Putin's most powerful weapon in this war isn't the Oreshnik missile.

It is something far cheaper and infinitely more scalable: lies.

🧵Shameless lies literally capture cities — here're some examples: The Russian military has a term for this: "capturing a settlement on credit."

They report the victory on Telegram and TV now and plan to achieve it "someday." This way, the same town can be "taken" over and over, for example, General Kuzovlev "captured" Kupiansk twice in two months.

[2/14]militarnyi.com/en/news/gerasi…

We already knew the Kremlin was sending men to die in Ukraine.

But a new @dossier_center investigation based on leaked military records shows it's far worse than anyone imagined. For soldiers in front-line assault units, the odds of surviving the war are approaching zero.

(Read on) According to internal documents, more than 28,000 soldiers were assigned to a single Russian division in 2024. Its full wartime strength should not exceed 14,000.

That means roughly a whole division's worth of personnel was lost in one year — killed, wounded beyond return, captured, or missing.

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The Iran war is expected to bring Putin an extra $4.5 billion in April alone. That buys him time in Ukraine, but it does not buy him a breakthrough.

Here's why: 🧵[1/6] Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz removed a substantial share of global oil supply from the market, and demand for Russian crude rose sharply. At the same time, higher energy prices complicate the task for Western governments trying to maintain strict sanctions.

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Starlink terminals on the Russian front are now just expensive dinner tables.

@elonmusk shut off every unregistered device — and it turns out the entire Russian military machine ran on an American commercial product.

(🧵Read on) In this war, internet drives the entire war machine on both sides.

Command posts look like a cross between a gamer's room — with dozens of screens streaming drone feeds, coordinating artillery in real time.

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Ilya Remeslo filed the complaint that put Navalny on trial.

Then testified against him in a prison courtroom.

[1/16] 🧵Yesterday, he went on Telegram and called Putin a war criminal who must resign and face trial Remeslo is a 42-year-old pro-Kremlin blogger. Since at least 2015, he has filed complaints, written denunciations, and helped block opposition websites. He was not adjacent to the Kremlin's machinery — he was part of it.

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The West spent four years building an energy strategy to make Putin irrelevant.

A war in Iran could collapse it in months — not by restoring Russian supply, but by proving the alternative is just as fragile. (🧵Read on — 1/13) When Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he committed a strategic error that had nothing to do with the battlefield. He demonstrated to every European buyer that Russia was an unreliable energy supplier.



[2/13] eia.gov/todayinenergy/…

Journalists have exposed Center 795 — Russia's newest assassination unit.

It was caught because one of its officers used Google Translate to talk to a hired killer, and did so under the watchful eye of the FBI. 🧵[1/12] Center 795 was created in December 2022 after Unit 29155, the GRU squad behind the Skripal poisoning and the Montenegro coup attempt, was exposed.

Investigators identified officers by name, by photo, and even by their passports, which had been issued with consecutive numbers.

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iPods now cost up to $7000 in Moscow — when your music streaming dies mid-commute because there is no mobile signal, you need one.

🧵The center of the capital has had no mobile internet for an entire week. [1/9] Mobile internet across the center of Moscow stopped working on March 6. At first, a handful of government-approved sites still loaded: public services, state railways, VKontakte. By March 12, six days into the blackout, nothing opens at all, with or without a VPN.

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In this photo, a baby taken from an orphanage in occupied Kherson is being baptized into the family of a major Russian party leader. They gave her a new name and erased her birthplace.

🧵A new UN report traces the system Putin built to do this at scale The girl's name is Margarita Prokopenko. She had a legal guardian in Ukraine, Darina Repina, who was also caring for her sister Anna.

After the occupation, the family reached Greece. Repina wants both sisters together but the Putin's regime has not returned Margarita.



[2/12]eng.obozrevatel.com/section-news/n…

Putin's shadow war on EU is no longer run by professionals. The Kremlin lost most of its spy networks and replaced them with desperate people willing to work for cash.

🧵One taxi driver shows what that looks like in practice Western security officials say Aleksei Kolosovsky, a 42-year-old from Krasnodar, has become a key facilitator in the Kremlin's sabotage campaign across Europe.

He is not a trained intelligence officer. He is a former cab driver who investigators say works closely with the GRU.

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Over 12,000 complaints about commanders killing their own soldiers, filed with Russian military prosecutors over three and a half years of war.

