Meme - "Currently in Ukraine we've got Neo-Nazi militias who obey the orders of their Jewish president doing battle with Radical lslamist mercenaries sent in by an Orthodox Christian country, all in the midst of a modern fully digital battlefield. This whole thing is like if you looked Hideo Kojima and Tom Clancy together in a room with a shit ton of cocaine and told them to write a book."
Facebook - "Also, add the point that we also have capitalist countries clamouring to confiscate and turn private property of former communists into state property."
This Is About More Than Ukraine - "Whatever form this hankering for American abstention takes—a preference for “peace” that protests against Western arms while remaining silent about the Russian variety, or a useful idiot’s mindless recitation of Kremlin propaganda—it’s premised on an unshakable opposition to US leadership in defense of world order... A world of rival spheres—what foreign-policy analyst Michael Lind calls “blocpolitik”—is what led empires of the past to undertake wild feats of adventurism and conquest in pursuit of a “place in the sun.” This struggle for mastery between comparable imperial states—a “great game” against the backdrop of a multipolar order—seldom ended peacefully, since the strategic appetite tends to grow with the eating. It is the kind of natural but perilous security competition and conflict that American primacy has suppressed since the end of World War Two. By contrast, a lack of power or will to enforce a modicum of global order will allow the reversion to a very different world in which revisionist powers enjoy free rein to press their quasi-imperial projects in their respective “near abroads.” Such a world will be a more anarchic place of diminished peace, prosperity, and respect for human rights. In the hope of demonstrating the strategic bankruptcy of the American-led order, Dougherty deems it “hysterical” to fear the consolidation of a Russian sphere of interest. (It’s worth mentioning that the Kremlin has used the very same word to describe the vigilance for maintaining “a Europe whole and free.”)... In reality, the best hope of containing an ambitious and assertive Russia is to push hard to prevent its acquisition of new territories and resources with which it would generate additional economic and military might. Equipped with those additional possessions, and the prestige that comes with them (which it would naturally harness to press its interests even further afield), Russia will become unfathomably more dangerous for independent states on its periphery and the larger security architecture of Europe... A hegemon that doesn’t possess the wisdom to discern between these two possible futures, or that lacks the will to exercise its power and influence accordingly, is no longer fit to be a superpower... Though not all American intellectuals today are ashamed of their own nationality, the overwhelming number have evidently grown ashamed of their own imperial vocation, frequently in the name of “America First.” We are bound to lose something important if we forget that Europe’s long peace was forged only after America decided to leave that parochial and primitive ideology behind."
Peace in our time!
Michael Beschloss on Twitter - "For any Members of Congress who refused to clap for Zelenskyy, we need to know from them exactly why."
Loving your country is bad because it means you're a white supremacist. But if you're not Ukrainian and don't love Ukraine and Zelensky, you're a public enemy
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Shock and anger in Eastern Siberia - "‘For the first time in history, a poll by the Finnish public broadcaster shows that a majority of Finns support joining NATO. Ironically, this war may be what draws Finland into the alliance.’"
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Russa’s Troops: Not Really a Threat to Ukraine? - "As Victor's wife Tatiana pours me a cup of fragrant tea brewed with dried black currant leaves she picked in the summer. I asked her if she believes war is imminent. We're concerned about the United States and the West interfering in the domestic politics of other countries like Ukraine, she tells me but no one here wants war. And Russia definitely won't be the one to start it. Like most Russians, Victor and his friends get their news from state TV. So it's no surprise to me that their opinions tally with ones I've heard before. Switch on a TV set here and reporters will tell you insistently that Russia isn't set to invade its neighbor. And yet somehow I don't feel entirely reassured… A December poll found that almost half of Russians consider war with Ukraine likely or inevitable. Also, half pin the blame on the west. For centuries, Ukrainians lived under the control of Russia to the east, or European empires to the west. But during brief episodes of independence, they managed to carve out a distinct identity of their own. President Vladimir Putin has sought to undermine this sense of Ukrainian national consciousness, repeatedly saying that Ukrainians and Russians are one people and dismissing their state as artificial"
We were once pro-Russian ... but now we’ve switched sides to defend Ukraine against Vladimir Putin - "Putin’s mistake, says Nikita Rozhenko, a deputy on the Kharkiv city council who once represented a pro-Russian opposition party, was to confuse pragmatism for ideology. “I thought we should have good relations with Russia. They’re our neighbours, we have close relations, we should trade and be friends,” he told The Telegraph. “It is not the same thing as thinking Ukraine is not a country.” A wiser Russian ruler might have chosen to nurture that latent goodwill. The invasion, said Mr Rozhenko, has destroyed it for generations to come... Multiple Russian-speaking cities have already defied Putin’s invasion"
Senate blocks $48 billion aid package for restaurants, other small businesses
Senate passes $40 billion Ukraine aid package
Sahil Kapur on Twitter - "Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.”"
