Yesterday, I posted a video about air raids in Kharkiv and, of course,
was immediately was accused of biased coverage of events etc.
Do you know what is propaganda's version of why houses burned in Kharkov and civilians died?
That Ukrainians shell their cities themselves to get an outrageous picture.
Yes, that’s what they say.
This morning started for the people of Kharkiv with a powerful explosion near the regional administration building.
According to preliminary data, there was an air strike. We are talking about another provocation by nazi militants.
Ukrainian nationalists shot at civilians when they were leaving town with a white flag up.
Waiting for confirmation from other sources.
Of course, such an idea could appear only within Russian and Belorussian propaganda.
Only the people who reduces the whole world to TV screen who have long ago sold freedom and truth for cocaine
may think that a government armed forces could shell their city to show it on TV.
In fact, the Russian military makes artillery and air strikes
advancing to Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities conduct artillery and air stikes
Looking at the number of housing areas strike one can see that they’re not the target.
Otherwise, the number of victims and the damage scale were much greater.
But artillery shooting is not exact science,
bombs regilarly land on targets different from what shooters planned.
And so Kharkiv civilians die.
Yesterday, Kharkiv residential areas were damaged, today the central square was bombed.
That’s how the city center of Kharkiv looks now,
which was peaceful, the biggest pro-Russian city of Ukraine.
This is a Russian speaking city with 2 billions people.
Today the TV tower in Kyiv was targeted.
Seems like the Russian government thought that in Ukraine it works the same way as in Russia,
and if you destroyed TV, Ukrainians stopped resisting so hard.
This place is situated right next to the “Babiy Yar” memorial.
I made a video about Holokost there a month ago and stood right on the shooting point.
I remember clearly how I was drinking coffee near that place.
Five people were killed as a result of this Russian artillery fire
I’ll not show you the torn parts of their bodies, but these videos were circulating in the Internet yesterday.
And these are peaceful people.
And the Ministry of Defense even warned about the fact that Russia would shoot at Kiev
While I was shooting this video, Russia started bombing Zhitomir
There’s information that the military base was targeted, but they missed and struck a living area.
Many houses burned and, apparently, people died.
I don’t have any info about that while shooting this video.
Ukrainians are far from giving up.
For now the Russian army hasn’t managed to capture any regional capital-city.
Although, they obviously planned to finish the war in 2-3 days.
What is happening is simply a complete disaster.
The Russian authorities have gone crazy and are waging a full-scale war against Ukraine.
The Ukrainian armed forces are defending themselves, and so far successfully.
The number of casualties on the Russian side is being concealed.
Apparently, there are a lot of victims, but not even death notifications come
A lot of videos were released today with Russian prisoners, it looks like there are a lot of them too,
and it doesn't look like anyone cares at all.
There is no way to misinterpret this:
Russia started an aggressive war, Russia is trying to capture Ukranian cities.
Russian army is committing war crimes, attacking, even if they weren’t the intended target,
residential areas and killing civilians
Russian army killing Russians in Kharkiv — this sounds unbelievable.
It’s unbelievable, and yet it is happening.
Yesterday, at the end of the day, in Russia, a very important event happened. Echo of Moscow was taken off air from the radio broadcast.
the last on-air media outlet where independent voices could be heard.
And it was disconnected
This is perhaps a better illustration of the state of affairs on the front than any other.
After all, if something like this had been planned in advance,
there would have been no problem in restraining “Echo” simply by right of ownership.
The radio station is controlled by “Gazprom-Media”, which is subordinate to the government through a chain of owners.
In about a week, it's possible to change the chief editor,
rearrange the broadcast, and shove in loyal speakers.
If the defeat of “Echo” had been predictable, it would have happened much earlier, certainly no later than January.
But apparently no one expected such a state of affairs in the war as it happened
and they are trying to deal with “Echo” as a matter of urgency, in the most clumsy way possible, by taking off air broadcast.
I would like to point out that this is the second time that “Echo of Moscow” has been taken off in its entire history.
The first time it happened was in August 1991, during the SCSE coup d'état:
the coup plotters brought tanks to Moscow, but they did not understand what to do with them,
so they turned off “Echo of Moscow”, which reported on the events too freely, as a precaution.
What happened happened, and more importantly, it happened the way it happened for only one reason:
the war with Ukraine is going from bad to worse.
