Putin’s Henchmen Rage About Getting Trolled With ‘Endless Photos’ of Dead Russian Troops

‘MASS ATTACK’

Moscow’s mouthpieces claim they’re being tormented with a flood of texts and calls about the war, including photos allegedly showing the bodies of dead Russian soldiers.

Julia Davis

DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images

While Russian President Vladimir Putin is raining bombs on Ukrainian cities, his top propagandists are most concerned about getting bombarded with text messages and losing the information war to Ukraine.

On Thursday’s episode of The Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, state TV propagandist Vladimir Soloviev complained that he and editor-in-chief of RT Margarita Simonyan are being terrorized by unknown individuals, receiving endless calls and texts about Russia’s military activities in Ukraine. He griped: “Margarita and I can show our telephones to demonstrate that we’re getting a thousand calls and texts per hour.”

Several days earlier, two other state TV propagandists, Olga Skabeeva and her husband Evgeny Popov, also reported a barrage of calls. Skabeeva, who hosts the state TV show 60 Minutes, angrily yelled that Ukrainians or their supporters have been “endlessly calling everybody, everybody, all citizens of Russia, including me and Evgeny!” Later in the show, she loudly interrupted a panelist to grumble about being subjected to a “mass attack that started at 2 a.m... we started getting calls from the territory of Ukraine, two to three minutes apart, Ukrainian and Polish phone numbers calling nonstop... And then, text messages with threats to kill me and my family, and photos—endless photos—of corpses, which they say are the corpses of Russian soldiers!”

The fact that the Russian military is experiencing heavy losses during the invasion of Ukraine seemed to be of little consequence to Skabeeva, who for years publicly agitated for war against Ukraine. She was, however, overtly angered by the messages, which serve as a reminder of the war’s consequences.

Meanwhile in Moscow, the Russian government has adopted new legislation to prevent the dissemination of “fake” information about the invasion, with state media describing worldwide condemnation of the Kremlin’s deeds as “informational carpet bombing.” Across state television, Putin’s attempted blitzkrieg against Kyiv is being entirely overshadowed by the Western response to the assault on Ukraine, including U.S. sanctions, which Russian lawmaker Alexey Nechayev described as “the blitzkrieg of the West against the Russian economy.”

Popular state TV pundit Karen Shakhnazarov conceded on Friday that, “It seems to me that we’re losing the information war. Our info-operation wasn’t thoroughly prepared, unlike the Ukrainian side—and whoever is standing behind them.” He, too, complained about getting trolled with strange phone calls. “By the way, I got a call from Zelensky. Well, at least it was his voice on my phone. Either a recording or somebody impersonating him. Other people are getting those too,” he said. “They’re well-prepared, with hundreds of thousands or millions of templates for things that are being disseminated.”

Appearing on Soloviev’s show on Thursday, Alexander Khinshtein, head of the State Duma’s information committee, said, “This is a blatant, overt information war that is being waged for hearts and minds, to make people not only abroad, but within Russia to believe in these horrors and to experience fear, panic and hatred, to start a psychological war over here.” He went on to describe “unprecedented” cyber attacks against Russia’s “infrastructure and its government websites,” claiming that they are “two to three times more impactful than any prior cyberattacks Russia experienced.”

“Our government seems to be impotent. We’re never prepared for anything.”

Khinshtein claimed that the cyberattacks targeted all government agencies, all federal and regional utility services, energy and transportation systems, as well as “objects of critical information infrastructure, including all of Russia’s state-controlled media.” He blamed unknown attackers for sending out text messages, push notifications and snail mail that is being delivered to physical addresses in Russia, describing the contents simply as “horrors.”

