Noodle chronicles

  • Propaganda Review pt.3: Meet the fruitloops

    To conclude the series, I’d like to showcase how vile their propagandists and propagandist shows are. That’s what we have to deal with regularly.

    The never-ending propaganda has a significant impact on lots of people in Russia, even on those who say they never watch TV; as people don’t live in a vacuum, some of their friends, co-workers do watch the shows and if something is repeated many times, it can leave a dent in your worldview.

    • RT Russian head (video) in March: Suka, this country should not exist, and we will do everything so that it does not exist. And I, blyat, told you that we will burn down your constitution, blyat, right on Khreshchatyk. And, blyat, I will come there myself. You asked me, blyat “Will you dare to come?” You’re already hiding who in Czechia, who in Germany whom I’ve spoken to. Listen to me, I will personally attend to the burning of your shitty so-called constitution. Right, blyat, on Maidan Nezalezhnosti.
    • Same guy, but recently (video):
      — They [Ukrainian children] should have been drowned in the Tysyna [river], right there, where the duckling swam. Just drown those children, drown them right in Tysyna.
      — Every hut over there is called “smerekova khata”. Shove them right into those huts and burn them up.

    He got fired when the video went viral, but another top propagandist from RT days after was ready to forgive him.

    • Lawmaker Aleksey Zhuravlev in March (video yet to be translated): They need to be shown what will happen to Kyiv, same as in Mariupol, if these bastards take assault rifles in their hands. That’s what we have to do. Or do you think we will stop now, and they will also say: “well, ok, there will be peace”? Not until our troops are on the border with Poland.
    • Kadyrov in April said that if it were up to him, he would use tactical nukes.
    • One of the most popular Russia-1 channel shows (video): I would say: “you have three days for all civilians to leave Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa,” 3 days. If it’s not done, we tear it all down, block by block. 3 days.

    In the next segments, they advocate striking our critical energy infrastructure, apparently turning millions into refugees (ethnic cleansing) and killing with cold those who can’t flee (genocide) is a fair deal to them:

    • One of the most popular Russia-1 channel shows (video): There will be unconditional capitulation. Now Putin is using food, heat, lighting, and gas as a weapon. We’ll probably start using children’s toys that way too.
    • In one of the most popular Russia-1 shows, top propagandists urge a total blackout of Ukraine (video).
    • Popular NTV show (video):
      — There are announcements that Ursula von der Leyen is planning to visit Kyiv. I sincerely hope that Kyiv and the Kyiv region will be plunged into darkness when she shows up there.
      — The strikes against the infrastructure. The civilian and military infrastructure can’t be separated. If all of Ukraine is plunged into cold, into darkness, if there is no railway communication, no fuel, and nothing else, then no one can supply any reserves.
      — We have to scale up the strikes against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure so that region after region, district after district, we plunge Ukraine into darkness. … so by December 20, 20 million Ukrainians will flee.
    • Same show, another day (video): Our victory depends upon how fast we can destroy the entire critical infrastructure of that country.

    Denials of our existence and promises to find a solution to “the Ukrainian question”:

