Suck them in, cut their supply line, and encircle them?
Hopefully. As Russians withdraw their forces from northern Ukraine and move them east, that frees up Ukrainian forces to do the same.
Karma indeed.
Perhaps a bit off, but essentially what I meant is that Putin’s aim at this point is to wipe out the population of Ukraine and to destroy everything so, technically and literally, no not a concentration camp. But is it any better at this point?
Well eventually he’ll run out of soldiers and the Paralympics athletes will be recruited.
In the meantime we do need to up our game about getting information into Russia. There will be a lot of wounded soldiers coming back with stories to tell.
Really? Wounded soldiers coming back?
I am beginning to think I’m an outlier because I think much darker things about Putin’s Russia than most. There are reports of the Russians leaving their wounded behind when they leave. If it’s important to Putin that the truth not come out back in Russia then there are ways to make sure those wounded soldiers, or less than absolutely faithful soldiers, don’t get an opportunity to speak to a mass audience. Internal exile, for example, the old “send them to Siberia” method. Or just so pumping out the propaganda that anyone not toeing the line will be discredited. And so one - so many unsavory things that could happen.
This is a week old but gives some flavor easily missed:
I don’t mean to mean to imply that Russian media is half free. If you hear the same message 90 percent of the time, the effect of rarely hearing something else may just be to convince yourself of not being hoodwinked. So Putin may be fine with his people occasionally hearing a bit of real Zelenskyy. It’s a more subtle approach than that of North Korea or Turkmenistan, but maybe just as effective.
If they’re leaving wounded behind then reporters from around the world can interview them.
The U.S. spends money on content:
I don’t know that we do anything much on the VPN side, nor do I know how practical it would be for foreign governments to step in there.
As I have posted previously, it’s not just about getting our message in, but also about having a legitimate message of, dare I say, love for the Russian people at the same time we resist Putin’s war.
I saw that speech a few days ago - one can watch it here - and found it quite curious. The speaker is known to be pro-Kremlin, but the speech’s content is negative and critical of the war. The conclusion he comes to, though, is that Russia must win the war or face “the beginning of the end of the Russian state”.
I’m not sure he’s wrong. I think the war has already begun the “end of the Russian state”.
Zbigniew Brzezinski summed it up well: “Russia can be a democracy, or an Empire, but it can’t be both.”
That reminds me. Is the current US ambassador to Poland a relative of Zbigniew Brzezinski?
His younger son, Mark Brzezinski.
Ah. I didn’t think to check Wikipedia. I saw his bio from the State Department and it didn’t say.
But that doesn’t get the information into Russia, which was the point of the post I was responding to.
Everything old is new again…
Aw man, I was gonna post that…
This calm before the next storm is making me nervous. No one knows what Russia will do next. There’s always a concern they could return to Keiv.
Ukraine is getting more tanks. They need to resupply quickly and build defenses.
These are the lines I found most poignant, even though the song context is different:
Kiev! said the commissar
from there your own way home
But I never got to Kiev
we never came by home