Posted on 03/29/2023 10:27:27 PM PDT by familyop
Pro-Kremlin groups have been caught red-handed staging a video of Ukrainian soldiers allegedly harassing a woman and her baby.
In the clip, filmed on the woman’s dash cam, a vehicle with a Ukrainian flag pulls over and two men in camouflage jump out.
They start insulting the Russian-speaking woman calling her "scumbag" and "swine" as the woman begs the officers not to talk to her like that.
"Give me your papers, you bastard," yells one of the men in the video. "First of all, use the official language [Ukrainian] when speaking to me, you pig. Don’t use the pigs' language [Russian] with me," says the military man.
"I won’t pay attention to your child. You, bastard, are you dumb?" screams the officer before appearing to fire his weapon at the woman's car as she shrieks.
The two-minute video caused outrage among pro-Kremlin officials and was widely shared claiming to be evidence of Ukrainian troops abusing civilians.
In a now-deleted tweet, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign affairs referred to the Ukrainian soldiers as Nazis, a common propaganda narrative pushed by the Kremlin since the start of the invasion.
How do we know this video is staged?
Internet sleuths were quick to debunk this video. GeoConfirmed, a group of volunteer investigators, managed to precisely locate the exact area where the video was filmed.
By analysing the direction of the power lines, as well as the roads and the location of the trees, the Twitter account determined that the action took place in Makiivka, in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region.
So, it wouldn't make any sense this road would be patrolled by Ukrainian soldiers if it’s under complete Russian control.
Another interesting point made by GeoConfirmed is the behaviour of the alleged Ukrainian military. If they’re in Russian-occupied territory, why are they acting so relaxed?
Moreover, dashcams have been banned in Ukraine since the start of the war. Normally under this law, the woman in the video would have had her camera confiscated.
The findings of the GeoConfirmed investigation were confirmed by the Moscow Calling Telegram channel.
A subscriber went to the exact area and was able to photograph the surroundings, showing a clear match of the shape of the tree branches, which were also visible on the staged video.
And Even pro-Kremlin Telegram channels admitted the video was a clumsy fake.
In a post, the pro-war Channel Veteran Notes said “The video is fake. Our [guys] are clumsily practising. In carrying out such information operations, our [guys] still have to learn.”
“Trust, but verify”.
You expect positive propaganda on all sides of every war with some truths exaggerated and others buried to serve a narrative.
The efforts Russia goes to to invent stories though, is a different matter.
Nobody doubts that Ukraine has a Nazi problem, or that Zelenskyy’s predecessor passed a lot of anti Russian laws. Or that Russian supporting political parties have been banned.
But the industrial scale fiction Russia pushes over these matters only serves one purpose, to dehumanise the enemy at home and abroad. And even Russia knows it’s fiction.
We’ve seen Russian election officials stuffing unused ballot sheets into the Yes piles on one Russian TV broadcast, five feet from the reporter, cameraman and boom mike holder.
We’ve seen the exact same group of half a dozen Russian soldiers popping up repeatedly at different Putin visits and alleged despatches from the front... They’re in Russia and always have been.
A small group of stage school kids alleged to be Ukrainian and in Ukraine have been on Russian TV in different skits in different locations and different stories... they were paraded for stories set in Russia one week, in Mariupol the next, back in Russia a few days later, and I think they even appeared in a news story allegedly showing Ukrainian kids happily going through the Russian reeducation and adoption system.
One Russian TV celebrity Vox Pop has been seen posing as a pro Russian mayor in one town, a fireman in another, a soldier in several different front line positions, an irate refugee from Mariupol, and an army medic. He’s been in three different places at once.
Kadyrov bragged from a gas station allegedly in the Donbas which was met with derision because that gas station chain never has opened a presence in Ukraine and it was subsequently proved to be far east of the Russia Ukraine border.
These fakes are intentionally obvious and Russia doesn’t care that they can be debunked very quickly by anyone with the mildest sense of critical thinking, a bit of initiative, and a pause button. The material is produced for consumption by useful idiots, politically blinkered ideologues who don’t care what’s true or not so long as it supports a narrative, anyone else who’s actively looking for confirmation bias, and of course the “dumb proles” who need to be geed up for their daily 2 Minute Hate.
It’s like phishing spam. You don’t have to be bigly smart to know what spam looks and smells like. You know your bank wouldn’t send you an email with spelling and grammar errors all over it. You know that Nigerian princes don’t treat you like a VIP.
So why do the spammers bother making it? Well, because it doesn’t matter that 98% wouldn’t fall for it so long as there’s at least one percent who are suicidally gullible, completely ignorant, or so desperate they are grasping at straws.
Russian propaganda is like that.
Sez the freeper awash in the ocean of MI6 propaganda...
Amateurs. They make Jussie Smollett and AOC look credible.
I don’t swallow that either.
