” he said during an interview this month.

In late April, Mr. Trump gave his first major foreign policy address in the ballroom of a historic Washington hotel. Some of the speech was a familiar litany of Republican policy positions — hawkish warnings to Iran and pledges to be tough on terrorism. But midway through the speech, as Russia’s ambassador to the United States watched from the front seats, Mr. Trump pivoted and said the United States and Russia should look for areas of mutual interest.

“Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility, must end, and ideally will end soon,” he said.

The Associated Press

“That’s the signal to meet,” Mr. Papadopoulos wrote in an email to his Russian foreign ministry contact that evening, meaning that Mr. Trump’s favorable comments about Russia suggested he might be interested in meeting Mr. Putin.

Just one day earlier, Professor Mifsud had told the campaign aide about a possible gift from Moscow: thousands of hacked emails that might damage Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy.

It was a breathtaking revelation. But there was no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos — while ambitious and eager for advancement in the bare-bones campaign — passed the information along to anyone inside the Trump circle.

More than two years later, Mr. Papadopoulos says he has “no recollection” of telling anyone in the campaign about the emails. He said he was supposed to have a phone call that day with Stephen Miller, a top campaign adviser, but it was postponed. If the two men had talked, Mr. Papadopoulos said, he might have shared the information.

“How fate works sometimes, I guess,” said Mr. Papadopoulos, who has been sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I.

As Mr. Trump continued to win primaries and vacuum up convention delegates late in the spring, the Russians made multiple attempts to establish contact with campaign officials.

A Republican operative connected to the N.R.A. tried to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and a Russian central banker at an N.R.A. convention in Kentucky in May. “Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” wrote the operative, Paul Erickson, in an email with the subject “Kremlin connection.” “Ever since Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, all senior Russian leaders consider her beyond redemption.”

Mr. Page, the foreign policy adviser, was invited to deliver the commencement address at the prestigious New Economic School in Moscow. That invitation now appears to have been an effort both to gain information about the Trump campaign and to influence it by feting Mr. Page in the Russian capital. Russian television that year was describing him as a “famous American economist,” but he was an obscure figure in this country.

At that time, the last American to give the commencement speech was Mr. Obama, who used the opportunity to criticize Russia for its treatment of Georgia and Ukraine.

Mr. Page, though, criticized the “hypocrisy” of the United States and its NATO allies for lecturing Russia about bullying its neighbors, which were former Soviet republics, while the Westerners were taking “proactive steps to encourage regime change overseas.” During his time in Moscow, Mr. Page met with at least one top Russian official and numerous business leaders.

And there was the now infamous June 2016 approach to Donald Trump Jr. by Russians whom he and his father had known from their days taking the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. The Russians met at Trump Tower in Manhattan with top campaign officials after promising damaging information on Mrs. Clinton.

See the timeline of events that surround the Trump Tower meeting.

What exactly transpired during the meeting is still a mystery, but it appears that the Russians pulled a bait-and-switch. They used the session to push for an end to the crippling economic sanctions that Mr. Obama had imposed on Russia.

Donald Trump Jr. has said how disappointed he and other campaign advisers were that they didn’t get what the Russians had promised. The campaign’s reaction to the Russian attempts to discredit Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was not to rebuff them or call law enforcement — it was to try to exploit them.

Experts who have studied Russian operations for decades see the catalog of contacts and communications between Russians and Mr. Trump’s advisers as a loosely coordinated effort by Russian intelligence both to get insight into the campaign and to influence it.

“The Russians aren’t reckless, and I don’t see them going through with this effort without thinking they had a willing partner in the dance,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former C.I.A. officer who served as the spy agency’s station chief in Moscow.

By midsummer 2016, the Russian contacts sounded alarms inside the F.B.I., where agents had received a tip about Mr. Papadopoulos and puzzled over Mr. Page’s Moscow visit. The bureau sent a trusted informant to help understand what was happening: Stefan Halper, a former Nixon and Reagan adviser and professor at Cambridge University, reached out to Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos under false pretenses.

American officials have defended Professor Halper’s work, saying the use of such a confidential informant is routine in a counterintelligence investigation. Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress and the media have called him something different: a “spy” sent by the Obama administration to infiltrate the campaign.

Eventually, Mr. Trump would use such episodes as a foundation for his view that America’s law enforcement agencies had been aligned against him from the beginning — ammunition for a looming war with the “deep state.” This idea would consume Mr. Trump after he became president, feeding his sense of grievance that the legitimacy of his victory was under attack and shaping his decisions as he tried to blunt the widening Russia investigation.

The long-promised “dirt” the Russians had on Mrs. Clinton would soon be made public. Three days after the Trump Tower meeting, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, appeared on a British Sunday television show.

He said that his website would soon be publishing a raft of emails related to Mrs. Clinton. And he said something at once ominous and prescient: “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”

Using a hacker persona, Russian military intelligence officers began to reveal documents stolen from the Democrats.

A website made its splashy debut three days later, presenting a jaunty hacker who called himself Guccifer 2.0. He had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, Guccifer said, offering as proof a selection of purloined documents.

“Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into the DNC’s network,” Guccifer wrote on June 15. “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks,” he added — which seemed to explain Mr. Assange’s boast.

Russian intelligence had worked fast. Just the day before, D.N.C. officials and their cybersecurity contractor, CrowdStrike, had announced that Russian hackers had penetrated the committee’s computer network.