There are now so many victims of this war that they need to be hidden.
There is no room for any line except the general one.
They cannot allow any voices to be heard,
because one way or another, either the death notifications, or coffins, or reports of killed Russian soldiers
will begin to reach the Russian regions and Russian families.
By all accounts, there are a lot of dead.
There are even reports that there are more of them than during the entire Chechen war that lasted many years.
This cannot help causing a reaction in society. And that is why yesterday,
probably because of it, in such a clumsy way they began to fight the independent media.
Ukraine's significant cities are not going to surrender.
Taking them means killing tens of thousands of soldiers, engaging in the heaviest street battles with a great chance of losing them.
With a great chance of losing to that army, which today is very different from the Russian one.
In one of my previous videos, I talked about motivation.
The word "motivation" is largely devalued.
It's used however you want.
But war is when motivatio takes on its true meaning.
In war, the price of a completed or failed task is not a missed contract, not a bonus.
In war, the price is life. You are either willing to take that risk, or not.
In social, economic, technical, political senses
war has drastically changed in thousands of years, since the Bronze Age times.
But one thing remained the same: people need to know why they give their lives,
they give their lives for what.
Life is not a question of dismissal, bonuses, individual’s position in a hierarchy.
Life is a question of whether you continue to exist or not.
That is why in the case of invasive war comparing forces of the parties is, apparently, meaningless.
The troops which defend their territory,
which are supported by the local residents knowingly are in a winning position.
The Ukrainian army is not only modernized, well-managed, and well-armed,
but is also on its own land and will defend it to the last.
Not understanding this fact is the responsibility of the Russian military leadership
which not only constructed a different reality,
about some insane control of power by fascists, under whose oppression the Ukrainians,
who will be glad of such "liberation", are, not only invented it all, but also believed it.
And on this basis they constructed some military plans.
And on this basis they sent Russian soldiers there to die.
And now the Russian authorities are forced to take some clumsy, immediate measures.
They are fighting on the information front by closing Echo of Moscow immediately,
canceling all programs on television, and showing only propagandists like Solovyov or Kiselev there.
By firing multiple rocket launchers into Ukrainian cities.
Because the Ukrainian army appeared not to be such a ruined and demoralized formation
as the Russian leadership thought it was.
And what about the Russian army?
Where did that Russian army go that was shown on the TV?
Why in the videos do the captured soldiers look more like street children without equipment
Aren’t these a lot like the cosmonaut-looking special forces we keep seeing on channels like Rossiya 1 and Zvezda?
The thing is that our army with Shoygu leadership is the ultimate victory of PR,
and unconditional surrender of everything else.
The TV is savoring the images of perfectly equipped and trained soldiers, shows “tank races”,
Russian army now has a logotype and brand ID, there are stores with branded merchandise in every airport.
Well-branded field rations
But everything that we can see now looks more like dark films of late 80s USSR,
of the Perestroika times with total gloom and degradation than cheerful army reports.
And it’s all about the nature of the army itself.
I’m going to dwell on it in detail but first, here’s what.
Today, the first time since the outbreak of war I’ll put an ad in the video.
We don’t want to shrink the editorial board and our independence allows us to pay our team.
We are going to put only appropriate ads, I hope you are not offended.
Let’s continue. We are talking about the Russian army and its state.
There will always be more chaos and corruption in any army and in any Special Forces formations
of any state than on average across a country.
The reason for this are the opacity and poor controllability of such institutions.
But because our country is highly special, the level of corruption is very high, the army is dealing particularly badly.
Why is the army usually worse than the rest of affairs, not just in Russia?
When you see the freshly laid paving tiles in the centre of Moscow looking like Godzilla trotted on it
after just a couple of winter days, the corruption and incompetence are obvious.
You can download price lists on the manufacturer’s website, compare it to the contracts and say:
this is how much they stole.
You can get specialists to have a look and say: this is why it went wrong.
The army is organised in a fundamentally different way.
You can’t take stock of anything for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, the army just won’t tell anyone what they buy, from whom, for what price,
where they spend their money.
Secondly, even if you did know that, what do you do with that data?
Simple firearms, automobiles, food have a market price and you can look it up
the way Navalny did with Rosguard’s subsistence expenses.
But tanks, rocket launchers, jets simply don’t have a market price.
How much should a strategic nuclear submarine cost?
