PARIS: When Moscow invaded Ukraine, Pavel Talankin, a staff member at a secondary school in Russia’s Ural Mountains, was ordered to film patriotic lessons, songs and morning drills.
Talankin, the school’s event organizer and also a keen videographer, found the propaganda work so depressing that he wanted to quit his job in the industrial town of Karabash.
Then he received what he says was the strangest message of his life.
A Europe-based filmmaker got in touch, offering to collaborate on a project to document the abrupt militarization of Talankin’s school in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of its neighbor.
Talankin had earlier seen a post from a Russian company looking for people whose jobs had been affected by the war. Talankin said he was ready to talk.
After receiving the foreigner’s offer Talankin did not sleep all night.
The project changed his life forever.
After teaming up with David Borenstein and shooting many hours of footage, Talankin last summer fled Russia with seven hard discs, leaving behind his mother, brothers and sisters and the town he loved.
Using the smuggled-out footage Borenstein, a Denmark-based US filmmaker, directed what became “Mr Nobody Against Putin,” an award-winning 90-minute documentary which exposes the intensity of the propaganda at Talankin’s school and throughout Karabash.
It premiered at the 2025 Sundance film festival in January.


The project cost Talankin dearly. Local officials banned his former colleagues from contacting him, he became a hate figure for supporters of the war and his school librarian mother was upset.
“I have become a persona non grata,” Talankin, 34, told AFP from Prague, where he is now based.
Russia outlawed all criticism of the Russian military and the Kremlin and Talankin knew he had taken huge risks.
But he has no regrets.
“I would do it all over again.”
He has been buoyed by the support of people featured in the film including those who lost their loved ones in the war.
One former colleague said she became ashamed that she, too, was “part of the system.”
The documentary reaped awards at festivals and the film crew hopes it will be available to wider audiences in Europe later this year. Borenstein said the film’s success had been a “relief” because the multi-national crew overcame numerous obstacles including communication and security.
But above all he was “really scared” that if the film flopped Talankin’s sacrifice would come to nothing.
“I knew the whole time that Pasha would have to leave Russia to make this project happen,” Borenstein told AFP, referring to his co-director by his diminutive.
“That is a huge sacrifice for him, because his mum is there, his whole life is there, he does not speak English, not at that time.”
Talankin has not been able to join the crew to present the film at the Sundance festival in Utah and elsewhere due to paperwork issues, but the team hopes this will soon change.
For now he is learning English and adjusting to his new life in Prague.


Talankin said he was heartened by the reactions at the screenings.
One viewer in the Czech Republic said he hated Russians but the film made him reconsider. “We knew nothing about what was happening to you,” Talankin quoted the Czech as saying.
“It is a powerful and poetic piece of cinema,” said producer Alexandra Fechner, who is promoting the film in France.
“This film shows the hidden side of propaganda in Russia, which targets the youngest members of society, children who are being taught a rewritten version of history and given guns!” she said.
With the war in its fourth year, Moscow has put society on a war footing and leveraged the educational system to raise a fiercely pro-Kremlin generation.
The film features Wagner mercenaries telling children about hand grenades and teachers calling Ukrainians “neo-Nazi,” and includes an audio recording of a wailing mother at her soldier son’s funeral.
But critics also point to the documentary’s empathy and light touch.
In one episode, a history teacher tells pupils that the spiralling prices could soon make gas unaffordable for Europeans.
“The French will soon be like musketeers, riding horses, and the rest of Europe too,” he said.
Borenstein said that by viewing the footage sent by Talankin nearly every day, he understood the effect of the dehumanizing war-time propaganda.
While at the beginning he found some of the clips shocking, months later his mind had become so used to the onslaught of the propaganda that he did not see the footage depicting the Wagner mercenaries as something abnormal.
“I was able to replicate among myself some of the feelings that maybe the students and people in the school felt,” he said. “Looking at this propaganda every single day was a lesson in how desensitised you can become to it.”
A lot of the footage had not made it into the film, including the school’s preparations for the possibility of a nuclear attack.
Karabash is located close to one of Russia’s most sensitive sites, the Mayak nuclear reprocessing plant.
Talankin said Borenstein did not want the viewers to “drown in the enormous amount of negative material.”
“I have plans for this footage,” Talankin said. “Sooner or later I will start slowly releasing it.”