Overnight, Russian military intelligence officers set up the website and created the Guccifer persona to counter the D.N.C. accusations. Guccifer — a name borrowed from a real Romanian hacker — was presented as a jovial Romanian, a “lone hacker,” who in his posts wanted to make one thing very clear: He had nothing whatsoever to do with Russia.

“It seems the guys from CrowdStrike and the DNC,” he wrote, “would say I’m a Russian bear even if I were a catholic nun.”

In fact, beyond the conclusions of CrowdStrike and the F.B.I., there were clues from the start that Guccifer’s posts came from Moscow: The name of the founder of the Soviet secret police was embedded in Guccifer’s documents, written using a Russian version of Microsoft Word.

Yet the Guccifer gambit would prove remarkably effective at creating doubt about Russia’s responsibility for the hack. Republican operatives working on congressional campaigns emailed “Guccifer” and received hacked documents relevant to their races. For journalists, the claims of the supposed “lone hacker” made the role of Russian intelligence seem to be a disputed allegation rather than a proven fact.

Today there is no doubt who hacked the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign. A detailed indictment of 12 officers of Russia’s military intelligence agency, filed in July by Mr. Mueller, documents their every move, including their break-in techniques, their tricks to hide inside the Democrats’ networks and even their Google searches.

See the timeline of hacking that led to the indictment.

The agency, now called the Main Directorate but often referred to by its former abbreviation, the G.R.U., proved agile, brazen and not terribly discreet — the same pattern it would show two years later in the nerve-agent poisoning in England of its former officer, the defector Sergei V. Skripal.

The hacking might have drawn little attention had the G.R.U. stopped there, simply stealing emails to peruse for intelligence clues. But the Russians’ decision to leak the emails to undercut Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy was a huge escalation.

The Russian officers’ political skills proved equal to their hacking expertise. They deftly manipulated a long list of Americans and Europeans, many of whom embraced Guccifer’s tall tale and took seriously the claim that the other Russian false front, DCLeaks.com, was run by American “hacktivists.”

“Guccifer 2.0” addressed a cybersecurity conference in London via messages to one of the organizers. The purported Romanian jousted with a suspicious reporter for Motherboard, insisting: “I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia.” When Twitter suspended the DCLeaks account, the Fox News host Lou Dobbs accused the company of “Leftist Fascism.” The account was swiftly reinstated.

But the Russians’ masterstroke was to enlist, via the Guccifer persona, the help of WikiLeaks. Neither of the Russians’ websites, Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks.com, had much reach. But WikiLeaks had a large global audience. Its editor, Mr. Assange, shared Mr. Putin’s hatred of Mrs. Clinton and had a soft spot for Russia.

Mr. Assange assisted with the subterfuge. He repeatedly denied that he’d received the documents from Russia; whether he was really taken in by the “Guccifer” ruse is uncertain.

Fox News via YouTube

But he also obscured the Russian role by fueling a right-wing conspiracy theory he knew to be false. He offered a $20,000 reward for information about the murder in Washington of Seth Rich, a young D.N.C. staffer shot to death in an apparent bungled street robbery. Trump supporters were suggesting Mr. Rich had leaked the D.N.C. emails and been killed in retaliation, and Mr. Assange played along.

In a discussion about WikiLeaks’ sources on Dutch television in August 2016, Mr. Assange suddenly brought up Mr. Rich’s killing.

“That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?” the interviewer said. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting that our sources take risks,” Mr. Assange said — and then declined to say if Mr. Rich was a source.

Such misleading interviews helped camouflage the Russian origin of the leak, and WikiLeaks’ adept timing gave the emails big impact. After some technical problems, according to Mr. Mueller’s indictment, “Guccifer” passed the entire archive of D.N.C. emails to WikiLeaks. The website published 19,252 of them on July 22, 2016 — three days before the Democratic National Convention.

The Russians’ work detonated with powerful political effect. The emails’ exposure of D.N.C. staffers’ support for Mrs. Clinton and scorn for Senator Bernie Sanders, her chief rival, forced the committee’s chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to resign. The resentment of the Sanders delegates deepened, leaving the party even more bitterly divided as it turned to the general election.

Unknown to the feuding Democratic delegates, a cyberdrama had been playing out in secret for weeks, as CrowdStrike experts tried to root out the Russian hackers who had penetrated the D.N.C. and its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Robert S. Johnston, a lead investigator for CrowdStrike, said the Russian hackers, uniformed officers of military intelligence, were “like a thunderstorm moving through the system — very, very noisy.”

CrowdStrike had begun watching the Russians in April, asking D.N.C. staffers to keep quiet about the intrusion. “We only talked over Signal,” an encrypted text and call service, said Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and veteran of the United States Cyber Command who is now chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Adlumin. Only by following the hackers for several weeks could CrowdStrike be certain it had found the Russians’ tools and blocked their access.

But somehow, possibly by intercepting communications inside the D.N.C. or the F.B.I., which was investigating the breach, the G.R.U. officers learned they had been spotted. On May 31, two weeks before the public disclosure of the hack, Ivan Yermakov, a G.R.U. hacker who had used American-sounding online personas — “Kate S. Milton,” “James McMorgans” and “Karen W. Millen” — suddenly began searching online for information about CrowdStrike. He sought to find out what the cybersleuths knew about the Russians’ main tool, a nasty piece of malware called X-Agent, the indictment noted.

After that, the spy-versus-spy contest escalated. “We knew it was the Russians, and they knew we knew,” Mr. Johnston said. “I would say it was the cyber equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.”

