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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.