Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Official Thread)
- Thread starter newarkhiphop
- Start date
T
Not Obama's finest moment
The Soviet WWII playbook was a little too stale and transparent lmao
The aggression towards Finland was particularlyto the point like 20% more people want to join NATO in Finland and Sweden now
I think Russia would actually try and stage a false flag attack with a chemical weapon as well based on their history so they have that going for them
when Putin started flexing on Finland, Sweden and Switzerland i was like "Okay, my guy..."
Voice of Reason
Veteran
Those guys were in a lose/lose situation.
Tell Putin the truth,
Tell Putin what he wants to hear,
I wonder if that's the same guy he was talking greasy to on TV a few weeks ago.
politico.eu
Hungary has become the EU home of Kremlin talking points
Lili Bayer
10-12 minutes
Hungary has become the EU home of Kremlin talking points
Viktor Orbán has publicly condemned Russia’s war and backed EU sanctions. The story from pro-Orbán media in Hungary is very different.
Press play to listen to this article
BUDAPEST — Welcome to the EU capital of Russian disinformation.
To read and watch state-linked news in Hungary these days is to catch a steady stream of Kremlin-friendly framings, arguments and outright conspiracies about the war in Ukraine.
The CIA helped install the current Ukrainian government in power. The U.S. prodded Russia into attacking Ukraine.
Ukrainian arms may be sold to “terrorists” in France. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is behaving like Adolf Hitler during the waning days of World War II.
There's no evidence for any of this, of course. But what’s remarkable is that these arguments are coming from pundits, TV stations and print outlets linked to Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, whose leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has publicly joined with Western allies in condemning Russia over its invasion. He has supported massive EU sanctions crippling Russia’s economy and even said NATO troops would be allowed to deploy to western Hungary.
Within Hungary, though, his party is often sending a much different message. From state-owned media to pro-government outlets that are propped up with taxpayer-funded advertising, pundits linked to Fidesz are promoting conspiracy theories about the conflict and relativizing Russia’s aggression.
At the same time, refugees are appearing at Hungarian train stations and local media outlets are reporting on the war, generating an outpouring of sympathy for Ukrainians fleeing for their lives. On a recent afternoon, a makeshift humanitarian center at a Budapest train station was crowded with church groups and volunteers handing out food, medicine and supplies to refugees.
The blend has created a somewhat bewildering atmosphere in a country where some citizens still remember firsthand how the Soviet Union brutally crushed the 1956 Hungarian revolution. And it has all emerged less than a month before Orbán faces a general election, making it an unexpected flashpoint in the campaign.
On Sunday evening, hundreds of opposition supporters gathered in front of the state media headquarters in Budapest, protesting in the biting cold against what they describe as a flurry of Russian propaganda on state TV.
“Broadcasting Russian propaganda,” one homemade poster said, “makes you complicit in war crimes.”
Budapest’s Kremlin narratives
In the first days of the war, state-owned channel M1 repeatedly invited on Georg Spöttle — a conspiracy theorist known for researching UFOs — to provide expert analysis of the war.
Russian forces took over Chernobyl, Spöttle said, so that “it won’t be attacked,” he said once.
Zelenskyy’s call for Ukrainians to volunteer to bear arms is “very dangerous,” he said, claiming Ukrainian weapons could be sold to “terrorists” in France. He even compared the Ukrainian leader's decision-making to Hitler's move in the last months of World War II to conscript men not already serving in the military.
Media analysts said this presence of Russian narratives is widespread in Hungarian state media.
“I think the Hungarian public media is the No. 1 broadcaster of the Kremlin propaganda in Europe right now, since RT and Sputnik are shut down,” said Ágnes Urbán, an analyst at Mérték Media Monitor.
Hungary’s state media has rejected this criticism.
“The left is attacking the independent Hungarian public media again,” the state media’s leadership wrote in a recent statement. “Now they want to prescribe what is in the news in connection with the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.”
Anti-American streak
Beyond state media, Fidesz-affiliated outlets and pro-government social media groups have also promoted a conspiratorial and at times derogatory narrative about Ukraine’s democratically elected government.
Flagship pro-government daily Magyar Nemzet was the one promoting the CIA conspiracy in its pages this past weekend.
And other Fidesz-linked figures have been blaming Washington, not Moscow, for the war.
“The United States — for military, political, economic and security reasons — arranged a challenge against Russia through Ukraine,” said Gábor Bencsik, a pundit with close Fidesz ties.
