Dima shares his memes with the kids Former President Medvedev delivers ‘educational lecture’ featuring quotes from his blog about ‘deranged Nazi junkies’ and ‘cockroaches breeding in a jar’

Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency was a single, short-lived term. After stepping aside for Vladimir Putin’s return, Medvedev served almost eight years as prime minister. Currently, he has a seat on Russia’s Security Council as its deputy chairman, but he largely owes his remaining publicity to an outlandish, foul-mouthed presence on social media, where he excoriates Moscow’s enemies with a fervor once monopolized by the late firebrand nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. This week, Medvedev showcased some of his inflammatory rhetoric in an educational lecture titled “Our Dangerous World: Who Is to Blame and What Should Be Done?” 

The Znanie Society hosted Dmitry Medvedev’s speech as part of a presentation series organized to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the USSR’s defeat of Nazi Germany. According to the organization’s website, Medvedev explained to an audience of mostly young people how the Second World War changed the world and shaped the future, particularly post-Soviet Russia’s relations with Europe and the United States. 

The former president also showed a slideshow of insults he’s used on Telegram against Russia’s adversaries — all while children were in the audience. In a parade of invective, the big screen behind Medvedev projected phrases like “Atlantic impotents” (his term for NATO leaders) and “raped by the lords of darkness” (from a Telegram post about Russia’s Unity Day cause).

The list of insults displayed during the lecture is long and colorful and also includes:

• “Rabble” (how Medvedev has described Poles, Bulgarians, and the Baltic peoples)
• “The rotten world order,” “the dying world,” “a big pack of barking dogs from the West’s pound,” “a bunch of deranged Nazi junkies,” “a pack of grunting piglets,” “sneering henchmen,” and “bloodthirsty zealots”
• “Bestial freaks” (referring to countries receiving NATO-supplied weapons)
• “Cockroaches breeding in a jar” and “trained insects” (from a post about Ukraine’s demand to return Crimea)
• “A disgracefully aging Europe” (regarding economic disagreements between Europe and the U.S.)

During his lecture, Medvedev paused on a slide showing the derogatory language from his blog and argued that “it is representatives of the West who are to blame for the fact that the ideals of the postwar world order — a just, safe, and balanced world — remained only dreams.” He explained that the opportunity to ensure Europe’s security was “squandered” and spoke about the appearance of terms like “Cold War” and “Iron Curtain” in the “political lexicon.”

Medvedev’s speech also featured an image depicting U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as Muppets. The photo mocked a meeting at the Vatican, where the two leaders spoke directly before attending the funeral of Pope Francis on April 26.

Later in the speech, when Medvedev urged the “destruction of the Kyiv neo-Nazi regime,” the slide show presented a collage of famous Ukrainians: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (depicted as Napoleon from the 2012 film Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon), labeled “president”; Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, labeled “philologist”; boxer Oleksandr Usyk, labeled “philosopher”; Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, labeled “military commander”; performer Andriy Danylko in his Verka Serduchka stage persona, labeled “singer”; and former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and current ambassador to the U.K. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, labeled “diplomat.”

When Medvedev declared Russia’s need for victory in the invasion of Ukraine, a slide appeared with the slogan “Death to vermin” and calls to “exterminate the parasites.”