Russian here. Roskomnadzor's capabilities for blocking TOR are quite sufficient to cripple TOR's capabilities to the point of making it unusable as a VPN service, unless you set up your own private TOR ramp, which in this case is essentially the same as personal VPN, but much more slow.
The algorithm is quite simple:
1. Attempt to connect to TOR
2. If it connects, blacklist the IP, goto 1.
3. TOR is unavailable
(If an anonymous TOR user can obtain bridge address, shared by any means, email, Signal, messenger pigeons or whatever, RKN operative can obtain it as well)
A solution that Tor has been using with china is to host bridges on something like AWS. In order for china to block the bridges, they must also block all of AWS IP space.
Roskomnadzor can block whole AWS and there will be neither rioting not even a significant outrage. They can even turn to whitelisting. The only reason they don't do it is that it is still considered unnecessary.
The reason it is considered unnecessary is that the existing blocks work enough to cover the most of the population, who aren't technically savvy enough and would not bother to take the special effort. This is enough to lower the reach of sources that contain information not approved by the government to where it doesn't pose any danger to the regime. The same concept as "kitchen talks" in the USSR, only on the Internet - you can have VPN in your own "kitchen", as long as it stays there it will be ignored.
So, if Tor browsing becomes easy enough for a common citizen to use, they will disrupt it just enough so that common citizen won't be able to use it, and would stop there.
The reason it’s unnecessary is because current mechanisms are enough to stop Google and FB from making money on Chinese citizens, which makes it unprofitable to spy and manipulate them.
They've already got their hands on ProtonVPN, Nord VPN, Opera VPN and a number (about 8-10, I think?) of others.
Their system analyzes all the traffic and tries to identify VPN packets, so I don't really see why wouldn't they block all the providers should they need to.
There are still ways to mask the traffic, but a regular user can only be bothered so much.
Yes, many businesses rely on VPN, but I can imagine that RKN might just come up with some great white-list idea.
"Rubber hose key extraction" is a USA idiom representing a beating with a rubber hose with is supposed to be a way to inflict pain without leaving lasting marks so it can be used by the authorities to extract information without leaving evidence of the beating - IIRC there are recorded past cases of some sheriff's departments doing this.
Other cultures don't bother as much with the aspect of leaving lasting marks. The equivalent Russian language idiom is 'thermorectal cryptanalysis' which involves a soldering iron inserted into the anus and is expected to reveal passwords of any length within a minute.
There are plenty of VPS providers in Russia, and many users have already been forced to move there because Visa and Mastercard made impossible paying for foreign services. (It is very difficult to find some action more harmful to anti-Putin dissidents and beneficial to Putin than this ban!)
And large subnets were blocked back then, blocking many unrelated websites/services at once. IIRC even some of RKN's own services were temporarily disrupted by that, but generally they don't shy away from inflicting collateral damage. There's no shortage of cases of blocking large websites for humorous or silly pictures and texts (not even political), too.
Seems like very elaborate pr stunt and what exactly did they stand to gain from this? I’d hesitate to explain something with a great conspiracy what is much simply explained with incompetence
They gain a lot of coverage as an unbendable brave service that does not bow to the requests of Russian government. So all the dissidents start using it for communication.
And the only downside is that RKN will have an even worse reputation... Which already was beyond worse of the worse, so nothing is really lost.
Telegram is already shady, it has no clear funding source while having the highest operating cost of any of the main stream chat apps due to it storing everything you send with no limits.
There is no e2e encryption, it has access to everything you do, its often said to be an alternative to WhatsApp, but its mostly worse in privacy, WhatsApp has proven encryption at least, and encrypted backups on android, while on apple its basically a back door.
And the explanation up to now is that durov is paying for everything for the faint of heart, which I really don't believe.
Matrix on paper is a good alternative, but its clients are not even close, and I speak as a daily matrix user.
Technically telegram does have optional e2e but group chats weren’t supported last i checked. Source on operational costs? Dont they have “telegram premium” thing to earn money now?
> Technically telegram does have optional e2e but group chats weren’t supported last i checked.
And aren't supported on desktop either, no body uses them, they are severely limited on purpose.
> Source on operational costs?
Telegram saves everything you do on the platform, every message, every picture, every video, every file with no limit.
They market it as a feature, on their twitter they often say you can use it as cloud storage.
This absolutely costs more than WhatsApp or signal, which only use servers as relays.
> Dont they have “telegram premium” thing to earn money now?
Its a very recent thing, and it has a very minimal effect, and the previous years didn't just pay for themselves.
> Telegram is already shady, it has no clear funding source while having the highest operating cost of any of the main stream chat apps due to it storing everything you send with no limits.
It's founder, Durov, is a billionaire and he has quite clearly stated he's bankrolling it but looking for monetisation avenues for Telegram to become self-sufficient - first it was some token scheme that was shutdown by the SEC, now there's Telegram Premium.
Durov is also known to lie a lot. He claimed that Telegram developer's were moved abroad from Russia, while in reality they were working out of old VK office, just a floor below.
And that VK was a company supposedly taken away from Durov. Also, Telegram's early versions bear the striking similarities with VK own products. As if Telegram was developed internally in VK and then spun away as an independent company.
1. Allegedly, Telegram was created when Durov was fired from Vkontakte and has to flee Russia. In reality, Telegram office was colocated with Vkontakte office on same building (famous Zinger's house in center of St. Petersburg) for years after alleged split. It was revealed in former employee vs Telegram court case.
2. Telegram had won over RKN by support of Google/Apple. RKN could not ban appstores and push notifications, so Telegram could constantly change IP addresses of proxy servers and send them to applications using push notifications.