“Russia, in my opinion, gave a tragically bad response to this challenge — but the challenge began from there,” he said on a talk show over the weekend on Fidesz-linked channel HírTV.
“I am not anti-American,” Bencsik insisted. Under former U.S. President Donald Trump, he said, “the world went toward peace … unfortunately, now America once again has leadership that goes toward confrontation.”
Péter Krekó, director of the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute think tank, said the invasion of Ukraine has led Hungary’s leadership to reassess its foreign policy.
“I think Hungary realized this is something totally new — and NATO and EU unity is key,” he said.
Nevertheless, “the pro-Kremlin disinfo and government information ecosystem cannot really be separated,” Krekó noted, adding that “there is a huge wave of relativization” and some Fidesz figures “hate the West more than they hate Russia.”
But the pro-government media narrative has gone beyond merely criticizing American foreign policy.
An article originating in a pro-government website and republished in multiple Fidesz-affiliated outlets accused, by name, an American diplomat in the region of working to “destabilize” Ukraine. More broadly, the piece said the U.S. had “provoked the Russians.”
Asked about anti-American content and whether the personal attacks have been brought up with Hungarian authorities, the U.S. embassy in Budapest declined to comment on the specifics.
But in a statement, the embassy did stress the importance “in a democratic society for members of the media to uphold high standards of journalism,” adding that the principle “is even more important in the present moment.”
The Hungarian government did not respond to a request for comment.
Chaotic campaign
While Hungary’s election is merely weeks away, it remains unclear how much Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and accompanying wave of disinformation — will impact the vote.
The ruling party is competing against an opposition alliance that brings together parties ranging from liberals and greens to conservatives and former far-right politicians.
While Orbán had originally intended to build his campaign around a “child protection” law — a set of anti-LGBTQ+ legislative changes — the public’s attention is now on the war next door.
Even before war broke out, Orbán saw a possible conflict as a challenge for his reelection campaign.
One politician from the ruling Fidesz party, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the issue came up during a party meeting in mid-February.
When Orbán spoke of “possible risks” for the upcoming election, the politician said, “he mentioned war as one of the most unpredictable elements.”
After Russia’s invasion, the prime minister pivoted to a strategy of emphasizing that Hungary should stay out of the war. Orbán and his allies have repeatedly said that the opposition wants to send troops to Ukraine — a claim that is not factually correct.
Unlike many other EU countries, Budapest has declined to provide Kyiv with bilateral military assistance. And despite Hungary’s support for punitive measures targeting Russia, a government minister this week blamed a historic fall in the Hungarian currency on “Brussels sanctions.”
The quick changes in government communication, combined with a stream of war images from Ukraine, Kremlin media narratives and refugees appearing in Hungary have simply left many befuddled.
“Hungarian public opinion is confused,” said Krekó. “But the majority blames the war on Russia.”
Hungary has become the EU home of Kremlin talking points
Lili Bayer
10-12 minutes
Hungary has become the EU home of Kremlin talking points
Viktor Orbán has publicly condemned Russia’s war and backed EU sanctions. The story from pro-Orbán media in Hungary is very different.
Press play to listen to this article
BUDAPEST — Welcome to the EU capital of Russian disinformation.
To read and watch state-linked news in Hungary these days is to catch a steady stream of Kremlin-friendly framings, arguments and outright conspiracies about the war in Ukraine.
The CIA helped install the current Ukrainian government in power. The U.S. prodded Russia into attacking Ukraine.
Ukrainian arms may be sold to “terrorists” in France. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is behaving like Adolf Hitler during the waning days of World War II.
There's no evidence for any of this, of course. But what’s remarkable is that these arguments are coming from pundits, TV stations and print outlets linked to Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, whose leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has publicly joined with Western allies in condemning Russia over its invasion. He has supported massive EU sanctions crippling Russia’s economy and even said NATO troops would be allowed to deploy to western Hungary.
Within Hungary, though, his party is often sending a much different message. From state-owned media to pro-government outlets that are propped up with taxpayer-funded advertising, pundits linked to Fidesz are promoting conspiracy theories about the conflict and relativizing Russia’s aggression.
At the same time, refugees are appearing at Hungarian train stations and local media outlets are reporting on the war, generating an outpouring of sympathy for Ukrainians fleeing for their lives. On a recent afternoon, a makeshift humanitarian center at a Budapest train station was crowded with church groups and volunteers handing out food, medicine and supplies to refugees.
