WASHINGTON, D.C. (The Daily Whatever Press) — On Monday, on his way to a midterm rally in Kansas, the President of the United States looked at the biggest war in Europe since 1945 and gave it a Siskel and Ebert-style two thumbs-up. “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” he told reporters. “They haven’t been doing much.”
Not much?
Hours earlier, a Russian drone hit a public park in broad daylight and killed six people, two of them children. The night before, Russia fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at Kyiv and went after nearly 30 energy facilities across the country, with winter on the way.
So that’s the bar for “not much.” Good to fucking know, Donnie.
He was explaining that a possible summit with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — one that, by most reporting, wouldn’t have Ukraine at the table — would be about nuclear weapons rather than Ukraine, because Ukraine is apparently handled. Then he blamed Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the war’s dead, said it was time for “somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” and announced that Ukraine is “losing their male population” because Zelenskyy won’t stop fighting.
And as much as my soul withers when I type these three words in succession: Trump is right. He’s right that Ukraine is losing men, that is. He’s just a little fuzzy on where they’re going.
Last month, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine published its report on conflict-related sexual violence from February 2022 through July 2026. Heard of it? Me neither, till today. I’m now longing for my life two hours ago, before this report and its horrors came to my attention. So consider this your trigger warning and if your mental health means you need to skip this one, I understand.
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And so, here we are. Investigators verified 1,004 cases of sexual violence and attributed 892 of them — that’s 89%, nearly an A grade — to Russian authorities: the army, the police, the FSB. Of those 892 victims, 725 were men, most of them prisoners of war and civilians held in Russian captivity.
725 rapes of men.
The report documents rape, gang rape, and genital mutilation. It documents rape with objects — prison keys, shovel handles. It documents a torture so routine it has its own equipment: 155 Ukrainian POWs told the UN they’d had electric current run through their genitals, by taser or by a Soviet-era military field telephone known as a “tapik.”
That’s the male population, Mr. President. A chunk of it is sitting in Russian detention, hooked up to a Cold War telephone zapping their junk.
And the men are only part of it. Female victims in the UN report ranged in age from four to 82. Yes, there’s a four-year-old girl in that document. And there’s an 82-year-old woman. Most of the women and children lived under Russian occupation — the same occupied land that gets bargained over at summits Ukraine isn’t invited to.
Those counts are a floor with a trapdoor in it. When the New York Times reported from Kherson in early 2025, Ukrainian prosecutors had registered just over 340 cases, 220 of them women. Women’s groups put the real number in the thousands, with at least one case in almost every village Russian troops occupied, and the stigma in conservative rural Ukraine keeps most survivors silent. One who broke that silence is Liudmyla, a 77-year-old former high school teacher. In July 2022, a Russian soldier knocked out her front teeth with a rifle butt, broke four of her ribs, and raped her. She now stands up at village meetings and tells it anyway, she said, so the world knows “that they are aggressors.”
I’m raising two daughters. I’m made of pretty sturdy stuff, but I’m not built to read a sentence about the rape of a four-year-old girl and then hear the word “fine” come out of the most powerful mouth on the planet.
Fuck “fine.” Fuck it into the sun. And fuck the man who uttered it.
The UN says its own numbers are low, too. Of course they are; Russia won’t let investigators into its camps or the occupied territories. Ukraine, for the record, gives the UN access to every one of its POW facilities, and the same report holds Ukraine responsible for 112 cases against Russian prisoners, about half of them threats. Russia’s response, per the report, has been to pass laws handing its own people broad impunity. In May, the UN secretary-general put Russia’s armed and security forces on the global list of parties credibly suspected of wartime sexual violence for the first time ever. Survivors asked for exactly that. In March 2025, women from a survivors’ network called SEMA Ukraine, joined by male survivors, carried that appeal to the UN in New York.
It took them 14 months to get it. It took the president one sentence to wave it off.
That’s the “not much.”
I started writing this story after reading a Twitter post from the brilliant Michelle Kinney, which claims Ukraine “leads the world” in genital reconstructive surgery and that “thousands” of men have come home castrated. I went looking.
The scale is real: doctors running a Ukrainian-American reconstructive urology project told the Kyiv Post in 2024 that more than 10,000 soldiers had injuries below the body armor requiring complex reconstruction or prosthetic genitalia — an estimate they said won’t firm up until the war ends. Most of those wounds come from mines. Some come from Russian captivity, where men have been castrated, and nobody has published a count of how many. “Leads the world” traces back to nothing I could find. But I have no doubt it true.
None of this is news to Trump. The UN report is a month old. Russia’s been on the UN’s sexual-violence blacklist since May. He has the same goddamn internet we do, plus, oh yeah, THE DAMN CIA. He has also just waived sanctions so Russia can sell diesel on the global market, reportedly to lower fuel prices before the midterms. So “fine,” in context, means something closer to “useful.”
Those of us who grew up on Red Dawn and The Day After were raised on exactly one geopolitical certainty: the Russians were the bad guys, and if they ever came over a border, America would at least notice. Forty years later, they came over the border, and the American president told the waiter everything was fine and asked for the check.
I don’t expect him to be a hero. I need him to be able to look at a UN document that includes the rape of a four-year-old girl in it and not call the people responsible “fine.” That’s the floor. That’s the dig-a-hole-and-lie-down-in-it floor, and he can’t find it with both hands and a flashlight.
R.E.M. tried to warn us in 1987. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and he feels fine.
Nobody in that report feels fine.
Hi, I’m Dana — and I Write Out Loud
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Thank you Dana for writing this!! This country has hit rock bottom and it keeps going under its “leadership.”
Of course he’s fine with it. He’s fine with raping young girls. He”s fine with a lot that most of us find abhorrent