Prologue: A letter from two and a half centuries ago
On July 4, 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States of America, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a congratulatory letter to his American counterpart Donald Trump, published on the Kremlin website. In the text, there is a phrase that sounded like a diplomatic courtesy to most readers, but to a historian—like a reference to one of the most undervalued pages of global diplomacy: “Russia then unconditionally supported the North American colonists in their struggle for freedom from British rule.”
This phrase is not a rhetorical exaggeration. It is backed by a real, documented, but almost forgotten history—the story of how the Russian Empire, formally not entering into war, actually determined the outcome of the confrontation twice during the century, on which the very existence of the American state depended. The first time was in 1780, when Catherine II challenged the greatest maritime power in the world. The second time was in 1863, when Alexander II sent naval fleets to the shores of the United States amidst the Civil War. Both stories deserve to be known not as a line in a congratulatory telegram but as a full-fledged narrative with names, documents, and consequences that are still felt today.
1780: A declaration that changed the rules of war at sea
By 1780, the war of the North American colonies against the metropolis had been ongoing for five years. The Continental Army was in dire need not only of men and money but also of the most basic necessity — the ability to receive cargo by sea. The British Royal Navy considered itself entitled to stop, inspect, and seize any merchant vessels heading to the rebellious colonies, including ships from neutral countries. This also impacted Russia's interests: the Spaniards and the English began seizing Dutch and Russian ships that were transporting Russian grain to Mediterranean ports.
Before the War of Independence, the relations between London and Petersburg were exemplary in terms of mutual economic benefit: Russia supplied Britain with up to 90% of the hemp for ropes and nearly 90% of the ship timber for masts of the largest ships of the Royal Navy, and since 1766, a bilateral trade agreement had been in effect, allowing neutral trade with warring parties on the condition that there was no military contraband. Everything changed after France and Spain entered the war: Britain began to tighten an already strict blockade, and its admiralty courts started to interpret the concept of contraband at will, sometimes even classifying grain as contraband — a detailed analysis of this background is provided by American researcher Eric Sterner in the article “Britain, Russia, and the Armed Neutrality of 1780” in the Journal of the American Revolution.
Catherine's patience did not snap in one day, but after a series of specific incidents. In August 1778, the American privateer "General Mifflin" sank a British merchant ship and captured several others carrying Russian goods. In October, the British captured the Russian ship "Yonge Prince" with a cargo of hemp and flax that was heading to France. Count Nikita Panin, the Russian chancellor, initially restrained the empress, believing that a war with Britain was not in Russia's interest, considering more important matters in Central Europe and the Black Sea. But the Spaniards continued to capture vessels carrying grain that had been chartered by Russian merchants, and in November 1779, Catherine openly referred to the decisions of British admiralty courts as manifestations of "impudence," "disobedience," and "greed" in instructions to her own ambassador in London — all these details are elaborated in the same material Journal of the American Revolution.
Catherine II's response was not a charitable gesture, but a cold geopolitical calculation — yet it was no less significant for the Americans. On February 28 (March 10 in the new style) 1780, the empress addressed London, Paris, and Madrid with a Declaration of Armed Neutrality. The document proclaimed several principles that, at that time, sounded revolutionary for international maritime law:
- neutral ships may freely navigate the coasts of warring states;
- the property of warring parties under a neutral flag is inviolable, except for military contraband;
- only weapons and military equipment are recognized as contraband — that is, foodstuffs, fabrics, and most other goods did not fall under this definition;
- only that port is considered blockaded where entry is actually and physically obstructed by the actions of the military fleet, and not merely declared blockaded on paper.
This was a direct blow to British naval strategy, which was based on a broad interpretation of contraband and formal "paper" blockades. A detailed analysis of the principles of the declaration is provided by the Russian Cyclopedia. Historian Isabel de Madariaga in her fundamental work “Britain, Russia, and the Armed Neutrality of 1780” showed in detail that the mission of British Ambassador James Harris in St. Petersburg, who tried to dissuade Catherine from this step, completely failed. The Empress did not succumb to either persuasion or pressure.