Ukraine war: Russia learns a hard lesson about the folly of war - "Vladimir Putin was not the only one who got it wrong. The Russian leader’s assumption that his armies would vanquish Ukraine within days was widely shared. The same Western intelligence agencies that correctly predicted that Russia would invade Ukraine also believed that Putin would probably win a swift victory. But almost three months into the war, Moscow’s military is bogged down and has taken heavy losses. Russia’s international isolation isgetting worse, with the confirmation that Finland and Sweden are planning to join NATO. There is now much talk about the incompetence of the Russian military. But perhaps no special explanation is required for its problems. In modern times, when major powers invade smaller countries they usually end up losing... As the Indian academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta observes: “It is one of the great mysteries of international politics that despite their terrible record at winning asymmetric wars, powerful countries continue to think they can win.” One powerful country that has resisted the temptation to wage war over the past 40 years is China. The Chinese got a bloody nose when they invaded Vietnam in 1979... In recent years, however, the Chinese government and people have displayed a certain yearning for the battlefield. China has poured money into its military. Threatening military exercises near Taiwan have been stepped up. War films have soared in popularity at the box office. Russia’s experiences in Ukraine, however, suggest that it would be a disastrous error for China to succumb to the temptation to fight a short, glorious war. Once the shooting starts, things rarely go according to plan. Historian Adam Tooze points out: “Other than wars of national liberation, one is hard-pressed to name a single war of aggression since 1914 that has yielded clearly positive results for the first mover.” People and nations that are defending their homes are usually much better motivated than an invading army. Russia’s reputation for military might was forged in defensive wars against Napoleon and Hitler. But now Russia is the aggressor – and it is the Ukrainians who are cast in the role of heroic defenders of the motherland, played by the Russians in 1812 and 1942. As a country fighting for its life, Ukraine has been able to insist that all adult men stay in the country and fight. Russia is still having to pretend to its own people that it is engaged in a “special military operation” that does not require mass mobilisation. The longer a war drags on, the harder it gets for an invading army. Even if you occupy the capital city – as the Americans did in Iraq and Afghanistan – you are likely to face a draining insurgency, which will be gleefully supported by outside powers. A losing war also has corrosive domestic effects. More than 15,000 American troops and contractors died in the Afghan and Iraq wars and twice that number later died by suicide. Hundreds of thousands were wounded, with the effects rippling out through society and politics. The few exceptions to the rule that great powers lose small wars seem to occur when the fighting and objective are clearly limited. If the conflict is genuinely a “special military operation” (to use Putin’s disingenuous term for the invasion of Ukraine), then success is possible. In the 1991 Gulf War, the US-led coalition restricted its goals to expelling Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from Kuwait. When the US attempted to go much further in the second Gulf War of 2003 – overthrowing Saddam and occupying Iraq – the plan unravelled. NATO’s successful intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was based on air power, in support of the Kosovans. Changes in military technology may now be further stacking the odds against an invading army, as Max Boot recently pointed out in the Washington Post. Information technology and drones can pinpoint the movements of an attacking force; precision-guided missiles can then pick them off. That shift in technology may partly account for Russia’s heavy losses in the battles for Kyiv and the Donbas region. As Russia is discovering, even a war against a smaller, weaker neighbour can go badly wrong. Larger conflicts invite disaster. Even nominal victory can leave your economy and society in a ruinous condition. Britain emerged victorious in the second world war, but never recovered its great power status. As the historian AJP Taylor later concluded: “Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one.”"
