The negotiator continues to negotiate. /END

He also met with Brig, Gen. Dmytro Usov, the deputy head of Ukrainian military intelligence on all POW swaps.
Zorin was in Turkey as part of the Russian delegation, led by Vladimir Medinsky, during the short-lived direct talks between Russia and Ukraine earlier this year.

For all that, Zorin is highly respected not only in Russia but also in Ukraine, according the Wall Street Journal. The Kharkiv-born general ran point on the evacuation of the Azovstal defenders in 2022.

This makes Zorin's biopic unique in another way, an exercise in moviemaking magic, filtered through the counterfactual lens of totalitarian dictatorship. John Ford meets Hannah Arendt.

The historical record won't matter the Russian filmmakers of "Porcelain Soldier" or to a Russian audience looking for a bit of action-packed escapism in the desert.

Russia's campaign in Syria ended in defeat and ignominy, its military footprint greatly reduced and the enemies of it client now installed in power. Ahmed al-Sharaa was Putin's guest in the Kremlin the other week. And so on.

Zorin grapples with none of this -- likely because he doesn't have to. He wrote his memoir before the fall of Assad, an event which retrospectively undermines the grandeur of his exploits. It was all for nothing.

We know this because after the fall of the regime, they recanted their false testimonies and explained their coercion. See this United24 story: united24media.com/anti-fake/ho...

Others eyewitnesses from Douma whom Russia brought to the OPCW headquarters to testify that nothing happened in Douma were coerced by Syrian and Russian intelligence, flown from Damascus first to Moscow, then on to The Hague.

Zorin never so much as alludes to the White Helmets in his memoir, which is odd given the focus his government put on discrediting the rescue workers as the root of all evil in Syria, particularly with respect to chemical weapons use.

But the doctor never spoke about rebel chlorine stocks at Russia's cynically choreographed "press conference." Why? Because Moscow decided to run with a different disinformation narrative, namely that no attack ever occurred in Douma, and the whole thing was "staged" by rebels and the White Helmets.

The real doctor, meanwhile, *did* turn up at OPCW headquarters in The Hague after the real Douma chlorine attack. (We used facial recognition software to compare the doctor in one of Zorin's selfies with a Syrian medic who was interviewed in the Netherlands on Russian state TV.)

The problem?

A chlorine attack was perpetrated in Douma in 2018 -- by the regime. Zorin at the time denied it ever took place, but nowhere in his memoir does he address this historical event, if only to try to complicate or debunk it.

The aim is to have the doctor testify at OPCW headquarter in The Hague about these perfidious rebel schemes, laying bare the West's duplicity in blaming the Assad regime for a host of chemical atrocities.