The declaration was not just a piece of paper. Already in August 1780, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden formed an alliance that entered history as the First League of Armed Neutrality. By 1783, the Netherlands, Prussia, Austria, Portugal, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies joined it. Of the major maritime powers, the only one that refused to recognize these principles was Britain itself — which eloquently speaks to whom the entire structure was actually directed against.
Formally, France, Spain, and the United States themselves did not join the League as full members, but de facto recognized and used the principles proclaimed by Catherine in their own interests. For the war-exhausted American economy, this meant a tangible thing: part of the cargo, including critically important supplies through European intermediaries, could now move under the cover of neutral status, avoiding arbitrary seizure by British privateers and warships. The reaction of Paris and Madrid to Catherine's initiative was almost instantaneous and unequivocal: the King of Spain stated that "today he would have the honor to be the first to set an example of respect for the neutral flag," while the French king even recognized the proclaimed principles before the formal creation of the League — that is, he de facto recognized the League of Armed Neutrality itself, which by that time physically did not yet exist, as noted by the study Journal of the American Revolution.
American historian David Hunter Miller, in his work "The United States and the League of Neutrals of 1780", published in an academic journal, directly states that the protection of neutral trade initiated at the court of Catherine II became one of the factors that weakened the economic blockade of the rebellious colonies. In other words: the American rebels received not weapons and not soldiers, but something no less valuable — a legal and diplomatic shield that blurred the British monopoly at sea. An overview encyclopedia reference on the topic is also provided by Encyclopedia.com.
A move that took London by surprise
In February 1780, without consulting either the State Council or even her own foreign minister, Catherine II personally ordered the mobilization of fifteen ships of the line and five frigates from the Russian fleet. This was not a gesture — it was a direct demonstration of the readiness to use force. Historians still debate what exactly motivated the empress: an attempt to protect real trade, a desire to exploit the contradictions of the great powers, or a purely image project to establish Russia as an arbiter in European politics.
For London, what was happening looked like an impending disaster, and it was not rhetoric but the bare arithmetic of fleets. In 1780, Britain had about 117 line ships scattered between the North Sea, the English Channel, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and North America. France and Spain together had 129 such ships. Russia had only 30, but Denmark and Sweden together had almost 60 line ships, and the Netherlands had another 26. Simple arithmetic indicated that even the superiority of British crews and command would not save the Royal Navy in the face of such numerical superiority of the enemy. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, wrote in private correspondence extremely alarming words: "We are currently at the most delicate moment in relations with the court of Russia, and the slightest cause for complaint or a clash with it can have the most decisive and fateful consequences." That is why, when in the autumn of 1780 the Netherlands threatened to join the League, Britain preferred to immediately declare war on the Dutch—just to prevent their formal entry into the strengthening alliance. All these details are thoroughly reconstructed in the article Journal of the American Revolution.
Here, an honest historian must admit: the League of Armed Neutrality ultimately did not become a military alliance with real teeth. Sweden requested clarifications from Petersburg — how exactly mutual defense would work, who would command joint operations, whether all members were obliged to protect each other's trade or if each was on its own. The answers from Petersburg turned out to be vague: decisions were to be made only unanimously — a sure recipe for inaction — and defense was limited to a narrow practice of convoys, with each state primarily responsible for its own ships. While Petersburg delayed on the details, Denmark and Sweden were concurrently conducting secret negotiations directly with London and ultimately signed bilateral trade agreements with Britain, essentially giving it what it sought — a commitment not to trade in military contraband.
Nevertheless, historian Eric Sterner insists: dismissing the League as a frivolous or useless project is an error in hindsight. London's real-time reaction was not to an empty declaration, but to a very real threat to naval balance of power, which led Britain to prefer to engage in yet another war — with Holland — just to prevent the consolidation of opponents. Duke Wellington famously said after Waterloo: "It was the closest thing to a defeat that you have seen in your life." Sterner draws a direct parallel: something similar can be said about the League of Armed Neutrality — Britain was indeed on the verge of a naval disaster, which was prevented more by its own skillful diplomacy in splitting Denmark and Sweden than by the weakness of the Russian initiative itself — this conclusion is made in the same article Journal of the American Revolution.
