Thread by @loogunda

#Donetsk oblast: "My source in #Novoazovsk (= occupied since 2014) says an (explosion) occurred in the warehouse in #Markyne (=google.com/maps/place/Nov…) a couple days ago. This somehow didn't hit the news"

https://twitter.com/sir_T_Lawrence/status/1548925379226009600

"It's just like the (explosion) in #Kalmiuske, which is not far away. The south of Donetsk oblast has always been terra incognita for media"

https://twitter.com/Whiteeagle210/status/1548927043810693121

In these^ translations the "explosion" is in brackets because it's not a direct translation but an interpretation - if you'll machine translate the originals you'll get "cotton" instead or some nonsense. It's kind of Ukrainian wartime slang based on quite interesting premises:

Russian media/officials call all explosions in Russia хлопок (a clap/pat, w/the 2nd syllable stressed) to diminish its seriousness, the word cotton has the same spelling (1st syllable stressed), so google/yandex etc often translate translate it as cotton, bavovna in Ukrainian

So the word bavovna (cotton) in Ukrainian can now mean an explosion in Russia or in Russian-occupied territory.

In fact, google-translate is part in modern Ukrainian humour - it's often easy to catch a Russian pretending to be a Ukrainian with machine translation - you can just build your phrase in a way that would be rubbish in Ukrainian but will perfectly auto-translate into Russian.

One of the classic google-translate phrases (there are at least a few dozen of them) is підлога країни "the floor of the country" which translated into the Russian пол страны ("half country").

*translates