Why Russia's air force failed to dominate Ukraine - "NATO countries have also been providing Ukraine with increasingly advanced military hardware as Russia’s war drags on. Slovakia announced last month that it had donated its Soviet-era S-300 long-range air defense system to Ukraine. Russia has been further hampered by its combat aircrafts’ lackluster weapons systems. U.S. officials say Russian pilots are “unable to quickly locate and engage targets on the ground,” and missiles launched into Ukraine “often miss their targets — if they work at all”... Russian stocks of precision-guided munitions are significantly smaller than NATO’s... But technology alone does not fully explain Russia’s failure to establish air superiority. Experts say Russia’s air doctrine has been poorly thought out and haphazardly executed from the opening days of the war... because Moscow believed it would capture Ukraine the first few days, Russian military command was keen not to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure it wanted to keep for controlling the country after the war... the Russian military struggles to creatively use air doctrine because it is philosophically wedded to being a traditional land power with massive reserves of soldiers at its disposal."
This is related to how the Soviets won World War II not because they were good but because they just kept throwing soldiers into the fray heedless of casualties. Conveniently that helped post-war propaganda
Piers Morgan slams Ukraine's Eurovision victory | Toronto Sun - "Piers Morgan has claimed that Ukraine won the Eurovision Song Contest on a “sympathy vote.” The rap group Kalush Orchestra were crowned winners of the annual contest for their song ‘Stefania’"
Retired colonel speaks out on Russian TV - "The programme was 60 Minutes, the flagship twice-daily talk show on Russian state TV: studio discussion that promotes the Kremlin line on absolutely everything, including on President Putin's so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine. The Kremlin still maintains that the Russian offensive is going according to plan. But on Monday night, studio guest Mikhail Khodarenok, a military analyst and retired colonel, painted a very different picture. He warned that "the situation [for Russia] will clearly get worse" as Ukraine receives additional military assistance from the West and that "the Ukrainian army can arm a million people". Referring to Ukrainian soldiers, he noted: "The desire to defend their motherland very much exists. Ultimate victory on the battlefield is determined by the high morale of troops who are spilling blood for the ideas they are ready to fight for. "The biggest problem with [Russia's] military and political situation," he continued, "is that we are in total political isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don't want to admit it. We need to resolve this situation. "The situation cannot be considered normal when against us, there is a coalition of 42 countries and when our resources, military-political and military-technical, are limited." The other guests in the studio were silent. Even the host, Olga Skabeyeva, normally fierce and vocal in her defence of the Kremlin, appeared oddly subdued. In many ways, it's a case of "I told you so" from Mr Khodarenok. Writing in Russia's Independent Military Review back in February, before Moscow attacked Ukraine, the defence analyst had criticised "enthusiastic hawks and hasty cuckoos" for claiming that Russia would easily win a war against Ukraine. His conclusion back then: "An armed conflict with Ukraine is not in Russia's national interests."... It is rare to hear such realistic analysis of events on Russian TV. Rare. But not unique. In recent weeks, critical views have appeared on television here. In March, on another popular TV talk show, a Russian filmmaker told the presenter: "The war in Ukraine paints a frightening picture, it has a very oppressive influence on our society." So what happened on 60 Minutes? Was this a spontaneous, unprompted and unexpected wake-up call on Ukraine that slipped through the net? Or was it a pre-planned burst of reality in order to prepare the Russian public for negative news on the progress of the "special military operation"? It's difficult to say. But as they say on the telly, stay tuned to Russian TV for further signals."
Damn CIA!
Pro-Kremlin Newspaper Blames 'Hackers' For Russian Military Death Toll Report - "The Russian pro-Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper claims hackers attacked its system and briefly published a figure indicating a Russian death toll of nearly 10,000 soldiers from the fighting in Ukraine before editors deleted the information... U.S. and Ukrainian officials have estimated the deaths to be more than 7,000, with some estimates going near 10,000, although casualty figures in the war are impossible to independently confirm. Yaroslav Trofimov of The Wall Street Journal wrote on Twitter that "either [the newspaper's website] KP.ru has been hacked or someone there got the leaked numbers and posted them.""
Those Who Cannot Learn From History Are Doomed To Repeat It – Seweryn Szwarocki - "Why wasn’t Hitler stopped when there was still time, allowing for an unprecedented extermination of civilians in concentration camps? Why did the politicians of the early XXth century did not realise the unavoidable consequences of their actions (or lack thereof), why were they seemingly so naïve? Looking at the dynamics of events in Ukraine and the world’s response over the course of the recent weeks, we often reflect on what tomorrow brings. In the information chaos and in the face of what Dr. Jacek Bartosiak calls “fog of war”, it is often difficult to say what the reality looks like... I decided to conduct an experiment and examine how the events of the first days of World War II were commented in the press. I compared the headlines of polish newspapers from 1939 with the headlines of news websites from 2022."