A mission not written in school textbooks: Francis Dana in St. Petersburg
Much less known is another line of this story — a direct, albeit unsuccessful, attempt by the American Congress to achieve official recognition from Russia. In 1780, the Continental Congress appointed Francis Dana, future judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, as minister plenipotentiary in St. Petersburg — details of this appointment are provided in correspondence published by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
His instructions, signed by Congress President Samuel Huntington, articulated the task very plainly: to convince "Her Imperial Majesty [Catherine the Great] to favor and support the sovereignty and independence" of the new United States and to lay the groundwork for "good mutual understanding and friendly relations" between the subjects of the empress and the citizens of the American states "to the mutual benefit of both nations."
Dana arrived in the Russian capital in 1781 and remained there until 1783, as noted in his biography. The mission, however, ended in disappointment: Catherine II, extremely cautious about matters of monarchical legitimacy and unwilling to irritate London with official recognition of the republic, refused to accept the American envoy in an official capacity. As noted in a review in the New York Times of historian William Cresson's study on this mission, its outcome was "a predetermined and disappointing failure" — but the very fact that Congress deemed it necessary to send a diplomat specifically to Petersburg rather than another European capital shows how seriously Philadelphia assessed the significance of Russia's position.
The historical irony is that official recognition never took place during Dana's lifetime, but the informal significance of Russian neutrality policy turned out to be far weightier than any ceremonial gesture. While European courts were engaged in a complicated game of recognition and non-recognition, the real protection of neutral trade was already operating in the interests of American colonists in practice, rather than on paper.
John Paul Jones — hero of two navies
There is another thread connecting the American Revolution with Russia—the fate of John Paul Jones, the founder of the American Navy. Jones became famous in 1779 by defeating a British convoy off Flamborough Head while commanding a squadron aboard the flagship "Bonhomme Richard"—details of this victory are provided by Naval History and Heritage Command. This was one of the first significant naval victories of the Americans over the Royal Navy.
After the end of the War of Independence, left without a command at home, Jones accepted an invitation from Catherine the Great's court and joined the Imperial Russian Navy, rising to the rank of rear admiral, as noted in his biography. He participated in campaigns in the Black Sea against the Turkish fleet under the Russian flag, as detailed in the article from Saint-Petersburg.com. This is not an episode of assistance from the USA by Russia, but a vivid example of how closely and early the fates of the two nations intertwined through individual people, long before the establishment of official diplomatic relations.
In the next part—The Civil War in the USA from 1861 to 1865 and the visit of Russian fleets to New York and San Francisco in 1863.
1863: Russian fleets in the harbors of New York and San Francisco
By the summer of 1863, the Civil War in the United States had been ongoing for three years, and its outcome was far from predetermined. The slaveholding South was counting on military and diplomatic support from Britain and France — powers whose textile factories depended on Southern cotton, and whose ruling circles openly sympathized with the idea of the division of the young American republic. Russia was closely watching this confrontation: the British Empire remained Petersburg's main geopolitical opponent, and any strengthening of the South by London would also strike at Russian interests — this context is thoroughly examined in the material "Rodnaya Ladoga".
On June 25, 1863, Emperor Alexander II made the decision to send two fleets to the shores of North America, as confirmed by the encyclopedic article “Expedition of the Russian Fleet to the Shores of North America”. The Atlantic fleet was led by Rear Admiral Stepan Stepanovich Lesovsky, and the Pacific fleet was commanded by Rear Admiral Andrey Alexandrovich Popov. According to the historical calendar of events, on September 24, 1863, Lesovsky's fleet anchored off New York, while on September 27, the second fleet under Popov's command anchored off San Francisco. The Russian ships spent not several weeks, but more than half a year in American ports, effectively overwintering there, and were recalled only in the summer of 1864, as detailed in the material “Trinity Variant”.
The appearance of Russian ships amid the war caused, according to historians, a real sensation in the United States. Northerners, whose country was teetering on the brink of military defeat and international isolation, perceived the arrival of the squadron as an unequivocal signal: the federal government in Washington has a powerful friend across the ocean, ready to show the flag just when London and Paris were considering the possibility of recognizing the Confederacy and even direct intervention — this assessment is confirmed by material from Facts.museum. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs still recalls this visit in its official publications, including historical notes, noting that the Lisyansky squadron arrived in New York "to guard the US coast in case of British intervention."
