By Phil Butler
When I set out to write the book “Putin’s Praetorians”, I told family and friends I would use part of any financial win to help helpless kids around the world. With Christmas Day here I am happy to report a few successes for the book. I am especially happy the Amazon bestseller made its first $100 dollars over and above all costs. Now to honor my pledge, this first win has been donated to help a young boy named Timothy Kapustkin in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
First, before I introduce the reader to Timothy, I’d also like to create further support for Timothy by pledging all the win from the sale of “Putin’s Praetorians” on Kindle until January 10th, 2018, to the fund established for his treatment. Please see more details below, but now it’s time to tell you the story of Timothy, and of RT Editor in Chief, Margarita Simonyan’s charity.rt.com project efforts (use Yandex or Google to translate).
Timothy Kapustkin is a brave young lad who’s in almost constant agony. The 14-year-old boy has suffered from the effect of a disease known as Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome (KTWS), a horrible congenital affliction that presents itself in the form of malformed blood vessels and/or lymph nodes that fail to form properly. Readers can read Timothy’s story at “Help A Child.Ru”, the organization organizing life-changing treatments for Tim and kids like him. In his case, a fund to raise 743,820 Rubles, or about 11,000 euros for another in a series of operations on Timothy’s malformed hand, this time by specialists in Germany. The images of the poor child’s hand from the Child.ru site are horrendous, and I do not share the closeup ones here out of respect for Timothy’s shyness about his hand. Seeing this wonderful child, and thinking how my own son Paul-Jules has been blessed with relatively good health, donating to help Tim is a “have to” thing for me.
As for my discovery of Timothy’s situation, I feel compelled to tell the story of another young boy named Tigran Eksuzyan, and how my friend, RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan tried to help him. Last year an unpublicized please by Margarita let me to the story of young Tigran and his battle with spina bifida. I wrote a few stories about Tigran, and contributed what I could to help fund his treatments. However, not many people realize the selfless efforts Simonyan makes on behalf of little kids in Russia, but Tigran’s case led to RT creating the charities which I mentioned above, which led me to find the plea for help for Timothy. Simonyan shies away from receiving mentions or accolades for such efforts, but I mention this hear so that people will know that contributions for Timothy won’t go to crowdfund some less meaningful purpose.
Finally, I implore you to help young Timothy using your own discretion and means. Obviously, buying the Kindle version of “Putin’s Praetorians” helps our sales numbers, but in all honesty, I had as soon readers contribute directly to Timothy’s cause via the fund page here. The organization has made it super easy to fund the operation via; PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Sherbank, Webmoney, SMS, Yandex Money, and so on. Please, please help raise the remaining 301,000 rubles (€4350 euro) by the January 10 deadline.
For those readers who purchase the Kindle Ebook on behalf of Timothy, I’ll gladly supply the Amazon royalty report upon their request to philbutler@yandex.com. Merry Christmas and God Bless you all.