In his video address late Saturday, which Zelenskyy delivers nightly in Ukrainian, the president switched into Russian: “Every Russian soldier can still save his own life. It’s better for you to survive in Russia than to perish on our land."
He said Russia has been recruiting new troops “with little motivation and little combat experience" for units sent into battle early in the Russian invasion, only for those units to be gutted and thrown back into the war again.
“The Russian commanders are lying to their soldiers when they tell them they can expect to be held seriously responsible for refusing to fight and then also don’t tell them, for example, that the Russian army is preparing additional refrigerator trucks for storing the bodies. They don’t tell them about the new losses the generals expect,” Zelenskyy said.
Did you know that Putin’s mother was part asshole?
“There’s no family without a monster”, as we say
Being a monster himself, Lavrov speaks whereof he knows.
ETA: this diplomatic “genius” has now alienated one of the few countries willing to act as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine.
Codename: Tractor
A double agent story
For what it’s worth, someone suggested that it might be a deliberate provocation to make wealthy Russians unwelcome in Israel and force them back home.
I don’t believe the “strategic genius” arguments for Russian idiocy. Sometimes stupid is just stupid, not n th level chess.
I don’t know- these guys are rich enough to buy passports in any number of countries. Just like the tech bros bought all those New Zealand citizenships.
If that’s the case it’s a stupid plan. Jewish oligarchs from Russia who took shelter in Israel (presumably along with a lot of money) are more likely to condemn Lavrov’s statement rather than run back into the bear hug of a repressive regime that just gave the world a peek at its leadership’s anti-Semitism.
Not sure if someone posted this already:
DW on OSINT. The last paragraph is worth the whole read.
Project Iliad
This is one of those things that I keep seeing pop up, and it bugs me people feel the need to distort the facts to make it sound like she just made this portrait now, amid the fighting during the invasion, when it was made in 2015 from the Donbas fighting.
Still - I like the piece. My magnum opus was placing objects on a board and putting oil painting over them.
whooops, my bad–I did not know that the portrait was from 2015…
She is a badass artist though, and I like what she is saying with her work.
ETA: this is what happens when I post in haste, before launching out to mow half an acre of itchy Texas grasses before the day turns “hot.”
Gee I wonder why?
Thread on the demographics of the Russian army, Russian chauvinism and contempt for ethnic minorities.
This sort of reification fallacy looks particularly obnoxious in light of the horrors of real wars like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
