Russian invasion of Ukraine

I don't know, but reading even that article highlights the issues of censorship. Certainly image wise the Falklands was very poorly documented.

Niall Ferguson has a good article in Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-22/niall-ferguson-putin-and-biden-misunderstand-history-in-ukraine-war

It's all placed in the context of his Cold War 2 - west vs China viewpoint, which I don't wholly disagree with, and I think it's worth reading his view of a) what Putin would consider a win, and b) that Ukraine is slowly losing rather than winning. it feels like a lot of commentary has been of how amazing Ukraine is doing but they're getting destroyed here.

Warning, horrible video of people being shot and dying https://twitter.com/politblogme/status/1­507975823290216448

A good thread here that lists out the inconsistencies in the video. I think that pro-kremlin journalist might well have been distributing a fake.

Some interesting stuff on the language being spoken by the captors (reportedly Russian accents with Ukrainian words edited in post). People being shot with no bullet holes or blood in later frames etc etc

https://twitter.com/Ars_Faivre/status/1508036906088636423

That said, I have no doubt that in some cases Ukrainian soldiers will be comitting war crimes. Happens in every war. Hopefully we see the Ukrainian government deal with it seriously.

A friend of mine works in a company where they crawl the web and look for pirated content.

Pirating movies is very popular in Russia and often times people who distribute the content add some ads to it - some betting websites or some apps / services - I guess it also makes it harder for crawlers to spot the content if it's mashed with some random content in between.

So she said recently they've noticed a lot of this pirated content having videos from the war instead of "traditional" ads.

Brilliant.

https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1508456636242927628?t=0hJBpzOIUcCDm7VRQIIM9A&s=19

Nexta just linked this bellingcat leak.
I also found the second guy shot in the leg's acting quite unconvincing

Yeah, its a really ropey staged video. To be fair, it took me quite a few watches before I started to see problems. I'd imagine that somebody who knows something about video would have a field day.

The translation of that order is amazing.

To heavily paraphrase and summarise:

"I'm really worried that the videos of the Ukrainians treating PoWs with respect and care combined with the extremely low morale in the Russian Army will lead to mass defections or surrenders. Please make some videos showing how brutal the Ukrainian military is towards PoWs to that they won't be as happy to surrender. K thanks bai"

This kind of shit worked in the late 90s and early 00s. Not working in 2022!

Problem is that the Russian media sphere is under near total control. So unlikely the public and by extension the soldiers will know any better.
Really grim if you think about it. Will lead to real atrocities in revenge likely.

And also, in the beginning it wouldn't make any sense for the Ukrainians to do this, videotape it and then distribute it because it directly hurts their interests.
On the upside it's nice to think that the lying doesn't reward. Reminds me of that CNN anchor getting emotional about Trump being held accountable. Although it's to see if that ages well

I've been watching some of the Vice media coverage on YouTube. It's worth finding it if you want to see the human angle of the conflict.

Abramovich apparently poisoned along with other members of peace negotiating teams

https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1508463513013997580?t=xC5tStrBEAg4QRbIXQn-eQ&s=19

Yes, it was the radar. Chilean radar showed when aircraft took off from airfields in Argentina. RAF Wing Commander somebody was in Chile. Using sat phones which the head of Delta force had offered to Mike Rose, the SAS chief, the info got to our ships fast enough for the Sea Harriers to be in the air at the right time. I've always wondered how, given their limitations of fuel/range/flying time, the Sea Harriers managed to be in so many air battles.

It's been said many times that if we'd lost one more ship we'd have lost the war. How many more ships would we have lost if the Sea Harriers hadn't been given this advantage? Three or four?

There are lots of other WTAF bits in the programme. It's densely packed with info.

This kind of shit worked in the late 90s and early 00s. Not working in 2022!

That assumes the audience is the west when it could just as likely be for their own soldiers so they don't consider surrendering or risk being captured. I linked previously analysis showing the Russian's are pumping out hardly any propaganda to the west but loads to Asia, Africa, S America as they no where to target their influence for most imapct

Problem is that the Russian media sphere is under near total control. So unlikely the public and by extension the soldiers will know any better.

This definitely applies to people who only consume Russian media.

The thing is, a lot of younger Russians started to use VPNs to access outside news more than a decade ago. Almost all of my Russian friends and colleagues do and say that others do anyway. Its not quite the media blackout curtain it used to be...

There are lots of other WTAF bits in the programme. It's densely packed with info.

Did it mention our promise to Chile that we'd never set foot on Chilean soil? Followed by our swift breaking of that promise following a bungled SAS raid on mainland Argentina resulting in only one feasible escape route....to cheese it into Chile. There are multiple reasons why Thatcher and the Tory party were so friendly to Pinochet. He saved us a few blushes.

It didn't mention that. That's been told many times and the emphasis was on newer stuff. It's been 40 years, and Tony Wilson's died, so the gloves were off. Better to watch it, then discuss it!

Grim
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/one-soldier-raped-me-then-the-other-as-my-son-cried-7xbqwzdqw

Tangential
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/adam-tooze-profile.html

Problem is that the Russian media sphere is under near total control. So unlikely the public and by extension the soldiers will know any better.

Just stumbled across this quote from an article on the explosion of popularity of VPNs in Russia in the last few weeks. VPN downloads up over 4,000%

“In the 10 days between February 24 and March 5, the top 10 VPN apps on the App Store and on Google Play saw more than 4,600,000 new downloads (from Russia). And our estimates are very conservative here.”

Edit: The top 10 VPN providers are reporting Russian traffic increases of between 650% and 10,000%

Of course, some of those new VPN users might only be doing so to retain access to Netlix and Instagram etc.

On VPNs, an article in the FT - Russian tech giant Yandex’s data harvesting raises security concerns- https://www.ft.com/content/c02083b5-8a0a-48e5-b850-831a3e6406bb

The krux being that just as the US government can access data on EU/ UK nationals transferred to the US by google, facebook etc services, Yandex has a set of SDKs in a bunch of russian (and 'Ukrainian') apps that will transfer data to Russia, including VPN apps.

I think the point being overlooked in the article is that the russian government its self is capable of making loads these apps that proport to be mundate utilities (call ukraine) that they can use to track ukrainian people and at least see where the civilians are, their movements etc but maybe even military if they are foolish enough to use them.

With payments services exiting Russia will russians be able to transact with VPN services (and with the rouble down can they afford them)?

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• FT_YandexSDKsDataSharing.pdf

With payments services exiting Russia will russians be able to transact with VPN services (and with the rouble down can they afford them)?

Several VPN services are offering big discounts or even free service to Russian citizens.

Remember the video of Ukrainian soldiers kneecapping Russian PoWs that was shared on Twitter by a pro-Kremlin account? Turns out that it if smells like shit it probably is.

Film of the soldiers rehearsing being kneecapped:

https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPR/status/1508772206020542471

Isn’t that the same video but higher quality and different audio?