    • Propagandist Sergey Markov on Echo Moskvy in January 2022 (video is not yet translated): A war between Russia and Ukraine is impossible because independent Ukraine does not exist. What does exist is an occupied, 21st-century style, in a hybrid way by the US and UK, a poor and unfortunate country with people groaning under the yoke of the occupation.
    • ria.ru removed article (because things didn’t go according to plan) at the beginning of the invasion:
      — Russia is restoring its unity — the tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe in our history, its unnatural dislocation, has been overcome.
      — Ukraine as anti-Russia will no longer exist.
      — Vladimir Putin has assumed, without a drop of exaggeration, a historical responsibility by deciding not to leave the solution to the Ukrainian question to future generations.
    • Another ria.ru article:
      — Denazification will inevitably also be a de-Ukrainization — a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic component of self-identification of the population of the territories of historical Little Russia and New Russia, begun by the Soviet authorities.
      — Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construction that does not have its own civilizational content.
    • One of the most popular Russia-1 channel shows (video): This idea [of being Ukrainian] needs to be erased from start to finish. It’s been poisoning the lives of Slavic people for 100 years.
    • Solovyov live (video):
      — A Ukrainian is a Russian who got sick. Like a transvestite, he was born a man, but then something happened, he had an operation and decided to become a woman and live like one. … A Ukrainian is a Russian spiritual transvestite. … I was always interested: when was this moment when they shifted from a healthy Russian person, let’s say, a Southern Russian person, into total schizophrenia.
      — The future is that they’re Russian people who recovered from their craziness.
    • One of the most popular shows on Russia-1 channel (video):
      — We’re erasing the project “anti-Russia” from the map.
      — Ukraine is part of historical Russia. Ukraine, as a country, never existed.
    • Lawmaker Matveychev (untranslated video): My opinion is absolutely radical: I think the very concept of “Ukraine” should not exist in the future. And the concept of “Ukrainian” should not exist in the future.
    • Dmitri Medvedev, ex-prime minister, ex-president, current politician (article): Deep Ukrainianism, fueled by anti-Russian poison and all-consuming lies about its identity, is one big fake. This phenomenon has never happened in history. And now it does not exist.

    I’ve mentioned the most popular shows and platforms where they try to appear civilized. Less-known folks can be absolutely vicious, like in this show: “All Ukrainian cities should be demolished. There are no people there.”

    I’m very grateful to our beloved Julia Davis for showing the world how rotten the Kremlin and its media have become. More thanks go to Francis Scarr and Dmitri.

    Recently, I started collecting those quotes and videos in a Notion notebook.

    Thanks so much for reading the article❣️

    Glory to our allies 🥰!

    Previous part:

    Propaganda Review pt.2: “8 years of the bombing of Donbas”

  • Propaganda Review pt.2: “8 years of the bombing of Donbas”

    The meme was translated by Dmitri

    First of all, I’d like to put this in the context that without Russian special forces planning and military participation, there would be no republics. Donetsk was a thriving and one of the wealthiest cities in Ukraine with an international airport, an amazing soccer arena built in 2004, several universities; it was known as an industrial center with lots of factories.

    pro-Ukrainian protests in Donetsk in March 2014

    According to Girkin (FSB colonel) he was “the trigger” that started the events in 2014. “I pressed the trigger of the war. If our squad had not crossed the border, everything would have ended, as in Kharkiv, as in Odesa. There would have been several dozen killed, burned, and arrested. And that would be the end of it. And practically, our squad launched the flywheel of the war, which is still going on.” He probably over-exaggerated his own importance, but it’s just another example of Russia’s involvement.

    There were many sightings of “green men” (Russian soldiers without insignia) on social media. By the way, prior to Crimea’s annexation, they also pretended that the “green men” in Crimea were not from Russia. Bellingcat, EchoSec, and others did good quality investigations using open-source evidence. For example, Bellingcat analyzed published imagery of awarded medals to understand who participated, EchoSec analyzed data from social media. MH17 was most likely shot down by a Russian-supplied Buk missile, according to PACE (but the final verdict of the investigation will be announced on Nov 17.)

    In a recent interview Alexander Hodakovsky (separatist, one of “DPR’s” battalion commanders) said: “When I was told in 2014 that we were incorporated into SoMi (ЮжВо, Russia’s Southern Military District) and that it’s the most ‘commercial’ district, …” So the Russian army took everything under control back in 2014.

    The next thing I’d like to address is that Zelensky started his presidency by moving our forces back in several places from the line of separation and was harshly criticized (+ people protested throughout Ukraine) by many for that, including myself. Because it’s an artificially created open wound on Ukraine’s body that drains our soldiers’ lives and resources. You’d think that Putin would be happy with this development, but it’s precisely the other way around; he saw a weakness: a comedian without experience in politics that he hoped during a full-scale invasion would run away or do some irrational things sowing discord and division leading to a governmental collapse and granting Putin another easy win, maybe not as easy as with the annexation of Crimea, he probably didn’t believe in 3–4 days like what Lukashenko (Belarussian president) and others had said, but it was indeed planned as a special military operation of approximately 2–4 weeks.

