Western propaganda has something to say, with all the honesty of that fat, orange, sleepy, liar, Donald J. Trump.
By Scott Ortkiese, President & CEO, Faulkner Capital Holdings. June 10, 2026.
On Wednesday, June 10, 2026, Alexander Mercouris recorded a video from a hotel room near Pskov, a regional center in northwest Russia, where he was attending an academic and independent-media conference alongside Pascal Lottaz of the Neutrality Studies channel. The program ran about forty-one minutes. By Mercouris’s own admission it was a shorter one than usual because of an early start the following morning. In it he reported what he saw with his own eyes during a long drive through the Russian countryside, what his Russian sources were telling him about a battle for a city called Konstantinovka, what was happening over the Strait of Hormuz, what the European Union was up to with a twenty-first sanctions package, what Volodymyr Zelensky was telling The Guardian about Russian isolation, and what the Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations had to say about the state of negotiations.
There is, on every one of these subjects, a Western media consensus. It is a consensus assembled from carefully chosen omissions, from headlines that misrepresent the bodies of the stories beneath them, and from analytical frames imported wholesale from government press offices in Washington, London, Berlin, Paris, and Kyiv. Mercouris’s reporting collides, point by point, with that consensus.
What follows is not a defense of Mercouris. He needs none. What follows is a substantive comparison, against primary sources and the Western mainstream press itself, of what he claims to have seen and heard against what the Western press has been telling its readers. The reader is invited to render a verdict.
I. The Country That Is Not Collapsing
Mercouris drove from Moscow toward Pskov through northwest Russia. He stopped at highway service points and found them, in his words, “fully stocked with every possible imaginable product you could imagine or conceivably desire if you were on a journey.” He reported gasoline prices that “seem astonishingly low to a Briton.” He saw roads filled with traffic. He saw no shortages. He saw no black-market currency activity of the kind any visitor to the Soviet Union in its final years would instantly have recognized. He compared this to his last visit in 2019 and concluded that Moscow, and Russia generally, looks “more prosperous and richer than it has ever been at any time in its history.”
The Western reader is told something different. The Western reader is told that sanctions are working, that the Russian economy is teetering, that Putin’s war is hollowing out the country. So what is the reality?
The reality is bifurcated, and the bifurcation itself is the most damning thing the data say about Western reporting.
On the consumer side, Mercouris is observably correct.Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 5, Vladimir Putin reported that real wages had grown by more than 30% over five years and that unemployment stood at 2.2%. Inflation has fallen from roughly 10% in 2024 to around 5.9% in early 2026, with the Central Bank of Russia forecasting 5.2% by year-end, according to bne IntelliNews. The CBR has cut rates by 550 basis points in the past year, with the prime rate now at 14.5% from highs near 21%. Russian retail gasoline as of late May 2026 was $0.95 per liter, 38.5% below the global average of $1.545 per liter, per DailyFuels. And the Iran war has been an outright fiscal windfall: Brent has traded between $92 and $102 per barrel through May and June, with Russian oil export revenues hitting $19 billion in March alone. The Kyiv School of Economics Institute estimates Russia could collect between $45 billion and $161 billion in additional budget revenues in 2026 from the Iran conflict’s oil price effect.
On the structural side, there is genuine deterioration.Russian Ministry of Economic Development numbers reported by bne IntelliNews on May 12 show GDP contracted 0.3% in Q1 2026, with monthly declines of -1.1% in January and -1.8% in February. Fixed capital investment in Q1 2026 plummeted 15% year-over-year, described as “the sharpest decline in the past 16 years.” Corporate profits fell 26% year-over-year. The Moscow Times reported on June 3 that some Moscow-area and northern Russian gas stations had introduced fuel rationing under pressure from Ukrainian strikes on refineries. A ban on gasoline exports remains in force through July 31.
Both things are true. A Russian consumer in 2026 is enjoying real wage growth, low unemployment, falling inflation, and gasoline at less than a dollar a liter, financed by an oil windfall the Western sanctions architecture failed to suppress. A Russian capital-goods firm is starving for investment as the central bank holds rates high to defend the ruble. The country Mercouris drove through is the country of the consumer. The country the IMF describes is the country of the balance sheet. Mercouris is not wrong. The Western press is not lying. The Western press is omitting half the picture and broadcasting the other half as the whole.
