{"id":80940,"date":"2022-05-11T12:38:59","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T17:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=80940"},"modified":"2022-05-11T12:38:59","modified_gmt":"2022-05-11T17:38:59","slug":"80940","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=80940","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Question O’ The Day:
\nHaving found out how weak, unprepared and frankly defenseless the Soviet Union was \u2014 i.e. driving trucks with long tubes around to pretend to have a lot more missiles \u2014 I\u2019ve begun to wonder if anything \u2014 any story ever told by international media \u2014 was ever true?<\/em>–Sarah Hoyt<\/p>\n

\n

Now the smoke is dissipating, and the mirrors are broken. What comes next?<\/p>\n

\n

Former Kremlin mercenary: Russian army was not prepared for a real war; Kremlin propaganda\u2019s Janus face.<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m traveling for work, with limited internet access. A couple things though:<\/p>\n

(a) A former mercenary with the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group,\u00a0quoted on the Telegraph\u2019s live blog today<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Russian forces were \u201ccaught by surprise\u201d by the fierce resistance of the Ukrainian army, according to a former mercenary who fought with the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group.<\/p>\n

Marat Gabidullin took part in Wagner Group missions on the Kremlin\u2019s behalf in Syria and in a previous conflict in Ukraine, before quitting the group in 2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were caught completely by surprise that the Ukrainian army resisted so fiercely and that they faced the actual army,\u201d Mr Gabidullin said about Russia\u2019s setbacks in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

He said people he spoke to on the Russian side had told him they expected to face rag-tag militias when they invaded Ukraine, not well-drilled regular troops.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told them: \u2018Guys, that\u2019s a mistake\u2019,\u201d said Mr Gabidullin, who\u00a0refused a call from a recruiter inviting him to go back to fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine several months\u00a0before Russia launched its invasion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(b) The head of GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA (and the successor organization to the GCCS which cracked Enigma)\u00a0says out loud what has been obvious for weeks<\/a>: Western SIGINT [signals intelligence .ed<\/strong>] agencies like GCHQ are passing tactically relevant info to Ukraine in real time.<\/p>\n

(c) Russian vlogger Roman, who has fled to Georgia, calls himself a \u201cBernie Bro\u201d in US political terms (most unlike this blogger here \u2014 OK, he has the excuse he\u2019s young enough to be my son ;)), and used to think Russian propaganda abroad only panders to \u201cthe right-wingers\u201d. Then he discovered that Russian propaganda efforts actually are Janus-faced: different propaganda trolls pander to left-wing and right-wing audiences. The former carp on again Western imperialism, \u201cPalestine\u201d, social \u201cjustice\u201d, a\u2026 and sandwich their Russian propaganda ham between slices of that; the latter instead put the ham between slices of anti-woke, anti-CRT, pro-nationalism,\u2026 bread.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Question O’ The Day: Having found out how weak, unprepared and frankly defenseless the Soviet Union was \u2014 i.e. driving trucks with long tubes around to pretend to have a lot more missiles \u2014 I\u2019ve begun to wonder if anything \u2014 any story ever told by international media \u2014 was ever true?–Sarah Hoyt Now the … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,9,85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deceit","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-question-o-the-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80940"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80941,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80940\/revisions\/80941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}