The candidate favored by the Russians alternated between denying their help and seeming to welcome it. On June 15, the day after the D.N.C. hack was disclosed, the Trump campaign pitched in with a novel idea to deflect blame from the Russians: The D.N.C. had somehow hacked itself.

“We believe it was the D.N.C. that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate,” the statement said. Later, Mr. Trump tried out other alternative theories: Perhaps the hack had been carried out by “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” or a “some guy in his home in New Jersey,” or the Chinese, or almost anyone.

But at other times, he appeared to accept that Russia was responsible.

“The new joke in town,” Mr. Trump tweeted on July 25, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

And two days later, he famously invited the Russians to try to retrieve 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton had deleted from her computer server on the basis that they involved personal matters and not State Department business.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a Florida news conference. The Mueller investigation discovered that the Russians were evidently listening: The same day as the news conference, the G.R.U. hackers began sending so-called spearphishing emails to accounts associated with Mrs. Clinton’s personal office.

The Associated Press

Mr. Trump’s pronouncements stood in striking contrast to the responses of past presidential candidates who had been offered assistance by foreign powers. In 1960, both Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy refused quiet offers of help from Khrushchev.

“Because we know the ideas of Mr. Stevenson, we in our hearts all favor him,” Khrushchev said in a message passed on by the Soviet ambassador. “Could the Soviet press assist Mr. Stevenson’s personal success? How?”

Mr. Stevenson declined the offer, in language that reflected the broad American political consensus about foreign election interference. “I believe I made it clear to him,” Mr. Stevenson wrote, “that I considered the offer of such assistance highly improper, indiscreet and dangerous to all concerned.”

Russia did not deliver on Mr. Trump’s request for Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. But it had obtained something just as useful: 50,000 emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, stolen via a phishing attack by the G.R.U. Roger Stone, a political operative and longtime Trump friend, seemed to have advance word. “Trust me,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug. 25, it would soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

But WikiLeaks withheld the Podesta emails for months after receiving them from “Guccifer” in June, evidently waiting for the right moment to have the biggest impact on the race. The time came on Oct. 7, amid two blows to the Trump campaign.

See the timeline of events that surround the release of the emails.

That day, American intelligence agencies made their first official statement that the Russian government, with the approval of its “senior-most officials,” was behind the hacking and leaking of the Democratic emails.

And then came a potentially lethal disclosure for the Trump campaign: the shocking “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump bragged of groping and sexually assaulting women. The candidate desperately needed to change the subject — and that was the moment WikiLeaks posted the first of thousands of Mr. Podesta’s emails.

They were invaluable for political journalists, offering embarrassing comments from staffers about Mrs. Clinton’s shortcomings and the full texts of her highly paid speeches to banks and corporations, which she had refused to release. WikiLeaks assisted by highlighting interesting tidbits in yellow.

Soon, Mr. Trump was delighting his supporters by reading from the stolen emails on the campaign trail. “Now, this just came out,” he told a fired-up crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in October, brandishing a page of highlights. “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!”

“Crooked Hillary” had said “behind closed doors,” Mr. Trump declared, that terrorism was “not a threat”; that she had “a great relationship with the financial industry”; that ISIS might infiltrate groups of refugees coming to the United States; that a politician needed to have “both a public and private position” on policies; and on and on.

The quotes were taken out of context, of course, and subjected to the most damaging interpretation. But they seemed to offer a glimpse of Mrs. Clinton’s hidden views.

For the last month of the campaign, in daily releases that kept the Clinton team on the defensive, WikiLeaks delivered the Russians’ gift. If the July D.N.C. dump had been an explosion, the October series was more like unrelenting sniper fire. Whether the timing was decided by the Russians or by Mr. Assange, it proved devastatingly effective.

Russian trolls, using fake accounts on social media, reached nearly as many Americans as would vote in the election.

David Michael Smith, a Houston political scientist and activist, spotted the alarming call on Facebook. A group called Heart of Texas was suddenly urging Texans to come at noon on May 21, 2016, to protest a 14-year-old Islamic center in downtown Houston.

“Stop Islamization of Texas,” the post declared, with a photo of the Islamic Da’wah Center, which it called a “shrine of hatred.” It invited protesters to prepare for battle: “Feel free to bring along your firearms, concealed or not!”

“We immediately asked, ‘What the blank is the Heart of Texas’?’” recalled Mr. Smith, who started calling friends to organize a counterprotest.

Months later, he would find out.

Heart of Texas, which garnered a quarter-million followers on Facebook, was one of 470 Facebook pages created 5,000 miles from Houston at the Internet Research Agency, the oddly named St. Petersburg company that would become the world’s most famous manipulator of social media. The two Russian employees who had visited Texas during that 2014 American tour, Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova, evidently had returned home with big ideas about how to exploit the emotional chasms in American politics and culture.

Just as the Russians’ Guccifer character had reached out to American activists, journalists and WikiLeaks, the Russian online trolls understood that their real political power would come from mobilizing Americans. The Russian company’s formula was simple: tap into a simmering strain of opinion in the United States and pour on the fuel.

Consider the Texas protest. After the Russians put up the “Stop Islamization” Facebook post, several dozen like-minded Texans added their own incendiary comments. “Allah Sucks,” wrote one, adding a threat to kill any Muslim who tried to visit him. Another wrote of the Islamic center, “Need to Blow this place up.”

A dozen yelling white supremacists turned out for the protest, at least two of them with assault rifles and a third with a pistol. Others held Confederate flags and a “White Lives Matter” banner.

