Yesterday, RIA Novosti published a lengthy piece titled "What Russia should do with Ukraine", which explains in detail what Russia understands by denazification. It's truly horrific: 1/6
The special operation revealed that not only the political leadership in Ukraine is Nazi, but also the majority of the population. All Ukrainians who have taken up arms must be eliminated - because they are responsible for the genocide of the Russian people. 2/6
Ukrainians disguise their Nazism by calling it a "desire for independence" and a "European way of development". Ukraine doesn't have a Nazi party, a Führer or racial laws, but because of its flexibility, Ukrainian Nazism is far more dangerous to the world than Hitler's Nazism 3/6
Denazification means de-Ukrainianisation. Ukrainians are an artificial anti-Russian construct. They should no longer have a national identity. Denazification of Ukraine also means its inevitable de-Europeanisation. 4/6
Ukraine's political elite must be eliminated as it cannot be re-educated. Ordinary Ukrainians must experience all the horrors of war and absorb the experience as a historical lesson and atonement for their guilt. 5/6
The liberated and denazified territory of the Ukrainian state should no longer be called Ukraine. Denazification should last at least one generation - 25 years. Then the author goes on to detail exactly what needs to be done: ria.ru/20220403/ukrai… 6/6
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
'Russian spies' detained yesterday in Poland turned out to be citizens of Belarus. Belarusian state media are so eager to prove their innocence that they have published all their personal details (how did they know who exactly was detained?) and even interviews with relatives. 1/
Have a look if you happen to know Russian. Someone clearly stayed up all night to post texts first thing in the morning about how these are ordinary students, with their biographies and interviews with their parents, ex-wives and whatnot (see links below). 2/
A bizarre thread on how a standoff on the Belarusian-Ukrainian border turned into a full-scale "billboard war" in just one week. It started on 8 March when Ukrainian soldiers guarding the border with Belarus put up billboards reading "Occupiers have no place on Ukrainian soil" 1/
In response, a few days later, Belarusian border guards installed two billboards: one with a US flag and the inscription "We will help Ukraine find the real occupiers", and the other saying "Belarus remembers" with pictures of World War II. 2/
On the same day, Belarusian TV aired a story in which Belarusian border guards complained that their Ukrainian counterparts had hanged a dummy of a Russian soldier named Valera, thereby putting psychological pressure on the Belarusian border guards. 3/
Saw the news about Viktor Bout's exchange and remembered the truly wild story of how he was arrested and what Belarus had to do with it. In the late 1980s, Bout served as a military interpreter in an aviation regiment in Vitebsk, Belarus. 1/
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the regiment was disbanded and Bout opened his own air transport company in the UAE, using IL-76 aircraft from the former Vitebsk regiment, quickly becoming the main arms broker in the post-Soviet space. 2/
In the mid-1990s, Bout engineered arms supply schemes for Lukashenko, who had just come to power and started selling off vast stocks of Soviet weapons, turning Belarus into one of the largest arms exporters in the world. 3/
On Shoigu's unexpected visit to Minsk. It was most likely arranged yesterday after Putin's phone call to Lukashenko. First, Shoigu together with his Belarusian counterpart signed amendments to the 1997 security treaty (signed in a hurry, at the airfield, not at MoD HQ). 1/4
Shoigu then went straight to Lukashenko, who was playing hockey on his day off. He thanked him for training Russian mobiks (the first time this was publicly acknowledged) and said that the joint regional grouping "already looks like a sort of force that can carry out tasks". 2/4
But most importantly, for the first time, Shoigu explicitly said that Russia expects more active and constructive contacts from the Belarusian MoD and Lukashenko himself. After the meeting, Lukashenko remained in his palace until midnight (very unusual, esp. on his day off). 3/4
Let me try to explain what's wrong with the new wave of deployment of Russian troops in Belarus and why the threat of a new attack on Kyiv from the north is a bluff.
A🧵 1/
Last week Lukashenko announced the deployment of a joint Belarusian-Russian regional grouping of troops composed of Belarusian ground forces and several thousand Russian troops (Belarusian MoD later specified there would be 9,000 of them). 2/
The first trains with Russian troops have already started arriving in Belarus, and three important points should be made here. 1) Judging by the photographs, it is not regular Russian army units that arrive in Belarus, but freshly mobilised Russian reservists. 3/
The release of the Azov leadership is an even bigger blow to Russian nationalists than the Kharkiv retreat. The retreat could be explained by the mistakes of the military, while the release of the Azov command undermines the very idea of "denazification". 1/
A🧵
Russian propaganda has been demonising the Azov regiment for the last eight years, telling stories about how they "kill Russian children of Donbas". They have become something like the SS and have been opposed to ordinary Ukrainian soldiers "who are just like us". 2/
One of the main aims of denazification was the elimination of Azov, and the fall of Mariupol and their capture was the main triumph of the war to date. Their trial and execution were supposed to be the culmination of the "liberation" of Ukraine. 3/