What the Western press does not tell its readers is that even the European Commission, in its Spring 2026 Forecast, upgraded Russia’s growth projection (citing the Iran-war oil windfall) to 1.3% for 2026, and that the IMF revised its forecast upward in April for the same reason. The sanctions architecture, the most expansive in history, has not delivered the collapse that was promised when the first packages were signed in 2022. The 21st package, on which more below, is itself testimony to that failure: when you have to write twenty-one of something to achieve the result you said the first one would deliver, the honest description is not “sanctions are tightening.” It is “sanctions are not working.”
And Mercouris, the man who drove through the country and saw the cars and stopped at the service stations and looked, is reporting what an honest visitor would report. The Western press, which has not made that drive in three years, is reporting what its editorial line requires.
II. The Drone Offensive That Was Going to End the War
Mercouris saw no Ukrainian drones on his Moscow-to-Pskov drive. He spoke to a woman from Smolensk who reported drones being a serious problem there, but who said they had a primarily psychological effect: that Russian air defenses were shooting them down preferentially in the countryside to minimize casualties, that she had heard the sound of anti-aircraft artillery, and that the drone attacks had “hardened, if anything,” Russian public opinion about the special military operation.
For the Western reader this picture is invisible. The Western reader has been told for the better part of a year that Ukraine’s drone campaign is dismantling Russian capacity to wage war, that strategic oil refineries are being shut down, that the home front is cracking. The premise of much Western commentary about Ukraine’s recent strategic situation rests on this assumption.
The hard data confirm Mercouris on the central point and complicate him on the edges.
On the night of June 6, the final day of the St. Petersburg Forum, Ukraine launched what the Moscow Times called “hundreds of drones” at Russia. The Russian Defense Ministry reported intercepting 376 across thirteen regions, including Pskov, with more than 140 shot down over Leningrad Oblast alone. One person was killed in Tver region by falling debris. On June 3, Ukrainian drones struck an oil terminal in St. Petersburg from over 1,000 kilometers away, igniting a fire that briefly halted airport operations, per NPR. On the same day two civilians and emergency responders were killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in Smolensk region, directly corroborating Mercouris’s source.
The Russian Defense Ministry has acknowledged intercepting roughly 500 drones in a single 24-hour period, possibly the largest barrage of the war. The Institute for the Study of War’s June 5 assessment notes that “Ukraine’s successful intermediate and long-range strike campaigns are generating discontent and panic in the Russian milblogger community” and that Putin himself, at the very SPIEF the Saudis were attending, called for stronger Russian air defenses against Ukrainian strikes.
The honest synthesis is this: The drone offensive is real, it is escalating, and it is causing genuine localized damage, including civilian deaths. The Russian air defense network is intercepting the overwhelming majority of inbound drones. The drone war is a constant battlefield, not a strategic crisis. Mercouris saw no drones because Russian air defenses are competently shooting them down before they reach the routes a traveler drives. His Smolensk source described the actual character of the campaign: psychological effect, fear, but no breakdown in economic life or political will. The Western framing of an imminent Russian collapse under drone pressure is contradicted by the data, by Putin’s own (admittedly self-serving) public appearances, by Russia’s continued offensive operations, and by Mercouris’s own observation that the campaign appears to be hardening, not weakening, the Russian public mood.
III. Konstantinovka
The most concrete and verifiable claim in Mercouris’s broadcast concerns the city of Konstantinovka in the Donetsk People’s Republic. Mercouris reported, citing the military analyst Andrey Marochko speaking to TASS, that a battalion of Ukrainian troops, between 350 and 500 men, is surrounded in the city. He cited the Russian Telegram channel Rybar to the effect that Russian forces have established total drone dominance over the supply roads north of Konstantinovka, automatically destroying any vehicle attempting to enter, and that Ukrainian infantry attempting to extricate the trapped garrison are themselves being picked off and destroyed. He described this as the same method by which the Russians captured Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad earlier: surround, infiltrate, build critical mass, close the pincers, choke the supply lines, never directly storm the city itself.
