Like every year, Putin held a very long press conference today. And like every year, he lied through his teeth the entire time.

🧵Here are just some of the falsehoods he pushed: ‘More than 40,000 sanctions have been placed on Russia’ – Just a couple of months ago, foreign minister Lavrov said the number of sanctions was only about half that, at 21,000.

Either the West has been very busy, or Putin is lying smotrim.ru/article/4162190

In 24 years of rule, Assad and his cronies have robbed Syria blind.

@FT and @dossier_center reveal where the money went: luxury apartments in Moscow

(🧵Read on) From March 2018 to Sept 2019, the Syrian central bank secretly sent 21 planeloads carrying over $250M in cash to Russia - nearly 2 tons of $100 and €500 notes. Supposedly for wheat, military aid & services. But the timing is suspicious.

Moscow spent 8 years building influence in Syria.

It took just 72 hours to lose it all.

🧵Here’re 3 crucial lessons that reveal Putin's strategic collapse (1/15) (2/15) The Kremlin’s propagandists claimed the Syria intervention was a geopolitical triumph—a bold move to counter Western influence and return Russia to the big table on the world stage after the annexation of Crimea.

Wayne Gretzky signed on to promote a Chinese hockey team. Little did he know, it was actually a front for Putin's buddy to secretly sell Russian LNG.

🧵Here's how the greatest hockey player of all time has played a unknowingly helped Putin fund his illegal war on Ukraine
With pipeline gas exports dwindling, Putin is increasingly relying on LNG to fund his war. He’s entrusted it to one of his closest allies—his hockey buddy, Gennady Timchenko

In Russia, children are now enemies of the state: 14-year-olds jailed for vandalism, teens imprisoned for online posts.

🧵With ≈100 minors labeled as terrorist, it's a clear pattern — here's how we got here (in case one famous foreign journalist currently in Moscow wants to ask Lavrov about it) The surge in minors being prosecuted marks a shift in the nature of the regime from authoritarian to full-blown totalitarian. Even in the early years of Putin’s rule, such a thing would be impossible to imagine

Meet Lyubov Lizunova: At 16, she wrote "Death to the regime" on a garage wall. At 17, she became the first Russian schoolgirl imprisoned for opposing the war.

(Read on) In October 2022, police detained Lyubov and her friends after they wrote an anti-regime message on a garage wall. What started as a minor vandalism case would spiral into something far more sinister.

Putin just sentenced Alexei Gorinov, 63, to 5 more years in maximum-security prison—for opposing the war in Ukraine.

He held a sign: "Enough killings, stop the war."

Here's what he said in his final statement to the court🧵1/9

https://twitter.com/eu_eeas/status/1862791148814619122

"All my life I've opposed aggression, violence, and war. I've dedicated myself to peaceful activities: science, teaching, governance, and human rights. Never did I imagine that in my country, citizens favoring peace would be accused of 'justifying terrorism' and put on trial." 2/9

Prigozhin is dead, but his African media empire lives on.

Internal Wagner documents show how Putin maintains control over Central African Republic's information space.

🧵Here’s what you need to know Despite Yevgeny Prigozhin's death last year, his Wagner mercenary group still pushes Putin's agenda overseas, especially in Africa. Thanks to a defecting journalist, the @dossier_center & @FbdnStories have uncovered details of their activities in the Central African Republic.

Putin found a backdoor for banned AI chips through India's pharmaceutical industry.

The numbers are staggering: $300M in restricted servers, 1,100 units, and a network of companies designed to bypass Western sanctions.

🧵Here's how military tech Russia sanctions have failed Mumbai-based Shreya Life Sciences, a pharmaceutical company, exported over 1,100 high-end Dell servers equipped with Nvidia AI processors to Russia between April and August 2024. These servers are restricted under US and EU sanctions targeting military tech. bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Kremlin's bot networks hit unprecedented activity levels ahead of US elections, with 80% of Matryoshka network posts now targeting American voters.

🧵Here's what our investigation uncovered about their dual-narrative strategy: In the days leading up to the election, there has been a marked and noticeable increase in the activity of Russian-controlled bot accounts on social media. On Friday, their activity reached record levels agents.media/kremleboty-raz…

MAGA influencer with 2.8M Twitter followers spent the last month in Moscow. He's now on the board of Putin's newest influence operation.