Houston police managed to keep them away from a much larger crowd of counterprotesters — some of whom had responded to a second Russian Facebook call. In a blatant attempt to create a confrontation, another Internet Research Agency page, this one called United Muslims of America, had asked people to rally at exactly the same time and place to “Save Islamic Knowledge.”

The event had no lasting consequences, though clearly it could have ended in tragedy. Still, it demonstrated that young Russians tapping on keyboards in 12-hour shifts could act as puppet masters for unsuspecting Americans many time zones away.

When Facebook first acknowledged last year the Russian intrusion on its platform, it seemed modest in scale. The $100,000 spent on ads was a trivial sum compared with the tens of millions spent on Facebook by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns.

See the timeline of events that shows Russia’s social media campaign.

But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Nature Tweets from Russian Trolls, by Day

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Election Day

March

April

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

Election Day

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

March

April

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

March

April

May

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

By The New York Times

And Facebook was only the biggest of the engines powering the Russian messages.

On Instagram, there were 170 ersatz Russian accounts that posted 120,000 times and reached about 20 million people. Twitter reported that in the 10 weeks before the election some 3,814 Internet Research Agency accounts interacted with 1.4 million people — and that another 50,258 automated “bot” accounts that the company judged to be Russia-linked tweeted about the election. The trolls created at least two podcasts, posted Vine videos, blogged on Tumblr, sought donations via PayPal and even exploited the Pokémon Go craze.

Without American social media companies, the Russian influence campaign could not have operated. The St. Petersburg trolls tapped the power of Silicon Valley for their stealth intervention in American democracy.

Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who has studied three million Internet Research Agency tweets, said he was “impressed with both their level of absurdist creativity and keen understanding of American psychology.” They knew “exactly what buttons to press” and operated with “industrial efficiency,” he said.

The Russian troll operation had gotten its start two years before, focusing at first on government targets closer to home.

In 2014, Vitaly Bespalov, then 23, finished a journalism degree in the Siberian city of Tyumen and signed on as a “content manager” at the Internet Research Agency, which looked vaguely like a digital marketing firm and offered a relatively generous salary of $1,000 a month.

Mr. Bespalov was surprised to discover that his job was to write or swipe stories to post on counterfeit Ukrainian websites, spinning the conflict there to fit the Russian government’s view. He had to be sure always to use the word “terrorists” for the Ukrainian fighters opposed to the Russian invasion that was tearing the country apart.

“My first days on the job I was in shock — I had no idea what kind of an operation this was,” Mr. Bespalov said in a recent interview while vacationing in Ukraine: his first visit to the country about which he had written so many bogus stories.

He was put off by the company’s work but said he chose to stick around for several months, in part to study its operations. “It was very monotonous and boring,” Mr. Bespalov said. “It seemed that almost no one liked this work. But almost nobody quit, because everyone needed the money.”

Soon he began hearing about a new, secretive department inside the St. Petersburg company that was recruiting English speakers to focus on the United States.

Like Peter the Great, the Internet Research Agency borrowed Western technology while shunning Western notions of democracy. As Mr. Bespalov quickly realized, the company was not a normal business but a well-compensated tool of the Russian state. It was owned by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who overcame an early prison sentence for robbery to create a thriving catering business. He then built a fortune as a loyal contractor willing to provide internet trolls, mercenary soldiers or anything else required by his patron, Mr. Putin.

In the company’s new department, some 80 young English speakers worked in shifts to feed Facebook pages and Twitter accounts imitating the snark and fury of outraged Americans. They stole photos, favoring attractive young women, for their Twitter profiles. They copied or created sharp poster-like commentaries on American life and politics, only occasionally slipping up with grammatical mistakes. They focused their efforts on pages that touched American nerves, with names like “Guns4Life,” “Pray for Police,” “Stop All Invaders,” “South United” and — mimicking Mr. Trump — “America First.”

If Mr. Trump was borrowing the hacked emails from the Russians for his stump speeches, the online trolls in St. Petersburg returned the favor, picking up the candidate’s populist rhetoric. Even pages that seemed nominally hostile to him often worked in his favor: “Woke Blacks” critiqued Mrs. Clinton for alleged hostility to African-Americans; “United Muslims of America” showed her with a woman in a head scarf and a slogan — “Support Hillary, Save American Muslims” — that seemed aimed at generating a backlash.

The Russians managed to call a dozen or more rallies like the one in Houston, sometimes paying unwitting American activists for their help via money transfer. The same method may have been used to get the bridge banners of Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama hung.

An Internet Research Agency Twitter account, @cassishere, posted a photo of the Putin banner on the Manhattan Bridge, winning a credit from The New York Daily News. In Washington, the Russian account @LeroyLovesUSA tweeted about suspending the Obama banner, then added more tweets with critiques of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy in stilted English.

Facebook, reluctant to step into the divisive politics of the Trump presidency, did not acknowledge the Russian intrusion until nearly a year after the election, asserting that Russia had chiefly aimed at sowing division. A closer look suggested a more focused goal: damaging Mrs. Clinton and promoting Mr. Trump.

Many of the Facebook memes portrayed Mrs. Clinton as angry, corrupt or crazed. Mr. Trump was depicted as his campaign preferred: strong, decisive, courageous, willing to shun political correctness to tell hard truths. The Russian operation also boosted Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who had dined with Mr. Putin in Moscow, to draw votes from Mrs. Clinton. It encouraged supporters of Mr. Sanders to withhold their votes from Mrs. Clinton even after he endorsed her.