Khinshtein concluded that the aim of the ongoing offensive is to “cause the infrastructure to crash and the public to panic.” Soloviev chimed in to clarify: “We certainly understand that Ukrainians are not the ones doing that and our doctrine clearly describes cyberattacks as casus belli. So what are we waiting for?” Unsatisfied with just one war in progress, Soloviev is agitating for another—but in all fairness, he believes that Russia is already at war with the Western world. He exclaimed: “Our war is against the West—a big, serious war... Ukraine is a proxy through which the West is fighting against us.”

The impact of the war on Russia’s economic crisis is already starting to manifest, as the government and major supermarket chains have agreed to restrict the amount of food staples sold to each customer in an effort to limit hoarding.

Alexander Babakov, member of the State Duma, said: “The current situation can be factually characterized as war. An economical war, a battle for survival... Look at what the West is doing. It’s destroying all logistics, it’s destroying us economically... Let’s not be shy about it, we intend to win this war.”

Appearing on Soloviev’s show on Wednesday, political scientist Sergey Mikheyev predicted: “The situation here, internally, may deteriorate once the people start to feel the impact of sanctions... even those people who agree with us right now... It won’t be enough just to tell them that this is our life now, because we had to undertake the denazification of Ukraine... We should have been preparing for this moment ten, fifteen years earlier, with a different economy, but even now, we need to communicate to people about this... We can’t just say that this is our new reality and we must live in it... We can tell them how hard this will hit America—which is also necessary—but that alone won’t suffice.”

Mikheyev added: “With all respect to our president, he always said that rising prosperity was the most important thing... Go ahead and explain, if the main thing in life is prosperity, then explain how we’re supposed to survive these sanctions.”

Without a hint of self-awareness, Soloviev boasted that he had no real concerns about the economic impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine—despite recently losing access to his two Italian villas, estimated to be worth a combined $8 million. The host bragged: “Myself, I’m well off.” He cackled: “I bought so much stuff in previous years that I don’t have to go to any stores for years to come.”

Even the most ardent Putin supporters sounded irritated with his government—not for waging war against Russia’s innocent neighbor, but for being unprepared to face the economic fallout. Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at Moscow State University, noted: “Our government seems to be impotent. We’re never prepared for anything... How will people fix their cars without automobile parts?” Evoking the story of Cinderella, Soloviev bitterly pointed out, “And our phones are about to turn into pumpkins.”

Russian State TV Just Blew Up Putin’s ‘Nazi Ukraine’ Bullshit

JIG’S UP

Russian lawmakers suddenly blab what Putin actually wants in Ukraine—and it has nothing to do with “Nazis.”

Julia Davis

Aris Messinis/Getty

Confusion reigns on Russia’s state TV, as panicked lawmakers and pundits try to explain to the public why their country invaded Ukraine and now faces crushing Western sanctions. And in the process of zealous propagandists striving to justify the unfathomable, they’ve inadvertently revealed too much.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state TV on Friday that President Vladimir Putin was directly involved in making command decisions with respect to Russia’s military activities in Ukraine. He urged: “It’s time to unite around our president,” and encouraged those who understand the Kremlin’s aims to “patiently explain” them to anyone who doesn’t.

Appearing on the state TV show The Evening With Vladimir Soloviev on Friday, lawmaker Andrei Kartapolov, who heads the Russian parliament’s defense committee, then set out to justify Putin’s military activities in Ukraine.

Starting with the most recent news of a terrifying fire caused by the Russian military’s efforts to take control over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Kartapolov claimed that Russian troops were ordered to seize Ukraine’s nuclear plants to prevent Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky “from building a dirty bomb” with which to attack Russia.

Kartapolov’s baseless allegation stemmed solely from Zelensky’s statement at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 19, where he brought up the failure by the signatories to honor the Budapest memorandum, wherein Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in return for security guarantees. Zelensky requested new security guarantees—or, in the alternative, he stressed that all provisions of the 1994 agreement would be void. This statement contained no threats towards Russia, but was convenient enough to be appropriated as one of Putin’s claims as to why Ukraine somehow posed a threat to its larger neighbor.