The Russian sources Mercouris cites are confirmed verbatim. Marochko told TASS on June 9: “In my estimates, there is a battalion of Ukrainian militants, about 360 to 500 personnel, in the center of Konstantinovka. If they do not wish to lay down their arms, they will remain in the center of Konstantinovka forever.” The same day, EADaily reported, citing Readovka, that “the ring of encirclement closed.” Independent corroboration from Military Affairs / voennoedelo.comconfirms the 360 to 500 figure and the operational pattern. Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada deputy Maryana Bezuglaya stated that Russian forces could take Konstantinovka “this summer if the Ukrainian command does not change its approach.”
What is striking is that even the Institute for the Study of War, the Western analytical organization most consistently aligned with Ukrainian framing, has conceded the broad picture: “The battle of Konstantinovka is coming to an end in a decisive Russian victory. Russian forces occupy already 2/3 of Konstantinovka and are pushing Ukrainian army out.” The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a Facebook postingmore focused on counter-narrative, quotes Ukrainian soldiers themselves saying Russians “are already being spotted throughout Kostiantynivka” using “the same tactics as in Pokrovsk,” the exact phrase Mercouris uses to describe the Russian method.
The Western mainstream press, by contrast, has been remarkably quiet about Konstantinovka. There is no front-page New York Times or Wall Street Journal coverage of a battalion-sized Ukrainian formation being encircled in a major Donbas city. There is no BBC explainer detailing the operational template. The Reuters wires note Russian advances obliquely, in passing, in the context of larger ceasefire stories. The British press, in particular, treats Konstantinovka as if it were not happening, perhaps because if it were happening, it would directly contradict the simultaneous Zelensky claim, given star treatment in The Guardian, that “the tide is turning in our favor.”
A battle is being fought, by the Mercouris account and by every Russian primary source and by the analytical consensus of ISW and even of named Ukrainian officials, in which a Ukrainian battalion is being eliminated by a method the Russians have now successfully applied to two prior cities. The Western reader is told nothing of substance. The Western reader is told the war is going well for Ukraine, and the actual unit-level developments on the ground are simply omitted from coverage. This is not error. This is curation.
IV. The Apache, the Strait, and the Air Superiority That Was Never Achieved
While Mercouris was recording on June 10, the Persian Gulf was exploding for the second time in seventy-two hours. A U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter had gone down on June 8 near the Omani coast while patrolling the Strait of Hormuz. CENTCOM rescued both pilots within about two hours and stated that the cause of the incident was “currently under investigation.” Iran did not initially confirm responsibility. Trump immediately ordered retaliatory strikes; CENTCOM struck Iranian air defense systems, ground control stations, and surveillance radar near the Strait of Hormuz at 5 p.m. Eastern on June 9, in what was described as a “proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression,” per CBS News. On June 10, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded with retaliatory drone and missile strikes against US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan; the IRGC claimed to have struck 21 US targets and to have downed an MQ-9 drone, per Al Jazeera. Brent crude moved to roughly $92 per barrel, per HDFC Sky.
Every operational fact in Mercouris’s account is confirmed. CENTCOM did say the cause was being studied. Trump did order strikes without waiting for that study. Oil prices did surge. The ceasefire, what was left of it after the original Iran war earlier in the year and a Lebanon ceasefire that collapsed within 24 hours, is in freefall.
But the most consequential observation in this section of Mercouris’s broadcast is one no major Western publication has been willing to articulate plainly. The United States has failed to achieve air superiority over Iran. Mercouris’s specific claim, that this is the first time since the later stages of the Korean War that the United States has not achieved air dominance over a battlefield where its forces are fighting, is his own analytical conclusion, not a Western talking point. The evidence sustains it.