Here it is worth stopping and saying what is often omitted in anniversary and patriotic texts, but what makes this story much more interesting, not poorer. Serious academic historiography — in particular, historian Nikolai Bolkhovitinov in his work "Historians in Search of Truth" — clearly indicates: Russian sources convincingly and unequivocally testify that Lesovsky's squadron was sent to New York not for the direct assistance to the federal authorities of the USA, but because of a real threat of war between Russia and England and France due to the Polish uprising of 1863. A detailed reconstruction of the motives is also provided in his separate monograph "Russian Squadrons in the USA in 1863-1864.", which includes a telling quote from the journal "Harper's Weekly" of that time: the tsar "sent the fleet to our waters so that in case of war British and French trade would not escape so easily as during the Crimean War."
The logic of Petersburg was extremely pragmatic. In the event of a war with Western powers, the Russian fleet, locked in the Baltic and Black Seas, risked being blocked or destroyed by superior forces of the British and French fleets. By placing the squadrons in neutral American ports at that time, Russia simultaneously solved two tasks: it protected the ships from being attacked in European waters and created a threat to British and French commercial shipping in case of war — the squadrons could at any moment go out to the ocean and attack the enemy's trade routes. This double calculation is detailed in the material DVGI DVU RAN.
Does this mean that the gratitude of Americans was a naive mistake and the whole story is a myth? In no way, and here intellectual honesty is important, not a revelatory pathos. The motive and the result are different things. Even if the main goal of Petersburg was to preserve its navy and create leverage over London and Paris, the objective consequence was that at a critical moment for the American North, fleets of a major military power, which publicly demonstrated friendly neutrality toward Lincoln's government, appeared at the shores of a country engulfed in war. The material Kulturologia.ru directly concludes: the visits were beneficial for both Russia and the USA simultaneously — a rare case where calculated realpolitik and historical gratitude turned out to be compatible.
Alexander II and Abraham Lincoln: two liberators of one era
The coincidence of the historical trajectories of the two rulers is striking and deserves special attention. In 1861, just months before the start of the Civil War in the USA, Alexander II signed a manifesto abolishing serfdom in Russia, freeing more than twenty million peasants. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing slaves in the areas affected by rebellion. The two leaders were united not only by their contemporaneous reforms but also by a largely similar fate: both sought to maintain the unity of their country through painful social transformations, and both met violent deaths at the hands of opponents of those transformations.
The sale of Alaska in 1867: the end of a colonial chapter, not the end of friendship
Just three years after the return of the squadrons from New York and San Francisco, Russia took a step that at first glance contradicts the logic of "mutual support," but in fact only confirms the pragmatic, measured nature of the relations between the two powers of that time. On March 18 (30), 1867, a treaty was signed in Washington for the sale of Russian America — Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and the coastal strip of British Columbia — to the United States for 7.2 million dollars in gold, with the signing occurring at 4 a.m., as specified by the Yeltsin Presidential Library. The treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate on April 21 (May 3), and the official transfer of territory took place on October 6 (18), 1867, as noted in the encyclopedic article "Sale of Alaska".
The reasons for this decision were far from sentimentality. Russian America was thousands of kilometers away from the metropolis, sparsely populated, extremely costly to administer, and practically impossible to defend in case of a war with Great Britain, whose Canadian possessions bordered directly on Russian territories.
The deal amount — less than five cents per hectare by today’s standards, as calculated by the publication KPRF, — today seems oddly insignificant. But for our topic, another aspect is more important: the deal became possible precisely because over the previous decades a channel of trust and working relationships had developed between St. Petersburg and Washington — the very ones that were laid down by the declaration of armed neutrality of 1780 and reinforced by the visit of fleets in 1863. The United States, in the eyes of the Russian leadership, was hardly the only major power to which such a sensitive territory could be sold without fearing that it would turn into a military foothold against Russia itself.
In the next part — the 20th century: lend-lease with actual supply numbers, the symbolic meeting at Elbe, the space docking of "Soyuz - Apollo," the Cuban Missile Crisis, the "hotline," and the author's epilogue.
