There is a parallel reality in Russia. It’s not an opinion, it’s facts: the government is preparing to criminalize anyone who uses maps of the country without annexed regions; the Department of Defense continues to publish unrealistic figures; and the Secretary of the Security Council, on the day when a missile killed two women and wounded six Ukrainians at a market in a town in the Kharkiv region, declared that what is happening is just a “bloody experiment by the West to destroy brotherhood.” destroy “people of Ukraine”.
There is a sentence attributed to Solzhenitsyn, but written by Elena Gorokhova, who lived in the Soviet Union before emigrating to the US, that defines the relationship between Soviet power and society: “The rules are simple: they lie to us , we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway and we keep pretending to believe it.” The current Russian regime, looking wistfully at the USSR’s role as a superpower, seems to be following the Soviet playbook described in Gorokhova’s memoirs, A mountain of crumbs.
The dissonance with reality is so great that Russian presidency spokesman Dmitry Peskov was contingent on stating that the Kremlin has “full confidence” in the Defense Ministry’s information.
On Sunday, it claimed a “retaliatory attack” for the New Year’s bombing — which killed 89 Russian soldiers according to Moscow and about 400 according to Kiev — had hit Kramatorsk and wiped out 600 Ukrainian troops. A New York Times journalist visited the affected sites – an industrial building and a vocational training school – shortly after the seven rockets fell and saw no casualties. Ukrainian authorities say damage was limited to buildings in that city in the Donetsk region.
The planes and helicopters the Russian Defense Ministry says it has destroyed are more than twice as many as Ukraine.
The next day, the same ministry took stock of the damage to the Ukrainian army since the start of the “special military operation”. According to Defense spokesman Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov, Russia shot down 367 combat aircraft, 200 helicopters, 2856 unmanned aerial vehicles, 400 surface-to-air missile systems, 7460 tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, 972 multi-missile launchers, 3793 artillery. and mortar weapons and 7978 military motor vehicles.
To give just one example of the inflated figures, Ukraine has not destroyed even half of the planes and helicopters Russia claims to have destroyed. THE Place Oryx, which documents the destroyed equipment piece by piece based on photos and videos, counts 56 Ukrainian aircraft and 28 helicopters that have been destroyed or captured.
While the Defense Ministry claims to have destroyed the equipment of the Ukrainian armed forces, Nikolay Patrushev, who is considered one of Vladimir Putin’s closest advisers, denies that Russia is even fighting the Ukrainians. “Developments in Ukraine are not a confrontation between Moscow and Kiev. It is a military confrontation of NATO, primarily the US and UK, with Russia. Fearing direct involvement, NATO instructors push Ukrainian men to certain death he said in an interview. with the state news agency TASS.
Not satisfied, Patrushev, who heads Russia’s security, repeated disinformation about an alleged persecution of Russian speakers: “Millions of people are banned from speaking Russian, their native language, and are forced to forget their origins.”
Those who will be forced to use maps with attached regions will be Russian citizens – otherwise they risk fines and prison terms, TASS reports. For now, the Russian government has issued a positive opinion on the Duma’s initiative to equate the distribution of maps that do not comply with the Kremlin’s claims of “territorial integrity” with extremist material.
Moscow claims to have captured a town near Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, in recent hours and has renewed attacks on that town and on Soledar. In the latter case, the owner of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, informed that the attack was carried out exclusively by his troops. In addition to these raids, Russia has hit several civilians in recent hours, either in a supermarket in Kherson (one dead and one injured) or in a hospital in Mykolaiv (ten injured), in the south; or go to a village market in Kharkiv (two killed and six injured) in the north; it was still in the town of Nevske, in Lugansk, where an undetermined number of civilian casualties was reported.
Source: DN