During the forty-day Iran war from February to April 2026, the United States expended, according to CSIS analysis reported in Al Jazeera, more than 200 THAAD interceptors, approximately half the entire inventory. It expended more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, more than 1,000 JASSMs, large quantities of SM-3 and SM-6 interceptors, and roughly half of its Patriot air-defense stocks. CSIS estimates that rebuilding to pre-war levels for these seven munitions will require between one and four years. The Pentagon’s acting comptroller put the war’s direct cost at $29 billion as of early June, with outside estimates running as high as $72 billion. CSIS estimated $2.3 to 2.8 billion in damage to US military equipment from Iranian strikes alone.
Despite all of this, Iran “retains approximately 70 percent of its pre-war stockpile,” per US intelligence assessments cited in the same Al Jazeera reporting. On June 7 to 8, before the Apache incident, Iran launched 30 ballistic missiles at Israel. On June 10, Iran struck three US bases in three different Gulf states. An Apache helicopter was shot down. An MQ-9 was, Iran claims, also lost. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress on May 12, per Responsible Statecraft, that munition shortage concerns are “foolishly and unhealthily overstated.” A week later, NBC News reported that the Defense Department had “yet to finalize new agreements to restock its ammunition.”
This is the picture. An American military command that has burned through half its strategic air defense interceptor inventory protecting Israel, expended a thousand-plus Tomahawks, spent thirty to seventy billion dollars, lost an Apache, and still cannot prevent the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from striking three different American bases on a single day three months after the formal end of the war. Mercouris is saying out loud what every uniformed officer in CENTCOM understands and what no major American publication has been willing to put in a headline: the air superiority on which American expeditionary warfare has rested for seven decades has been contested, and the United States has lost the contest. The full strategic consequences of this fact have not yet been absorbed by Washington, by London, or by the editorial board of any major Western newspaper.
The Western reader is told that strikes have been launched. The Western reader is not told what the box score is.
V. Castle Beaufort and the War Israel Is Not Winning
Mercouris reported that the Israeli military’s capture of the medieval crusader fortress of Castle Beaufort, presented in Western coverage as a decisive victory in the south-of-Litani campaign, has not produced the strategic effect promised. He reported that Hezbollah has pushed Israelis back in places, recaptured at least one village, and continues to inflict costs on the IDF in a war of attrition that shows no sign of breakthrough.
The capture of Castle Beaufort is confirmed by Associated Press on May 31 and described as the most significant Israeli incursion into the region in 25 years. Israeli Defense Minister Katz used the language of restoration: “The flag is again flying the peaks the Galilee communities.” Per Al Jazeera, Israel now controls approximately 2,000 square kilometers of Lebanese territory, nearly one-fifth of the country.
What followed the capture is the relevant story. A US-brokered ceasefire was signed on June 3 and collapsed within 24 hours, per the Tahrir Institute. Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, per CNN on June 7, stated that Israel has conducted nearly 3,500 airstrikes and over 400 bombing missions on Lebanon since the April ceasefire began. The death toll: 3,526 killed and 10,733 injured. Per Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Hezbollah has been conducting as many as 100 operations per day against Israeli forces, has introduced fiber-optic guided FPV drones to defeat Israeli jamming, and has killed 20 Israeli soldiers and wounded dozens since March, the figure attributed to the Israeli military itself. Hezbollah’s operational tempo has not been broken. Israel, in the careful judgment of Al-Sharq al-Awsat, has been “unable to impose the conditions it seeks on Lebanon.”
The Western framing of a captured fortress, decisive victory, and advancing flag is the framing of an Israeli press release. The operational reality, sourced to Lebanese officials, the IDF’s own casualty acknowledgment, and Arab-language reporting, is the reality Mercouris describes: a costly war of attrition without breakthrough, in which Hezbollah is adapting, attacking daily, and inflicting casualties Israel has shown itself unwilling to advertise.
VI. The Country That Is Not Alone
Of all the assertions in The Guardian’s June 9 interview with Volodymyr Zelensky, the one that astonished Mercouris most was this: “They are isolated within Europe and from the United States. They are alone.” The Guardian’s interviewer, Luke Harding, recorded the claim and published it without contesting it.
