Nope. I understand why Zelenskii has to use them against Russia, but he should have sent an obscure defense ministry official to greet them. This just plays into the bogus Russian narrative that Ukraine is a fascist state, and legitimises Azov’s political ambitions (at the moment, the far right is siloed off from political power in Ukraine, but that can’t last if they’re celebrated by the head of state).
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That’s what I’m saying, Zelenskiy should keep his distance from the far-right but politically he can’t afford to snub the Azov commanders because they made themselves national heroes. The long-term consequences are bad, but he doesn’t have an alternative.
On top of that, Erdogan chose to release them when Zelenskiy was visiting Turkey, so there was no way for him to avoid seeing them.
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From the Shoigu thread:
15/ The Ministry of Defence awards 113 different medals, of which at least 66 were established by Shoigu and another 15 re-established by him. It also has hundreds more ribbons and insignia, in total more than 400, of which over two-thirds were created by Shoigu.
27/ The Russian MOD issues medals and awards in huge quantities. At least 212,750 medals and 32,000 other insignia were awarded in the first half of 2015. By 2018, at least 573,000 medals and 45,000 other awards were given out.
28/ When Russia held its massive Vostok-2018 exercise involving troops from Russia, China and Mongolia in September 2018, 339,566 medals were awarded to the participants at a cost of almost 77 million rubles ($975,000) – as much as a T-72 tank. The Chinese didn’t reciprocate.
I wonder who has the contract for producing these trinkets??? 
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@gracchus Something for the Shirtless Wonder’s Alternate History.
24/ Shoigu’s medal “For the return of Crimea” has an interesting story. Its existence was denied until 2018, when Shoigu first wore in it public. The medal dates the start of the operation to seize Crimea as “20.02.14” – while Viktor Yanukovych was still the president of Ukraine.
25/ Russian investigative journalists discovered that the contract for the medals was advertised as early as December 2013, only a month after the Euromaidan protests began in Kyiv, and were concluded on 13 January 2014, with Mosshtamp Plant LLC awarded the contract.
26/ This suggests that Russia was planning to seize Crimea well before Yanukovych was deposed on 22 February, and probably intended to seize it whatever the outcome of the protests and the ‘referendum’. Russian propaganda had claimed Crimean was Russian since as early as 2001.
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Re: contract -
Anyone here can read N⁰ 9?
Google Lens finds this should be read as:
- Делай, что долесно се буро стор и деб.
Which deepl translates as:
Do what you can do in a way that’s right for you.
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When factoring in the number of men wounded so seriously that they did not return to military service, Russia’s total casualty count rises to at least 125,000 soldiers, based on our calculations. (This figure does not include missing or captured soldiers or Ukrainian nationals fighting with Russian proxy forces based in Donetsk and Luhansk.)
Unlike Ukraine, Russia has no public registry for missing soldiers.
…
While there is ample and reliable information to estimate the number of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, we simply lack the objective indicators needed to calculate how many Russian soldiers have gone missing.
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It’s “Делай, что должно и будь что будет” - “Do what you must, and whatever happens, happens.”
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Such a drama queen this guy.
Drama queen in this instance = terrorist.
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The real portfolio of Putin’s dancing bear is “Minister of Making Crazy Threats”. There’s nothing that arse-licker won’t do for his boss.
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Two sources close to the Kremlin and one close to the Russian government told Meduza that Medvedev made a conscious choice to use such inflammatory rhetoric (they said that the former president “at the very least edits the posts,” and that he writes some of them entirely “by himself”).
According to two of Meduza’s sources, after the Russian Security Council’s meeting on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in which Putin openly humiliated everyone who advocated for continued dialogue with the West, Medvedev “realized it would be better to err on the side of caution, lest anyone bring up his past liberalism.” The sources said that by shifting to attacks on the “collective West” and the war’s opponents, Medvedev helped not only to protect himself from criticism but also to secure a more significant post.
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