“Remember, It’s Wrong to Eat Your Children:” Chronicles of the Ukrainian Genocide - "It is the winter of 1933 and buildings across Kharkiv, Ukraine is covered in repulsively drawn Soviet propaganda posters. “Remember, it’s wrong to eat your children,” they say, while the streets are covered with hundreds of decomposing bodies. Corpses are lying there almost casually as the people walking by don’t even bat an eye on the horrors of their daily lives... When Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union in 1922 — just five years after gaining independence from the Russian Empire — the Ukrainian people were once again forced into Russification. In an attempt to kill the national identity of Ukrainians, the communists set out to eradicate Ukrainian culture by forbidding the Ukrainian language and propagating the narrative that all Ukrainians were uneducated peasants who were inferior to Russians. The actions of the Kremlin were met with resistance from Ukrainians that grew stronger each year until it was almost uncontrollable."
Damn CIA false flag!
Gaffe-prone Joe Biden thinks he’s a foreign policy genius. He isn’t - "Running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency against Obama in 2007, for example, he awkwardly described his opponent as: “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”. A few years later Obama observed to his staff about his then vice-president, “Never underestimate the ability of the vice-president to screw things up.” Biden’s first gaffe during the Ukraine crisis was to suggest that Putin would face only limited sanctions if his incursion into the country was correspondingly minor...
Lord Renwick is a former British ambassador to Washington, DC"
Sweden to accept fewer Ukrainians than in 2015 - "Sweden's prime minister says her country will help refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine but won't take in the kind of share it did during the influx of 2015... Andersson, a member of the Social Democratic Party, said Sweden accepted about 12% of the total number of refugees coming to the European Union in 2015, despite having only 2% of the bloc's population."
Damn racism and white supremacy!
Russian police officers sue their bosses after being sacked for refusing to invade Ukraine - "The story of how the Omon special police unit rebelled against Vladimir Putin’s invasion plans can only be told now after their lawyer and a human rights group went public with their case... Under a law rushed through at the start of March, military recruiters can target anybody who protests against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine."
Western elites are exploiting the Ukraine conflict to lower the standard of living - "Since Russia launched its military campaign in Ukraine, Western elites have been arguing that we all must collectively and senselessly concede to lowering our basic standards of living in order to hit back at President Vladimir Putin. In reality, all it does is allow them to continue to profit from our increasingly lowered expectations while all we get in return is the satisfaction of our own virtue signaling... German Agriculture Minister Cem Ozdemir told Spiegel magazine that people should fight Putin by changing their diet. “Despite the fact that I am a vegetarian, I will not preach that everyone should go vegetarian,” he said. “But let’s put it this way: Eating less meat would be a contribution against Putin.” This message is brought to us by the same elites who routinely peddle the idea of westerners eating bugs in mainstream media. Ozedemir’s request has nothing to do with Putin or Ukraine and everything to do with this obsession of relentlessly guilting the average person into complying with, and pressuring one another into, lowering their own living standards under the pretext of fighting climate change, or Putin, or whatever other cockamamie excuse they think you’ll accept. Meanwhile, Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, climate change fighter, and relentless vaccine peddler, has become the largest private farmland owner in the United States and is set up to be one of the big beneficiaries of a meatless future. Particularly when considering that Gates has openly supported genetically modified food production, while the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested millions into the genetically modified food company, Monsanto, according to NBC News. Other Silicon Valley billionaires are also investing in fake food production, including PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Sergey Brin... At this rate, we’ll soon be at the point where if you aren’t living at the same standard as a Ukrainian refugee, then you’re an earth-killing, gas-guzzling, democracy-hating glutton who has no business participating in polite society. If you think that it can’t happen, just ask any of those who were shunned and marginalized without pity, losing their jobs, lifestyle, or freedom of travel amid the Covid crisis when they refused to get vaccinated in order to obtain the coveted digital health pass"
Conflict of interest isn't a problem when it's for pushing liberal goals
Russia reframes war goals as Ukrainians advance near Kyiv - "Moscow signalled on Friday it was scaling back its ambitions in Ukraine to focus on territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists in the East as Ukrainian forces went on the offensive to recapture towns outside the capital Kyiv... Reframing Russia's goals may make it easier for President Vladimir Putin to claim a face-saving victory, military analysts said. Moscow had said its goals included demilitarising Ukraine. Western officials dismiss this as a baseless pretext for a war they say is aimed at toppling Ukraine's government... in the first big sign that Western sanctions on Moscow were hurting investment from China, sources said state-run Sinopec Group, Asia's biggest oil refiner, halted talks on a petrochemical investment and a venture to market Russian gas"
Russian soldier gets $10K from Ukraine in money-for-tank deal - "According to Viktor Andrusiv, a member of the Russian forces – whom he identified as "Misha," short for Mikhail –voluntarily handed over an operational main battle tank to the Ukrainian military... "It turned out that he was left alone by the tank crew, the rest fled home. He saw no point in fighting. He could not return home because his commander said he would shoot him and write it off as combat losses," Andrusiv wrote in a Facebook post. "Misha said that there was almost nothing left to do, the command of the troops was chaotic and practically absent. The demoralization is enormous," he explained. "Now the soldier has received comfortable conditions of detention. He will also receive $10,000 after the end of the war and the opportunity to apply for citizenship"... some $1 million has been promised to those who fly fighter jets into the custody of the Ukrainian army and $500,000 for helicopters, announced Yuri Gusev, the CEO of Ukraine's central state military company."
