Dmitry Mishov, a former Russian military pilot who fled the country on foot and requested asylum in the EU, told BBC News Russia earlier this month that Russian servicemen intentionally distort data on the number of destroyed Ukrainian tanks in order to earn more money. “Say there’s a damaged tank. Several helicopters fire at it multiple times, and for a small fee, the gunner confirms each time that a new unit of equipment was destroyed. And everyone gets payments for the same tank,” he said.
9 Likes
8 Likes
11 Likes
9 Likes
8 Likes
So it seems the most effective defense now against the Ukrainian counteroffensive seems to be the mine fields slowing things down, and that is only a delay as Russian artillery gets eaten up by counter battery fire.
9 Likes
7 Likes
10 Likes
9 Likes
No paywall: https://archive.is/F1mbq
Kremlin spokesman claims Ukraine largely ‘demilitarized’.
Kremlin press secretary Dmitriy Peskov claimed that Russia’s goal of “demilitarizing” Ukraine was largely completed, saying that it was using “fewer and fewer of its own weapons” and increasingly relying on weapons provided by the West.
3 Likes
Something something stage 2 propaganda: What do words even mean?
13 Likes
Maybe this will give Russia an “out.”
8 Likes
The logic is that Ukraine supposedly can’t keep fighting without an ongoing supply of weapons from the West.
6 Likes
… is there a process for kicking somebody out of NATO, or does the whole group have to be dissolved and then re-assembled from scratch 
8 Likes
AFAIK, there isn’t.
So yeah, dealing with Turkey is… difficult. Not in the least because Turkey has a large military, and occupies an extremely strategic location.
8 Likes
5 Likes
This has always seemed to be the likeliest outcome: Russia’s stated goals in this war are all bullshit propaganda, so they can be “achieved” only though bullshit propaganda, not by victories in objective reality. And we already saw how this works at the start of the war, when the official line flipped from “Russian invasion of Ukraine is a ridiculous fantasy of the US” to “Russian invasion of Ukraine is righteous and inevitable” without any steps in-between.
Or, to use an older example, here’s a chart I like a lot:
It shows the frequency of the word “fascist” in the Soviet “Pravda” across 1938 - 1942. (Different shades, darkest to lightest, mean successive pages: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) You can see fascists were a favourite subject before the war, appearing in about half of the pages of the newspaper. During 1939, as Soviets and Nazis began making plans to divide Eastern Europe among themselves, the use gradually tapered, and then dropped basically to zero at the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Apparently, starting in September 1939, fascists just stopped doing anything newsworthy in the world. Instead, Soviet audiences could read about the “friendly German nation” and “comrade Hitler” who were fighting “bourgeois capitalists” in Poland, France and elsewhere. But then in June 1941 the “friendly German nation” invaded and, to everyone’s shock and surprise, they had been fascists all along!
Basically, you should never try to look at the course of Russian propaganda too closely because the whiplash is going to break your neck.
17 Likes
Russia’s army is shit.
Also, they can eat shit and die.
11 Likes
I think that title is reference to Peculiarities of the National… film series.
BTW Raivo is a Estonian first name not Finnish. Raivo means rage in Finnish.
10 Likes
5 Likes
