Ukraine
I am writing this in part, as with the local covid figures during the height of the pandemic, to remember it. And, in part, because I know that sometimes Russian LJ people read the non-Russian journals and may be surprised, or just interested, in how things look from outside Russia.
So... President Putin says that the warship Moskva sank after an outbreak of spontaneous combustion and explosions in the munitions store, and also announces a revenge attack targeted on the factory near Kyiv where the Ukrainian missiles, that he insists did not start the fires and explosions that sank the flagship, are made. Methinks we have some fake news there - and it isn't that the ship sank, or that Russian missiles attacked the factory!
We are reading interviews with the people who have survived in areas where the Ukrainian army has driven back the Russian one, or where the Russian army has retreated; they all agree that, at first, the Russian soldiers were expecting to be greeted with bread and salt, and welcomed, by the people of Ukraine that they had been told were desperate to be liberated from a Nazi dictator.
Except that there is no Nazi dictator - there is a president and government that they elected fair and square, and they were greeted by people telling them to go home they weren't welcome - including fellow ethnic Russians who are Ukrainian citizens and lived there happily.
We have seen Russian tanks simply being abandoned because they ran out of fuel - presumably they expected a generously liberated people filling them for them! We have also seen rows and rows of Russian vehicles that have been burnt out where they stood - because once the crews didn't turn around and go home when asked nicely they discovered that the Ukrainian armed forces were not a push over as they had also been assured.
This might have been a surprise to even the senior members of the invasion force - after all when they marched in and annexed Crimea in 2014 there was no resistance.
Why was there no resistance? Because Russia and Ukraine signed a pact of permanent peace only a few years earlier, promising that Russia would always not only recognise the Ukrainian borders as they then stood, but help defend them from others, in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons to Russia... So the Ukrainian army and politicians genuinely believed Moscow would keep its word. They learnt a bitter lesson in 2014.
Whilst officials in Moscow insist only military buildings are being bombed we see entire towns and cities reduced to rubble - the elderly and bedfast who could not escape were clearly a major threat to President Putin in his eyes, as were the 300 civilians killed when his forces targeted a theatre in Mariupol where people were sheltering; they thought it would be safe as it was so clearly not a military target.
And now we see that the Russian forces who retreated were either badly disciplined or led by officers with the morals of gangsters - they stole food because they had none; they trashed houses even where they hadn't bombed them; women and young girls, as always happens in a war, have been raped - and many many civilians have died. And then you get the farcical announcements from Moscow that pictures, taken by non-Ukrainian journalists, of bodies lying in the streets, many clearly shot in the back or the head, are faked - 'they are all fit healthy Ukrainians pretending to be dead for the photos' President Putin insists. That there was drone and satellite footage showing the bodies lying in the exact same positions for days before the Russian forces retreated is, according to his theory, some sort of time travelling fake news.
Then there is Chernobyl - to quote a recent newspaper article "Russian forces trundled into the Chernobyl exclusion zone on 24 February in the early hours of the invasion. According to local observers, they crossed over the Pripyat River from Belarus using a pontoon bridge. They then headed towards the Chernobyl nuclear power station, covered with a giant sarcophagus, the scene of the disastrous 1986 accident.
By breakfast time they had seized the station. Russian troops disarmed the 169 Ukrainian national guards based at the plant and rounded up its technical staff, 103 people. They established a command centre and began digging fortifications including tank shelters, trenches and an underground kitchen. For 1,000 servicemen, Chernobyl became home."
Note - the digging. In radio active ground. Soldiers worked and slept in Chernobyl’s prohibited deadly red zone. The Russian army either purposefully, or due to horrific incompetence, exposed many troops to high levels of radio-activity - it is thought that some are already severely ill with radiation sickness - others will die from the exposure more slowly over the next few years. I am curious as to how this can be spun to be 'fake news' - do we think the word from Moscow will be that Chernobyl is not radio active, or that there were never any troops there, or that they all wore protective gear and didn't disturb the area? Who knows.
The truth of the matter is that President Putin wishes to be remembered by history as a new Czar of his idea of Greater Russia - he does not recognise the right of peoples to choose their own government or to choose their own friends and allies. Ukraine was never going to invade Russia, it was no threat - but it irked him that the people of Ukraine chose to be just that - the people of Ukraine.
But the effect has been that other countries bordering Russia are now deciding it might be safer to abandon neutrality and ask to join NATO; which is the exact opposite of his intention when invading Ukraine. And they are not particularly worried at any threats from Moscow should they choose to do this; after all look at the shambles the Russian forces are in in Ukraine - and how much of their equipment has already been lost or abandoned, and how badly equipped and trained the Russian army is when push come to shove.
