From a Munich startup, for example, via proxy of some wealthy Ukrainian buyer.
I suggest you take this to your translation machine:
Just FTR, this is bullshit:
However, two features reveal its military orientation: the drone transmits its videos in encrypted form and it can switch to an extremely low-noise gliding flight.
Unencrypted video is not at all advisable even for the simplest of tasks, and a low-noise flight is extremely advisable, e.g., in regard to nature protection laws in the EU (especially Germany, where the company is situated).
They’re not random guerilla fighters. Ukraine still has an active, trained military in the field. They had a drone corps and trained drone operators before all this, they have quite a bit of artillery and professional artillery units.
Part of what those drones are doing is coordinating between artillery and Ukrainian Special Forces. Special Forces groups that got training with NATO advisors between Crimea and the full invasion.
That’s fairly important to outline. Ukraine’s government is still active and functional, they have an intelligence system that’s still operating and can coordinate with it’s allies.
It’s worth stressing. This hasn’t descended to “asymmetric warfare” or insurgency. People expected it to because of that Russia’s unstoppable tanks assumption.
I don’t think the Biden administration is interested in obvious and easily disprovable lies like Putin. We just had the Defense Secretary meeting publicly with the Ukrainians, so what’s there to be sneaky about now. Probably Putin already knew anyway.
There may also be valid tactical reasons for this openness. It sure seems like US intelligence services know a lot more about what’s going on inside the Kremlin than we hear about.
We’ve also had NATO AWACs and intelligence drones openly flying along the Ukrainian border, and lingering near key areas since the start.
So it’s not exactly deniable. Off the record confirming what was already assumed, and what the Russians probably already know is probably messaging.
This comes out at the same time we’re confirming we’ve been providing NATO standard artillery for a while, and announcements about tanks and heavy weapons being supplied.
A couple of recent articles from independent Russian sociologists have explored the beliefs of war supporters in Russia. Neither claims to be a scientifically representative study, but they flesh out the portraits of the supporters instead of just quantifying them. The first one, from the Public Sociology Laboratory, is available in English:
An important takeaway is that only some of the supporters make full use of the propaganda directed towards this war (that Ukrainians are Nazis, that Russians never harm civilians, etc.). Instead, a lot of them are guided by larger, long-term narratives (Russian imperial vision - “Russian world”, or the idea that Russia was preemptively responding to an impending NATO attack), so in their eyes the war is worthwhile even if Ukrainians aren’t all evil and Russians aren’t all angels. And then there are those who are resigned to fatalism: even though they feel bad about the war, they don’t think anything better is possible.
The second article, by journalist Shura Burtin assisted by sociologists and psychologists, does not (yet?) have a proper English translation. You can try the machine translation, though it gets very muddled in places:
The main idea here is that probably most supporters actually know or suspect uncomfortable truths about the war, but they use ideas from state propaganda as a defense mechanism. People are beset by negative emotions - guilt, uncertainty, fear - so they turn to the comforting lies and the mirage of unified support for the President to avoid dealing with it. “Propaganda formulas work because people can use them for their own needs. People are victims of propaganda, but at the same time - its customers.”
The article presents a few examples of people who don’t believe what their relatives in Ukraine tell them about the war. Generally, they think that people in Ukraine are forced to lie so as not to appear “pro-Russian”, although when the author pushes them about what gave them the idea, it turns out that the Ukrainians were just talking a lot of “negativity”, i.e. uncomfortable truths. Here’s an exchange with a woman who is so close to self-awareness:
All in all, this paints a pretty grim picture of Russia - a society that badly needs some psychotherapy but instead self-medicates with fascist propaganda.
There are people in rural California who trace their ancestry back to Europe the long way—some of them might even applaud Putin showing up to save them from Gavin Newsom
That is a different thing. Because that is something that was not previously reported, and that Russia has repeatedly threatened will be treated as a red line.
It’s the difference between saying NATO is behind Ukraine. And confirming Putin’s accusation that NATO is behind Ukraine.
Johnson is a fucking idiot and can’t tell the difference.
