Ukraine War: "20 months of war for a used car."

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Ukraine War: "20 months of war for a used car."

(Thread IKs: weg, Toxic Mental)

Tafferling: Oct 22, 2008; DOOT DOOT
ALL ABOARD THE ISS POLOKONZERVA

Der Kyhe posted:

The good old Russia decided to take a page from their "rear end in a top hat neighbor" playbook and froze all bank accounts for the Finnish embassies in Russia:

https://yle.fi/a/74-20032248

This is an direct act against the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and according to our foreign minister Pekka Haavisto, "probably a petty act of revenge against Finland joining NATO."

Russians proclaim that this is a counteract against Finland setting restrictions on Russian citizen's ability to use Finnish bank accounts or transfer money back to Russia.

Why on earth would you mantain a russian bank account?

# ? May 17, 2023 21:29

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# ? May 31, 2024 04:54

Sedgr: Sep 16, 2007; Neat!

Putin is a real piece of poo poo.

# ? May 17, 2023 21:33

Private Cumshoe: Feb 15, 2019; AAAAAAAGAGHAAHGGAH

Tafferling posted:

Why on earth would you mantain a russian bank account?

Diversity

# ? May 17, 2023 21:35

Der Kyhe: Jun 25, 2008

Tafferling posted:

Why on earth would you mantain a russian bank account?

Because it would be easier taxation-wise to pay the local workers from local accounts and have self-contained internal finances for embassies? In addition, the Vienna convention clearly dictates that embassies and consulates are not to be harassed unless they are thrown out, and Russia just crossed that line.

# ? May 17, 2023 21:41

mobby_6kl: Aug 9, 2009; by Fluffdaddy

Tafferling posted:

Why on earth would you mantain a russian bank account?

The embassy probably needs to in order to conduct embassy business

# ? May 17, 2023 21:46

Tai: Mar 8, 2006

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeffrey-epstein-noam-chomsky-leon-botstein-bard-ce5beb9d

Anyone able to un paywall this article about Epstein moving money around for Chomsky?

# ? May 17, 2023 23:14

aeiou: Jul 12, 2006; It's cold in here...
Just kidding! It's to
fool enemies..

Tai posted:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeffrey-epstein-noam-chomsky-leon-botstein-bard-ce5beb9d

Anyone able to un paywall this article about Epstein moving money around for Chomsky?

https://archive.is/lxwIt

# ? May 17, 2023 23:18

Coquito Ergo Sum: Feb 9, 2021

Coolguye posted:

the bradley also has a lot of conceptual overlap with the f-35 insofar as the bradley came at a time when there was a big gap to fill in modern battlefields and nobody really knew how to fill it, so they more or less made a single project an overbloated mass of R&D wherein they solved an entire class of basic problems that then got appropriated into a bunch of other projects - even after they slapped together everything they learned from it into a vehicle that actually does solve some interesting problems.

it turns out churchill's old joke about how you can always count on americans to do the right thing after they have done literally everything else
1) is true
2) happens to make americans weirdly good engineers

A while back but it's worth noting that the Bradley wasn't really "overbloated." You couched your speech enough that I don't think you believe the Pentagon Wars' mythology around the Bradley program, but the US had gone through decades of specialized equipment and wanted to streamline its needs for light AFVs that something like the Bradley could fulfill. At the end of the day, the we got a vehicle that performed admirably in the recon/counter-recon, cavalry, infantry support, and mobile command roles, among others. And it was even under budget, a rarity for its time. Its long development came at a time when we were trying to scrap old thinking and reorganize unit structure.

# ? May 17, 2023 23:22

Tai: Mar 8, 2006

https://twitter.com/DylanBurns1776/status/1656718672633765890

gently caress putin

# ? May 18, 2023 00:57

tiaz: Jul 1, 2004; PICK UP THAT PRESENT.

