Russian invasion of Ukraine

My 84yo grandma from outskirts of Bucha/Irpin has finally been granted a UK visa and is flying here tonight... after a nearly 3 week wait full of lies and broken promises by Home Office.

She’s been reading the news and is losing it trying to come to terms with seeing hundreds of civilian bodies lying in roads whilst she was being evacuated, assuming they were collateral from shelling, now realising most are result of genocide...

Glad to hear she is making it to safety. It must be difficult to come to terms with all of this in her age. She has surely seen a lot in her Life time and Let’s hope she still sees peaceful Ukraine flourish.

Great to hear you have managed to get the visa resolved

The Timofei Sergeitsev ramblings on Ukraine published by the state news agency were quite shocking (what else would you expect from russia these days.)
You read through it and it’s supposed to be about de-nazification yet ticks all the nazi regime boxes.

@ectoplasmosis Hope the menagerie made it ok too.

Someone mention Russian mercenaries?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/05/russian-mercenaries-and-mali-army-accused-of-killing-300-civilians

No doubt replicated in dozens of towns and villages
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/05/barbarians-russian-troops-leave-grisly-mark-on-ukraine-town-of-trostianets

Edit: confirmed as fake

What Google vs Yandex (Russian google) shows when you search for Bucha.

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Is that what it shows to someone in Russia? Looks like this for me now:

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Is there a russian vpn service so one could see the internet through their eyes? Would be really interesting to compare

Is that what it shows to someone in Russia?

Supposedly... Would be interesting to see it via russian VPN, yes. Otherwise it's a fake...

not sure how reliable it is with a western VPN service routing through russia but this is what I get. Trace route once from the russian side and once from the Netherlands.

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Yep, another friend checked it, also shows all the horrendous pictures. Edited my post to mention it's a fake, sorry guys. :(

The internet is odd in Russia. I've been to St Petersburg for work a couple of times.
Some things are there, just as you'd expect, but others aren't.

LinkedIn for example simply doesn't exist on Google if you look for it from Russia. You don't get any indication that it's banned, it simply isn't there in the list of results.

I wonder how it is with instagram these days because as far as I understand it's been banned as an extremist organisation and people using it in Russia might face fines, even jail time.
Yet I find myself arguing on instagram with a lot of Russians who are located in Russia - I see their recent posts with location tags and everything. I wonder maybe the law doesn't apply if you support the "military operation".

What's odd for me is those fake news which I just shared myself this morning.

It's not the first time I discover fakes/false news which seemed that they were meant to spread in western media. I wonder if it's part of information war to lift the spirits or it's part of kremlin's plan to spread as much random fake news as possible and eventually people will start questioning everything like if Bucha massacre actually happened.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/06/world/ukraine-russia-war-news#russia-pows-ukraine-executed

non-paywall summary
https://twitter.com/evanhill/status/1511760338743545858

Zhirinovsky’s dead, lol.

Wow that's horrible.
It's definitely gonna get worse for Russians after the Ukrainians saw what they did in Bucha.

US now saying they are confident they will be able to name the regiment responsible for Bucha, gonna lead to some awkward chats around the dinner table in Russia

I work in academia. I have a few contacts in Russia and a few Russian friends at work. Obviously none of them support the war, but their insight into the Crimean invasion was very interesting. In their view it was nothing to do with nationality and very much about securing a warm water port with access to fresh water.

Also a big challenge for museums in Russia is preventing the ruling class and the rich from "borrowing" cultural treasures to decorate their personal houses.
There's a lot of effort going into creating very high quality digital and physical replicas to lab to politically connected people and churches to relieve this pressure.

I imagine these are for the most part part of the troll farms

Zhirinovsky’s dead, lol.

Might be the first and only time I've read about a Covid death and not felt sad.

Heard it on the news last night and genuinely lold.

Thought the correspondents comment that what Zhirinovsky said out loud was what the Kremlin was thinking in private.

Quite chilling to listen to an old interview of him totally rejecting the concept of the existence of Ukrainians.

https://youtu.be/8FrYM7CxYsU

Burantino?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOS-1

But he had 846 covid vaccinations - how is this possible?!

lol