The Brink of War?

[RonanTheBarbarian]

One Russian man’s view of Putin's propaganda.

For several years I have been watching a YouTuber called NFKRZ. It is run by a young Russian guy called Roman, who used to post videos about daily life in Russia, including politics culture etc.

With the outbreak of the war he, like a lot of other liberal minded Russians, has fled the country, in his case to Georgia.

This week, he posted an interesting video looking at some of the left-wing propaganda outlets to Russia controls, and is using to spread its line about the Ukraine war. It is quite commonly known that Russia pumps out a lot of propaganda on Facebook and the RT News channel, usually praising Putin as a proper conservative and aimed at FOX News watching types.

But they also control other, left-leaning websites, and that churn out propaganda that is meant to appeal to left wingers, usually focusing on perceived or real western hypocrisy.

I kind of knew this already, but it was interesting to see it from the perspective of an anti-Putin Russian person.

Watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY5Qd7rTC8M&t=6s

[cdnmatt]

Matt, is it kind of trolling? NATO will stay away, nobody wants next WW.

Have you not been watching the news? The West quite obviously already views this as WWIII, and your dear leader started it. Have you not noticed that the entirety of Europe has shifted their energy policies over the last couple months? The Pentagon has now quite obviously made the decision that the West is going to run Russia into the ground economically and militarily and ensure Russia simply can not wage a war like this again for decades to come.

Thing is, the West can keep up this pressure for an indefinite period. Russia simply can't, and at some point, Russia is going to run out of steam. We're all just hoping nukes don't fly in the interm.

[Dragonman]

Correct. Instead it they will pay taxes here. Sanctions you said?

True, but under the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) provided for by FEDERAL LAW NO. 225-FZ OF DECEMBER 30, 1995 ON PRODUCTION SHARING AGREEMENTS (with the Amendments and Additions of January 7, 1999, June 18, 2001), both royalty and profit taxes are low by international and Russian standards. According to the terms of the PSA, the consortium members at, e.g., Sakhalin-2, must pay a royalty tax of 6% on gross revenues and a profit tax of 32% on all oil and gas produced. In comparable PSAs, the average royalty tax is 10-20%. The profit tax of 32% is 3% lower than the Russian tax rate at the time the PSA was signed.

As I quoted in an earlier post, Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.

[cdnmatt]

The Sakhalin project can be considered dead in the water. Folks like Exxon, Shell, Haliburton and Slumbergeigh have all already pulled out of Russia, and Russia simply does not have the necessary tech to maintain such an operation, nor does China.

The production from that project will slowly degrade as the months tick by, until it finally halts producing altogether. We're a few years out from that though, so it'll take some time.

[Moses]

The Sakhalin project can be considered dead in the water. Folks like Exxon, Shell, Haliburton and Slumbergeigh have all already pulled out of Russia, and Russia simply does not have the necessary tech to maintain such an operation, nor does China.

The production from that project will slowly degrade as the months tick by, until it finally halts producing altogether. We're a few years out from that though, so it'll take some time.

Yeah, exactly because "can be considered dead" Japanese companies don't want to drop this project, and want to keep shares, right?

May be you will use logic? Can you?

[dab69]

Hackers replaced Russian TV schedules during Putin's 'Victory Day' parade with an anti-war message saying the blood of Ukrainians is on Russians' hands


Russian television schedules were hacked to display an anti-war message as the country celebrated a national military festival on Monday, BBC Monitoring reported.

On-screen program descriptions were replaced with the hackers' text when viewed on smart TVs, the outlet reported.

According to the BBC's translation, the message read: "On your hands is the blood of thousands of Ukrainians and their hundreds of murdered children. TV and the authorities are lying. No to war."

Major channels such as Russia-1, Channel One, and NTV-Plus were changed, the BBC reported.

Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring — the branch of the BBC that follows mass media worldwide — tweeted a short video of a screen showing the TV schedules, on which every program showed the same description.

The hack came during Russia's Victory Day celebrations, a national holiday and military parade overseen by President Vladimir Putin, which was being televised in Russia. The annual event celebrates the Soviet Union's victory alongside Allied forces over Nazi Germany in 1945.

International observers previously speculated that Putin would use the event to further propagandize or toughen his stance around his invasion of Ukraine. But his Monday speech ended without the expected declaration of mass mobilization or war against Ukraine.

Putin's justification at the outset of the February 24 invasion was that he was launching a "special operation" to "denazify" the country. His aggression is viewed by NATO and other Western countries as a war.