The impact is impossible to gauge; the Internet Research Agency was a Kremlin fire hose of influence wielded amid a hurricane of a presidential election. Christopher Painter, who had served under President George W. Bush at the Justice Department and as the State Department’s coordinator for cyberissues from 2011 to 2017, said the propaganda flood and the leaked emails certainly affected the vote. But no one can say whether it made the difference in an election decided by the tiniest of margins, fewer than 100,000 votes in three states.

“It’s impossible to know how much voter suppression it caused, discouraging people from coming out,” Mr. Painter said. “It’s impossible to know how many votes it changed.”

He added that “people don’t like to admit they’ve been fooled” — hence the strenuous efforts from Mr. Trump and his supporters to deny or dismiss the significance of the Russian interference.

A case in point would be Harry Miller, a devoted Trump supporter in Florida who was paid to organize a rally in which a woman portraying Mrs. Clinton sat behind bars on the back of his pickup truck. It turned out that the people who had ordered up the rally, “Matt Skiber” and “Joshua Milton,” were pseudonyms for Russians at the Internet Research Agency, according to the Mueller indictment.

But don’t tell that to Mr. Miller. Contacted via Twitter, he insisted that he had not been manipulated by Russian trolls.

“They were not Russians, and you know it,” Mr. Miller wrote, adding, “If you don’t then you are the one snookered.”

The president has created doubts about the investigation and an affinity for Russia among his supporters.

The White House statement released at 7:21 p.m. on May 17, 2017, was measured, even anodyne. Reacting to the news that Mr. Mueller had been appointed special counsel for the Russia investigation, the statement quoted Mr. Trump saying that he was “looking forward to this matter concluding quickly,” and that in the meantime he would be fighting “for the people and issues that matter most to the future of our country.”

Exactly 12 hours and 31 minutes later, early in the morning without his staff around him, he told the world what he really thought.

“This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!” he wrote in a tweet.

It had been little more than a week since the president had fired his F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but the “Russia thing” wasn’t going away. Now the president was up against someone who could become even more formidable — a careful, tenacious former Marine whose stewardship of the F.B.I. during the Bush and Obama years had been praised by Washington’s establishment.

Mr. Trump’s instinct was to fire Mr. Mueller, but he settled for a different strategy. He has used all his power to try to discredit the special counsel’s investigation.

Revelation upon revelation about Russian encounters with Trump associates has followed in the months since Mr. Mueller was appointed, intensifying the fear in the White House. Mr. Trump has used his Twitter pulpit to repeatedly assault the Mueller inquiry, and has made scathing remarks at rallies about claims of Russian interference. “It’s a hoax, O.K.?” he told a Pennsylvania crowd last month. The attacks have had an impact on how Americans view the country’s national security apparatus, how they view the Russia story, even how they view Russia itself.

See the full timeline of Mr. Trump’s repeated denials and attacks.

The strategy has helped sow doubts about the special counsel’s work in part because Mr. Mueller and his prosecutors only rarely go public with the evidence they have been steadily gathering in secret interviews and closed-door sessions of a grand jury.

During a period of 146 days over this year — between the Feb. 16 indictment of the Internet Research Agency operatives and the July 13 indictment of Russian intelligence officers — Mr. Mueller’s office was effectively silent. The president was not, sending at least 94 tweets that denied he had been involved in “collusion,” called the Russian interference a “hoax” or labeled the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt.”

Indictment of Internet

Research Agency operatives

Indictment of Russian

intelligence officers

Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

April

July

Oct.

April

July

Jan. 2017

Jan. 2018

Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

Jan. 2017

April

July

Oct.

Jan. 2018

Indictment of Internet

Research Agency operatives

April

Indictment of Russian

intelligence officers

July

Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

Indictment of Internet

Research Agency operatives

Indictment of Russian

intelligence officers

April

July

Oct.

April

July

Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

Jan. 2017

April

July

Oct.

Jan. 2018

Indictment of Internet

Research Agency operatives

April

Indictment of Russian

intelligence officers

July

By July, one poll showed that 45 percent of Americans disapproved of how Mr. Mueller was handling the investigation, a 14-point increase from January. The shift was even more dramatic among Republican voters: from 49 percent to 78 percent. More recent polls, conducted since the indictment of the G.R.U. officers and Mr. Manafort’s conviction, have shown a reversal of the trend.

The president’s aides hardly make a secret of their goal to discredit the investigation before a jury of the public. There is little expectation that Mr. Mueller would ignore Justice Department guidelines and try to indict a sitting president, so Mr. Trump’s lawyers see Congress and impeachment as the only threat. Turn the public against impeachment, the thinking goes, and Congress is less likely to act.

“Mueller is now slightly more distrusted than trusted, and Trump is a little ahead of the game,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s omnipresent lawyer, told The New York Times last month, without citing any data to buttress his assertion.

“So I think we’ve done really well,” he said. “And my client’s happy.”

Mr. Trump’s frustration with the Russian investigation is not surprising. He is right that no public evidence has emerged showing that his campaign conspired with Russia in the election interference or accepted Russian money. But the inquiry has buffeted his presidency, provoked concern that his attempts to thwart the investigation amount to obstruction of justice and fed his suspicion that the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies — what he calls “the deep state” — are conspiring against him.

The Associated Press

The desire of the president to make deals with Mr. Putin, and the longstanding skepticism of the intelligence community about Russian intentions and actions, might have made a clash inevitable. But Mr. Trump appears to have had success in persuading some Americans that the spy and law enforcement agencies are corrupt and hyperpartisan. He has scrambled alliances that solidified over decades, including the Republican Party’s reflexive support of the national security agencies. A president in open war with the F.B.I., once inconceivable, is now part of the daily news cycle.