The week the interview was conducted, the following events had occurred or were occurring:
DateEventMay 19 to 20Putin met Xi Jinping in Beijing for a state visit marking the 25th anniversary of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Friendship. (AP, NPR)May 27 to 28Putin made a state visit to Kazakhstan, signed the “Joint Statement on the Seven Foundations of Friendship and Neighbourliness” with President Tokayev, and attended the Eurasian Economic Forum. (Kremlin)June 3 to 6Saudi Arabia served as Guest of Honor at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, sending a 200+ person delegation led by Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. (Saudi Gazette) Approximately 30 bilateral cooperation agreements signed.June 4Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev confirmed continuing US-Russia talks on energy and economy with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. (Reuters via U.S. News)June 5Putin formally offered India joint development and production of the Su-57 fifth-generation stealth fighter at SPIEF. (India Today)June 5Vice President Han Zheng of China sat on the SPIEF plenary panel. (Kremlin transcript)
At the SPIEF plenary on June 6, in the presence of Putin, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman delivered the line Mercouris quotes: “We’re weathering all of these storms with a diligent commitment to each other as partners that… although I am a Muslim and Russia is not Catholic, but still we do go by until death do us part.” Putin called Saudi Arabia “a long-standing friend of Russia.” This is the foreign minister of the world’s largest oil exporter, on Russian soil, on the stage of Russia’s flagship economic forum, comparing his country’s relationship with Russia to a marriage. The Saudis signed something like 30 bilateral agreements at the forum, per Eastern Herald, where 142 countries and 24,500 participants generated $89.57 billion in announced deals.
The Western press, in the same week, covered the St. Petersburg forum by writing about Steven Seagal and Candace Owens and Trump’s ballroom commissioner, per CNN’s June 4 piece. The Saudi presence, the structural significance of the world’s swing oil producer formally headlining Russia’s signature economic event during the very week Western governments were claiming Russia was isolated, was not a story. It was not analyzed. It was not framed. It was, for the readers of The Guardian and CNN and Reuters, invisible.
This is the press environment in which Zelensky said Russia is “alone” and a journalist for The Guardian did not ask him a single follow-up question about China, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, India, or the US Treasury OFAC oil licenses being extended through June 28. The interview was conducted in London, where Zelensky had spent the day with Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz, and Emmanuel Macron. The four men comforted each other. The Guardian reported the comforting. The world Russia was operating in went unmentioned.
Mercouris’s outrage is the appropriate response. The assertion of Russian isolation, made in mid-2026, is not a defensible analytical position. It is an article of liturgy. The Guardian’sfailure to challenge it is not journalism. It is stenography.
VII. Nebenzia, Anchorage, and the Standstill the Europeans Will Not Accept
While Zelensky was in London, the Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzia, was telling Izvestia on June 8 and reiterating the next day that Moscow is aiming for a long-term settlement and does not need “imitation negotiations.” Mercouris characterized this as Nebenzia declaring negotiations at a “total standstill.” The substance is correct; the framing matters.
The European position, repeated by Mercouris and confirmed by the available reporting, is unchanged from where it was after the Anchorage summit of August 15, 2025: an unconditional ceasefire on existing lines, freedom for European powers to continue arming Ukraine without Russian consent, a continued Ukrainian path to NATO and EU membership, and the assumption that all territory occupied by Russia within pre-2014 Ukrainian borders must eventually be returned. Russia has refused this framework. Russia continues to refuse this framework. Russia’s position, articulated by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Nebenzia, and Putin himself at SPIEF, is that the starting point for any negotiation is what Putin claims was discussed at Anchorage: Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donetsk Oblast, a frozen line in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, no NATO trajectory, and a recognized Russian Crimea.
The Anchorage summit itself produced no signed agreement. Trump himself, per ISW’s May 13 assessment, denied having agreed that Russia should acquire all of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Financial Times called the summit “an embarrassing failure for Trump.” But the Russian negotiating position has remained consistent and the European refusal has remained consistent, and in the space between, the war continues and Ukrainian battalions are being eliminated in cities like Konstantinovka.
