Difference is a self ban here requires paperwork and bureaucracy not just avoidance.
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I can’t decide what’s better, the dude firing with one hand and taking selfie video with the other, or the old lady who’s basically like, “C’mon in, let me show you the blood of the Russian invaders!” I bet she offered the reporters hot tea and snacks, too. Old Ukrainian women rule.
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This is some Red Dawn shit.
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I got a chuckle out of the little added “all hands on deck” after the “but the locals are leading them into a trap”. It sounded like something out of an David Attenborough nature video.
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Oof. As the article mentions the brigade this guy was with is pretty terrible in addition to just being a part of an invading army, but there’s something kind of shocking in the modern era in being able to find someone’s name in some debris on the battle field and after a simple Google search know his family members, see his childhood posts on social media, etc
Among the rubbish falling off the destroyed BMPs, one can find a couple of Russian bank cards bearing their owner’s name: “Aleksandr Gagarin.”
It is impossible to know which of the nameless bodies used to respond to that name in life.
Another piece of evidence is a name tape, knifed off a killed soldier’s fatigues: “Lubsandabayev B.N.”
A simple search of Russian social networks indicates that a man named Bair Nikolaevich Lubsandabayev, an ethnic Buryat, was most likely 24 years old, born in the town of Tsagatui between Lake Baikal and the Mongolian border.
His mother Ariuna is an elementary school teacher in Tsagatui, and he has a sister named Ayana.
In his school years, he was fond of futsal and nature studies, as mentioned in local newspapers.
A Russian military publication says in December 2018 he graduated from Far Eastern Higher Combined Arms Command School in the city of Blagoveschensk and later served with “a motor rifle brigade in the Orenburg Oblast” — that is, the 21st Guards Motor Rifle Brigade.
By all appearances, he was killed in that attack near Rusaniv — 5,000 kilometers away from his hometown in Buryatia.
https://kyivindependent.com/national/how-ukraine-swaps-living-soldiers-for-dead-russians/
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This article doesn’t have any high flying tidbits but the author has a way of bringing the human connection in the article. It feels like a good travelogue but for two civilian volunteers in a war zone
Oleksandr, an IT entrepreneur, first became a volunteer in 2014, when Russia invaded Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts and annexed Crimea.
In February, he was sucked back into the life when he got the news from Hostomel on the third day of the war. His ex-wife had been shot and wounded, trapped in the city with her friend and her child from her second husband.
“No one could gather the courage to come get them, including her father and her second husband,” said Oleksandr. “We went to the bridge by car, then crossed on foot…. We carried them out.”
He hadn’t talked to his ex-wife in a long time over some personal disagreements but all of that fell by the wayside when life was on the line. Risking his life for her awoke a whole spectrum of emotions. Being the only man who came to get her has pushed their relationship into new, complicated territory.
“I was really afraid but didn’t want to lose her a second time,” he said. After being rescued, she’s gone to Italy, where Oleksandr’s sister and nephews are staying.
The experience realigned his value system. “I understood then that I can’t just sit in one place,” he said to me on the phone.
His friend Andrii, whom he met playing geocaching games, has a travel agency and has traveled all over the world. The friends would often meet time and again after not seeing each other for years. When they last reconnected, they became partners in what they consider their most important undertaking.
Andrii seems the brasher of the duo while Oleksandr is a bit more measured. With the calm detachment of combat medics, the lackadaisical quips of Marvel protagonists and their big hearts, the friends perfectly complement one another.
As she opens the door to Oleksandr and I, Tetiana can’t stop weeping with relief. “Thank god, thank go-o-od,” she sobs convulsively.
Oleksandr has seen this many times. He steps forward to give her a big hug and calmly talks her through how the Russians have been driven out and how she’s safe now and everything’s going to be okay. Tetiana is so overcome with emotion, it takes her a few minutes to be able to speak in complete sentences. She’s been here since the war began, cut off from her family, with no power or an internet connection.
Many people who have been trapped, especially the elderly, sometimes have a hard time coping with the stress, Oleksandr told me in the earlier phone call.
“I try to inspire optimism,” he said then. “My mother has a friend who was in Irpin and it got shelled. They were so scared. But when I hugged her, smiled at her and advised them to get out while there’s still a chance, they listened to me.”
Oleksandr’s charged phone catches the whiff of a signal and they call Tetiana’s son but cannot reach him. Then they try her granddaughter, Katya. She picks up, as Tetiana tenderly says her name.
“Babushka?”
