“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…” nor Russian drones nor shelling…
I think the kids call that a ‘flex’. 
…and Merry 
, fellow mutants.
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Ukrainian authorities previously sentenced Krasovsky in absentia to five years in prison for supporting the Russian invasion and calling for the genocide of Ukrainians.
The host called for Ukrainian children who hate Russia to be “drowned and burned” in October 2022. He also added that Ukraine “should not exist at all.”
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Oh no!
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The symptoms they describe correspond to leptospirosis, or “rat-bite fever”, including a 40C temperature, severe headache, rashes, bleeding in the eyes, kidney failure, nausea and vomiting. The disease is caused by exposure to the urine of infected animals.
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There’s a new report from an ongoing study of Russians’ opinions about the invasion of Ukraine, based on interviews conducted up to the end of 2022.
I haven’t read all of its 140 pages, but some of the conclusions look interesting (emphasis mine):
The authors make a lot of effort to explain that most support for the war is passive, from people who privately harbor many criticisms and reservations, and who would prefer peace. But I wonder how much that distinction matters in practice. So long as Russian government can bet that the population won’t challenge the continuation of war, it doesn’t particularly matter if the support is enthusiastic or superficial.
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From the Guardian liveblog:
An investigation by the Associated Press has found that Russian occupation authorities vastly and deliberately undercounted the dead in one of the most devastating episodes of the 22-month war in Ukraine — the flooding that followed the catastrophic explosion that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in the southern Kherson region.
Russia said 59 people drowned in the territory it controls. But an AP investigation claims the number is at least in the hundreds in the town of Oleshky alone. Health workers and others who were in Oleshky told the news agency that Russian authorities hid the true number by taking control of the issuance of death certificates, immediately removing bodies not claimed by family, and preventing local health workers and volunteers from dealing with the dead.
An exact figure for the dead — in Oleshky, the occupied area’s most populous town before the war, and beyond — may never be known, even if Ukrainian forces retake the territory and are able to investigate on the ground.
“The scale of this tragedy, not just Russia, but even Ukraine doesn’t realise,” said Svitlana, a nurse who initially oversaw the process of collecting death certificates and later escaped to Ukrainian-controlled territory. “It’s a huge tragedy.”
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On the other hand, as Prygyozhin(sp?) showed, superficial support means those same “supporters” won’t get in the way of anyone challenging the leadership as well. Even army units mostly dragged their feet and no one was really willing to die defending Putin.
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Fair enough. However, I don’t think we’ll see anything like Prigozhin’s mutiny in the foreseeable future. He had a ridiculously good shot - his own private army, personal connections in the Kremlin and (what amounts to) several months of publicity campaigning that was amplified by state media and earned him sympathizers in the army, media (e.g. Simonyan) and the general populace. But even with all that, he failed and got blown up. Nobody else has anywhere near as good a starting hand, and I doubt anyone is foolish enough to try their luck.
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“Russia is defending Western Christian civilisation!”
/s
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