A team of journalists tracked the officers doing it and identified over 60 by name: [🧵1/12]
The investigation, "Обнулители" (The Nullifiers) published in Verstka (@verstka_media), by Ivan Zhadaev, Olesya Gerasimenko, Rina Richter, and Ivan Smurov documents how Russian officers execute their own troops through beatings, forced assaults, and drone strikes on the wounded:

[2/12]verstka.media/im-pohuj-kogo-…

Polish border guards found a tunnel from Belarus that was 1.5 meters high, braced with concrete, and built by specialists Warsaw believes came from the Middle East.

🧵Here is how Moscow is turning migration into a weapon against Europe — [1/9]
The tunnel near Narewka was reportedly 1.5 meters high and braced to prevent collapse. Warsaw believes Belarus brought in Middle Eastern specialists with direct experience in complex tunnel construction to design and build them.

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Sedanka has no running water, no indoor toilets.

What it does have: a brand-new monument to the "heroes of the special military operation."

A village of 258 people has lost 12 men, 7 more are missing (🧵Read on) Winter temperatures here, 7,000km from Ukraine, fall to -10C and below. Firewood is how people survive. But with all the men gone, local women say there is nobody to gather and chop it.

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My friend Boris Nemtsov was murdered 11 years ago today. He was one of the few who openly challenged Putin, and it cost him his life.

🧵The case was solved just enough to bury it. [1/10] We met in the 1990s. Over two decades, different paths, different fates. While I was in prison, Boris stood at pickets holding my portrait, supported my family, and never stopped fighting for my freedom. You don't forget thinks like that.

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Dialog with Putin isn't just possible — it's unavoidable.

But the Europeans pushing for it are focused on the wrong thing entirely.

↓ Here's what they should focus on instead 🧵 At the @MunSecConf, many European politicians asked me whether dialog with Putin is still possible, or even desirable.

My position has not changed in four years: yes, there must be dialog. He is an enemy, but you must always talk to your enemy.

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Putin sold Russia's partnership with China as a triumph of multipolarity.

In reality, he's turned Russia into Beijing's discount gas station — and a new report lays out exactly how deep the dependency goes.

(🧵Read on — 1/12) The @nestcentreorg report "Marriage Without Love" makes a simple argument: this is not the strategic alliance they swear it is. Instead, it is a transactional arrangement built on necessity, opportunism, and shared hostility toward the West.

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Georgy Avaliani didn't want to kill Ukrainians. For that, he was thrown in a basement and tortured. He escaped on his 3rd attempt.

🧵Now Germany says he can go back safely. Germany is wrong — [1/10] Georgy Avaliani was mobilised in September 2022 and sent to the front weeks later. After trying to flee the war, he was captured and tortured in a makeshift detention cell known as 'the basement'

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We were taught that truth is the best weapon.

That if people have access to facts, they'll figure it out.

This turned out to be completely, dangerously wrong

(🧵Read on) Information is no longer scarce: everyone has access to it. The Kremlin understood this sooner than most. Unlike Pravda in Soviet times, they don't see hiding facts as the biggest priority — instead, they flood you with versions of events until you start drowning in them.

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The Abu Dhabi talks won't end the war—but they're far from pointless. Here's what they could actually achieve, and why Putin may be forced to soften his demands within months: 🧵[1/8] Previous rounds of talks have led to some important, albeit limited results. First and foremost, I'm talking about prisoner exchanges - the UAE has mediated 17 of them in the past four years, allowing thousands of captured soldiers to return to their families

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A Bangladeshi janitor arrived in Russia expecting a cleaning job. Within weeks, he was sent to the front lines in Ukraine with a rifle in his hands.

🧵Read on to learn how Putin is avoiding another round of mobilization: [1/12] An investigation by @ap has found that Russian companies have been approaching Bangladeshi workers, claiming to be recruiting for civilian jobs - but when they arrive in Russia, the migrants are coerced into signing military contracts and deployed into combat zones against their will

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An IT specialist was deported back to Russia at the weekend after being detained for jaywalking in Kazakhstan. The moment his plane landed in Russia, he was arrested for treason.

🧵 The walls are closing in for those fleeing the Putin regime [1/10] Russian-Ukrainian dual citizen Alexander Kachkurkin is one of two people to be handed over to the Kremlin by Kazakhstan in the past four days, which clearly shows that the country is no longer safe for Russians pursued by the regime.

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