There go Tetiana’s complete sentences. Helped along by Oleksandr, they bring each other up to date. Katya’s dad is fine, he’s outside Lviv and she’s in it. We tell Katya that we’re volunteers and are about to evacuate her grandmother to Kyiv and put her on a train to Lviv. By the end of the short conversation, both sides are pretty hard to understand, sobbing “I love you” to one another through the spotty connection.
I did lol at this
At the bridge, we get a call about two groups of people needing evac, a few from Chekhov Street and one from Dostoevsky Street. We decided to hit Chekhov first, not for any literary merit, it just seemed closer.
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Grunching. The US invaded mexico a couple of times in 1914 to 1916
Sad.
Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, United States doctrine towards Mexico was officially known as “Gimme that it’s mine.”
https://twitter.com/tassagency_en/status/1506405420944052227?s=21
Lose more men in 3 weeks than in 10 years in Afghanistan? All proceeding according to plan.
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Well Russia hasn’t tried a new offensive in days, so they’re clearly regrouping/waiting for reinforcements. Ukraine seems to have had mild success with a few offensives during this time, but the Russian lines aren’t crumbling yet. So it’s looking a bit stalematey at the moment,
https://twitter.com/markhertling/status/1506456716430528513?s=21
https://twitter.com/dalperovitch/status/1506454606104125442?s=21
https://twitter.com/dalperovitch/status/1506455904719360002?s=21
https://twitter.com/dalperovitch/status/1506456704048902144?s=21
This has already been retweeted by a few other solid accounts.
The first tweet actually has the recording, for our Russian-speaking UPers.
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I think the problem is logistics. You can bring in new units, but they still need fuel and food and bullets.
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Yup. Men can walk, but bullets, missiles, and gasoline cannot.
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the conversation seemed rather light. not like the other ones with family.
Did you get a feeling either way of whether it’s real/fake?
the audio is perfect, which is not what the other ones were. the guy complaining about the situation didn’t sound too distraught, maybe even sarcastic.
i don’t know. it did make it onto nexta twitter, so i’m assuming they have some other confirmable info about the call.
The US defense dept said they’re aware of the call, but can’t confirm if it’s real.
This article is depressing as fuck. People just can’t handle a decade of propaganda hammered into their brains for hours a day. Nice to hear that youtube is too valuable as a Russian propaganda outlet to shut down over the stuff they don’t like. Apparently the average Russian thinks the average American spends all their time obsessing over how much they hate Russia and want to destroy their way of life.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/22/putin-propaganda-pozdorovkin-qa/
Summary
Americans may be greatly underestimating the impact of 10 years of Putin’s propaganda
Russian American filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin says Russians have been trained for a decade to view the United States and the West as an existential threat
Today at 2:00 p.m. EDT
Listen to article
7 min
A closed studio at independent radio station Echo of Moscow, seen March 3. The shuttering of independent outlets in Russia has led to a news desert that is almost entirely filled with state-media messaging. (AFP/Getty Images)
Few Americans have parsed Russian propaganda on its various platforms like Maxim Pozdorovkin.
The Russian-born, Harvard-educated filmmaker and thinker is behind several works on the subject, most notably “Our New President” from 2018, an award-winning documentary deconstruction of the Russian media’s portrayal of Donald Trump’s election that was, as he puts it, “a movie based entirely on actual footage without a single true statement in it.” He also examined the resistance to such media messaging in “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer,” a nonfiction film on the political collective.
Far from just an attempt to negate discontent over its Ukraine invasion, Russia’s current state-media approach is, in Pozdorovkin’s view, a continuation of a decade-long campaign to warp Russian citizens’ view of the West. He argues the country’s population has been long primed for this moment — seriously lowering the odds for any tech company or foreign outlet hoping to poke through the veil.
The Washington Post spoke to Pozdorovkin by phone from his home in Brooklyn, where he now lives. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: You’ve been very vocal in your work that there’s been a whole narrative about America playing out in Russian media that most Americans aren’t aware of. What exactly has been happening?
A: I don’t think Americans fully understand what’s been fed to Russians about the U.S. and the West for literally the past decade. It’s been an information war — a totally one-sided information war — and it has been waged so fully and artfully that it’s made a lot of what’s happening now preemptively possible. What this information war boils down to is this: “The West is completely against us and trying to stifle and destroy our way of life.” It’s a simple message. But people are told this over and over, in so many different ways.
Q: Like how?
A: The Western sanctions back in 2014 over the war in the Donbas? An attempt to destroy the Russian way of life. The backlash to the Russian disinformation campaign in the 2016 U.S. election? An attempt to destroy the Russian way of life. Russian-doping punishments at the Olympics? Same thing. You name it, if it has involved Russia and the West, it was the West trying to destroy the Russian way of life. When in reality, of course, most Americans don’t typically spend much time thinking about Russia at all.