WASHINGTON: The Republican-controlled US Senate narrowly advanced President Donald Trump’s, sweeping tax-cut and spending bill on Saturday, during a marathon weekend session marked by political drama, division and lengthy delays as Democrats sought to slow the legislation’s path to passage.

Lawmakers voted 51-49 to open debate on the 940-page megabill, with two of Trump’s fellow Republicans joining Democrats to oppose the legislation that would fund the president’s top immigration, border, tax-cut and military priorities.

Trump on social media hailed the “great victory” for his “great, big, beautiful bill.”

After hours of delay, during which Republican leaders and Vice President JD Vance worked behind closed doors to persuade last-minute holdouts to support the measure, Democrats demanded that the megabill first be read aloud in the chamber — a task that could delay the start of the debate until Sunday afternoon.

Democrats say the bill’s tax cuts would disproportionately benefit the wealthy at the expense of social programs for lower-income Americans.

“Senate Republicans are scrambling to pass a radical bill, released to the public in the dead of night, praying the American people don’t realize what’s in it,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor.

“Democrats are going to force this chamber to read it from start to finish,” he said.

Once the bill has been read, lawmakers will begin up to 20 hours of debate on the legislation. That will be followed by a marathon amendment session, known as a “vote-a-rama,” before the Senate votes on passage. Lawmakers said they hoped to complete work on the bill on Monday.

Republican Senators Thom Tillis and Rand Paul voted against opening debate, a move that seemed for a time to be in danger of failing.

Trump attacked Tillis, who opposed the bill’s cuts to the Medicaid health care program for lower-income Americans, which he said would be devastating for his native North Carolina. Tillis is up for reelection next year.

“Numerous people have come forward wanting to run in the Primary against ‘Senator Thom’ Tillis. I will be meeting with them over the coming weeks,” the president posted.

Paul opposed the legislation because it would raise the federal borrowing limit on the $36.2 trillion US debt by an additional $5 trillion.

“Did Rand Paul Vote ‘NO’ again tonight? What’s wrong with this guy???” Trump said on social media.

In limbo

Saturday’s vote was in limbo for hours as Vance, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other top Republicans sought to persuade last-minute holdouts to support the legislation. It was not clear what deals if any were struck to win over their support.

Hard-line Republican Senators Rick Scott, Mike Lee and Cynthia Lummis, who want deeper cuts in federal spending, voted to support the bill in the end. Another hard-liner, Senator Ron Johnson, initially voted no but flipped his vote and backed the legislation.

Trump was monitoring the vote from the Oval Office late into the night, a senior White House official said.

The megabill would extend the 2017 tax cuts that were Trump’s main legislative achievement during his first term as president, cut other taxes and boost spending on the military and border security.

The nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee released an analysis projecting that the Senate bill’s tax provisions would reduce government revenue by $4.5 trillion over the next decade, increasing the $36.2-trillion US government debt.

The White House said this month the legislation would reduce the annual deficit by $1.4 trillion.

The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, also took a swipe at the bill, which would end tax breaks for the electric vehicles that his automaker Tesla manufactures.

Calling the bill “utterly insane and destructive,” he risked reigniting a feud with Trump that raged earlier this month, before Musk backed down from his rhetoric.

“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X.

Medicaid changes

Republicans from states with large rural populations have opposed a reduction in state tax revenue for Medicaid providers, including rural hospitals. The newly released legislation would delay that reduction and would include $25 billion to support rural Medicaid providers from 2028 to 2032.

The legislation would raise the cap on federal deductions for state and local taxes to $40,000 with an annual 1 percent inflation adjustment through 2029, after which it would fall back to the current $10,000. The bill would also phase the cap down for those earning more than $500,000 a year.

That is a major concern of House Republicans from coastal states, including New York, New Jersey and California, who play an important role in keeping the party’s narrow House majority.

Republicans are using a legislative maneuver to bypass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to advance most legislation in the 100-member chamber.

Democrats will focus their firepower with amendments aimed at reversing Republican spending cuts to programs that provide government-backed health care to the elderly, poor and disabled, as well as food aid to low-income families.

The bill also would raise the Treasury Department’s debt ceiling by trillions of dollars to stave off a potentially disastrous default on the nation’s debt in the coming months.

If the Senate passes the bill, it will then return to the House of Representatives for final passage before Trump can sign it into law. The House passed its version of the bill last month.