George Takei on Twitter - "The protests in Russia from brave citizens there, risking true life and liberty to voice their opposition to Putin’s war with Ukraine, make the “convoys” protest in North America over “freedum” seem truly ludicrous."
Great. So we can dismiss BLM and all the other liberal handwringing about First World Problems
Rep. Adam Smith Says Calls for Ukraine Aid Oversight are 'Russian Propaganda' - "Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the head of the House Armed Services Committee, said Saturday that the growing calls for more oversight of the billions of dollars the US is spending on Ukraine are “part of Russian propaganda.” While the majority of Republicans strongly favor continuing to arm Ukraine, even the more hawkish GOP members have said they favor increased oversight for the aid. Smith said that the concern from Republicans for more transparency “makes me a little crazy.”"
Oversight and transparency are only good when they support liberal ends
The U.S. aims to ensure that the aid to Ukraine goes where it's supposed to go - "MARTÍNEZ: I think what people are worried about, or at least concerned about, is that the money is going places where maybe it's not supposed to go. I know that Ukraine, even before the war began, was considered a very corrupt country. They have their share of oligarchs, just like Russia does. So I think people are worried that maybe the money that's being sent to Ukraine is going into the hands of oligarchs who are now calling themselves freedom fighters.
CANCIAN: Well, I think this is a reasonable concern. Ukraine, before the war, was known for inefficient government and some level of corruption. Although, the government and the people have fought valiantly, that doesn't make the government more efficient or less corrupt. We ran into this problem in Afghanistan and created a group called the SIGAR - the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction - that had people on the ground, had a large staff back here in the United States to track money and equipment. And I think that that would be a good step to take for two reasons."
Corruption concerns involving Ukraine are revived as the war with Russia drags on - "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's dismissal of senior officials is casting an inconvenient light on an issue that the Biden administration has largely ignored since the outbreak of war with Russia: Ukraine's history of rampant corruption and shaky governance. As it presses ahead with providing tens of billions of dollars in military, economic and direct financial support aid to Ukraine and encourages its allies to do the same, the Biden administration is now once again grappling with longstanding worries about Ukraine's suitability as a recipient of massive infusions of American aid. Those issues, which date back decades and were not an insignificant part of former President Donald Trump's first impeachment, had been largely pushed to the back burner in the immediate run-up to Russia's invasion and during the first months of the conflict as the U.S. and its partners rallied to Ukraine's defense... even as Russian troops were massing near the Ukrainian border last fall, the Biden administration was pushing Zelenskyy to do more to act on corruption — a perennial U.S. demand going back to Ukraine's early days of independence."
I got accused of drinking "the russian propaganda coolaid" and "claiming good and evil are not absolute" since I did not have a manichean view of the world and treat him as a saint, a hero and "the face of good vs evil, of democracy vs authoritarianism, of freedom vs subjugation."
Revealed: ‘anti-oligarch’ Ukrainian president’s offshore connections - "The Pandora papers, leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with the Guardian as part of a global investigation however, suggest Zelenskiy is rather similar to his predecessors."
Damn FSB! They're as powerful as the CIA in infiltration and false flagging!