Zelensky's Zealots

Tai posted:

(video)

gently caress putin

NB you see this dude picking his way past some corpses in the trench.

harrowing footage though. at the top you can see him signalling "100: yes. 200: no" saying "I want to be a POW (cargo 100), not dead (cargo 200)", trying to establish to the drone that he wants to live, and then mimes ripping off his unit patch. he also understandably jumps pretty hard when they drop a document explaining what to do, fearing they're trying to kill him with a grenade. glad it worked out for him in the end.

e: or maybe it's 300 (wounded) yes? wikipedia says 100 is munitions. I'm not sure about that, but it really looks like 1-00: nod, 2-00: shake head to me

tiaz fucked around with this message at 01:04 on May 18, 2023

# ? May 18, 2023 01:01

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Coquito Ergo Sum posted:

A while back but it's worth noting that the Bradley wasn't really "overbloated." You couched your speech enough that I don't think you believe the Pentagon Wars' mythology around the Bradley program, but the US had gone through decades of specialized equipment and wanted to streamline its needs for light AFVs that something like the Bradley could fulfill. At the end of the day, the we got a vehicle that performed admirably in the recon/counter-recon, cavalry, infantry support, and mobile command roles, among others. And it was even under budget, a rarity for its time. Its long development came at a time when we were trying to scrap old thinking and reorganize unit structure.

I've posted this before, but the real story behind the Pentagon Wars "how did they go from this to that" scene is that the BMP came out in 1966, three years after the Bradley procurement started.

The US army looked at it, said "ooooh, gently caress this APC shitbox, we want one of those". And from there it was a priority MIC project in which expense and graft is tolerated as long as the end result is good. Which it was.

# ? May 18, 2023 01:04

Saoshyant: Oct 26, 2010

Tai posted:

[ur]https://twitter.com/DylanBurns1776/status/1656718672633765890[/ur]

gently caress putin

The desperation of that guy, asking twice if he will be killed if he surrenders, and then all that trek through a battlefield with live explosions and dead bodies in trenches, and going through this hell just not to mindless kill people. I couldn't but root for the guy even though I knew he would probably make it from the context of the tweet.

# ? May 18, 2023 01:17

Gejnor: Mar 14, 2005; Fun Shoe

Its real, or at the very least i choose to believe its real, but it almost feels like a scene from an anti war movie.

The Ukrainians are really good at their PR work. Goddamn.

Gejnor fucked around with this message at 01:23 on May 18, 2023

# ? May 18, 2023 01:21

Edgar Allen Ho: Apr 3, 2017; by sebmojo

More than once I�ve thought about how difficult it must be to surrender in a war of drones and artillery

# ? May 18, 2023 01:29

Slugworth: Feb 18, 2001; If two grown men can't make a pervert happy for a few minutes in order to watch a film about zombies, then maybe we should all just move to Iran!

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

More than once I’ve thought about how difficult it must be to surrender in a war

I can't emphasize enough how absolutely terrifying it must be hoping the guys who have been trying their hardest to kill you will stop trying if you raise your hands high enough.

# ? May 18, 2023 01:31

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

The huns are espousing that Ukraine is being very mean to them

Yeah gently caress them

# ? May 18, 2023 01:35

I would blow Dane Cook: Dec 26, 2008

I can't stop giggling at this image

# ? May 18, 2023 01:41

Coolguye: Jul 6, 2011; Required by his programming!

Coquito Ergo Sum posted:

A while back but it's worth noting that the Bradley wasn't really "overbloated." You couched your speech enough that I don't think you believe the Pentagon Wars' mythology around the Bradley program, but the US had gone through decades of specialized equipment and wanted to streamline its needs for light AFVs that something like the Bradley could fulfill. At the end of the day, the we got a vehicle that performed admirably in the recon/counter-recon, cavalry, infantry support, and mobile command roles, among others. And it was even under budget, a rarity for its time. Its long development came at a time when we were trying to scrap old thinking and reorganize unit structure.

yea i meant overbloated in terms of the problem space for the project as a whole. normally weapon systems have really clear requirements as to what something should do and what benchmarks it needs to hit but that was precisely the way they had ended up with all that specialized equipment that wasn't adapting to war requirements that were very much 'here', not theoretical or just areas of concern. the big thing on the bradley was the huge battery of fundamental problems they solved as part of that program ended up benefitting a bunch of other projects, which is imo the biggest observation that pentagon wars got wrong. like yeah, overhauling equipment to really integrate with more modern capabilities turns out to be a really big job, it's the engineering version of the "basic research" that everyone always gushes about funding and then never does. the time and money look even better spent when you realize that components that they worked up as part of the bradley project eventually made it into pretty much anything with treads or tires in the US arsenal in some way or another.