Q: And Trump fits neatly into this —
A: Trump fits neatly into this because Trump was the one American leader who wasn’t trying to destroy the Russian way of life.
Q: And in their eyes that’s what caused the U.S. backlash to him.
A: That was the one and only reason.
Q: What effect does this have? Like you said, it’s not like the U.S. or Europe has done much to really feed this narrative.
A: It’s true, the Russian media has been totally shadowboxing for years; no one was fighting back. But that doesn’t really matter. If you ingrain this message of victimhood so completely, what it does is when there’s any kind of [President Vladimir] Putin aggressive action, as there is now, a lot of people in Russia don’t see it as aggressive — they just see it as standing up for their way of life. That’s why the nuclear threat computes.
Q: Because it’s not viewed as much as saber-rattling as “look at what you made me do.”
A: Exactly. “We don’t want to take the nuclear option. But what choice do we have? You tried to destroy our way of life.”
Maxim Pozdorovkin. (Third Party Films)
Q: How broadly does this apply in Russian society, in your research? Many Americans have the feeling, perhaps naive, that there’s a generational split here. An older audience that remembers the Cold War and is more likely to watch state TV may think this way. But a younger generation that doesn’t remember it and is also tech-savvy won’t. Technology and the until-recently open Internet must have some role to play here, no?
A: I think that depends on the level of willful agency people have. For some younger Russians, yes. But it’s getting so much harder to get this information. You have to take action. There is [independent online news service] Meduza, which is based abroad, and Bellingcat and the other leaks about the war. But you have to know where to look; you can’t go to any old site. You have to know how to work a VPN, which a lot of people don’t. Or they’re afraid to. People used to just turn on [liberal radio station] Echo of Moscow or [independent TV station] TV Rain. And now they’re shut down or preemptively closed because of the new censorship law.
Q: But isn’t that a sign that the information war is not working? If you’re such good propagandists, you shouldn’t need to shut down independent outlets — your propaganda should just counter it, shouldn’t it?
A: I think it’s just about plugging all the holes in the boat. The propaganda has been working. But for those it doesn’t, this makes independent news that much harder to get.
Q: Where do tech companies fit into this? So many platforms, from Facebook to Twitter, have been cut off. But YouTube, for example, stays on. Can that help get independent media through? Alexei Navalny’s channel, for instance, now run by Leonid Volkov . Or other dissidents.
A: YouTube is problematic for Putin because it works both ways; [Russian censorship agency] Roskomnadzor can’t just cut it off. Because you have the Navalny channel, but you also have a lot of very popular Russian propagandists that the government would like to hold onto to reach younger people. And of course they can’t just remove one channel; once they allow it, they have to let it all in. So for now they’ve decided to do that.
Q: So the idea of creating a full media blackout isn’t so simple.
A: I do agree this information whack-a-mole is a losing game. Shutting down one informational sphere causes it to pop up somewhere else. But it does make things harder each time. Russia will never become North Korea. But it’s getting closer to it.
Q: Does this fill-the-news-desert-with-propaganda approach work if people don’t have bread to eat, or their nephews aren’t coming home from battle? That would dwarf anything NATO is supposedly trying to do, wouldn’t it?
A: I believe 90 percent of people in Russia who think like victims just stick to their broad ideological coordinates. They don’t change their thinking that’s been so ingrained just because life is harder. They don’t connect the two.
Q: Or they blame the West.
A: Yes, this is what Putin is doing with the “sanctions are an act of war” comments. He’s connecting people’s hardship with the larger narrative of the invasion, which is itself the larger narrative of victimhood and the destruction of the Russian way of life.
Q: And that’s why the idea that harsh economic sanctions will make ordinary Russians call for an end to the war may be a fallacy.
A: Absolutely. What a lot of people may want in tough times is the opposite: They want a display of strength against the West. That’s what Putin and state media are all ready to serve up to them.
Q: So how do they do that? Is Russian state media — are nightly programs on Vesti — filled with bombed-out Ukrainian apartment buildings?
A: No, there’s not really any of that. They’re showing the attacking of military bases; that’s how they project strength. When you see Ukrainian civilians, it’s Russian soldiers helping elderly people, if they can somehow manage footage like that. It shows how they’re helping Ukrainians against the great threat of the West.
Q: Which is also part of the “reunification” narrative.
A: It fits very nicely into that. Reunify the people and save them from the “Nazi” government that is an instrument of the West. And that’s maybe when you’d see some bombed-out apartment buildings.
Q: Why would Ukrainians be bombing their own apartment buildings?
A: It’s NATO.
Q: NATO isn’t attacking Ukraine.
A: Does that matter?