    Also, the casualties were going down as time went by:

    Total conflict-related civilian deaths from 2014 to 2021

    As you can see, most of them happened in the first two years, during the hot phase of the conflict. But note that it’s not always clear who’s responsible for those casualties, and it includes everything, like stepping on a mine. MH-17 crash victims were included in the statistics as well. Additionally, part of those casualties was on Ukraine’s side (the red line is the line of separation):

    Civilian casualties from 2017 to 2020

    Next, if you look at photos and videos of Donetsk before Feb 2022, the city that was near the line of separation (except the airport where our soldiers were located and, in their usual manner, Russians destroyed it to get them out), if you compare it to Mariupol and many other towns and villages, it’s day and night, even though our army supposedly was bombing it for 8 fucking years. Russia managed to erase many places out of existence in few measly months. Donetsk in 2020:

    And here’s Mariupol before and after:

    A different video of Mariupol before the invasion:

    This is not a fragment from a sci-fi movie, it’s a city in Ukraine called Bakhmut that Russians are trying to take:

    Many towns and villages have almost no undamaged houses. Some examples:

    Another thing worth pointing out is that the towns and cities that Russia destroyed were like 98% Russian speaking. Putin has zero fucks to give about them. Though it’s not like he cares about Russians either.

    Would you like to know the Russian government’s position on territories getting independent 🤔? Well, I’m going to explain anyway. Meet Chechnya (Ichkeria). They declared their independence in 1991 (Ukraine got its independence in 91 too) and even won the first Chechen war against a formidable and enormous, in comparison, enemy. It took two wars to take them back in, and many ruined lives.

    Grozny (Chechnya’s capital) in 1999

    Other big brain stuff

    Combat mosquitoes and fighter Doritos

    A quick note about the ‘US-orchestrated coup in 2014’. Like biolabs, it’s so insane that I don’t even want to explain it in detail.

    We protest a lot, it’s our tradition. In 2012 before the mass protests in Kyiv, I volunteered and protested for months, then went to Kyiv for around two weeks. My family went there too but didn’t stay as long. In 2013 as well, all our family members protested in our city. I also volunteered in few different ways, and our family donated some things for permanent protestors. I wanted to go to Kyiv but couldn’t due to personal issues. The protests were peaceful for a long period of time (like 7 months) until protesters started to get caught and thrown into prison, abused, killed, and eventually, when 107 protesters were killed on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, this was when the corrupt thug decided to flee.

    But according to tankie unimaginable scumbags, we can’t do anything without it being a CIA plot. After many months of vicious resistance, it’s still not obvious to them that we want neither Putin nor his puppets here in Ukraine. All I can wish for them is to experience exactly what we’re experiencing: while their country is being destroyed, people getting murdered, tortured, raped, as they lose their family members, online psychos roll their eyes, laugh in their faces, call them nazis, CIA bots, etc. That would be very deserving.

    Thanks for reading the second part of the series. The next article shows what Russian media have turned into under the control of Putin’s regime:

    Propaganda Review pt.3: Meet the fruitloops

    Previous part:

    Why Kremlin propagandists’ verbal diarrhea is worse than pigeons on laxatives pt.1

  • Why Kremlin propagandists’ verbal diarrhea is worse than pigeons on laxatives pt.1

    Mandatory glamorous Khuilo, as posting Putin’s pics with makeup is against the law in Russia.

    I’ve never written a political article before, but now given that our country is under threat of total destruction and Russian propaganda is working quite well, their talking points are taken as a given (like starting a war because of the NATO “threat”), it’s not possible to resist the urge to write something, also if I don’t survive this war, I want my opinion to be recorded and publicly available.

    It’s unfortunate to see that plenty (but thankfully not the majority) of people from our allied countries buy into it and, as a result, become an extension of Putin’s propaganda machine, another tool to excuse our genocide. Despite the fact that their propaganda trashes those countries nonstop, makes fake stories, and threatens them with nukes.

