If there is any doubt in your mind that Vladimir Putin is rational, I hope that today’s developments dispel all question. It’s well known that Putin has lived in an adamantine echo chamber of his own device for the past two decades he’s been in power. He’s not in touch with reality, if that word can be defined as “the facts of what is actually taking place” and the Ukraine war is not going well for him. So, he’s decided to create his own reality.
Ergo, Friday Putin went bonkers and banned social media, then he signed into law a bill that made news reporting a crime and allowed for the imprisonment of journalists for up to fifteen years. From now on, the occurrences of the day are what Putin says they are. Not what any objective observer reports from the scene. The Guardian:
The bill, quickly rubber-stamped by both houses of the Kremlin-controlled parliament and signed by Putin, imposes prison sentences of up to 15 years for those spreading information that goes against the Russian government’s narrative on the war.
In response, multiple outlets said they would pause their work inside Russia to evaluate the situation. Among them, CNN said it would stop broadcasting in Russia while Bloomberg and the BBC said they would temporarily suspend the work of their journalists there.
Russia is broadening efforts to control the spread of information on the invasion of Ukraine and to move against independent news sources. It follows the blocks imposed earlier on Friday on the BBC, the US government-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle and Latvia-based website Meduza.
Meta said on Friday that it was blocking RT and Sputnik in the UK. It followed a request from the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, in a letter a day earlier to TikTok, Twitter and Meta. Meta has already blocked the news organisations across the EU.
“Earlier this week, we announced that we’d be restricting access to RT and Sputnik across the EU. Consistent with that action, and after a request from the UK government, we will also be restricting access to RT and Sputnik in the UK at this time,” said a Meta spokesperson.
Meta announced on Monday that it had taken down a disinformation network targeting people in Ukraine, comprised of about 40 accounts, pages and groups on Facebook and Instagram.
In a blogpost, Nathaniel Gleicher and David Agranovich, Meta’s head of security policy and director of threat disruption respectively, said the networks were run from Russia and Ukraine.
“They were operated from Russia and Ukraine and targeted people in Ukraine across multiple social media platforms and through their own websites. We took down this operation, blocked their domains from being shared on our platform, and shared information with other tech platforms, researchers and governments,” they said.
And then this happened in a call with Putin and the Chancellor of Germany. Daily Beast:
In a Friday phone call with Germany’s chancellor, Russian President Vladimir Putin flat-out denied that his troops were bombing Ukrainian cities, according to a readout from the Kremlin. Despite the nonsensical logic and the overwhelming evidence to suggest otherwise, Putin told Chancellor Olaf Scholz that reports about “ongoing air strikes of Kyiv and other large cities are gross propaganda fakes.” He reiterated his conditions for a ceasefire which largely mirror his bogus reasons for invading Ukraine: the demilitarization and “denazification” of Ukraine, the recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, the “sovereignty” of separatist regions in eastern Ukraine, and the neutral status of Ukraine. Putin reportedly said he was open to a third round of talks with Kyiv if those demands were met.
Classic dictatorship. If Putin says it’s not happening, it’s not happening. As George Orwell put it, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” We get it, Comrade Putin. Dah.
Here’s Michael McFaul from Friday evening discussing how Putin is losing it.
There’s only one question and nobody knows the answer: just how nuts is this going to get?
Denazification sounds a lot like genocide.
My other thought is that Putin is remaking Russia back into a communist nation.
Can you imagine what would be happening now if Dimwit Donny had got back in instead of Biden?
His sheer, epic, inept, incompetence has resulted in The USA dodging a bullet.
Another big red flag that he knows he’s losing. Still, you have to question the wisdom of throwing ALL that out, as FB, Twitter, etc has been his propaganda tools for several years now. My mother always speaks of how he continues to live in his heyday and this stands as the latest example of him attempting to recreate it by force.
As Carey Grant stated in a movie long ago, ” the law is just a gun against somebody’s head.”