So apparently don is a filler word in Russian
… like “um” or “er” or maybe “like” in English 
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It’s a filler word in Chechen.
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When I read the headlines of this, I thought it was the battleship!
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Is that how war is supposed to go?
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The order also directed that each army must create “blocking detachments” at the rear that would shoot “panic-mongers and cowards”.[2] In the first three months, blocking detachments shot 1,000 penal troops and sent 24,000 to penal battalions. By October 1942, the idea of regular blocking detachments was quietly dropped.[5]
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Today I learned something valuable about malapropisms in the Russian language. (Also Freudian slips.)
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Everyone should read the adventures of ol’ Sgt Sveijk.
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Ksenia Sobchak now runs the “Ostorozhno Novosti” project, which includes a network of Telegram news channels, a podcast studio, a YouTube channel and Sobchak’s own social media page. She has long straddled a fence between Russia’s political elite and its liberal political opposition, creating some distrust of her from both camps. In 2018, she ran for president against Putin, winning about 2 percent of votes.
Sobchak’s current legal troubles seemed to reflect tension within the well-connected elite as well as the climate of heightened anxiety amid Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. It also highlighted the urgency many well-to-do Russians feel about obtaining dual citizenship and a second passport.
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One can only play that game for so long under a regime like Putin’s, especially with a famous name. That game is over for her, although she was fortunate enough to have at least one fascist pal who tipped her off before the Chekists arrived at her door
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In WW2 the use of penal battalions could work because the enemy were literal actual Nazis, with all that entailed:
So for soldiers facing the three-way choice between deserting, surrendering and fighting, the latter option became arguably the least dangerous of the lot. These days, Russian soldiers can surrender to an enemy who respects the Geneva conventions and will possibly give them better treatment than they ever got in their own military bases.
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She is also Volodya’s goddaughter.
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In fact, Ukrainian policy is to do everything to make surrender attractive, to encourage surrender. Right at the beginning of the war, commanders were told to discourage venting their anger on captives, because the treatment of POWs is a well known factor in getting troops to surrender: if you think becoming a POW is a terrible fate, of course you’re going to keep fighting.
One of the crimes of the GWB/Cheney/Rumsfeld era was tossing the old Army interrogation handbook for “enhanced questioning”, when the older guide made it clear that the best way to get good intel from captured soldiers was simply to be nice to them, and out of gratefulness they would often blurt out positions, morale, and other info.
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