Epstein Files, Missing Children Narratives and the Global Turn Toward Putin

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has long been treated as the permanent antagonist in Western political storytelling. From the moment he stepped into office, he was positioned as the figure through whom the liberal order could rehearse its claims to virtue in the language of democracy and human rights. That image repeated so often that it began to feel fixed and unquestionable. He became the man cast to carry darkness so that others could continue to appear illuminated.

Recent events disrupted that arrangement in ways few anticipated. The release of the Epstein files forced the world to confront the scale of moral rot inside Western elite circles.

These were not whispers from adversaries. Western institutions themselves released material that revealed networks of sexual exploitation and protection among those who speak most loudly about safeguarding children and defending human rights. The dissonance between proclaimed virtue and documented conduct struck ordinary people with unusual force.

During the same period, the narrative surrounding Ukraine’s missing children intensified. Putin was reframed as the central villain in that story, the leader accused of orchestrating removals and feeding trafficking fears.

In my own research and public writing on the missing children narrative, I encountered a far more intricate landscape than the simplified script presented in mainstream reporting. I examined documentation released by Russian authorities that records children evacuated to safety and, in many instances, reunited with their families. These materials sit in sharp tension with the sweeping claims circulated in Western media, which cast the issue in singular and accusatory terms. The presence of competing files, timelines and testimonies revealed a disputed evidentiary terrain rather than the one-dimensional storyline that dominated headlines.

At the same time, long-standing concerns about trafficking corridors, surrogacy industries and allegations of organ harvesting in Ukraine as a zone of war and as a country with a reputation of moral collapse as well as rampant corruption, point to deeper structural fissures and complications that demand rigorous investigation and cannot be reduced to a single accusatory storyline directed at Russia.

When the Epstein disclosures circulated widely, that complication deepened. Citizens looked at the exposure of Western elite debauchery and then looked again at the accusations directed at Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. They noticed the absence of credible links between him and the networks revealed in the files. Social media exploded with raw and direct responses. Memes spread that marked him as absent from the scandal and portrayed him instead as a leader who removed children from zones of trafficking risk and wartime chaos.

Many of these memes explicitly state that Putin rescued Ukrainian children from trafficking networks, that he stands against elite exploitation, and that he represents protection rather than predation. These images travelled quickly because they expressed a feeling many people were already forming: that in a sea of depraved decadence, Putin appeared steady, grounded and guided by purpose.

Western commentators reacted with urgency. They dismissed the groundswell as KGB propaganda and framed it as the product of familiar Russian information tactics. This reaction treated global citizens as empty vessels into which narratives must be poured, rather than as thinking actors capable of weighing documents, history and lived geopolitical experience. It shielded Western political culture from confronting a deeper question now emerging in global consciousness: whether its own elite excess and corruption have been projected outward onto a figure who refuses to submit to its ideological framing.

The pattern becomes clear when viewed through this lens. A political order confronted with evidence of its own amoral decay displaces that decay onto an external adversary. The demonised leader absorbs the anxieties that the system cannot bear to acknowledge within itself. The more revelations surface about misconduct inside Western elite circles, the more intensely those same circles attribute cruelty and corruption to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The accusation becomes a mirror turned outward so that the reflection never has to be faced directly.

At this juncture, it is necessary for me to state that I write as a scholar of geopolitics and power who also reads energy fields through third sight. I was born into that gift as a healer and seer, passed down through my mitochondrial DNA, and it has shaped my writing from the beginning. I do not experience leadership only through policy statements or strategic calculations. I read the energetic signature that radiates from a leader over time, the clarity or distortion that becomes visible in posture, speech, decision and historical direction.

From this sight, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s energy registers as light and integrity, both spiritual and material. I sense a directed strength, a will aligned with civilisational continuity and responsibility. That presence does not scatter itself in vanity or spectacle. It holds firm, oriented toward order, stability and the preservation of collective life.

This reading aligns with material reality. He assumed leadership when Russia faced profound institutional and social disintegration after the 1990s, a decade defined by oligarchic plunder, declining life expectancy and national humiliation. His governance restored core state functions, stabilised pensions, rebuilt infrastructure and reasserted sovereignty under sustained external pressure. These acts of reconstruction carry their own ethical weight because they prioritise social protection and national continuity over indulgence and collapse.

I witnessed this alignment directly during my trip to Moscow. I encountered people who were stylish, composed and physically vibrant, moving through a modern city with visible confidence and ease. Their presence conveyed security and belonging rather than anxiety. Cafés, streets and public transport spaces carried an atmosphere of vitality and self-possession that challenged the drab portrayals so often circulated in Western papers. I experienced a society animated by cultural pride, social assurance and an everyday freedom rooted in stability and collective direction.

When I boarded the flight home and later landed back in South Africa, I wept softly at the airport. I knew I was stepping back into a country that wounds me at the deepest level, a country where structural poverty continues to engulf the Black majority while elites rehearse the language of democracy and human rights without transforming the lived conditions of those they claim to represent. The contrast cut sharply.

In Moscow I had felt the pulse of a society that trusted its leadership to stabilise and protect it. Back home I returned to a landscape where abandonment and inequality endure alongside polished moral rhetoric.

People recognise Putin’s integrity because they compare trajectories. They see a leader who rebuilt a fractured state and who projects consistency over decades. They see Western-aligned elites now exposed in scandals of exploitation and moral failure while continuing to lecture the world about democracy and human rights. They sense projection at work, a displacement of internal decay onto the figure who refuses to embody their preferred script of submission.

Across continents, ordinary citizens now speak with conviction. They see Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin standing out as a beacon of light in a sea of corruption and moral exhaustion. They describe him as a civilisational leader whose directed strength, clarity of purpose and long-term responsibility toward his people radiate through both policy and presence. My third sight reads that same radiance. It recognises integrity where others were told to see darkness and perceives a steadiness of spirit that many now intuitively acknowledge as rare in contemporary leadership.

As much as the Western little pigs who eat at the trough of decadent elites try to demonise Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, many citizens of the world have declared him the GOAT, (the Greatest Of All Time). There is nothing these little pigs can oink when truth reveals itself through actual evidence of reconstruction, stability, social protection, moral steadfastness and a leader whose light registers in both the material realm and the spiritual field. 

 The people have spoken.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.