Mr. Trump began laying the foundation immediately after he won the presidency, when he questioned the intelligence agencies’ findings that Russia had disrupted the election, and likened America’s spies to Nazis. Since taking office, he has worked with partners in Congress to cast the agencies as part of an insurgency against the White House.

It continued in July, when he stood next to Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland, and declared that he trusted the Russian president’s assurances that Moscow was innocent of interfering in the 2016 election.

And it continues today. Early one morning last week, hours before flying to Pennsylvania to honor the victims of the flight that crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, the president fired off a tweet that appeared to quote something he had seen on Fox News.

“‘We have found nothing to show collusion between President Trump & Russia, absolutely zero, but every day we get more documentation showing collusion between the FBI & DOJ, the Hillary campaign, foreign spies & Russians, incredible.’”

The reshuffling of alliances has seeped into the media, where the president’s reliable allies have been joined by voices on the left to dismiss the Russia story as overblown. They warn of a new Red Scare.

On Fox News, the network where Sean Hannity fulminates nightly about Mr. Mueller and his team, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, a founder of the left-leaning news site The Intercept and a champion of government whistle-blowers, has appeared regularly to dismiss revelations about the investigation and decry officials “willing to leak, even at the expense of committing crimes,” in order to damage Mr. Trump.

Multiple frenzied television segments and hyped news stories have given credence to the concerns of Mr. Greenwald and others about a 21st-century McCarthyism. And critics of the “deep state” were given powerful ammunition after the release of text messages between two F.B.I. officials involved in the Russia investigation, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, that revealed their animosity toward Mr. Trump. The pair, who were involved in a romantic relationship at the time, have been skewered regularly on Mr. Hannity’s show as the “Trump-hating F.B.I. lovebirds.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s glowing words about Mr. Putin and Russia have created a new affinity for Russia — in particular its social conservatism and toughness on terrorism — among Mr. Trump’s most devoted supporters.

During a period of myriad accounts about Russia’s attempts to disrupt the last election, the percentage of Republicans who view Mr. Putin favorably has more than doubled (from 11 percent to 25 percent), according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Democrats are now far more likely than Republicans to see Russia as a threat. An October 2017 poll showed that 63 percent of Democrats and just 38 percent of Republicans said they saw “Russia’s power and influence” as a significant threat to the United States.

Once again, Mr. Trump has flipped the script in the party of Reagan: A country that was once seen as a geopolitical foe is now embraced by many Republicans as a bastion of Christianity and traditional values.

Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, said that despite the country’s relative economic and military weakness, Mr. Putin had often played a poor hand deftly. “Across many dimensions, Putin is using all kinds of instruments of power,” he said.

“It feels to me,” the former ambassador said, “like he’s winning and we’re losing.”

On July 16, the president woke early in Helsinki, hours before he was to sit face to face with Mr. Putin. The meeting came three days after Mr. Mueller indicted the 12 Russian intelligence officers. Once again, Mr. Trump dashed off a tweet.

“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!” he wrote.

Russia’s foreign ministry responded with a simple tweet hours later.

“We agree.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html | Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far, in 2018-09-20 13:43:55

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Uncovering the Hidden Gems of UFC Fight Night: Moscow

As the pieces of Conor McGregor vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov were inching into place, much noise was made about a UFC event in Russia. The chatter intensified as the UFC allowed its fighters to be seen wearing Akhmat MMA shirts, the company owned by Chechnyan strongman and Putin friend, Ramzan Kadyrov. It's taken a while, but between ACB, FNG, M-1 Global and its many, many other MMA promotions, Russia is becoming a recognized force in the fight game.

If you thought you would be getting Conor vs. Khabib in Russia, though, you have been duped even more harshly than those gullible folks who hoped the UFC might finally book Croke Park for a McGregor fight. Fighting is a pay-per-view business and the only time zone that matters is in the United States. There’s no shame in wanting it though—what could be more exciting (particularly for a fight journalist) than a modern Rumble in Jungle, deep in the heart of the former USSR? But once that sigh of disappointment is out of the way, a look down the UFC’s first Russian offering reveals some pretty intriguing match ups and some very good fighters who might slip under the radar simply due to the absence of McGregor–Nurmagomedov.

Returning to action for the first time since September 2017, Mairbek Taisumov is a fighter who rarely disappoints in the cage but finds a way to keep letting fans down with his inactivity. While there will be a Russian flag next to his name on the pre-fight graphic, Taisumov might be called a citizen of the world. He was born in Grozny, fights out of Vienna, trains at Tiger Muay Thai in Phuket, and goes on excursions to Turkey to visit their wrestling team. But the only thing you need to know about Taisumov if you’re on the fence about watching him fight is that he’s wickedly fast and he quickly ended the night for the last two men he fought in exactly the same way: by walking them onto his right hand.

Continuing a theme of Russian bangers, Petr Yan returns to action just a couple of months removed from his UFC debut. A hot prospect for ACB, Yan split a pair of good bouts with Magomed Magomedov there before being welcomed to the UFC by walking meme, Teruto Ishihara. Ishihara—who lives on his solid counter left hand and a decent double leg takedown when he’s worried—was forced to sprint around the cage under Yan’s pressure.