Coolguye fucked around with this message at 02:16 on May 18, 2023

# ? May 18, 2023 02:12

the popes toes: Oct 10, 2004

Der Kyhe posted:

Because it would be easier taxation-wise to pay the local workers from local accounts and have self-contained internal finances for embassies?

Yeah, embassies have to have local accounts for the typical utility bills and other local costs. And as you mention for salaries for the local workers.

However, salaries for the Russian nationals that work at the embassy or consulate works a bit differently than elsewhere (or used to when I was more familiar with it). The Russian workers are hired from a pool of workers that Russia presents to the embassy. That is to say, the embassy just can't hire who they want locally - they have to go through the diplomatic labor pool operated by the Russians. Additionally, the costs of those workers are paid in USD to the Russian "agency" that controls the workers.

And on other fronts, per a journalist working the Pentagon

https://twitter.com/idreesali114/status/1658986422307635204

# ? May 18, 2023 02:21

Alan Smithee: Jan 4, 2005; A man becomes preeminent, he's expected to have enthusiasms.

Enthusiasms, enthusiasms...

they replaced the ERA?

# ? May 18, 2023 02:24

Barudak: May 7, 2007

Poor Patriot system got so tuckered out it needed a nap

# ? May 18, 2023 02:37

zone: Dec 6, 2016

Russia is pissed again and once more launching missiles. Maybe they no longer care about maintaining a reserve of missiles, but would rather use all they have.

# ? May 18, 2023 02:47

El Jebus: Jun 18, 2008; This avatar is paid for by "Avatars for improving Lowtax's spine by any means that doesn't result in him becoming brain dead by putting his brain into a cyborg body and/or putting him in a exosuit due to fears of the suit being hacked and crushing him during a cyberpunk future timeline" Foundation

zone posted:

Russia is pissed again and once more launching missiles. Maybe they no longer care about maintaining a reserve of missiles, but would rather use all they have.

They didn't hear? Someone should tell Russia the Patriot system was fixed already.

# ? May 18, 2023 02:51

Alan Smithee: Jan 4, 2005; A man becomes preeminent, he's expected to have enthusiasms.

Enthusiasms, enthusiasms...

it's just their Zap Brannigan approach to troops except for missiles

# ? May 18, 2023 02:51

shadow puppet of a: Jan 10, 2007; NO TENGO SCORPIO

zone posted:

Maybe they no longer care about maintaining a reserve of missiles, but would rather use all they have.

Someone on the arms black market sold Russia a containership full of 25 thousand Bissells and since all the competent procurement officers got sent to the front to die months ago they authorized payment and are now eagerly awaiting their arms bonaza to arrive next week.

# ? May 18, 2023 02:54

tiaz: Jul 1, 2004; PICK UP THAT PRESENT.

Zelensky's Zealots

shadow puppet of a posted:

Someone on the arms black market sold Russia a containership full of 25 thousand Bissells and since all the competent procurement officers got sent to the front to die months ago they authorized payment and are now eagerly awaiting their arms bonaza to arrive next week.

I have been assured that once the Iranian Ligma system arrives in theater nothing will be able to prevent our forces' coming :smug:

# ? May 18, 2023 03:07

Toxic Mental: Jun 1, 2019

Gonzalo Lira voice from jail: Of COURSE they would tell you it wasn't damaged

# ? May 18, 2023 03:09

zone: Dec 6, 2016

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1658872217432621060
New piece of Russian junk just dropped.

# ? May 18, 2023 03:10

the popes toes: Oct 10, 2004

Toxic Mental posted:

Gonzalo Lira voice from jail: Of COURSE they would tell you it wasn't damaged

A student of history understands that the US is a master of deception, lies and misdirection. One need only look at the record. If the Patriot was damaged, they would not have acknowledged it, this much is clear. So by extension, their statement that it is "fixed" is clear proof that it is not.

# ? May 18, 2023 03:21

shadow puppet of a: Jan 10, 2007; NO TENGO SCORPIO

zone posted:

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1658872217432621060
New piece of Russian junk just dropped.

Someone needs to send out an alert like they do for missile strikes but this time for an eminent krumping.

# ? May 18, 2023 03:21

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

zone posted:

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1658872217432621060
New piece of Russian junk just dropped.

