Claim: 'Kyiv is the mother of all Russian Cities'

robindch

Of course what's usually not reported is that this is not a Ukranian grain through the Black Sea deal, this is a Ukranian and RUSSIAN grain through the Black Sea deal.

Turkey gets its $5b while Russia continues to sell its grain, some of possibly farmed with equipment stolen from Ukraine - there were consistent reports a couple of months back that marauding the Russian/Buryat/Chechen soldiers/militia/marauding-ex-cons who drove off with the equipment didn't first disable the GPS, allowing Ukrainian farmers to track where their expensive kit ended up.

Reports earlier today suggest a substantial Ukrainian missile strike on a Russian airfield in occupied Crimea, and - bearing in mind Amnesty's tonedeaf report earlier this week - producing this burn from the AFU, splendid and awful in equal measure:

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1557061408340287490

robindch

Over the last couple of days, there's been the mildest of public pushback in Russia from men failing to demonstrate the required degree of enthusiasm for personal involvement in the unprovoked war in Ukraine. Social media has been filled with unconfirmed videos showing elderly and drunken recruits, vicious police violence and rusty, soviet-era rifles - "What are they supposed to do, give the other guy tetanus?"

Noting this, Patriarch Kirill - he of the famous photoshopped Breguet watch photo of ten years ago - has announced that murdering men, women and children in Ukraine amounts to a sacred duty which, should the murderer die during the course of his crimes, will expiate the murderer's sins and therefore guarantee a safe eternity in whatever debauched, cold, Russian-themed and Putin-heavy heaven haunts Kirill's fevered dreams. Kirill made this announcement while holding a cross and with his sleeve held close to his wrist, should he still be wearing his Breguet.

https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1574058496324157440

Hotblack Desiato

Lack of enthusiasm on the ground for Pooty-Poots imperial masterplan? That's unpossible!

Grated with me that, due to sheer ignorance, several Western media sources bought the lie that calling up reservists is not conscription. It goes like this:

• Conscription - 1 year mandatory service in the armed forces
• Reservist - following the above, mandatory 5 year period where one is liable to be recalled into active service

So calling up reservists is just an extension of the already mandatory conscription they were forced into.

robindch

Lack of enthusiasm on the ground for Pooty-Poots imperial masterplan? That's unpossible!

Unpossible? It's double-plus-unpossible!

Conscription, Reservist

Seems the Kremlin can't make up it's mind, or at least, multiple stories abound and any or all of the following may be true - contract-soldiers have had their short-term contracts binned and told to stay on their bit of the front line until they either die or win the war; conscripts, which like the common soldiery themselves, are largely from Russia's ethnic minorities and sent to the front with little or no training - if you survive for five years, you get Russian citizenship and a прописка which entitles you to live in Moscow; a reservist is anybody who has done any military training at all, ever, including a short stint of mandatory military bollocks during university decades ago; prisoners conscripted in, sent to the front line where they promptly surrender; in Moscow, conscription is taking place, factory by factory; you can be picked up from home, work or the street resulting in unconfirmed videos showing Russian guys escaping, or trying to escape, parkour-like, from pursuing policemen waving batons and draft papers; Kadyrov's Chechen tiktok performance troupes/troops sent to Dagestan to deal with a women-led, anti-conscription insurgency there; multiple reports of recruiting offices burning down and recruiting officers being shot or otherwise killed; army detachments sent to all foreign borders, together with draft offices, to draft the hundreds of thousands of men currently trying to flee the country - would be interesting to speculate what might happen, country-wide, if one of those small army detachments was disposed of with extreme prejudice, and the resulting video shared widely on social media.

Lots of history happening, in fairness.

ohnonotgmail

There are a couple of videos online of young russians deliberately breaking arms or legs to avoid being called up. I won't be linking to them as I'm sure they break site rules.

robindch

There are a couple of videos online of young russians deliberately breaking arms or legs to avoid being called up.

Yes, they're grim, and there's worse out there - in terms of clips and what's happening. A day or two back, rapper Ivan Petunin recorded a final video and appears to have committed suicide rather than be called up.

https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1576333259583025154

Meanwhile, back in Moscovia (a term used by Ukrainian media to refer to Russia), PTN's fake referendums last week led to the fake annexations of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaparozhia and Kherson at a fake ceremony in the Kremlin on Friday, and an even weirder, fake show afterwards at which some vile, wailing thug announced a holy war against the west. Fun to note the staples of communist-era stage management - flags are all identical (handed out before, binned afterwards), cheering sounds stitched in over a passive, uncheering crowd, close-ups of the thug (possibly recorded elsewhere), multiple photos and videos elsewhere of dozens of buses parked nearby to ship people in and back home when the farce concludes.

https://twitter.com/krides/status/1575945547080699904

Fun to read PTN's annexation speech - touches on more than a few of the far-right's wailing-points:

https://www.reuters.com/world/extracts-putins-speech-annexation-ceremony-2022-09-30/

Do we really want, here, in our country, in Russia, instead of 'mum' and 'dad', to have 'parent No. 1', 'parent No. 2', 'No. 3'? Have they gone completely insane? Do we really want ... it drilled into children in our schools ... that there are supposedly genders besides women and men, and [children to be] offered the chance to undergo sex change operations? ... We have a different future, our own future.

Hotblack Desiato

Fun to note the staples of communist-era stage management - flags are all identical (handed out before, binned afterwards), cheering sounds stitched in over a passive, uncheering crowd, close-ups of the thug (possibly recorded elsewhere), multiple photos and videos elsewhere of dozens of buses parked nearby to ship people in and back home when the farce concludes.

Sounds like an Irish pro-life rally

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119695697#Comment_119695697

or a Trump rally.

robindch

or a Trump rally.

Indeed - synchronized messaging too - on Friday, the GOP's political action committee announced, in a rapidly-deleted tweet, its suspicions concerning Biden's support for Ukraine:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/1/2126372/--Conservative-now-just-means-hates-America-and-CPAC-made-that-brutally-clear

btw, for anybody wondering about the stitched-in cheering:

https://twitter.com/KyivPost/status/1576930376416899074

robindch

State-controlled broadcaster, RT, has issued the latest in a series of winter ads in which RT thinks of Europe, and stretches out a finger:

https://mobile.twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1606347049284165632

robindch

The excellent Simon Ostrovsky looks into what Russians are doing to non-Russian Orthodox religious believers in Ukraine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh0IdyeiAiQ&ab_channel=PBSNewsHour