The 20th Century: From Alliance Out of Necessity to the Handshake at Elbe
If the 19th century connected Russia and America through the diplomacy of neutrality and demonstrative gestures of the fleet, the 20th century made them allies in the literal, military sense — twice, in both world wars. It is this layer of history that Vladimir Putin mentioned in his congratulation to Trump, speaking of the "not insignificant number of glorious pages," the alliance in the world wars, and the joint liberation of humanity from the "horrors of Nazism" — on the Kremlin's website. Behind this wording lies a colossal amount of well-documented, but today too often politicized facts.
On January 10, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt submitted a bill to Congress known as the "Defense Aid Act" — the future Lend-Lease law, which was signed on March 11, 1941. On November 7, 1941, just a few months after Germany's attack on the USSR, the law was officially extended to the Soviet Union.
The scale of supplies is often either exaggerated or, conversely, unjustly downplayed — the truth, as it often is, lies in the middle, and it is impressive in its own right. According to incomplete calculations presented in a study by Babel, by the summer of 1945, the Soviet Union had received from its allies 14,795 aircraft, 7,056 tanks, 51,503 jeeps, and 375,883 trucks.
A detailed economic analysis clarifies the structure of this aid: an investigation by "Vedomosti" cites an estimate from the U.S. Department of State at $10.2 billion and an estimate from Rosstat at $13.2 billion, of which the largest share was food — 4.53 million tons, metals — 3.64 million tons, trucks and cars — 2.34 million tons, oil products — 2.14 million tons. An encyclopedic article on lend-lease specifies: the share of delivered aircraft constituted 14.6% of the total number received and produced by the USSR during the war, while the share of armored vehicles was 17.6%. Additionally, from the United Kingdom and Canada, according to a report from "My Homeland is Magadan", another 7,400 aircraft, 4,292 tanks, and 5,000 anti-tank guns were received.
Historians rightly debate how crucial this contribution was to the overall victory. A study from "Immortal Barrack" presents calculations by Professor M. N. Suprun, according to which the food supplied under lend-lease alone would have been enough to feed a ten-million army for 1,688 days. But the fact remains: the last ship with military cargo under the lend-lease program departed for the Soviet port after Japan's capitulation, meaning that aid was provided until the very end of the war.
There are moments in history that are important not so much for their texture, but for their symbolism — and the meeting on the Elbe is such a moment. On April 25, 1945, in the area of the town of Torgau, the Soviet 6th Rifle Company commanded by Lieutenant Grigory Goloborodko met with a reconnaissance group of the 69th Infantry Division of the 1st American Army. The meeting took place at 1:30 PM Moscow time, as specified by the Russian Historical Society, and has entered history as the pinnacle of allied relations of the anti-Hitler coalition.
By this time, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front under Marshal Ivan Konev had met with the forces of the American 1st Army under General Courtney Hodges, cutting the remnants of the German-Fascist front into northern and southern parts — these details are elaborated in the encyclopedic article “Meeting on the Elbe”. The British Broadcasting Corporation, in an article titled “The Meeting on the Elbe: the Apex and End of the Alliance”, calls this episode the symbolic high point of ally relations. The handshake between the Soviet and American soldiers on the war-torn bridge became not just a military episode, but that rare frame of the 20th century which is equally honored in both Russian and American historical memory — a rarity for an era so generous with dividing rather than uniting symbols.
Thirty years later, amid the Cold War and détente, the two powers repeated a symbolic gesture — this time not on Earth, but in space. On July 15, 1975, at 3:20 PM Moscow time, the Soviet ship “Soyuz-19” launched from Baikonur with commander Alexei Leonov and flight engineer Valery Kubasov, while the American “Apollo” with crew members Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Donald Slayton launched from Cape Canaveral — the flight chronology is detailed in the material of the Gagarin Museum “Mission 'Soyuz-Apollo'”.
On July 17, 1975, at 7:09 PM Moscow time, for the first time in the history of manned spaceflight, the ships of the two powers docked in orbit, forming a single complex, as clarified in the encyclopedic article “Union – Apollo”, and the total flight time in the docked state was 46 hours 36 minutes. The EPAS program received the informal name “handshake in space” — this formulation and the recognition from Stafford himself, who called the expedition a turning point in the relations of the two powers, is cited by the publication Russian Mind. The project became a technical and political prologue to all future international cooperation in space, including the "Mir – Shuttle" program and the International Space Station, where Russians and Americans work side by side to this day.