If it was your first time seeing Yan, he might have looked a little limited in the beginning: spending a half minute circling the cage and then stepping in on a basic one-two and missing. But all of a sudden Yan began opening up in combination and using that step-up lead leg round kick which is so important for shorter fighters hoping to burst in on opponents. Trapping Ishihara against the fence, he smoked the Team Alpha Male representative and announced his arrival in the division.

The "local" boys seem to have been placed in fairly favorable match ups on this card, because patriotism is still the most easily manipulated force in combat sports, and perhaps the most obvious example of that is 18-0 knockout artist, Alexey Kunchenko being welcomed to the UFC by the waning Thiago Alves. But Kunchenko’s match up contrasts harshly with the welcoming party that the UFC have selected for Ukranian karateka, Nikita Krylov.

Krylov is easily the most intriguing fighter on this card. When "The Miner" was let go from the UFC in 2017 most fans were left baffled. The light heavyweight division is the weakest in men’s MMA right now and is desperately short on young prospects—Krylov along with a couple of others offered a glimmer of hope for the division’s future but when his contract came up, the UFC let him go back to the Russian circuit. Since then Krylov has taken four fights, all of them against non-threats like a thoroughly washed up Emanuel Newton and a never-was-all-that-good Fabio Maldonado.

Another sad loss for Maldonado.

Yet Krylov returns to the UFC against Jan Błachowicz, currently ranked No. 4 on the UFC’s rankings. Krylov might have all the promise in the world but he has never beaten anyone even close to being top-five ranked when he fought them. Krylov’s biggest fights were against Ovince Saint Preux back in 2014 and Misha Cirkunov immediately before Krylov’s departure in December 2016, and in both of those fights the big lad from Ukraine blew it.

What makes Krylov fascinating is that he is one of the light heavyweight division’s very few skilled kickers, coming from a Kyokushin karate background. If you aren’t getting bogged down in the flowery details of forms and lineage, there are really only two types of karate—knockdown and point style. Point style karate tends to produce crafty in-and-out strikers like the Machida brothers and Kyoji Horiguchi. Knockdown styles tends to produce grizzled toughmen who place a great deal of value on attrition striking to the body and legs, and develop the kicking dexterity to high kick from almost chest-to-chest.

Krylov is the perfect representative of knockdown style karate in MMA, throwing a constant array of low kicks, front kicks, triangle kicks and high kicks, and it has carried him to a staggering 24 finishes in 24 victories. Like a young Alistair Overeem, Krylov has never seen a decision and that is largely due to the pace that he drives. In his best showings, Krylov gets to kicking the legs and body early, and keeps at it until the opponent's guard sags long enough for one of his constant attempts to land a high kick pays off. All the classic Kyokushin looks are there—the sankaku-geri or "triangle kick," a front kick that arcs up on a diagonal under the elbow:

The question mark kick, Brazilian kick, or mach mawashi-geri, is a feature in all of his bouts, though it only actually works for him because he sets it up so well with body kicks.

As Krylov has struggled so much with the few elite light heavyweights he has met this could seem a step too far, dumping him in with a top-five ranked opponent after time off fighting effectively nobodies. Perhaps, but it also offers him a great opportunity to break through into the upper echelons of the division in a match up which might favor him in some areas. Jan Błachowicz is a very awkward striker—relying heavily on his hands and on timing counter swings. By attempting to check hook Alexander Gustafsson every time he stepped in, Błachowicz forced the light heavyweight division’s prettiest boxer to wrestle instead. But Błachowicz own defense and footwork aren’t especially sharp and the majority of Krylov’s offense comes in from beyond the range of Błachowicz's jab and counter swings. Furthermore, longer Błachowicz bouts have turned into open mouth wheezing affairs and while Błachowicz has the huge experience advantage of actually having gone to the decision before, the pace that Krylov drives might bring him into his clumsy late fight state somewhat faster than normal.

Krylov’s boxing is largely ones and twos, which works great out at the mid-range, spliced in with his deceptively close-in high kicks, but gets him into trouble when he starts chasing knockouts and over committing. As Błachowicz's timing has looked pretty sharp in recent years, Krylov’s Rock'em Sock'em Robots boxing style could see him run onto Błachowicz's blows. Furthermore the downside of kicking so frequently is that sooner or later the opponent will probably bundle you to the mat off a kick, and the mat has been where most of Krylov’s problems have happened. It is difficult to reap the benefits of high volume and a torrid pace, while also being cautious so as to not expose oneself to the grappling game.

In any case, the main event of Mark Hunt vs Alexey Oleinik should provide either a Hunt knockout or another bizarre Oleinik submission. Krylov vs Błachowicz is the fight to watch for, and Taisumov, Yan, and Kunchenko are all there too—though you should take their victories (if they get them) with a grain of salt based on the matchmaking. It is no Gennady Golovkin versus Canelo Alvarez, but then what else is going to be able to compete with that this weekend?

Uncovering the Hidden Gems of UFC Fight Night: Moscow published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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New Post has been published on http://drubbler.com/2017/01/31/paradise-for-selected-konchalovskiy/

"Paradise" for selected Konchalovskiy

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Aleksey Jusev, January 31, 2017, 7:03- REGNUM

the film “Paradise” by Andrei Konchalovsky this month received two big Russian kinopremii Golden Eagle from Nikita Mikhalkov’s Film and “white elephant” Guild of film critics. Previously, the creator of paintings was celebrated in Venice as best Director, but all prizes to enumerate. Nevertheless, Konchalovsky’s latest work is weak, like the overwhelming majority of the rest of his opus, and the figure of the author — bloated not due to high art.