Still less junk that an apple product

# ? May 18, 2023 03:25

url: Apr 23, 2007; internet gnuru

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/16/russia-prisons-wagner-group-ukraine-crime-culture/?tpcc=recirc_trending062921

quote:

The recruitment of prisoners via the Wagner Group has boosted manpower but cost morale.

Russia�s invasion of Ukraine has cost it dearly on many fronts, but especially when it comes to casualties. Since the first days of the war, the invaders have been bleeding manpower. Plugging those holes became one of the tasks of the Wagner Group, the mercenary company with close ties to the Russian state. Its founder, Russian President Vladimir Putin�s close ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, began to actively and sometimes forcibly recruit from the country�s prisons, offering convicts the chance of freedom in return for service. The Russian army has gone on to follow that model itself.

With those recruitments have come a whole series of subcultural notions that are shaping the lives of soldiers and the conduct of the war�but which are often ignored or overlooked by Western analysts. The power of Russia�s criminal culture, known as the �thieves� world,� is not new. Prigozhin himself, like a surprising number of players in Putin�s world, is a former convict�because the men who profited most in the chaos of the 1990s were very often outright criminals. But the invasion of Ukraine has made these notions even more prominent, and understanding them all the more important.

On April 9, Prigozhin�s press service posted a response on Telegram to a question about the state of prison recruitment that had been sent to the Glas Naroda (Voice of the People) news site�one of the many parts of his media empire. In response, Prigozhin had some harsh criticism toward how prisoners are treated by the state authorities:

�There are rumors of roosters, downcast and resentful prisoners fighting together with ordinary prisoners, which violates their [the prisoners�] internal laws, so-called unspoken rules, in a flagrant way. Everyone knows that Russia has been living by these rules, by a certain way of life for centuries, and therefore it seems to me that such situations are absolutely unacceptable.�

From the outside, Prigozhin�s statement seems incomprehensible. But in the world of Russia�s prison culture, where brutally imposed caste systems govern life and death, his statement makes perfect sense.

A member of the Russia�s Wagner Group, who is a former criminal prisoner, sits in the interrogation room after being captured by Ukrainian soldiers near Bakhmut, Ukraine, on March 12.Sergey Shestak/AFP via Getty Images

The thieves� culture is a set of rules, modes of action, and a strict social hierarchy that regulates everyday life among those in the criminal underground. It is especially focused on organizing the life of inmates in the many prisons and camps, known as �zones,� of Russia and other former Soviet countries. While traces of it existed even under the tsars, the system was largely forged in the vast gulags of the Soviet Union, the network of camps that formed almost a separate country inside Soviet borders.

The thieves� culture gets its name from the ruling class, the �lawful thieves� who enforce the thieves� law�an unwritten set of rules called ponyatiya, literally translated as �concepts� or �notions.� These rules include positive recommendations on how a �proper criminal� should act, harsh prohibitions on various actions with corresponding punishments, as well as a basis for how the social hierarchy in prisons should be organized. All this is described in jargon that, even for ordinary Russians, is hard to understand.

For instance, the prisons themselves are measured on a scale from blackness to redness�those prisons where everyday life is mostly organized by the criminal authorities are called �black,� and the prisons where the unspoken rules and thieves� culture are being actively suppressed and everyday life is in the control of the prison administration are considered �red.� Very few prisons are entirely one way or the other, of course, so arguments about whether a particular institution is red or black are commonplace�and baffling to outsiders.

The unspoken rules enforce a harsh hierarchy, one that serves the interests of the men on top�and sometimes of authorities who see it as a way to help keep prisoners under control. There are four basic groups of prisoners, known as �suits,� as if they were a deck of cards. This is essentially a caste system; it is extremely hard to move up, extremely easy to move down, and fear of degradation governs every social interaction. Of course, each suit, like any caste system, has many detailed subdivisions, branches, and complex substructures, but at the basic level, they are the following: blatniye (thieves), muzhiki (men), kozliy (billy goats), and petukhi (roosters).

Blatniye are the criminal authorities. They are career criminals�thieves and those who have chosen to embrace the rules and live by them full time. They are few in number but hold a lot of power and influence. Among them, the lawful thieves or thieves-in-law are a special subcategory, the equivalent of a mafia don or a yakuza elder. Their word is literally law in the criminal underworld�and they are bound only to the ponyatiya themselves, which they also have the power to change in specially organized gatherings.

