A more blatant one, that doesn’t even pretend there’s some democracy, maybe?
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The best-case scenario for post-Putin Russia (which also sucks) is a coup/junta by the military faction. That only comes to pass if the brigadiers and colonels get up the courage to eliminate Shoigu and the other arse-lickers on the general staff playing Putin’s game of “let’s you and him fight” with the other factions.
If that happens Prigozhin and Kadyrov are as screwed as the oligarchs and Putin’s other toadies. The real question is where the siloviki will stand after Putin is gone.
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Another day, another story about corruption in the Russian armed forces.
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Thread which Threadreaperapp won’t process:
https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1655630066577989645
tl;dr Russia doesn’t have enough troops to defend against the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
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It really is startling that they’re scaling back Victory Day events this year. Where WWII is fading from living memory in other countries, in Russia it’s always very much with people of all ages – not only in museums and monuments and history classes but in everyday discourse.
As much as it re-opens the door for fascism when people forget the lessons of history (as we see in the West), it’s just as bad when the period is remembered but the lessons are twisted.
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Where are the rest of their tanks? Oh that’s right, in the possession of the Ukrainian Army
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Prigozhin would like a word.
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Military parades on May 9 were always only tangentially about World War 2. The only parade that was truly about the war was held on June 24, 1945. Afterwards, USSR held only three military parades on May 9: in 1965, when it was about showing off the new ICBMs at the height of the Cold War; in 1985, during the war in Afghanistan; and in 1990, as a desperate show of strength when the empire had already begun to crumble (Lithuania and Latvia had already declared independence by that date). Yeltsin revived the practice in 1995, during the First Chechen War, and Russia continued to hold the parades annually ever since.
The farther we got from 1945, the more extravagant the parades became, and the more twisted their message. By now, the takeaway from WW2 has basically been reduced to “our big strong army fought the bad Nazis all the way to Berlin, and we can do it again.” Russians as a people may have learned some good lessons from the war, but the Russian state has worked hard to forget them.
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The Belarusian media have pointed out that, at the end of the parade, Lukashenko declined to walk to the Unknown Soldier monument together with Vladimir Putin and other visiting heads of state. Instead, Lukashenko was driven to the memorial in an electric cart, although the distance he would have needed to walk was only about 300 meters (1,000 feet).
For the photos:
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