KevinC
24072
You have got to be kidding me. Wow.
Combined with the story about Russian troops not being paid, i have to imagine their morale is sky high.
Shoigu, though he wears a general’s uniform, has never served in the military and basically has no particular understanding of military affairs.
It’s not that crazy for a defence minister to have no military background but to assume the trappings of a general seems a little weird.
abrandt
24074
Putin’s going to get right on fixing that any day now.
Grifman
24075
Heh, there goes one major Russian export industry:
After this Prigozhin (PMC Wagner guy) become very sad. Yesterday he begged Russian MoD for ammo. Don’t know why would Russian MoD give ammo to some civilian, but anyway today he publicly accused Shoigu of treason.
Regarding the supply of ammunition. “Akhmat” and some other units shared what they could. The generals, who are connected to the leadership of the army group, sign documents (including those for which they would be put in a cell by the military prosecutor’s office) just to provide us with ammunition, which we receive straight from the central supply. The Chief of General Staff and the Minister of Defense issue the commands to everyone, which state that not only the Wagner PMC should not be given any ammunition, but is also not to get air transport. Now we have information that they have crossed out receipt of sapper blades needed for the guys to dig in. There is direct confrontation, which is called nothing else but an attempt to destroy the Wagner PMC. It can be equated to treason. At a time when the Wagner PMC is fighting for Bakhmut, losing hundreds of their fighters every day.
There’s also Putin’s report to a Federal council today, but it’s basically a report to the people. By the Russian constitution, it should happen every year but for some reason, it was skipped last year.
Not watching it, but Russian media quotes make it look like the whole speech is about The West being dishonorable and dishonest. Lately, such speeches from Putin go back in history so the Russian internet is full of jokes about looking forward to learning about how it all ended for Cumans and Pechenegs.
Thrag
24078
I’m watching it. Not much of note yet really. The decadent west is to blame for everything.
I can’t help but giggle at the audience shots of people trying to look interested, while of course also looking hard and unsmiling in that peculair Russian way.
Thrag
24079
After I posted that shit is kind of getting weird. Accusing the Church of England of making god gender neutral!?
Now we’re getting to the good part. Paedophilia is the Western way now.
No talk about nukes though. Strange.
Edit: Oh, no worries, he talked about nukes. Apparently, they’re 90% modernized and they’re an example for the rest of the army. Curious how the only branch of the army that didn’t have to show any real results is doing OK.
Thrag
24081
Yeah, not much in the way of threats aside from the bit about “if you give ukraine long range weapons we’ll have to push them further back”. A bit about fixing historical injustice. Usual getting the USSR back together stuff.
Then the whole framing of the war as defending children from the western pedophiles and their gender neutral god. That was something.
Russian political analyst’s explanation of the big speech: it’s all about appeasement for the elites and the common folk. Putin acknowledges that the war is here to stay. But the elites will enjoy more freedom and more money. Common folk will get paid a lot too, and military service guarantees citizenship political career, and other benefits.
This is a money-burning operation. There’s no promise of some sort of victory, it’s just defending the future of our children so that they can pray to a god with a specified gender.
Also, remember when Putin talks about traditional values: he’s divorced, it’s an open secret he has mistresses, one of his official daughters lives in the Netherlands, and the other one is divorced too and is in a relationship with a South Korean businessman. Not saying it’s amoral or wrong, just reminding you about the hypocrisy in case someone thinks for a second that any moral thing might be involved here.
It’s weird because in fiction the villains are usually more interesting than the heroes, but in reality tyrants tend to be these dimwitted, empty-headed repeats, while the heroes are the ones who actually have something to say.
There’s absolutely nothing special about Putin beyond his capacity for violence, and his disregard for humanity. He’s just a very small, very boring person with a grudge.
It’s sort of disappointing.
Eh. I wouldn’t go that far. It seems that he was lucky to be a compromise for everyone in the late 90s when it was clear Yeltsin is done. But there were a lot of such figures who didn’t survive in the world of politics, and Putin managed to become a proper dictator. Likewise if you listen to his bro Lukashenko you might think he’s an idiot, but he somehow survived through a lot. There’s no clear definition for what high intelligence means, but surviving and thriving in cutthroat politics is probably a good sign of someone being smart.
But yeah, it’s relatively boring.
I think the point is that these dictators are just not that interesting, not that they are stupid. They are depressingly unremarkable, which is probably the really scary part of all of this. It isn’t the mustache-twirling, maniacally cackling archvillain you have to worry about. It’s the dude who to all appearances could be a local banker or mid-level bureaucrat that will open the death camps and ramp up the secret police persecutions.
Yep, the entire point of Arendt’s ‘the banality of evil’.
After the speech, Girkin is even more sad.
“Today, another chance to prevent mutiny has been missed. And it’s not obvious it wasn’t the last chance.” I see that he’s also waiting for 1917.
Grifman
24090
Biden got to Kyiv before Putin did.
Quaro
24091
I get how culture war red meat works in regular, normal, non invasion politics.
But does “We’re sending your son to fight in Ukraine because marriage is between man and woman, or there is no gender neutral God” actually play out positively in Russia? Those parts of the speech had really loud applause.
Like “We’ve invading Ukraine because the Ukrainians are genetically engineering a bioweapon targeted at Russia DNA to be deployed via expertly trained carrier pigeons from the United States” (A real thing the Russian government official claimed BTW) is absurd but it has a logic.
If it’s part of a speech about limiting immigration or something, ok, I guess, but I really can’t squint and see how it connects to Ukraine. Though I just remembered the Russian Orthodox church, so presumably that’s the connecting logic. Ukraine is part of the church so it’s a corrupting influence through that channel, and they have to cauterize it?