But under a near blackout of independent media and social-media platforms, most Russian viewers can access only Kremlin-controlled messaging about the conflict, Insider's Connor Perrett reported.

The message in Monday's hack runs deeply counter to Putin's claims that his forces are in Ukraine to "liberate" Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

It is unclear who was behind the alteration of the schedules on Monday, but the hacker group Anonymous retweeted Scarr's tweet with the message "Good morning Moscow" within hours of the hack.

In early March, Anonymous claimed responsibility in a tweet for the hacking of several state-controlled TV channels, whose programming was replaced with footage from independent networks, Radio Free Europe reported.

https://www.businessinsider.com/russ...essages-2022-5

[dab69]

INSIDER
Russian ambassador pelted with red substance during country's Victory Day celebrations

https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-a...124327607.html

[dab69]

Consider how similar Vladimir Putin is to Adolf Hitler to understand threat to world peace



The events in Ukraine over the past couple of months have become tragically reminiscent of what transpired in Europe in the late 1930s, when a right-wing German dictator began invading his neighbors and committing atrocities. Is Vladimir Putin the new Adolf Hitler? Is Russia a fascist danger to world peace, as was Nazi Germany? The parallels are disturbingly similar.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/consider-...151509993.html

[Moses]

At May 9 president Zelenskiy published in his official Twitter photo of Ukrainian soldier with Nazi SS emblem of division "Dead Head" and wrote "We will win".

Twit has been deleted soon, but has been re-twitted many times, including official account of Ukrainian ministry of defense

1652177382(1).jpg.


Orwell. EU collaborate with Nazi for to fight with Russia. Openly Nazi battalion "Azov" isn't Nazi anymore in Western medias.

[Dragonman]

At May 9 president Zelenskiy published in his official Twitter photo of Ukrainian soldier with Nazi SS emblem of division "Dead Head" and wrote "We will win".

Twit has been deleted soon, but has been re-twitted many times, including official account of Ukrainian ministry of defense

1652177382(1).jpg.


Orwell. EU collaborate with Nazi for to fight with Russia. Openly Nazi battalion "Azov" isn't Nazi anymore in Western medias.

Outrage about the display of Nazi-linked symbols from someone from a country that uses a letter that isn't in its alphabet (Z) as a sign of victory when it is clearly the lower half of a Nazi swastika isn't convincing. It is reported, moreover, that while Putin and other Russian leaders enthusiastically embrace this symbol, "Germany to prosecute use of ‘Z’ symbol to support Russia’s war" (https://www.politico.eu/article/germ...t-russias-war/).

Meanwhile, there are also reports that "Russia is the World’s Breeding Ground for Neo-Nazi Culture" (https://www.eupoliticalreport.eu/rus...-nazi-culture/), and "Putin’s fascists: the Russian state’s long history of cultivating homegrown neo-Nazis" (https://theconversation.com/putins-f...o-nazis-178535). Is the man in the black soft hat and full beard in the front row a Russian Orthodox clergyman?

What about the report that "A soldier wearing Nazi imagery was given a medal by a Russia-backed separatist republic for killing Ukrainian 'nationalists'" (https://www.businessinsider.com/russ...onalist-2022-4). A close-up of the insignia as worn by Roman Vorobyov, a Senior Lieutenant of the so-called "Somalia Battalion" is at https://www.romea.cz/en/news/world/s...on-his-uniform - i.e., the same "dead head" image. The photographs show Vorobyov wearing a modified skull-and-crossbones on the sleeve of his uniform, which is the symbol of the former 3rd Tank Division SS Totenkopf ("Death's Head") from World War II.

Outrage about Ukrainian display of Nazi symbols is laughable when one considers Russia's use of the mercenary Wagner Group. "The group’s leader, Dmitry Utkin, reportedly wears Nazi tattoos, including a swastika, a Nazi eagle and SS lightning bolts. Wagner mercenaries are reported to have left behind neo-Nazi propaganda in the war zones where they’ve fought, including graffiti with hate symbols" (https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...ties-rcna23043).

There are reports that the Nazi Azov Regiment is used pragmatically, simply because they are "good fighters" (https://www.factcheck.org/2022/03/th...fying-ukraine/). They can be regarded in the same light as the Chechen Kadyrovtsy of unpleasant reputation, i.e., as a psychological weapon (https://theconversation.com/chechens...ackfire-179447).