    It’s kind of understandable, there’s a strong anti-establishment bias in many places; whatever the government is in favor of, many are automatically against. Also, people are busy with their own lives and have enough problems in their own countries, and it takes time to understand this conflict. And, of course, strong “US bad” sentiments, not realizing that while the US made mistakes that were deservingly criticized, it does not in any way excuse Russia’s atrocities. A ruthless dictatorship like Russia annexing territories and now trying to overcome and destroy an entire country is insanity in the 21st century. In addition, if someone does not understand, the Iraq war and this one are not quite comparable; the US didn’t annex part of Iraq and then tried to annex it fully, claiming it never existed.

    Putin’s Russia is a very dangerous and inhumane regime, whether it’s invading their neighbors and participating in conflicts all over the globe or killing journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, defectors like Alexander Litvinenko with polonium, Skripal with Novichok, political opponents like Navalny with Novichok (survived the poisoning, but was jailed), Nemtsov, whistleblowers like Sergei Magnitsky. Nerve agents, radioactive materials — anything goes, they stop at nothing to get what they want. I mentioned the most high-profile and known cases. There are less known and also unknown who fell out of the basement’s window without it reaching the news and turning into a scandal.

    Even though the propagandists badmouth many developed countries as “rotten,” many of their top politicians send their families to study, live, and buy houses and villas there. Top propagandist Vladimir Solovyov owns two villas in Italy, Sergey Lavrov’s (diplomat and politician) daughter lived and studied in the US, then the UK, and is (was?) not even fluent in Russian, Dmitri Peskov’s (Putin’s press secretary) daughter studied and lived in France, his son lived in the UK and also in France, Putin’s daughter owned property in France (probably not anymore, all top officials’ family members were sanctioned), Vladimir Yakunin’s (RF ambassador, Russian Railways ex-head) kids live abroad in Switzerland and the UK [bbc]. Yelena Mizulina’s (Duma and Senate member) son lives in Belgium. She’s a strong proponent of anti-gay laws, even though her son worked for a law firm that sponsored pro-LGBT associations and organizations in Belgium. The list goes on and on, but it’s not the topic of this article.

    “NATO made us do it”

    NATO pooped my pants when I least expected it

    To this day, this talking point is brought up as a reason for the invasion, even though it’s absurd and nonsensical.

    • Putin is not afraid of NATO; he’s well aware that no one would dare to attack a nuclear power, the second largest at that. He may be a bloodthirsty psychopath, but not a complete idiot.
    • By annexing Crimea and starting the hybrid war in the East part of Ukraine, Putin himself made NATO more popular not only in Ukraine but in other neutral countries like Finland and Sweden. Also, if someone doesn’t know, Russia was bordering NATO countries (Latvia, Estonia) before 2022. NATO would’ve disassembled on its own if not for the erratic actions from Kremlin.
    • Ukraine had no chance of joining it in the near future (10–30 years). Countries like Germany would insta block us, not to mention Hungary, whose government is friendly with Russia, even after this insane full-scale invasion. That’s what Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Putin before the war started.

    Putin previously said that the USSR collapse was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” that it was an event in life that had the most significant impact on him, and if he could have, he would’ve prevented it. At the beginning of the current events, on February 21st, he said that Ukraine was created by Lenin (another BS talking point), and since we want decommunization, he will show it to us (i.e., destroy Ukraine and “fix” “Lenin’s mistake.”)

    That sick fuck wants to recreate the USSR and believes that Ukraine belongs there. It’s clear as a day to someone who’s been keeping an eye on the events and what their politicians have been saying (of course, there are other reasons for this invasion, like excellent ratings.)

    This is one of the problems with dictatorships. As a dictator gets older, starts feeling the breath of death, and stops caring about mundane day-to-day things, they want to do something “great,” see some fireworks, to end up in history books as the great uniter. That’s why another pointless and tragic war might await us in the future between China and Taiwan.

    “They deserve it because they’re all neo-nazis anyway”

    Always use confirmation bias if instructions are unclear

    Overall, our president, previous prime minister Volodymyr Groisman, and other politicians are Jewish. Also, millions of Ukrainians died during WWII fighting Hitler. It’s never been a widespread issue, it became a problem after 2014 when the Kremlin needed to find justification for their crimes. Then it became an even bigger problem when the war began. A very cynical strategy to turn a victim of genocide into a villain.