Correct answer: it doesn’t have a market price because there is no such market.
Moreover, there is nothing comparable to a submarine, nothing to compare costs to.
It costs exactly however much a top secret contract says.
Thirdly, stocktaking is completely impossible.
However much you steal buying shoes for an orphanage, you still need to buy something.
Children with no shoes on attract attention.
Shameless as you are stealing the money intended for a bridge construction, some sort of bridge has to appear in the end.
And has to not fall.
How many bullets did they fire in training? How many rockets were launched?
The grenades that were written off, did they ever physically exist or did they just write down the indexes?
Did they really upgrade the tank or just rewrite the indexes?
Army, especially in non-democratic countries, without independent parliamentary audit,
alas, is organised in such a way that anyone can steal, from the minister of defence to the last sergeant.
From billions-worth contracts for weaponry purchases to toilet roll and a box of canned meat.
When you steal in a case that is so public, you have to deceive everyone who sees it.
When you are making money on a black hole like army supplies, you have to deceive a small group of officers
happy to be deceived and sing the song of the “army revival” to the public.
If you modernise tanks by adjusting indexes on paper,
you can modernise many more of them than if you were doing it in reality.
The fact that someone will actually have to go to war in those tanks never concerned anyone.
Who on earth would a Russian tank go to war against?
To put it very simply, you can’t say that there is a shiny new children’s clinic
full of cutting edge tech if there isn’t an actual physical clinic to be found.
But you can easily say anything you want about the army reform, however pitiful the actual state of that army is.
Whipping up a couple demonstrative regiments for the TV is not a problem.
Until an actual war breaks out, no one can check if you were true,
and no one expected an actual war.
But here it come. And now you can see everything.
The most horrendous thing is the price the Ukrainian people are paying for everything
the Russian regime is based on: the corruption, the incompetence, the propaganda lies.
Propaganda lies doesn’t help a corrupted incompetent army lead a successful invasive war with Ukrainian army,
and that means Ukrainian civillians have to die.
We are all learning hard lessons these awful days.
Corruption, irremovability, incompetence, inadequacy and unreasonableness of political leadership
all not some abstract evil that you’d like not to see but can kind of live with.
No. They kill.
Do you understand now, dear children, the dangers of authoritarisms?
You understand why power concentrated in one pair of hands is bad?
Understand what regular government turnover is for?
Understand why you can’t say “Well, he is okay at his job, let him be”?
Understand that there is a limit, after which that “being” takes a completely different form?
Understand why we need checks and balances?
Understand that the institute of democracy is not a cutesy knick knack for rich countries that made some silly thing up because that’s what they are used to?
It’s a system of fuses that prevent an explosion.
And if you don’t have them, or you coherently take those fuses off, or didn’t bother installing them in the first place,
nothing protects you from someone suddenly deciding that his historical mission demands exactly what we have now.
Alongside the military actions,
the avalanche of sanctions that covers Russia is becoming more and more apparent.
Almost every western company is leaving our country.
Even Apple announced that it stops selling iPhones and other devices in their online stores,
and moreover, it limits the functioning of Apple Pay.
The presence in Russia is becoming more and more toxic with the growth of public pressure,
and now massive leave of foreign businesses seems to be inevitable.
Meanwhile, the Russian government is trying to prevent
such an outcome by blocking all the possible ways of currency outflow.
Thus, the government is imposing restrictions on foreigners’ withdrawal from Russian assets,
and as for Russian citizens, it is already forbidden to transfer currency to their accounts abroad
and take more than $10,000 out of the country.
Under the attack of sanctions two spheres died.
They successfully existed even in the totalitarian USSR allowing it to broadcast its ideology to the whole world no matter what.
We remember, of course, the 1980 Summer Olympics boycott in Moscow
because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but this is only a glaring episode.
With this exception, nothing prevented the Soviet athlets from participating in championships at various levels
including during the Afghan campaign.
And now, among other crises we and our region are facing, just as an illustration
Russian sport was destroyed in a week.
Just a few days ago the Olympics was over but how dramatically has the world changed.
We were seriously discussing what exactly Kamila Valieva had taken
and how it was going to impact her career.
And now it is clear that Kamila Valieva has no future career
and all other Russian athletes simply don’t have it anymore.
They will not have to compete in any international competition in any sport in the foreseeable future at all.
Any discussions about the minimum competition age in figure skating are no longer relevant for us.
