In a now deleted VK post, the pro-Kremlin media outlet Readovka claims that Russia’s Defense Ministry stated at a “closed briefing” that it’s lost 13,414 soldiers in Ukraine *plus* another 7,000 who are missing. 116 sailors killed aboard the Moskva, with 100+ still missing.
The archived post is still accessible here (my screenshot above is pulled from there, hence the timestamp). web.archive.org/web/2022042119…
This recalls the “9,861 killed soldiers” report from Komsomolskaya Pravda back on March 21. The paper claimed that was a hack. I don’t see any statement from Readovka about this new thing.
One last thing: this report about a closed briefing never appeared on Readovka’s Telegram channel (which has more than twice as many subscribers), suggesting some funny business of some kind.
Now there’s a statement. It’s another hack. The Ukrainians are quite good at this, it seems: t.me/readovkanews/3…
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To all those who mocked Putin’s “long tables”: Russia’s Dear Leader has heard your cruel words and now invites you to watch him go tip-to-tip with his good camping buddy, Sergey Shoigu.
Absolutely insane. St. Petersburg artist Alexandra Skochilenko is placed in remand prison pending felony prosecution for spreading “false information” about Russia’s military by swapping in war facts on price tags at a local grocery store. A customer reported her to the police.
Curiously, her case file doesn’t actually specify what she wrote on the prices. It’s as if the prosecutors are themselves afraid of adding to the documentation of Russia’s war crimes!
Why remand prison for a patently nonviolent “crime”? The judge justified the decision by noting that Skochilenko has friends in Ukraine, plus one of her Russian friends recently emigrated. t.me/chtede/46673
I get a lot of questions from people about where to find good content on Telegram. Here are some of my favorite channels (be warned: I don’t vouch for Telegram’s data security, but it’s now the go-to social network in Russia, like it or not). A thread:
This stuff is all in Russian, but there’s plenty of multimedia that is useful even without the language. For the rest, you can struggle with copy-paste machine translation or go invest 20+ years of your life into studying Russian, like I have.
I’ll start with Meduza, which is where I work yes but it’s also the single-best Telegram channel for continuous updates on all the headline news. t.me/meduzalive
I finally read Timofei Sergeitsev’s RIA Novosti op-ed myself, and I found it to be terrifying how he takes Putin’s rhetoric to its logical conclusion. An insane essay but still plausibly something the Kremlin could consider for actual implementation. meduza.io/en/live/2022/0…
Kortunov captures the core element of Sergeitsev’s madness in this analysis: when you deny Ukraine’s legitimacy (and, by extension, its right to exist), you’re playing with fire. forbes.ru/mneniya/461235…
And, right on cue, here is former President Medvedev complaining about “Ukrainianism [sic] fueled by anti-Russian poison & all-consuming lies about its own identity” and the “pseudo-history of Ukrainian statehood.” Putin, Medvedev, Sergeitsev — all sick. t.me/medvedev_teleg…
Some highlights from the final proceedings in the @doxa_journal case: as an April 1 joke, @AAAAramyan said his “main expectation” from the trial is “the fall of the Putin regime later tonight.” Also, asked about her family members, Natalia Tyshkevich said, “I have a cat-wife.”
When the judge asked as clarification, “A husband?” Tyshkevich answered, “No, we prefer to call each other precisely as I said.” t.me/sotavision/380…
The verdict won’t be announced until April 12. God, they’ve dragged out this ridiculous case over and over. t.me/sotavision/380…