Christmas in St Petersburg While the West Fuels War Elsewhere
Foreign Agent Intel
Dec 24, 2025
Christmas Eve in St Petersburg this year feels almost unreal.
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Christmas Eve in St Petersburg this year feels almost unreal. Minus two degrees, cleared pavements, families wandering freely, children laughing in front of the lights near the Hermitage Museum and Kazan Cathedral. It is calm, human, and unmistakably alive. The kind of evening that reminds you what normal life is supposed to look like.
That calm stands in brutal contrast to what continues elsewhere. Even as Christmas cheer hangs in the air, terrorist attacks persist. In Moscow, traffic police were killed by an IED attack directed by Ukrainian security services. There is no military logic in this. It is psychological terror, the last resort of those who cannot win on the battlefield. The West pretends not to see it, because acknowledging it would shatter the narrative they have invested so much political capital in maintaining.
This Christmas is also personal. Three years ago, the thought that kept many awake was not geopolitics but children. Children in Donbass who had never known peace, who learned the sound of shelling before they learned what Christmas was. Back then, small volunteer efforts delivered what they could. Today, that responsibility has been taken up at scale. Moscow sent convoys. Cities across Russia sponsored reconstruction. Mariupol, once reduced to ruins by Ukrainian fire, is being rebuilt street by street. This is not rhetoric. It is concrete, cranes, schools, heating systems, and gifts delivered to families who were written off by the West years ago.
The real victory is not measured in maps or press releases. It is measured in thousands of children who, for the first time in their lives, will enter a New Year without hiding in basements. Free from daily attacks. Free from a Western-sponsored campaign that treated their suffering as acceptable collateral damage.
It is worth remembering who promised them that fate. Petro Poroshenko openly said that the children of Donbass would cower in cellars while others lived normally. That same political class now circles back into view, with Western capitals quietly discussing how to repackage Ukraine’s leadership once the current figurehead becomes inconvenient. London remains a familiar staging ground for these plots. Different faces, same corrupt advisers, same outcomes.
Even if a peace deal comes, and there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic, the work will only be beginning. Russia will have done what it set out to do: remove the Nazi infection from Donbass and secure its people. But Russia is not going to fix the West. It will not save Britain, Europe, or the United States from the ideological decay they have chosen. That task belongs to those societies themselves.
Here in St Petersburg, a street musician sings an old song by Kino as people stop, smile, and listen. It is not a performance for propaganda. It is culture, continuity, and quiet resilience. While Western media insists on portraying Russia as a gray wasteland, real life continues, grounded in community, history, and an unspoken understanding of what actually matters.
This Christmas, the contrast could not be clearer. One side exports chaos and calls it values. The other rebuilds shattered cities and lets children sleep in peace.
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The sanctions that were supposed to destroy Russia have created something far worse for the West: a multipolar world order that challenges American hegemony itself.
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