Men and billy goats make up the �middle class� of this hierarchy. Men are those who just want to serve their terms with no fuss, but who are also informed about these prison laws, who pay respects to the notions, listen to the blatniye, and most importantly, do not cooperate in any way or form with the prison administration, even when it comes to, say, kitchen or library duties.

Billy goats are inmates who participate in formal prison structures, and are willing to work with the prison authorities but also pay some respect to the criminal ones. The people who run the black market inside a prison, who can get you cigarettes, drugs, gaming consoles, or whatever else, are also in the billy goat caste�but they�re obviously left alone and respected as long as they pay their tax into the common pool for the blatniye to use as they please.

A security officer walks in front of the entrance of a penalty colony in Yavas, central Russia, on Nov. 19, 2022. Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

There is a subsection of those people, called �activists,� who are lower in the hierarchy and try to hide their position. Those are the billy goats who actively try to cooperate with the administration for extra benefits, which often are more than just being released on parole. In black prisons they�re hated like snitches are in U.S. prisons, whereas in extremely red ones, they often take positions that a blatniye would take otherwise.

The lowest caste, and the one that every prisoner fears degradation to, are the roosters, also known as the �offended,� the �pederasts,� or the �downcast.� That is a position to which it is extremely easy to fall down to, but one that you can never climb up from. They�re forced to do all the worst jobs�such as cleaning the cell�s latrine, washing everyone�s underwear�because no, your average Russian prison does not have any washing machines�and often serving as sexual slaves. They also get the worst sleeping spots in the cell, usually next to the latrine.

A rooster is untouchable outside of sex. One is not allowed to share anything with a rooster except as a payment for services�not only is it taboo to touch them, but also anything that they have touched, as that instantly moves one to their caste. Their kitchenware is explicitly marked as such, for one, and whenever transferring cells, they�re supposed to publicly announce their suit status and move in with �their own� accordingly.

There is also an extensive list of other infractions that can instantly move one into this caste, far too long for me to list here. Many of those are linked to a toxic sense of masculinity. Gay and transgender prisoners are automatically placed among the roosters, but so are those who foolishly admit to having given oral sex to a woman�an act that, as among the ancient Romans or the modern Italian mafia, is seen as fundamentally impure.

The only interactions allowed between higher-caste prisoners and roosters are purchasing sexual services from them, raping them (my personal sources say that this was completely acceptable up until approximately 2010, but that currently, although it won�t make you a rooster, it is considered to be a minor infraction with a material fine attached to it), and beating them up�but only with kicks or using improvised weapons, as even the touch of a punch is still considered taboo. It might seem bizarre that a man who rapes another man is not seen as impure, but his victim is�but it harks back to a sense of sexual dominance found in prison cultures and reactionary machismo worldwide.

A rooster�s status is truly miserable. It�s driven many people to suicide and made people so miserable that they used to rebel and intentionally touch blatniye inmates as a last attempt of revenge�sure, they would be instantly killed by other inmates, but the prisoner who previously belonged to the higher caste would instantly be a rooster inside the prison system and out, and would never be able to move upwards in the hierarchy.

These notions, especially the revulsion against LGBTQ people, are powerful in Russian mainstream culture as well. Take the ex-liberal, now extremely pro-war and pro-Putin Russian journalist Anton Krasovsky, who was thrown out of the Donbas under threats of violence because he�s also openly gay. He�s the kind of gay man who agrees with the Kremlin�s stance of �traditional values� and believes that �gay cure� procedures should be mandatory, but nonetheless, he reported that he�s received messages that he�s not welcome there although he completely supports the Russian side in the war. Those messages included people stating he couldn�t even dig trenches, because the shovels he used would have to be burnt afterward.

A prisoner stands against the wall of his cell in the Mordovia penal colony in Russia on March 21, 2007. Maxim Marmur/AFP via Getty Images)

In his post on Telegram, then, Prigozhin was making it clear that there was no redemption from prison caste even when fighting for the nation�and that the caste mixing was an active threat to morale. It might seem bizarre to stick to such prejudices given Russia�s dire need for manpower, but the laws of the underworld can�t be cast aside that easily.

