For those who think Russians are about to rise up in open revolt, here's a translated post and comments from a popular Telegram channel covering the war. You'll see that there are plenty in Russia who are desperate to see ordinary Ukrainians slaughtered. 1/5
The main post (I won't link to it, because screw these guys): "The Russian army is using their guns. Right now they're only shooting into the air." Video shows a small crowd gathered in Ukrainian town. Shots fired. Cameraperson ducks down behind a car. 2/5
Here are the comments, in order, and with no editing: "Should have done it on the first day."
"That's the way. They don't understand anything else."
"A long time coming."
"😂😂😂😂"
"That shut them up. If only they broke up demonstrations in Moscow and Petersburg like that." 3/5
"That's the only way to do it with scum."
"[Antisemitic image of Ukrainians]"
"If they don't get it the nice way, we'll give it to them the bad way."
"The big boys really shat themselves."
"Shame they didn't shoot into the crowd, the Nazis." 4/5
It goes on. Hundreds of comments, thousands of views. Russians who want to are seeking out these pockets of Telegram to share and encourage these deplorable viewpoints. Worrying times. 5/5
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Big Thread: Russian propaganda is tanking, but Ukraine has been hitting home runs for a week now.
Here's how they're doing it by turning Putin's own favourite propaganda themes against him.
Putin's spent 2 decades building a World War 2 cult in Russia. You all know what this looks like: huge military parades on Victory Day each year, blockbuster state-funded WW2 movies, history education in classrooms, constant WW2 documentaries on state TV...
...adulation for surviving veterans and their families, the "Immortal Regiment" parades in which ordinary Russians carry their veteran parents' photographs through Russian towns each year.
Big Thread: After a few more days of war, I've been carefully monitoring Russian social media reaction and production and I'm more convinced than before that Putin's regime has totally overestimated its ability to win a propaganda war.
Russians are being bombarded with very effective Russian-language anti-war propaganda. We're seeing a lot about Zelensky etc. but Russians are widely viewing some HUGE celebrities with big, big follower counts coming out against the war.
You might have read about Yury Dud, the popular Russian blogger, speaking out against the war. 5 million followers, and look at what he's sharing at the top of his Instagram page: strong stuff.
Big 🧵: We constantly hear that Putin is a master media strategist, but here’s a thread on WW2, national heroes, myth, and why he cannot win the media war at home.
In short, enthusiasm for the war is going to crater because Putin's propagandists have an impossible task.
The key way in which Soviet writers - I've written an entire book on this - created a hugely popular myth of national self-sacrifice in WW2 was by focusing on people, not events. The papers were filled with stories of ordinary people laying down their lives for the greater good.
This was a hugely effective approach even as the country was in the depths of torment.
In short, readers connect with humans, not with tactics, strategy, or even which towns and cities are under attack.
Russian-Ukrainian solidarity from one of Konstantin Simonov's wartime Stalingrad stories: "Viktoriya and one of my traveling companions turned out to be from the same area. They spent half the crossing trying to outdo each other’s stories about Dnepropetrovsk, chattering... 1/4
....about the city’s streets, about the building my companion had lived in, and about the building where Viktoriya had studied. They recalled every last detail of their hometown. 2/4
It felt that, in their hearts at least, they had refused, and would always refuse, to surrender Dnepropetrovsk. It felt that, come what may, they believed that their town could never belong to anybody else." 3/4
Beautiful, tragic words from Mikhail Bulgakov on war in Kyiv. From his novel "The White Guard": 'A year after her daughter Elena Turbin had married Captain Sergei Talberg, and in the week in which her eldest son Alexei Turbin returned from years of grim and disastrous... 🧵
...campaigning to Ukraine, to the city of Kiev and home, the white coffin with the body of their mother was carried away down the slope of St. Alexei’s Hill towards the Embankment, to the little church of St. Nicholas the Good.
Their mother’s funeral had been in May, the cherry and acacia blossom brushing against the narrow lancet windows of the church. His cape glittering and flashing in the golden sunlight, their parish priest Father Alexander had stumbled from grief and embarrassment.