About eleven months ago we did a post on the Russian-Ukrainian war, pointing out the amounts of outright censorship and throttling of outlets online. Things have gotten a lot more bizarre since then.
NAFO
Part of the absolute reduction of Twitter from "that site the journos and comedians hang out at" to "Elon's Rightwing Funhouse" has been the rise of the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, this bizarro quasi-parody of NATO, operator culture, and Internet memes. All of the members get little Shiba Inu person avatars (a reference to Dogecoin), and they have made "saints" out of anti-tank/short-range anti-aircraft missiles, such as "Saint Javelin", a name they reused for their sticker and merchandise store.
. . . . .Ukraine’s new authorities actually made every concession to neo-Nazi militants because they themselves feared the monster they had armed to keep them in power. However, nationalist and neo-Nazi groups were systematically made mainstream by all Ukrainian governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union; they were needed to reverse the mass nostalgia for the late-Soviet welfare state with free healthcare, education, free apartments for workers, free trips to resorts and vacation homes with very low prices for food, gas, electricity and public transport.
Now people get prison sentences for even wearing a Soviet badge, listening to Communist songs, or wearing a T-shirt with a hammer and sickle. Most of the communists left for the rebellious republics of Donbass (where their own communist party operates), some went to Russia, and some stayed to work underground in Ukraine.
Even recently, in March 2023, the Ukrainian security services reported the detention in western Ukraine, in the city of Lviv, of a cell of the illegal Communist Party of the Soviet Union, numbering 45 people. Judging by their description, they were mostly elderly people. . . . .
....Even before 2022, Ukraine went through a stage of deindustrialization, when most of the country’s enterprises were shut down. This was one of the consequences of the trade association with the European Union, which caused the Euromaidan in 2014. Millions of Ukrainians were already working on construction sites in Russia or in the fields in Poland, as nurses in Italy, or in shopping malls in Turkey. By that time, a whole class of people had formed in Ukraine, living on their relatives’ salaries, which they transferred to them from abroad.
As a consequence, Ukraine is experiencing a shortage of workers, even to maintain infrastructure. A Ukrainian worker receives an average of $200-250 per month, but this is usually enough for a couple of weeks. The fact is that in 2014 Ukraine began to take mass loans from the IMF, the World Bank and Western countries. The condition for the loans was a sharp increase in tariffs for gas, light, and gasoline, so that the debtor could pay back later. Since 2014, the prices of heating, water, transport, and electricity in Ukraine have increased five to six times, while in Donbass they remained almost at the same level. For this reason, Ukrainian workers prefer to work abroad and spend their earnings at home.....
The Russo-Ukrainian Dilemma
Not enough has been written about the probable collapse of the Russo-Ukrainian identity, which was fragile at the best of times. Unfortunately at the time of this edit of this post (11-09-23) the string of online articles we were hoping to unearth on that subject did not materialize. We will do more work, and will come back to this subject in the near future.
The "side of Russian things"......
Above: One of the 2020 social media ads made by a news website (not the infamous "troll factory") in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) with ties to the now-deceased Yevgeny Prigozhin (he was on their board of trustees) that pushed for a Russian federal amendment to the Russian constitution making it mandatory that households who adopt children be cisgender, i.e. a man and woman in a family unit. The ad itself is set in 2035, features a gay couple adopting a Russian orphan boy, with all the nasty undertones of pederasty implied in this sort of "think of the children" propaganda. This video is from The Moscow Times, but my link to it is The Russian Reader blog.
Russian Dissent Substack: The Revolution That Wasn't (June 28, 2023) A piece on the Wagner Group revolt before Prigozhin's demise.
Below: Video from Vestnik Buri on the history of Yevgeny Prigozhin up to roughly January of this year. A very critical view of the man. Remember to turn on the subtitles in the settings.