On Soloviev’s show—an Orwellian environment, typical of the Russian state media—the host and every panelist repeatedly denied the obvious, attempting to disprove the notion that Russia is at war with Ukraine. Soloviev asked: “Are we de facto at war with NATO?” Kartapolov concurred: “De facto, we are at war with NATO, because all of Ukraine’s military formations are carrying out NATO’s tasks... NATO is also solving another problem, getting rid of Europe’s excess migrants by sending them to fight in Ukraine.” He pompously concluded: “God is not in power, but in truth.”

As to the Kremlin’s aims in Ukraine, Kartapolov explained them in detail: “Our position is clear and transparent, including during these negotiations. The essence is as follows: Ukraine will recognize Crimea as the Russian Federation, as well as DPR/LPR [‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ and ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’] within their administrative borders. Ukraine will change its social and state system and become a neutral, demilitarized country. That’s it.”

Lawmaker Konstantin Zatulin, who is deputy chairman of the Duma commission on relations with the former Soviet Union, seemed unsettled by Kartapolov’s revelations and angrily replied: “When a horse has something to say, a saddle shouldn’t be the one to talk. This is not the time to tell everything. First of all, we’re not the ones who should be saying that, they [Ukrainians] need to be the ones who say that. But that situation has to ripen first. It won’t be done during the thunder of cannons. Until our operation has concluded, it won’t be clear what ‘denazification’ will consist of.”

As for “demilitarization,” Zatulin said that even specific kinds of weapons Russia wants to eliminate from Ukraine are being discussed during talks between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations.

The banter revealed Putin’s apparent strategy in Ukraine: destroy Ukraine’s infrastructure and cause widespread desperation with a brutal military assault, which would then compel the Ukrainian government to concede to Putin’s terms and leave their positions or face a violent removal by force. It’s a land grab of Eastern Ukraine, followed by the transformation of the rest of the country into a powerless vassal state, controlled and headed by Putin’s puppets. To break Ukraine’s resolve, the Kremlin likely intends to replicate the brutality it demonstrated in Syria and Chechnya.

The devastation Putin’s military campaign has already caused to its neighboring country was of no concern to the pro-Putin pundits. In a glib and nonchalant manner, Soloviev noted: “Ukraine is sinking into the stone age. Most of its territories are on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe.” Nonetheless, he encouraged the Russian government not to stop their “military operation,” known in the rest of the world as brutal, unprovoked war.

Soloviev added: “It should be understood that this is not a war against Ukraine or the Ukrainian people, but a military operation... of denazification and demilitarization of NATO’s fist that was directed at us.” Zatulin chimed in: “This is a war against the West, a war against NATO.” The host agreed: “Of course. This is a battle from the war that started on May 9, 1945, when they—pretending that they’re with us—were getting ready to destroy us.”

Like a mantra, state television talking heads are making references to World War II, invoking the spirit of a fight against Nazism for no other reason but to whitewash Putin’s latest land grab in progress.

Lawmakers and pundits essentially debunked Putin’s claim that he invaded Ukraine to remove what he said is a “Nazi” government—which is, incidentally, headed by a Jewish man. Instead of demystifying the Kremlin’s agenda for the masses, state media demonstrated that in Putin’s Russia, anyone who dares to oppose Putin is described as a “Nazi,” to the point where the term is devoid of its original meaning.

On Soloviev’s show, political scientist and professor of history Elena Ponomareva asserted: “We’re fighting not only against NATO, but also against the Nazi European Union.”

Two days earlier, on a state TV show 60 Minutes, journalist Andrei Sidorchik rode the concept all the way down the hill when he exclaimed: “Joe Biden is a Nazi. The U.S. congressmen⁠—Democrat and Republican⁠—are Nazis... German chancellor is a Nazi... EU leaders are Nazis... because their sanctions are attempting to preserve neo-Nazism in Ukraine.”

Julia Davis

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