But “our” propaganda is to advance the case for continuing with our treaty obligations toward Ukraine, by supporting their defense. And that takes the form of military support, supply, humanitarian assistance, and diplomatic pressure.
“Our” propaganda is not promoting a culture of genocidal hatred against the Russian people. It is targeted specifically at the activity of Russia’s political and military commanders, not just recently but for over twenty years.
Russia’s hackers were waging a cyber war on European and American hospitals at the instruction of the Putin led regime, YEARS before they invaded Ukraine. We did not retaliate because we were so desperate to “not poke the bear.”
Muscovy revanchist propaganda clearly does have ambitions that ours does not. It’s entirely about slandering all Ukrainian resistance as Nazi led, conflating Ukraine’s Europeanisation with Russophobia, and painting EU NATO (that’s never once fired so much as a shot into Russia) as a forever enemy bent on destroying Russia.
Europe or Ukraine don’t want to destroy Russia, they’d much rather keep buying Russian grain, coal, oil and gas without having to listen to the regime’s incessant paranoid warmongering aggression.
The first casualty of war is the truth.
The second is sobriety.
You mean Russians engage in propaganda?
Ho hum.
The debunking is also being debunked.
Neither side has produced the woman clearly named in the video.
Isn’t this “war” over yet? It’s like a stupid sitcom that got renewed for 2 or 3 seasons more than it should have.
Of course it is.
Which is why I’m completely relaxed about positive propaganda - as long as there’s an element of truth to it.
Both sides in any war will deploy positive propaganda and both sides in any war are perfectly entitled to do that.
Both sides in any war are entitled also to speculate on unknown quantities. So it’s not a problem that nobody knows how many Ukrainians or Russians have died since February 2022, nor is it a problem that estimates on both sides vary from 4 figure losses to six figure losses.
Where I draw the line is when I know for an absolute fact that the information being presented is completely fabricated, is intentionally being fabricated, and it flies in the face of verifiable evidence from a range of sources including sources close to the outfit doing the fabrication.
The UN said that the civilian casualties in the Donbas were averaging 25 a year from 2019 to 2022. The Ukrainian figures were in the same ballpark. So were the Red Cross numbers.
The DNR OMBUDSMAN based in the Donbas office building hosting Pushilin’s FSB handlers called bullshit on those numbers and pitched civilian casualty numbers with average annual body counts that were closer to... Fifty.
So where is the evidence for “ongoing genocide” in the Donbas from 2018 to 2022? Answer: nowhere, because there is none. It’s a totally invented claim without a shred of evidence behind it, that’s refuted by absolutely every attempt to quantify the cost of the conflict in the Donbas INCLUDING the evidence collected by the Russians.
First casualty of war is truth. Ongoing genocide as a causus belli for the Special Military Operation was a lie. Moscow knew it, Kyiv knew it, the UN knew it, the DNR ombudsman and FSB both in Donetsk knew it...
Denis Pushilin and his fellow separatist tourists had a vested interest in talking up the scale of the conflict between Azov and DPR. They’ve never explained why their bold assertions of ongoing genocide are completely undermined by even their own statistics.
It has been debunked.
Well, in Ukraine's case, I think it's more nearly true that: Ukraine doesn’t want to destroy Russia, they’d much rather just sell Ukrainian grain, coal, oil and gas to Europe without having to listen to the Putin regime’s incessant paranoid warmongering aggression.
Of course, that would cut into Russia's profits.
Typical putinesque attempts at lies — they can’t even make good propaganda
Mar 30, 2023
Desperation and fantastical thinking take hold of “top US foreign policy experts” as they contemplate an end game in Ukraine…
- CSIS admits crucial weapons and munitions face critical shortages including HIMARS launchers, 155mm artillery rounds, anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles;
- CSIS suggests the US could deplete all of its inventories along with Europe into Ukraine to make up for critical shortages or shift to “substitutes” despite being inadequate for Ukraine’s requirements;
- A recent confab of US foreign policy experts attempted to come to grips with the coming end game in Ukraine in which they see a Russian victory owed to its ability to supply more weapons, munitions, and trained manpower;
- Suggestions to turn the tide include sending 1,000 M1 Abrams tanks, creating (another) foreign legion, and transferring weapons to Ukraine to strike deep within Russia;
- However these “solutions” range from unrealistic to entirely counterproductive;
- Ukraine doesn’t have the manpower or time to assemble crews for 1,000 M1 Abrams tanks, a foreign legion was already created and already failed, and striking deep inside Russia will likely only help Moscow justify further mobilizations;
- Sanctioning China is also considered, with no self-reflection on the flawed reasoning that led to ineffective sanctions already placed on Russia;
- Only a fundamental change in Washington’s premise can a sensible foreign policy be proposed, one that sees the US cooperating constructively with all other nations rather than attempting to subjugate all other nations;
You should start your own threads rather than spamming every thread with your non-relevant youtube spamming.
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