Cold War: how two nuclear powers decided to talk instead of being silent
Almost two centuries after Catherine and nearly a century after Alexander II, the relations between Russia and America underwent the most dangerous test in human history — the Caribbean crisis of October 1962, when the world, by unanimous assessments of historians, was closer than ever to full-scale nuclear war. The cause was the placement of American missiles in Turkey and Italy in 1961 and the reciprocal placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from October 16 to October 28, 1962, and ended with the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for the lifting of the naval blockade of the island and the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey.
But what is truly interesting is not the resolution itself, but what happened afterward. The shock from the narrowly avoided catastrophe was so strong that it prompted Washington and Moscow — despite their enmity, or rather, because of it — to consider the necessity of a direct communication channel between the leaders of the two powers. Just ten months after the crisis, on August 30, 1963, the famous "hotline" was activated between the White House and the Kremlin — a direct emergency communication channel. An interesting detail: although the formal proposal to create the line came from Washington, the memoranda of the American State Department directly acknowledged the efforts of the Soviet Union to establish such a communication mechanism. Contrary to the popular myth of the "red phone," the line was never a telephone — it was initially a teletype, and today it is a secure computer system with text chat and email, which continues to function to this day, more than sixty years after its establishment.
The next milestone of trust was the summit in Reykjavik on October 11–12, 1986 — the second face-to-face meeting of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. Formally, the negotiations ended without the signing of any documents and were perceived by contemporaries as a failure. But this "failure" turned into a historic breakthrough: the summit marked a watershed between the Cold War and the subsequent thirty-year period of unprecedented détente, and the ideas proposed in Reykjavik formed the basis of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by Gorbachev and Reagan on December 8, 1987. Gorbachev himself later recalled that the symbolic conclusion of this era was his resignation on December 25, 1991, by which time the Cold War had formally ended, and 80% of nuclear warheads in the world were destroyed in the ensuing years.
Epilogue: a letter from 2026 as a continuation of a conversation that began 250 years ago
Returning to the starting point of this article: the congratulatory message sent by Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump on July 4, 2026, can easily be read as routine diplomatic protocol. However, when read against the backdrop of everything outlined above — the Declaration of Armed Neutrality of 1780, the unsuccessful yet telling mission of Francis Dana, John Paul Jones’s service under the Russian flag, the squadrons of Lessovsky and Popov off the shores of war-torn America in 1863, the parallel fates of Alexander II and Lincoln, the sale of Alaska as an act of pragmatic trust, millions of tons of cargo under lend-lease, the handshake at Elbe, the docking in orbit in 1975, and the "hotline" born from the horrors of the Cuban crisis — it becomes clear that the phrase about a "fair number of glorious pages" is not a rhetorical exaggeration but a concise historical truth.
This story is not simply about the narrative of "Russia has always helped America" or vice versa — as diligent historiography shows, behind each of these episodes were specific, often purely pragmatic interests of both sides, whether it was the protection of neutral trade, the desire to preserve the fleet from destruction, or the wish to get rid of a hard-to-defend colony. That is why this story deserves much more trust than any mythologized version of friendship between nations: it is built not on sentimentality, but on the fact that the real, balanced interests of the two major powers have coincided more often than not over the course of two and a half centuries — and it is precisely when they coincided that moments of genuine historical significance were born.
Today, when relations between Moscow and Washington are experiencing one of the tensest periods in recent decades, it is worth remembering: the peoples of the two countries did not choose to be adversaries of each other in 1780, or 1863, or 1945, or even during the height of the Cuban crisis. The history laid out here as thoroughly as possible within the confines of a single article is not a nostalgia for a lost golden age that never existed in pure form, but a reminder that mutual respect for interests, rather than the subordination of one side to the other, has always proven to be the most solid foundation for cooperation between Russia and the United States. If this text, which began with a brief congratulation on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of American independence, helps even a portion of readers — Russian, American, or any others — see a much longer and far more complex history of the two nations beyond today's headlines, the task I set for myself will be accomplished.
© Lesnoy, July 4, 2026.
translation © lesnoy
https://lifearmy.org/articles/two-powers-one-freedom
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