The European position, broken to its load-bearing components, asks Russia to stop fighting on lines disadvantageous to itself, accept the rearmament of its adversary, accept the eventual NATO membership of its adversary, and accept that Russia’s territorial gains will be reversed at some unspecified future date. No serious analyst expects Russia to agree to this. No serious analyst at the European Commission or at Westminster appears to have considered that Russia will not agree to it. The proposal is repeated. The proposal is refused. The proposal is repeated. This is what Mercouris is describing when he speaks of an inability to take “no” for an answer. It is the diplomatic equivalent of the Western military’s failure to absorb the air-superiority lesson from Iran. It is the refusal of a class of policy elites to update their priors in the face of evidence.
VIII. The Twenty-First Sanctions Package
On June 9, the European Commission unveiled its 21st sanctions package against Russia. Two of its elements drew Mercouris’s particular attention: a ban on imports of certain complex metallic alloys produced by Russia, and a ban on entry into the EU of Russian soldiers who have participated in the special military operation.
The package is confirmed in Eurointegration, DW, Euronews, and von der Leyen’s own press conference. It targets metals and alloys “used in the aerospace and defense sectors” on the export side (preventing the EU from supplying Russia) and “certain metals, metal or car parts” on the import side (preventing the EU from buying these from Russia). The Commission’s own framing acknowledges the goal as “diversification away from Russian imports,” an implicit admission that, twenty packages in, the dependency remains and is only now being addressed. The veterans entry ban does not apply to Russian soldiers who fought in or after the 2014 Crimea annexation but to those involved in the post-February 2022 operation. The package must be unanimously approved by the Council by July 15 to maintain the Russian oil price cap timeline.
Mercouris’s commentary is severe and, on the merits, correct. A Russian soldier prepared to fight on the lines in Donetsk is not, by any reasonable hypothesis, deterred by the prospect of being unable to take a vacation in Rome. The enforcement mechanism, a comprehensive database of Russian military personnel maintained at EU border posts, is essentially unimaginable. The metallic-alloys ban runs into the durable problem that has plagued the entire sanctions architecture from the beginning: when the European industrial base is dependent on Russian materials, and when alternative suppliers either do not exist at scale, do not exist at price, or are themselves countries the EU does not wish to deepen its dependency on, the import ban becomes either an act of self-harm or an exercise in symbolic gesture. Mercouris’s doubt that the EU has secured alternative suppliers is not refuted by any documentation in the sourcing.
This is, in functional terms, the twenty-first attempt to repeat an experiment that has not produced the predicted result on the previous twenty attempts. The European political class has not paused to ask why. The European press has not asked the question on its readers’ behalf. Mercouris asks the question, and his asking it is what makes him uncomfortable for the Western consensus.
IX. The Pattern
What unites these eight subjects, namely the Russian consumer economy, the drone war, Konstantinovka, the Apache and Iranian air defense, Castle Beaufort, the “isolation” narrative, the Anchorage standstill, and the 21st sanctions package, is a consistent and identifiable pattern in the Western press.
The pattern is not lying. The pattern is more useful than lying for the institutional purposes it serves. The pattern is:
1. Report the press release. Whatever the State Department, the Foreign Office, the Élysée, the Federal Foreign Office, or the office of the President of Ukraine says, report it. Quote it. Headline it. If the press release announces a victory, the headline announces a victory. If it announces isolation, the headline announces isolation. If it announces a ceasefire collapsing because of Russian intransigence, the headline announces Russian intransigence.
2. Omit the operational reality. The CSIS report on munitions depletion exists and is published. It is buried in Al Jazeerafeatures and Responsible Statecraft commentary, not on the front page of the New York Times. The Konstantinovka encirclement is happening in real time and is documented by TASS, Readovka, Marochko, and even ISW, but the Wall Street Journal reader will not learn of it. The Saudi delegation at SPIEF is a structural event of the first importance and is covered as a story about Steven Seagal.
3. Refuse to update. When the predicted outcome of a policy (sanctions collapse the Russian economy; air strikes degrade Iranian capability; Castle Beaufort breaks Hezbollah) fails to materialize, the failure is not analyzed. It is simply not mentioned. The next iteration of the policy, whether package 21, strike package against new targets, or additional incursion across the Litani, is announced as if the prior iteration had not failed.