    Hoaxlines used Cloud Explorer to analyze nazism related articles about Ukraine, and there were spikes in 2014 and 2022:

    The NYT used Semantic Visions to scan 8 million articles:

    In the Azov battalion, unfortunately, part of the soldiers were indeed neo-nazis; it doesn’t mean that every single one of them was too, because their primary objective was to defend Ukraine. Then it was incorporated into the army and reformed. It’s not the same battalion compared to what it used to be at the beginning when it was comprised of volunteers. But, it doesn’t mean that the far-right issue is fully solved in our army, just like in the general population — not everyone is an angel.

    In some cases (not saying that in the majority), some of those things, like the nazi salute, were done as trolling. In our view, Russian propaganda is so irrational and insane that it’s funny and instantly becomes a meme. Propagandists called us ‘каратели’ (punishes), and people started adding “каратель” to their social media handles, then said that we use Russians as slaves, and people began talking about how they use slaves in their day to day lives after that. But as I said before, far-right people do exist in our country, and I strongly condemn their views.

    I don’t think it’s a widespread problem in Russia either (though the Kremlin is known for financing far-right parties in the EU), but to demonstrate that these unfortunate types are present in every country, check out a few examples below.

    Rusich group

    A photo they posted on their telegram channel

    Created by a famous neo-nazi, Alexey Milchakov. Before that, he was known because of his videos of torturing animals. In one of his posts on VK, he wrote: “Animals have rights too, and I respect their right to be 1-delicious, 2-well done, 3-vein free. Today I was once again convinced that a dog is not only a friend of a person but also a good barbecue ;)”. At that time, he also started involvement with different neo nazi groups in Russia.

    Milchakov holding a nazi flag with swastika
    Milchakov

    I don’t know why propagandists have to glorify him so much by giving him airtime through interviews and appearances with war correspondents. He’s not even hiding it, quite the opposite:

    Quotes from the interview:

    • I’m talking straight. My first actions when Chechens come. I am a Nazi. I am a Nazi. I will not go into depth, there is a nationalist, a patriot, an imperial direction, and so on. I say it straight out — I’m a Nazi.
    • You understand when you kill a person, you feel the excitement of the hunt. Who has not been on the hunt — try it, it’s interesting.

    During the conflict in 2014, he collected the ears of deceased or alive Ukrainian soldiers. Boasted that his unit does not take prisoners. And overall, the group is quite ruthless; in their telegram channel, they wrote that if anyone messed up, to not leave any witnesses behind. The channel is now private. Wayback Machine link https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://t.me/rusichdshrg/174 does not work because I think Telegram’s JS (saved by WM) interferes with the post. The message was featured by CIT while it was still up.

    As Spiegel reported [bbc], another neo-nazi group is fighting in Ukraine — the Russian Imperial legion.

    Wagner group

    A mercenary group from Russia that participated in conflicts in Syria, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Libya, Venezuela, Mozambique, Mali, and Ukraine. Here’s Dimitry Utkin, an alleged co-founder of the group:

    Dimitry Utkin

    He had “Wagner” as an army nickname, and that’s how, it’s believed, the mercenary group got its name.

    In approximately 2016, Rusich joined Wagner and went fighting in Syria.

    In Ukraine, it’s famous because of a video of them beating a man with a sledgehammer and cutting off his head in Syria. In the Central African Republic, they have executed, tortured, and beaten civilians since 2019, according to Human Rights Watch. The Daily Beast has an informative article about their activity in CAR: This Is How Russia Is Pulling Off a Free-for-All Murderous Rampage. In addition to murder and torture, they linked to the exploitation of African countries’ natural resources, the usage of asylum seekers as a weapon to put pressure on the Italian government, sending prisoners to fight in Ukraine, and others.

    In addition to links in the text, here are a few more resources explaining neo-nazi issues in the Russian army:

    Outside the army, there are countless neo nazi, imperial proto-fascist, and far-right organizations. For example, here are marches of the Russian Imperial Movement, an ultranationalist, imperialist, and fascist org. Black-yellow-white is Russian Empire’s flag:

    Next part:

    Propaganda Review pt.2: “8 years of the bombing of Donbas”
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