Russian football players no longer have to embarrass themselves by losing matches to various microstates
because now they can play only with themselves.
Russian hockey, in which one of the closest Putin’s friends, Rotenberg, invested so much effort and money, no longer exists.
Another sphere is the cultural one.
Conductor Valery Gergiev was fired from Munich Philharmonic.
Opera singer Anna Netrebko was withdrawn from La Scala theatre.
They are one of the world's biggest stars, gathering full houses anywhere in the world.
Today, cooperation with them seems impossible.
The number of canceled concerts, both of foreigners in Russia and of Russians abroad, are numbered in dozens.
The largest film producers in the world cancel the premieres of their films in our country.
Disney refuses to deliver cartoons!
This was not the case even in Soviet times.
There was a famous song that said,
"and in the field of ballet dancing, we’re far ahead of everyone today"
and it was true.
Soviet theaters successfully toured the world, and the Hermitage traveled with exhibitions.
Of course, they didn't show Western blockbusters in the USSR, but that was a self-restriction:
distributors would have loved to show James Bond films to Muscovites,
but no one would let them in.
Now the situation is the opposite.
Russia has already been excluded from literally everything.
There have never been precedents of sanctions on this scale in human history.
Even Iran didn’t look like that.
And, unfortunately, they will only increase.
Yerserday, at the end of the day, we had the following situation:
on the one hand, the chain of command seems to be working.
Everyone says ritual phrases, all institutions carry out the orders.
On the other hand, there is the fact that the war did not go according to the plan.
Mostly because the plan was foolish.
A plan in which taking over a 40-million people country which has a regular army in a couple of days is an achievable goal.
It was clear from the beginning, even clearer now:
such a plan cannot be implemented,
one can only dream and fantasize about it, this is exactly what Putin was doing
The capture of a large city like Kiev or Kharkov, even by the standards of the World War II,
when the number of armies was measured in millions, is a very difficult task.
Under current conditions, it is literally an impossible task.
When you start destroying cities with missiles, you have already lost the war.
Because you've created hatred between you and the people who live there.
You yourself have produced millions of people who yesterday were wondering to which bar to go tonight,
and today, for them killing your soldier is a valor.
At this point it becomes completely irrelevant whether or not you were able to suppress the organized resistance of the army.
You find yourself in a territory where it is socially acceptable to take an assault rifle and kill the occupant.
Watch this video from the Russian army-occupied city of Melitopol.
A military convoy tries to pass, but is blocked by a crowd of locals.
And they are not even intimidated by an assault rifle pointed at them.
These people just shout and do not let the cars pass.
And Melitopol was occupied without a fight.
There are many such videos on the net from other cities.
One can imagine what the reaction will be to Russian soldiers in cities that have been bombed and where blood has been spilled.
I do not know and do not want to know what kind of bullshit was going on in the minds of those
who started and carried out this attack.
All I can see is that this bullshit was as far from reality as possible.
Russia hardly has the resources to take over the major cities of Ukraine.
Our leadership certainly does not have the financial, human, or political resources to hold Ukraine.
Due to the fact that one man, Vladimir Putin, had in his head a very different world,
everyone, whom he can reach, will have to pay:
the civilians of Ukraine, the Russian economy, the Russian media,
and, if he is not removed from power for a long time, Russian citizens.
Whether they are for the war or against it, they may pay for it with their health and freedom, too.
I want to reiterate a few things that we all need to remember and repeat.
This war was started by us, by Russia,
for no reason at all, we simply invaded the territory of a neighboring country,
We are not saving anyone from fascists,
there are no fascists in power there.
They have a popularly elected Jewish president
who was a famous Russian-speaking actor before he was elected, he can't be a Nazi, and neither can his entourage.
Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom.
no one there welcomes our troops with flowers, they are considered occupiers.
We are not saving the people of Donbass.
In Donbass, as in Kharkov and other cities, there would have been a peaceful life,
people would be rich and live happily if Putin hadn't decided to use military methods to establish Russian peace there.
If we hadn't gone there in the first place, everything would have been fine
Right now, Russian weapons are killing Ukrainians and Russians, Russian-speaking civilians, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers,
and both countries are suffering enormous damage.
There is only one way to stop this:
to immediately withdraw troops from Ukraine and to prosecute those who unleashed this war.
See you tomorrow!