Andrey Konchalovskiy enjoyed great privileges in the USSR as the son of the author of the anthem of the country. Shortly before his departure from the Union in 1980, he got the title of people’s artist of the RSFSR. But life began in Europe — the reason prosecution in emigrant press that Konchalovsky is associated with the KGB. Director, in turn, comments positively on their homeland and the ruling regime there, and even negotiating with Soviet dissidents on the return back. For example, Tarkovsky considered Konchalovsky agent secret service and stopped to chat with him, despite the old friendships. A large part of the creativity of the son of Hollywood Film period is a series of paintings with vague source of funding. American Studio, which created four films, it is not cared about renting tapes Konchalovsky, as it happens, when money is allocated from the outside. The only potential commercial hit — “runaway train” had nominations for the Academy Awards, grossed in theaters less than cost in production. The last Hollywood picture — “Tango and cash” (which received three nominations for the “Golden raspberries”), made at a major film Studio, Director of the project, though left uncredited. In fact, Konchalovsky did not any commercial strips, though he worked in the style of the mass movie. The apotheosis of his effort was “the Nutcracker and the rat King” with a 90-million budget, mostly funded by the Russian Bank VEB, controlled by the State. In the end, the tape failed miserably in the United States, which it alleged was originally oriented (even mice in rats altered to Mickey Mouse does not discredit). According to the results of the American cinema, advertising campaign whose cost in 25 times more than the income received (5 million against 195 thousand), for the “the Nutcracker” was thought up by special nomination in Razzie antipremii entitled “Pluck the eyes».

at home have much things went better Painter than overseas. On his return he took upon himself the role of a liberal Messiah and quoted in the press of Western economists. In 2004-m Director in response to the publication of theses Khodorkovsky nominated their article “Catechism of a revolutionary”. The author debunks misconceptions society that repressive apparatus is bad and that the KGB and other security structures are enemies of mankind. In the same years Konchalovsky shoots documentaries about Yuri Andropov and Heydar Aliyev heads of special services. Despite the sympathy mode, directed by Russian okolokinoshnyh best friend left Liberals, even though his recent interview «Meduze» under the title «beautiful cannot be put at the forefront of human rights, where there is an attempt to justify censorship. “I personally regret that no censorship. Censorship has never been an obstacle to creating masterpieces. Do you think that freedom creates masterpieces? Never. Masterpieces they create restrictions. In creative terms artist freedom gives nothing. Show me these geniuses, which crowd shakes censorship? Yes No such “. in addition, the reader learns that Putin is perfectly knowledgeable world culture Westerner, which Europe did not let to themselves, and not waited.

new picture Konchalovsky “paradise” is devoted to the role of Russian emigrants in the rescue of Jews during the second world war. The theme for the most part artificial, as Mikhail Trofimenkov: least Resistance dealt with the Jewish question, and this is not the only exaggeration authors paintings. For example, if judged according to extermination in concentration camp (10 thousand per day), for the year would have to burn almost twice as many as died in all stoves for the period of the second world war. In another episode mentions about 80 thousand Jews arrested in France for one week, although this figure is close to losses in the country during wartime. Unfortunately, no information about scenaristku “Paradise” Alena Kiselevu, which was directed by: it would be interesting to become better acquainted with creativity of Lesja likeminded Rjabcevoj and alternatively vosprinimavshej the story of the heroine of “Stories” Segal. Though perhaps the Holocaust (indicated by the same Trofimenkovym as “speculative and nepravdopodobnaja) may not be much. This pass not only the world of festivals, but also guarantee the financing of the budget of the project — even where among the main characters no Jew. It is hard to imagine what a thing of “paradise”, in addition to fees and props in the form of hundreds of points. The film is very poor, with little use of props, although it cost the same as “attraction” Bondarchuk. Pre-war Beach scene at Konchalovsky filmed not just cheap, but just for a penny, why give bad vaudeville.

“Paradise” does not exist as a whole cinematic statement. This is a short, five-minute episodes, which are interrupted by scenes of the main characters who speak on camera about her life (derived from the witty “Animal nature” Michel Gondry, but here’s a rough pereinachennyj). In these pieces, the actors give your skill, istoskovavshemusja on a theatrical catwalk and soloist wife filmmaker, better known to the masses as the face of culinary brand. Her character, a Russian princess, came out very contradictory what we cannot say even about changing women. Her actions deprived logic: what it says, being fed on securing German officer, denies it has demonstrated resistance under penalty of death. In his youth, Princess sexy nevozderzhana, if not to say rasputna that organically for decadent Paris, but not for the believers in paradise.

the ideology of one of the main characters, a German officer, unusually for high-ranking Nazis, let and aristocrats. Character values the Stalin and the Communists, which clearly could not get out of his hobby at the youth of Chekhov. Officer draws on clean water caught corrupt Chief of German camps, but nobody cares. In General, as if not about Germany, but about present Russia, directorial justification systematic theft.

in General, the “paradise” Konchalovsky boring more than is incorrect in historical detail. As if the Director did not film, and he decided to fill the Assembly joints the speech of characters (so, for example, have been reported in domestic anime “first squad”). But even in the monologues of the creators cannot remove all single doubles and constantly get gluing. Apparently, even the audience in Paradise bored listening to the characters, and the angels cut their dialogues. But whatever made Konchalovsky, gag “gloss” or himericheskij “Nutcracker”, we have the Director still has the status of sacred cows of merit of half a century ago. Well, what are these cultural society and its idols.

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