The blend has created a somewhat bewildering atmosphere in a country where some citizens still remember firsthand how the Soviet Union brutally crushed the 1956 Hungarian revolution. And it has all emerged less than a month before Orbán faces a general election, making it an unexpected flashpoint in the campaign.
On Sunday evening, hundreds of opposition supporters gathered in front of the state media headquarters in Budapest, protesting in the biting cold against what they describe as a flurry of Russian propaganda on state TV.
“Broadcasting Russian propaganda,” one homemade poster said, “makes you complicit in war crimes.”
Budapest’s Kremlin narratives
In the first days of the war, state-owned channel M1 repeatedly invited on Georg Spöttle — a conspiracy theorist known for researching UFOs — to provide expert analysis of the war.
Russian forces took over Chernobyl, Spöttle said, so that “it won’t be attacked,” he said once.
Zelenskyy’s call for Ukrainians to volunteer to bear arms is “very dangerous,” he said, claiming Ukrainian weapons could be sold to “terrorists” in France. He even compared the Ukrainian leader's decision-making to Hitler's move in the last months of World War II to conscript men not already serving in the military.
Media analysts said this presence of Russian narratives is widespread in Hungarian state media.
“I think the Hungarian public media is the No. 1 broadcaster of the Kremlin propaganda in Europe right now, since RT and Sputnik are shut down,” said Ágnes Urbán, an analyst at Mérték Media Monitor.
Hungary’s state media has rejected this criticism.
“The left is attacking the independent Hungarian public media again,” the state media’s leadership wrote in a recent statement. “Now they want to prescribe what is in the news in connection with the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.”
Anti-American streak
Beyond state media, Fidesz-affiliated outlets and pro-government social media groups have also promoted a conspiratorial and at times derogatory narrative about Ukraine’s democratically elected government.
Flagship pro-government daily Magyar Nemzet was the one promoting the CIA conspiracy in its pages this past weekend.
And other Fidesz-linked figures have been blaming Washington, not Moscow, for the war.
“The United States — for military, political, economic and security reasons — arranged a challenge against Russia through Ukraine,” said Gábor Bencsik, a pundit with close Fidesz ties.
“Russia, in my opinion, gave a tragically bad response to this challenge — but the challenge began from there,” he said on a talk show over the weekend on Fidesz-linked channel HírTV.
“I am not anti-American,” Bencsik insisted. Under former U.S. President Donald Trump, he said, “the world went toward peace … unfortunately, now America once again has leadership that goes toward confrontation.”
Péter Krekó, director of the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute think tank, said the invasion of Ukraine has led Hungary’s leadership to reassess its foreign policy.
“I think Hungary realized this is something totally new — and NATO and EU unity is key,” he said.
Nevertheless, “the pro-Kremlin disinfo and government information ecosystem cannot really be separated,” Krekó noted, adding that “there is a huge wave of relativization” and some Fidesz figures “hate the West more than they hate Russia.”
But the pro-government media narrative has gone beyond merely criticizing American foreign policy.
An article originating in a pro-government website and republished in multiple Fidesz-affiliated outlets accused, by name, an American diplomat in the region of working to “destabilize” Ukraine. More broadly, the piece said the U.S. had “provoked the Russians.”
Asked about anti-American content and whether the personal attacks have been brought up with Hungarian authorities, the U.S. embassy in Budapest declined to comment on the specifics.
But in a statement, the embassy did stress the importance “in a democratic society for members of the media to uphold high standards of journalism,” adding that the principle “is even more important in the present moment.”
The Hungarian government did not respond to a request for comment.
Chaotic campaign
While Hungary’s election is merely weeks away, it remains unclear how much Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and accompanying wave of disinformation — will impact the vote.
The ruling party is competing against an opposition alliance that brings together parties ranging from liberals and greens to conservatives and former far-right politicians.
While Orbán had originally intended to build his campaign around a “child protection” law — a set of anti-LGBTQ+ legislative changes — the public’s attention is now on the war next door.
Even before war broke out, Orbán saw a possible conflict as a challenge for his reelection campaign.
One politician from the ruling Fidesz party, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the issue came up during a party meeting in mid-February.
When Orbán spoke of “possible risks” for the upcoming election, the politician said, “he mentioned war as one of the most unpredictable elements.”
After Russia’s invasion, the prime minister pivoted to a strategy of emphasizing that Hungary should stay out of the war. Orbán and his allies have repeatedly said that the opposition wants to send troops to Ukraine — a claim that is not factually correct.