This isn�t Prigozhin�s only extolment of the virtues of the thieves� law. In a leaked video from the Feb. 21 this year, where he�s giving a recruitment speech to inmates, he explains the �working conditions� in the Wagner Group. He notes, �We need criminal talent. I did 10 years myself before becoming a hero of Russia,� letting the potential recruits know that Wagner Group is being run according to the thieves� law. �We don�t take any kind of the offended, the downcast, and so on�we respect all the unwritten rules.�

Prigozhin says that those who are in prison for drugs are �taken care of.� Violence, on the other hand, puts you on the top of the hierarchy. The desirable charges are murder, grievous bodily harm, robbery, and armed robbery. He especially notes that �If you beat up the administration or the cops, that�s even better.�

In another cruel example, Wagner Group recruits who are suffering from HIV, hepatitis, and other hard-to-cure illnesses, who have been enticed with the promise of a cure should they survive, are made to wear specific wristbands that mark them as �impure� in an attempt to not �taint� others. And, as reported by Ukrainska Pravda, �according to the [Ukrainian] intelligence, the fighters are becoming angry about this situation. Russian medics are known to routinely refuse to treat injured [soldiers] with hepatitis or HIV.�

None of this makes for good soldiers, and it�s already having serious consequences in Russian society. Organized violence is both physically and mentally demanding. A sense of camaraderie among the soldiers and respect, or at least obedience, for officers is vital. The Wagner Group operates on a different culture�one where such mutual respect and military tradition does not exist, and obeying formal superiors is literally taboo for the highest castes of prisoners. Nor can the dead be respected�after all, they might be roosters. Because of these prison laws and hierarchy, soldiers in the Wagner Group are not encouraged to bond; instead, they�re treated as expendable and sent as a human wave into the �meat grinder.�

Extreme violence�like the shocking sledgehammer execution of a Wagner recruit who tried to defect to Ukraine�is used to keep soldiers in check. As Prigozhin commented about that event: �A dog�s death for a dog.� And while this does keep the prisoner recruits under some control and can achieve limited results, it also has made the Wagner Group tactically inflexible and predictable. Once Ukrainian defenders of Bakhmut understood that these blunt, straightforward assaults were the only thing that Wagner forces would ever do, the Ukrainians adapted and improved, eventually negating the costly gains that Prigozhin�s private army had made.

The normalization of prison culture may be contributing to the brutalization of the Russian army and its war crimes in Ukraine�but it�s also affecting the home front. Many of the prisoner recruits return home with a full pardon after serving out the six months they�re contracted for, often having served a tiny fraction of their sentence. Wagner specifically looked for violent criminals�who usually have long sentences. Already, the crimes of these returning Wagner soldiers are piling up, and analysts and Russian opposition politicians, such as Mikhail Khodorkosky, are warning against the return of the violence of the 1990s, when crime soared. Lawful thieves, prison laws, and ponyatiya in general are surging again, as the country is once again criminalizing itself to the point of gang wars, but this time, with military-grade armaments.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private mercenary group, leaves a cemetery in Moscow on April 8. Yulia Morozova/Reuters

Yet the Western press has largely missed most of this. The reports of Prigozhin�s comments, such as this UPI wire, entirely skipped it over. The lede simply states: �Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia�s Wagner Group, said Sunday that the mercenary group �acted honestly� by hiring prisoners to fight in Ukraine as he branded the convicts �heroes.�

In an April 10 report from the Institute for the Study of War, the ponyatiya are entirely ignored. Instead, it mentions only �Prigozhin insinuated that the Russian MoD [Ministry of Defense] would treat convicts worse than Wagner treated them to further advertise recruitment into Wagner and discredit the MoD�s recruitment efforts. The insinuation seems odd given that Wagner reportedly used convicts in human wave attacks that cost thousands of them their lives.� That misses the point entirely. Prigozhin isn�t talking about regular treatment, but about the deeply embedded caste notions�and under those, being degraded to a rooster is far worse than death.

While Prigozhin frequently uses the language of thieves , Putin avoids explicitly stating the rules, but nevertheless hints that he sticks to them himself. Putin was a KGB agent, of the organization that jailed many �thieves� back in Soviet days, and never a convict himself. However, he has long-standing ties to Russian organized crime�most notably through the Cooperative Ozero, which was founded as a dacha cooperative in November 1996 by Putin and his friends and has since grown to a powerful group, bonding together oligarchs and more conventional criminal activities.