Ukraine charges priests for ‘praising Russia’ - "Several Orthodox Christian clergy from the Kiev Pechersk Lavra have been charged with “glorifying Russia,” the Ukrainian security service SBU said on Thursday. The announcement comes just days after a raid on the 11th-century monastery that the Moscow Patriarchate called an attempt to intimidate the faithful. The SBU said it had received a tip that the priest and several “accomplices” had spoken words of praise about the “Russian world” during a church service. The service then established the “fact of illegal activity” through the subsequent “expert investigation,” it said in a statement"
AP Reporter Who Wrote on Russian Missile in Poland No Longer Works There - The New York Times - "When The Associated Press wrote last week that Russia had struck a village in Poland with a missile, fears quickly rose the event would escalate the Ukraine-Russia war into an even bigger conflict. But it soon appeared that Russia did not fire the missile. And one of the journalists behind the article is now no longer at the news organization. The reporter, James LaPorta, who had worked at The A.P. since April 2020, had provided information that Russia was to blame from a single U.S. intelligence source. The A.P. used that information in a news alert: “A senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people.” The significance of the alleged event was immediately apparent: It could escalate the war. The information was soon proven wrong. The NATO secretary general and Polish officials said the explosion was most likely caused by a Ukrainian air-defense missile that was fending off a Russian attack and went off course."
The single anonymous source strikes again!
Meme - Stephen King @StephenKing: "If a woman was in charge of Russia instead of the testosterone-fueled current leader, the war in Ukraine would be over by New Years Day and we could all breathe a little easier."
Lucas Lynch @Lucasjlynch: "Catherine the Great is literally the Russian leader who conquered Crimea the first time, and along with others partitioned Poland. This wins the historically ignorant tweet of the day, lol. The female Moskals have been just as imperialist and barbaric."
The Critical Role of Morale in Ukraine’s Fight against the Russian Invasion - "The role of morale, also known as esprit de corps, in a high technology environment of the 21st century warfare, is poorly understood. The purpose of the study is to seek evidence for the proposition that the Ukraine’s population and military forces morale has neutralized the asymmetric difference in the military force of the two countries. The academic and practical implications have the potential to refocus military practice. An exploratory qualitative research method using theoretical sampling was used in this study. The study finds significant evidence for high morale as a balancing factor in the asymmetric differences of Russia and Ukraine, which explains Ukraine’s success against greatly superior enemy."
From 2020
Meme - "Russia is not going to invade Ukraine. Stop believing US/NATO propaganda. Russia is not an aggressor."
"Russia is only sending in troops to protect areas controlled by separatists. This is not an invasion. Stop calling it an invasion!"
"Putin needs to occupy the rest of Ukraine so he can de-Nazify its government. It will only take a few days because the Ukrainians hate their own government and actually love Russia."
"Everything is going according to plan. Russia is winning. Look at this map! All of your evidence of Russian losses is fake. Syrian volunteer fighters are a good thing."
"Russia needed to attack now because America used Ukrainian labs to develop an anti-Slav bioweapon and was going to send waves of infected birds and bats to attack Russia."
Inside the Russian prison where all is not as it seems - "he rarely sees people who support the war or Kremlin policies. Even those sent to war to fight have their doubts, he said. While being shuffled from one prison to another he says he has met with numerous convicts whose cellmates had just been recruited by the Russian Wagner mercenary group to go to fight in Ukraine. “Very rarely are those fighters motivated by Putin’s speeches,” he says. “They take up arms out of despair: either because they’re facing 10-20 more years in prison or they do it for money.” However, Mr Yashin admits that the Kremlin, by jailing people for social media likes and kicking students out of university for voicing sympathy for Ukrainians, has succeeded in “fostering an atmosphere of fear and repressions completely identical to the spirit of the Stalin times”... The Kremlin establishment’s habits of luxury could be its weak spot that the West needs to target, Mr Yashin says, urging for more sanctions against Putin’s supporters. “So that Putin who once was a guarantee for corruption-gained stability for them will turn into a headache and constant source of stress.”... Alexei Navalny, who has the biggest following among Putin’s opponents, recently had to sue his prison colony merely to receive a pair of winter boots. This week, more than 600 Russian doctors signed an open letter, urging the Kremlin to hospitalise Mr Navalny after he came down with a fever in a punishment cell apparently after the prison administration planted a sick man there to infect him. Alexei Gorinov, a councilman from the same Moscow municipality where Mr Yashin served as the chairman until recently, landed in hospital over Christmas after being kept in a damp, cold cell."