Sadly President Putin seems to be a man whose sense of his own importance is such that he is never going to admit that the armed forces of Ukraine, their ranks swelled by Ukrainians who have never thought of fighting before now, did not crumple because he wanted them to.
So... President Putin says that the warship Moskva sank after an outbreak of spontaneous combustion and explosions in the munitions store, and also announces a revenge attack targeted on the factory near Kyiv where the Ukrainian missiles, that he insists did not start the fires and explosions that sank the flagship, are made. Methinks we have some fake news there - and it isn't that the ship sank, or that Russian missiles attacked the factory!
We are reading interviews with the people who have survived in areas where the Ukrainian army has driven back the Russian one, or where the Russian army has retreated; they all agree that, at first, the Russian soldiers were expecting to be greeted with bread and salt, and welcomed, by the people of Ukraine that they had been told were desperate to be liberated from a Nazi dictator.
Except that there is no Nazi dictator - there is a president and government that they elected fair and square, and they were greeted by people telling them to go home they weren't welcome - including fellow ethnic Russians who are Ukrainian citizens and lived there happily.
We have seen Russian tanks simply being abandoned because they ran out of fuel - presumably they expected a generously liberated people filling them for them! We have also seen rows and rows of Russian vehicles that have been burnt out where they stood - because once the crews didn't turn around and go home when asked nicely they discovered that the Ukrainian armed forces were not a push over as they had also been assured.
This might have been a surprise to even the senior members of the invasion force - after all when they marched in and annexed Crimea in 2014 there was no resistance.
Why was there no resistance? Because Russia and Ukraine signed a pact of permanent peace only a few years earlier, promising that Russia would always not only recognise the Ukrainian borders as they then stood, but help defend them from others, in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons to Russia... So the Ukrainian army and politicians genuinely believed Moscow would keep its word. They learnt a bitter lesson in 2014.
Whilst officials in Moscow insist only military buildings are being bombed we see entire towns and cities reduced to rubble - the elderly and bedfast who could not escape were clearly a major threat to President Putin in his eyes, as were the 300 civilians killed when his forces targeted a theatre in Mariupol where people were sheltering; they thought it would be safe as it was so clearly not a military target.
And now we see that the Russian forces who retreated were either badly disciplined or led by officers with the morals of gangsters - they stole food because they had none; they trashed houses even where they hadn't bombed them; women and young girls, as always happens in a war, have been raped - and many many civilians have died. And then you get the farcical announcements from Moscow that pictures, taken by non-Ukrainian journalists, of bodies lying in the streets, many clearly shot in the back or the head, are faked - 'they are all fit healthy Ukrainians pretending to be dead for the photos' President Putin insists. That there was drone and satellite footage showing the bodies lying in the exact same positions for days before the Russian forces retreated is, according to his theory, some sort of time travelling fake news.
Then there is Chernobyl - to quote a recent newspaper article "Russian forces trundled into the Chernobyl exclusion zone on 24 February in the early hours of the invasion. According to local observers, they crossed over the Pripyat River from Belarus using a pontoon bridge. They then headed towards the Chernobyl nuclear power station, covered with a giant sarcophagus, the scene of the disastrous 1986 accident.
By breakfast time they had seized the station. Russian troops disarmed the 169 Ukrainian national guards based at the plant and rounded up its technical staff, 103 people. They established a command centre and began digging fortifications including tank shelters, trenches and an underground kitchen. For 1,000 servicemen, Chernobyl became home."
Note - the digging. In radio active ground. Soldiers worked and slept in Chernobyl’s prohibited deadly red zone. The Russian army either purposefully, or due to horrific incompetence, exposed many troops to high levels of radio-activity - it is thought that some are already severely ill with radiation sickness - others will die from the exposure more slowly over the next few years. I am curious as to how this can be spun to be 'fake news' - do we think the word from Moscow will be that Chernobyl is not radio active, or that there were never any troops there, or that they all wore protective gear and didn't disturb the area? Who knows.
The truth of the matter is that President Putin wishes to be remembered by history as a new Czar of his idea of Greater Russia - he does not recognise the right of peoples to choose their own government or to choose their own friends and allies. Ukraine was never going to invade Russia, it was no threat - but it irked him that the people of Ukraine chose to be just that - the people of Ukraine.
But the effect has been that other countries bordering Russia are now deciding it might be safer to abandon neutrality and ask to join NATO; which is the exact opposite of his intention when invading Ukraine. And they are not particularly worried at any threats from Moscow should they choose to do this; after all look at the shambles the Russian forces are in in Ukraine - and how much of their equipment has already been lost or abandoned, and how badly equipped and trained the Russian army is when push come to shove.
Sadly President Putin seems to be a man whose sense of his own importance is such that he is never going to admit that the armed forces of Ukraine, their ranks swelled by Ukrainians who have never thought of fighting before now, did not crumple because he wanted them to.