Putin�s emphasis on supposedly traditional Russian values also implicitly includes the laws of the prison�especially when it comes to macho behavior and sexual purity. The Russian state�s homophobia can�t be understood without recognizing the sadism of a caste system that sees raping men as normal but loving them as degrading.

A bird flies over a barbed wire fence of IK-3 penal colony in Vladimir, Russia, on April 19, 2021. Dimitar Dilkoff /AFP via Getty Images

Maxim Katz, a prominent Russian opposition journalist and politician currently living in Israel, told me that the ponyatiya are important to understand Putin and the Russian political elite in general. But he said that �it is not the criminal authorities� notions of the Russian prison that reign in the Russian security services, but their ersatz version. Chekists, especially retired Chekists [a term for former KGB officers such as Putin, referring to the old Soviet secret police service], like to copy the style of behavior of high-ranking criminals. But for these criminals themselves, the Chekists are second-rate people, frankly not even people. The moment an employee of the �office��current or former�is taken to a detention facility, he is immediately relegated to a lower caste and never gets beyond the latrine.

�Putin�s criminal behavior is more the case of a boy from an educated family trying to imitate the behavior of school bullies�but never quite becoming one of them. The Russian criminal world distinguishes between the blatniye and the �trash� very clearly; the trash can try all they want to mimic this world, but they will always be subhuman to it, and their rhetoric is cheap cosplay, not true adherence to �the notions,� since the notion is to kill them on the spot.�

Putin may only be playing at the rules, but the criminal world takes them very seriously. So too should Western analysts striving to understand the actions of Russian troops, especially Wagner�s, in Ukraine, and the kind of culture that will become even more prominent back in Moscow and St. Petersburg when they return from the war.

# ? May 18, 2023 03:30

zone: Dec 6, 2016

Air defense worked in Kyiv, Vinnytsia, and Odesa. Explosions heard in Kremenchuk, Khmelnitskiy, and Zhytomyr.

zone fucked around with this message at 03:36 on May 18, 2023

# ? May 18, 2023 03:31

HonorableTB: Dec 22, 2006

zone posted:

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1658872217432621060
New piece of Russian junk just dropped.

lmao these technicals keep getting more and more held together by hopes, prayers, and cope cages

# ? May 18, 2023 03:38

HonorableTB: Dec 22, 2006

Ukraine is drat serious about this "shut the gently caress up" opsec position:

https://twitter.com/NewVoiceUkraine/status/1658844426716758019?s=20

# ? May 18, 2023 03:44

Budzilla: Oct 14, 2007; We can all learn from our past mistakes.

zone posted:

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1658872217432621060
New piece of Russian junk just dropped.

ZSU-57-2 is the self propelled version of the AZP S-60 and they are using this? Even the ZSU-57-2 successor, the Shilka was developed in 1960.

# ? May 18, 2023 03:46

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

url posted:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/16/russia-prisons-wagner-group-ukraine-crime-culture/?tpcc=recirc_trending062921

Jesus loving christ that is some bleak poo poo right there

also is Prigozhin a cia agent with orders to destroy russian society or what? "take all the violent criminals and release those who survive 6 months of hellwar into the cities" is a literal batman villain plot.

# ? May 18, 2023 03:51

HonorableTB: Dec 22, 2006

Klyith posted:

Jesus loving christ that is some bleak poo poo right there

also is Prigozhin a cia agent with orders to destroy russian society or what? "take all the violent criminals and release those who survive 6 months of hellwar into the cities" is a literal batman villain plot.

Anyone got a non-paywall version of this?

# ? May 18, 2023 04:00

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

HonorableTB posted:

Anyone got a non-paywall version of this?

scroll back up, the OP posted the whole thing in quote

# ? May 18, 2023 04:01

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# ? May 31, 2024 04:54

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

Klyith posted:

Jesus loving christ that is some bleak poo poo right there

also is Prigozhin a cia agent with orders to destroy russian society or what? "take all the violent criminals and release those who survive 6 months of hellwar into the cities" is a literal batman villain plot.

He posted a video of a dead American soldier and said he'd send him home wrapped in a flag because he died a hero.

So take that one for what you will.

I'm a bit curious what the response will be to this one. Will the right do their thing and make some hilarious reaction to this that is absolutely bad? Yuck tuck probably would have spouted oni San prigohzins e-honor move as good good poo poo.

# ? May 18, 2023 04:03

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Ukraine War: "20 months of war for a used car."

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