Do you think they are just trying to waste Ukraine’s missiles?
The powerful backlash against Russian celebrities who attended an “almost naked” party was escalated at the command of President Vladimir Putin’s administration, sources in the government, the State Duma and the presidential administration told The Moscow Times.
Days after donning lingerie, mesh and leather at a Moscow nightclub, some of the country’s most famous pop stars and bloggers this week posted makeup-free apology videos.
They were facing fierce criticism online, losing contracts and sponsorships and looking at possible prosecution. In short, they were getting canceled.
And this cancellation wasn’t just a product of the denunciations of conservative and pro-war voices — it was also coming from the very top.
Throughout the 22-month invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities preferred to act as if nothing extraordinary was happening, even when facing serious problems on the front. The Kremlin had been one of the advocates for insulating ordinary Russians from the impacts of the war.
But as Putin’s re-election campaign got off to a start this month, the Kremlin found it advantageous to encourage Russians to aim their discontent toward the war and the lagging economy at non-political, non-military figures.
“First and foremost, it’s about shifting citizens’ attention and directing anger away from the Kremlin and toward 'greedy stars’," a current Russian government official told The Moscow Times, agreeing to speak on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
A source close to the Kremlin and a source in the State Duma confirmed this information to The Moscow Times.
An 18-year-old Russian has become the youngest person confirmed to have died fighting for the Russians in Ukraine. His death, only two and a half months after signing up, followed the Russian government’s decision in 2023 to let teenagers go to war straight from school.
According to French journalist Elsa Vidal, of course our govts deliberately starved Ukraine of the most decisive types of weapons – this needs to be universal knowledge now – but she goes further into the interpretation, which is interesting. She believes it’s our fear of Russia collapsing following a proper defeat. She also fingers
@RANDCorporation
for being responsible for promoting the cynical policy goal of aiming for neither defeat nor victory in Ukraine.
Additionally, and that’s also a diagnosis I made on this platform, she notes that aiming for a stalemate to begin with was necessarily going to make sustaining the political will to support Ukraine more difficult.
And, in my view, it’s on that latter point that we really see the problem we have today, with the U.S. losing heart and resolve at the level of the entire country. Because the policy was not some kind of “golden middle” worked out by geniuses, but a costly and bloody and cowardly middle-of-the-road trajectory at a time in history that requires decisiveness.Vidal concludes, like entire governments in the eastern half of Europe, like many parliamentarians across all of our nations, like hundreds of experts on the region and on military affairs, that we must aim for victory.