Unlike many other EU countries, Budapest has declined to provide Kyiv with bilateral military assistance. And despite Hungary’s support for punitive measures targeting Russia, a government minister this week blamed a historic fall in the Hungarian currency on “Brussels sanctions.”
The quick changes in government communication, combined with a stream of war images from Ukraine, Kremlin media narratives and refugees appearing in Hungary have simply left many befuddled.
“Hungarian public opinion is confused,” said Krekó. “But the majority blames the war on Russia.”
Putin infuriated by Russian intelligence failures in Ukraine war | News | The Times
WAR IN UKRAINE
Putin infuriated by Russian intelligence failures in Ukraine war
Tom Ball
Wednesday March 09 2022, 5.00pm GMT, The Times
The FSB, a successor to the KGB which President Putin once led, is drawing his ire
At the height of its powers, the KGB was among the most formidable intelligence agencies in the world, a weapon of the state wielded to promote the Soviet Union’s interests at home and abroad. Since then, however, it appears Russian intelligence has suffered a precipitous fall.
The FSB, one of the successor agencies to the KGB, is being blamed in part for Russia’s stuttering invasion of Ukraine, according to security experts, with Vladimir Putin said to be furious at the inaccurate intelligence he has received.
“It is not a competent organisation,” said Andrei Soldatov, co-founder and editor of Agentura, a investigative website that has monitored the Russian secret services for more than 20 years. “The final reports that they produced on the situation on the ground in the run-up to the invasion were simply not right, which is part of the reason as to why things have gone so badly for Russia.”
• This war will be a total failure, FSB whistleblower says
The primary responsibilities of the FSB, of which Putin was director from 1998-99, are internal and include everything from counterterrorism to border security. Over recent years, its fiefdom has expanded and it is also responsible for monitoring the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Since 2014, the agency had spent a lot of time and resources on attempts to foment unrest in western Ukraine among far-right groups, which ultimately came to nothing, Soldatov said. Their assessments of popular support among Ukrainians for a Russian invasion and the extent to which the country would resist were also “terribly miscalculated”.
“We can’t rule out the fact that the intelligence they gathered on the ground was in fact very good,” said Soldatov. “The problem is that it is too risky for superiors to tell Putin what he doesn’t want to hear, so they tailor their information. The tailoring probably takes place somewhere between the rank of colonel and general in the FSB.”
A series of public embarrassments involving its officers over recent days has provided further humiliation. Last weekend an alleged report written by an officer within the FSB emerged. The disgruntled author complained about being overworked and about meaningless “box-ticking exercises” that had left the country woefully unprepared for the effect of western sanctions.
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, was director of the FSB in the late 1990s
PAVEL GOLOVKIN/AP
During periods of crisis, agents are often required to sleep in the Lubyanka, the imposing Moscow headquarters of the FSB which also served as the KGB’s head office. “When I speak to FSB officers, they are not doing it because of a big idea. It’s always because they are complaining about something relatively trivial,” Soldatov said.
“They are narrow-minded people. They are not like MI6 officers who have been to Cambridge and are supposedly the cream of the crop. They have left school and been educated at the FSB academy. They often go into it because their father and grandfather had also been an intelligence officer, it’s well-paid and they give you an apartment.”
The FSB, which specialises in sowing political instability, currently has hundreds of its agents operating throughout Ukraine, using tactical groups to intimidate civilians in occupied areas, the Ukrainian military said on Tuesday.
Philip Ingram, a security expert and former senior British intelligence officer, said the FSB had also attached its officers to each military unit to act as a “political commissar”. Ingram said: “They will be making sure that there is no dissent and that the party line is being followed, scaring the commanders and therefore the troops on the ground with their approach.”
•How Putin cemented his power: the KGB and rise of Kremlin Inc
When one of those officers, embedded with the 41st army outside Kharkiv, phoned another officer in Russia to tell him of the death of General Vitaly Gerasimov, the phone call was intercepted and published by the Ukrainian security services.
Rather than using the services’ secure communication channel Era, which was rolled out to much fanfare last year, they were speaking using normal sim cards.
“The FSB is still a relatively old-fashioned organisation trying to play espionage the old-fashioned way, the way it has always done it,” Ingram said. “They will be smarting at the moment as Putin is very angry. You can see it in his body language, the way he is gesturing, the terminology he is using. He blames them for seeding him the advice that led to the poor decision-making in Ukraine.”