4. Police the perimeter of acceptable opinion. The voices who report the operational reality, including Mercouris, the analysts at the Quincy Institute, the academics associated with Neutrality Studies, and the Brookings authors willing to acknowledge American overreach, are not engaged with on the substance. They are either ignored or attached to disqualifying labels. The reader who reaches them does so against the gradient of the institutional press, not with its assistance.
This is the system. It is not a conspiracy. It does not require coordination. It requires only that the editors and producers and reporters of the major Western outlets share an editorial worldview within which certain conclusions are presupposed and certain questions cannot be asked. Inside that worldview, what Mercouris reports from his hotel room in Pskov is not news. It is heresy. Inside that worldview, Putin is delusional and Russia is alone, regardless of what the Saudi energy minister said three days earlier on the stage of SPIEF.
Mercouris’s value to the reader who wants to understand what is actually happening in Russia, in Ukraine, in the Persian Gulf, and in southern Lebanon, is that he steps outside the worldview and reports what is in front of him. He does so without claiming infallibility. He notes that he has been in Russia only two days and that his impressions are personal. He acknowledges what his sources tell him and what they cannot tell him. He distinguishes his analytical conclusions from his factual reporting. He cites primary sources by name. He is, in the old-fashioned sense, a journalist.
The institutional Western press, increasingly, is not. The institutional Western press is the public relations arm of a policy consensus that the operational facts no longer sustain. That consensus is what produced the predicted collapse of the Russian economy that did not happen, the predicted defeat of Iranian air defense that did not happen, the predicted breaking of Hezbollah that did not happen, the predicted Russian diplomatic isolation that is being contradicted by every passing week of summit meetings and bilateral agreements.
When the consensus and the facts have diverged this far, the responsible thing for a reader is to seek out the people reporting the facts and to discount, heavily, the people reporting the consensus. Alexander Mercouris is among the people reporting the facts. The Guardian’s June 9 interview with Volodymyr Zelensky is the consensus. The choice between them is no longer a close call.
X. What the Reader Should Do
There is a temptation in pieces like this one to end on an admonition. The temptation is to be resisted. The reader who has followed the argument this far already knows what to do.
Read the Russian sources. Read TASS and read RT and read the bne IntelliNews dispatches and read the Kremlin transcripts. Read the Iranian sources. Read Mehr News and Press TV. Read the Israeli press in both English and, where you can, Hebrew. Read Al-Sharq al-Awsat and Al Jazeera. Read the analytical work coming out of the Quincy Institute and Responsible Statecraft and Brookings’s more honest authors. Read Mercouris. Read the actual Financial Times and Wall Street Journal reporting beneath the headlines, where the operational nuances are sometimes preserved.
Then read The Guardian and the New York Times and the Washington Post. Not for what they tell you. For what they refuse to tell you. The systematic omissions are themselves data. When the country in which Putin spent five days in May is described as “isolated,” and the country whose energy minister said “until death do us part” three days earlier is not mentioned in the analysis, you are not reading journalism. You are reading the artifact of a policy preference. Make the appropriate adjustments.
The war in Ukraine is being lost on the lines by the side the Western press has told you is winning. The war with Iran is being prosecuted from a depleted American magazine against an enemy that retains 70% of its capability. The war in Lebanon is a war of attrition Israel is paying for in soldiers it does not publicize. The sanctions are not working. The economy is not collapsing. The diplomacy is not isolated.
Mercouris is correct in his observations and in his reading of what those observations imply. The Western press, on the operational specifics he addresses, is not. The reader will reach his or her own verdict. But the reader should reach it on the facts, not on the headlines.
Scott Ortkiese is President & CEO of Faulkner Capital Holdings. He writes on geopolitics, energy markets, and capital structure at Throughline Synthesis.
Sources cited throughout. Verbatim quotations are attributed to their primary publications. The full Mercouris broadcast referenced is the June 10, 2026 program; primary transcript available on request.
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