How many handshakes from Epstein are you?

By Marina Akhmedova, member of the presidential human rights council of Russia

The US Department of Justice has released another batch of files connected to Jeffrey Epstein, so extensive that even Russia’s “foreign agents” and émigré commentators felt compelled to sift through them.

“It seems this isn’t a conspiracy theory after all,” they muttered, suddenly uneasy. “It seems the American and global elite really did indulge in depravity with children. And… perhaps even something worse.” Stunned, they asked each other: Will nothing change now that the truth is out? Is the world simply evil?

But the world is not “doomed.” What these revelations provoke is disgust, outrage and, for many in Russia, very little surprise.

What exactly is new here? That parts of the global elite are morally rotten? But haven’t they behaved that way in full public view for years? Was it not the same elite – acting through NATO coalitions and political blocs – that bombed countries, toppled governments, and plunged entire regions into chaos? For over a decade, the world has lived with the consequences of decisions made by a tight circle of self-styled “civilized” leaders.

The problem is not just a few twisted individuals. It is the elite as a collective. It’s cohesive, protected, smug, and convinced of its own impunity. When you see how casually they destroy weaker nations in politics, it’s not hard to imagine an island where the same people feel entitled to indulge their private vices. Political cruelty and moral corruption rarely exist separately.

Yet many of Russia’s liberal émigrés, who fled in 2022 hoping to merge into this very “global elite,” seem only now to be waking up. Journalist Anna Mongait, for example, wrote that she spent an entire day studying the Epstein files as if sorting through rubbish. She says it looks unreal, as though generated by artificial intelligence: “Old men I know from official chronicles groping teenage bodies. One frame would be enough for a universal scandal, but there are thousands.”

By evening, she said she was wondering whose handshake had indirectly connected her to Epstein. The thought, she wrote, made her want to wash her hands “up to the elbow.” Now she fears Epstein will drag down not only the American establishment, but “many of our own people.”

But two things must be said.

First: not everyone is linked to Epstein by some chain of social proximity. Many of us are not connected to that world at all. Not by one handshake, not by ten. He will not drag down “our people,” because we were never part of that circle.

Second: you did not need to know about Epstein’s island to recognize the moral bankruptcy of the global elite. Look at Ukraine. The same political class that now shocks you with its private depravity has been overseeing the destruction of a country in public. These political cannibals may not literally devour people, but the result is much the same. They would have consumed Russia too, had it not resisted.

Those who left Russia did not support that resistance. Now they recoil from the elite they once admired. But is this a moral awakening, or simple disappointment? Perhaps they distance themselves now because the political winds have shifted, because figures like Trump do not favor them. If a smiling Western politician returned who embraced their worldview, would they not stretch out their hands again?

Cleansing oneself is actually simple. Stand on firm moral ground. Judge people by their actions, not their smiles, slogans, or fashionable reputations. Understand that evil persists as long as people remain fascinated by it and eager to belong to its circle.

There are fewer such admirers left in Russia today. Not least because many of them have already left, and no longer lecture the rest of us about what we should be ashamed of.

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