Here's how Jackson Hinkle went from spreading debunked war claims to the Kremlin's inner circle, thanks to @dossier_center Hinkle, 25, is best known for spreading anti-Ukrainian fake news and photoshopped images on Twitter, which is the only platform he hasn’t been banned from yet

In October 2002, Putin sacrificed 130 Russian civilians to prevent an opposition leaders from gaining popularity.

🧵This wasn't a mistake - it was a preview of how his regime would operate. Here's what happened:
When terrorists seized Moscow's Dubrovka theater with 912 hostages inside, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and Moscow's mayor Luzhkov attempted negotiations to free women, children, and the elderly - until Putin asked them to stop

Under Kadyrov's control, Mariupol's steel plants are being gutted and sold for scrap. Here's how Putin's favorite warlord profits from occupation 1/9 2/9 Kadyrov’s men have plundered the city’s two steel mills – Azovstal and Ilyich Iron and Steel Works – stripping them of millions of dollars' worth of equipment and scrap metal, which is shipped to Russia wsj.com/world/russia/r…

Meet Ilan Shor, the Kremlin’s new favorite oligarch in Moldova.

This fugitive tycoon, convicted in the "theft of the century", is now at the center of unprecedented meddling in Moldova's pivotal elections.

1/9 Here’s what we know about him, thanks to @dossier_center 2/9 Shor made his first millions running duty-free shops in Chisinau. Then, remarkably, at just 24 years old with zero banking experience, he became chairman of Moldova's largest bank - Banca de Economii.

France just broke a crucial barrier for Russian deserters.

For the first time ever, an EU country has welcomed soldiers without papers - and it could change everything about Putin's war.

🧵Here's why this matters: Since the invasion, several European countries have – to varying degrees – made it very difficult for Russian citizens to escape the country and avoid being dragged into Putin’s war machine

Soviet psychiatry was notorious for being weaponized against political dissidents.

Now, Putin is reviving this practice, with nearly 50 sane critics currently subjected to forced "treatment".

Here are the stories of some of them: Think about that. People are being sent for "treatment" under the "fake news" law. In other words, they're being declared mentally disabled for telling the truth about the war, for disagreeing with the regime.

Complete collapse of law and order. Putin was already recruiting convicts to fight his war in Ukraine. Now, he’s expanded that to anyone facing charges.

🧵Both short and long-term consequences of this will be catastrophic. A closer look: As of this month, anybody charged with a crime in Russia can sign a contract with the Defense Ministry in exchange for the charges being dropped, under a law signed by Putin last Wednesday.

What does this mean? washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/…

After serving almost two years in jail for a picture his daughter drew, single father Alexey Moskalyov was released yesterday. His child met him at the gates of the prison 1/7 In 2022, 13-year-old Masha Moskalyova drew an anti-war picture in class, showing a Ukrainian woman shielding a child from missiles. The school principal reported her to the police 2/7

Putin’s ‘dear friend’, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, seemingly forgot to wish him a happy birthday last week.

However, he did remember to sign a declaration of support for Ukraine. Moscow formally continues to consider Belgrade ‘friendly’, and Serbia hasn’t introduced any sanctions over the war in Ukraine. But Vucic has toed a careful line since the war started, and has made it clear he considers Serbia’s future to be in Europe

A regime that fears a nurse with 15 social media followers has truly lost its way.

🧵The story of Yulia Menshikh's 8 year sentence is a damning indictment of Putin's rule Last week, a Moscow court sentenced nurse Olga Menshikh to eight years in prison for social media posts about the war in Ukraine

A messy divorce, a hostile business takeover and a deadly public shootout in the very heart of Moscow.

Here’s how “Russia’s Amazon” may have cost Chechen warlord Kadyrov everything Wildberries is Russia’s largest online retailer, founded in 2004 by Tatyana Bakalchuk, with help from her husband, IT technician Vladislav. It fast became a billion-dollar business, and during Covid it exploded, valued at $6bn in 2020