Perhaps Swedes are not a minority because their loyalties are not questioned and they aren’t regarded as a potential threat.
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But while Mariupol flourished, rebel-held Donetsk mouldered. When the rebels returned to Mariupol, Volodymyr, the paramedic, believed they were driven by revenge to destroy the city.
“‘If we live in shit, then you will live in shit as well,’” Volodymyr says they told him at a checkpoint as he finally escaped the city. “They just looked at us and envied how we lived.”
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If you have ever read Defying Hitler, the author tells how everyday Germans were shocked by how they lost the war due to media (newspapers) up until the end telling them how close they were to finally winning it. I suspect Russians will go through the same phase of shock, after being spoon fed stories all along of how victorious their brave boys have been against the fascists in the West.
I also suspect the new scapegoat will be the LGBTQ+ minorities, as sexual deviants whose decadence was sapping Russian virility like it has sapped the Americans, yadda yadda.
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You remind me of an old trick, and one that does work every now and then, where intelligence agencies hostile to an authoritarian leader will pinpoint a relatively competent member of the leader’s government, and start rumors that he is working with them, or planning a coup, and so on. It accelerates the way such leaders drive out or kill anyone with competence in their government.
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I think that’s pretty much what is being done here, and it might be very effective considering that Putin already seems to be paranoid. They are not pinpointing a particular member, but that might sow even more doubt.
I also think that previous reports about Ukrainian intelligence having sources in Kremlin had exactly same purpose.
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The caveat here is that Putin has ample knowledge of these tactics, both academic from his time in the KGB and practical in stirring up shit with his neighbors. On the other hand, often the con men are themselves the fattest marks. One gets so used to using the tools that one is blind to being on the receiving end.
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That’s what people say about Trump.
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Until “reliable sources” in US intelligence gave the game away by admitting it was them.
Or did they?
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Only slightly off topic, but there is a similarity of the corruption in both Trump’s businesses and in Putin’s expenditures. Scammers and skimmers are attracted to both, which is why for all the cheating Trump has done, he himself is often cheated and his vaunted profits are often eaten up by (ahem) expenses). With Putin, we see how his budget to modernize the army was eaten up by grifters at every level.
His intelligence expenditures were even worse, money for bribes are easily pocketed since there are no receipts. Apparently only one mayor that was supposed to habe been bought off was actually paid the bribe, and even then I bet it was only a fraction of what Moscow budgeted, the rest going into offshore accounts belonging to wives and aunts and uncles of all the accountants along the way.
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AFAIK no serving mayors have defected, so any mayor that actually got bribed simply pocketed the money and did nothing in return.
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As I’ve written upstream, the Russians and Trump are rank amateurs when it comes to graft. Simple stealing and skimming are what you do when you don’t have the infrastructure or the know-how to do it right.
- RAH-66 Comanche Stealth-Chopper: $7.9 billion in development to defense contractors for a weapons system that in the end never worked. Cancelled in 2004.
- XM2001 Crusader self-propelled artillery piece. It’s a fucking gun. $2.2 billion, and it never worked. Cancelled in 2002.
- When the Crusader wasn’t going to work, the Army started in on the Future Combat System in its place. $18.1 billion later, in 2009, the program was cancelled.
- Then there’s the F-35, nearing a trillion dollars in wasted spending for a plane that doesn’t work right, seems to be hazardous’ to pilots’ health, and can’t be produced or maintained very easily…
- Bush II’s orbital radar system. Billions gone with nothing produced.
- The Air Force’s 2000s Airborne Laser project: Billions gone, nothing produced.
What the Russian’s are doing badly isn’t the graft, it’s that the graft is so obvious.
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“For the third time in a month, Russian authorities have denied an embassy visit to detained U.S. citizen Brittney Griner,” said Sullivan in a statement the U.S. Embassy in Moscow posted to its Twitter account. “This is unacceptable. We call on @mfa_russia (Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry) to provide timely consular access, in line with Russia’s international and bilateral obligations.”
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State Department spokesperson Ned Price on Tuesday told reporters during his daily press briefing that a consular official “was able to speak with” Griner “on the margins of her court proceedings” on May 13.
“That consular official came away with the impression that Brittney Griner is doing as well as might be expected under conditions that can only be described as exceedingly difficult,” said Price.
“But sporadic contact is not satisfactory,” he added. “It also may not be consistent with the Vienna Convention, to which Russia has subscribed. That is why we continue to urge the Russian government to allow consistent, timely consular access to all U.S. citizens detained in Russia, in line with those very legal obligations, and to allow us to provide consular services for U.S. citizens detained in Russia.
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I recall the mayor of Kherson was accused of folding way too easily, and that several people were saying he was bribed. But with war being what it is, it’s hard to know what is true and what was mere speculation.
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The mayor of Irpin received an offer of a bribe, which he refused.
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Thankfully, the initial reports seem to exaggerate the damage.
From a tweet by Lise Lykke Steffensen, the head of NordGen and someone in contact with her Ukrainian counterparts:
Fortunately, the main collections have been preserved so far. Unfortunately, some working collections that were at an experimental base perished. Nevertheless, the situation for the main collections of the national ukraine genebank system is at high risk.
So yeah, it’s bad, but luckily nowhere near as bad as it seemed at first.
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For a video ostensibly about airstrikes on American howitzers, there is remarkably little video of howitzers actually being hit.
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