RKN allegedly failed to pressure Apple/Google to ban Telegram app in Russia, despite trying for years.
When Navalny's team tried to employ same tactics, RKN was able to ban their app in both appstores in week or so. Same for LinkedIn.
It is known that Google and Apple did accept the demands to block apps both before and after the Telegram affair. What we don't know, is did they even receive that demand? Every new sources that the demand was sent sources to RKN press release on their own website (I checked about 50 news reports, that all referenced each other and RKN). When asked about blocks (of LinkedIn), Google's spokesperson said that they follow the regulations on the local markers.
We need Apple/Google to confirm, if they did ever receive the demands to remove Telegram from their app stores. If not, it is a big big red flag.
Tor is not really comparable to telegram. check out that link I posted, that talk goes over a lot of details that I am currently at a loss of words for.
China also does not seem to be willing to burn all the bridges to the rest of the world just yet, so it has to accept some kind of interconnection to services like AWS that aren't under its control.
“Just yet”? China is number one industrial superpower, you can’t have that with bridges burned. In fact China is going the exact opposite way, see the Belt and Road.
I believe it’s mostly those in Russia, because it become useless from both commercial (embargoes on everything make Russian transport worthless) and political (don’t want your problematic vassal control something crucial to your economy) point or view. Funds have been shifted to countries like Kazakhstan.
Didn't Signal do something like this and get in trouble?[0] I honestly don't know much about domain fronting so if this is something completely different than I'd appreciate an explanation. I do know that my friends in China are unable to use Signal, so I figure something is up.
Domain fronting was (and to a lesser extent still is) mainly about using CDN infrastructure so that clients appear (to a network censor) to be connecting to one CDN customer, but then ask the CDN to actually let them talk to a different CDN customer. (There are various protocol-layering tricks that may enable this either by accident or on purpose.)
This is a little different than using VPS services because with the VPS services you're actually connecting to the customer you appear to be connecting to, it's just very unclear who that is, because it's just one random VPS customer among a huge number of servers hosted on that same service.
Ah, thanks for the explanation. I do have a followup though. If this method is successful for Tor, why isn't it for Signal? I was under the impression that they used AWS and other servers. Or are they just not doing this and leaving an (easy?) censorship mitigation opportunity unsolved?
I believe Tor has a more active anti-censorship project than Signal does. While I don't think Signal is in any sense OK with governments blocking it, the Tor folks have something along the lines of a whole anti-censorship team (part paid and part volunteer). I don't believe Signal has a direct equivalent to that.
There could also be an element of luck or differences in how strongly particular governments are trying to block particular apps and circumvention methods at a given moment. I know that varies a lot from country to country.
Edit: However, Signal does have a "Censorship circumvention" feature under "Advanced" options. So there is some level of official work on that from Signal. Have your friends tried this feature?
Thank you for trying it! Maybe I need to donate to Signal in the hope that they'll eventually have more resources to work on improving their anti-censorship technology.
I don't think the privacy/anonymity proposals are exactly identical to anticensorship, even if they tend to appeal to the same people. (In the thread you linked, they're advocated by the same person.) After all, you can have a highly centralized service that knows personal data about its users but that also tries to prevent governments from blocking it.
Well I should correct this slightly. They have been fine if they connect to a VPN first. I'm not sure if they have tried the proxy option, though I was under the impression that this wasn't as actively supported. This is something I wish Signal would do better.
I also have the impression it's not as actively supported, but when I first replied to you, I had the impression it no longer existed at all as an organized effort, so it looks like the situation is probably better than I first thought. :-)
There are a number of countries gearing up to actively regulate instant messaging, including with potential encryption restrictions and app-blocking remedies for noncompliance, so I imagine this functionality will become more and more relevant over time. :-(
If you are stating that AWS is required to provide all data flowing in and out of datacenters to the USA Government, but not the Chinese government, then you are 100% wrong.
This is why Chinese regions have to replicate nearly all services in their own regions. No intermingling with other regions.
The difference here is that American companies are forced to cooperate with their government with any data, it doesn’t matter where that data is located. That’s why China decided they want their own infrastructure, and other governments, like EU, are taking similar steps.
Another Russian here. 99% of usage of Tor and Bitcoin is Russia is to purchase drugs — darknet has almost completely replaced street dealers in the whole country, and there's an addiction epidemic going on. At the same time, most of drug trade in Russia has been managed by various branches of police and secret police (actual police, rosgvardia, fsb, fskn in the past), and large marketplaces are likely directly owned by them. So there's a huge monetary incentive to keep Tor network available, which I think is much more important to people in power than a dozen or so journalists and activists who might publish some anti-government banalities on some darknet forum that nobody (unfortunately, in my personal view) reads or gives a shit about anyway.
Russians at large know perfectly well that their media is censored and the government is corrupt. They just don't care.
> who might publish some anti-government banalities on some darknet forum that nobody (unfortunately, in my personal view) reads or gives a shit about anyway.
So true, so Slavic. I love the dark Russian humor and bracing cynicism.
A Russian and an American sinner die and end up in Hell. As they stand before Satan, he says: "I give you the choice of your punishment: you can spend eternity either in the American Hell, or in the Russian Hell."
"What's the difference?", they ask.
"In the American one you're force-fed a bucket full of shit every day. In the Russian one, you're force-fed two buckets. Other than that, you're free to do as you please."
"Well, that's a no-brainer; I pick the American Hell", says the American.
The Russian ponders for a while longer and says, "I'd rather stay in a familiar place; I'll go to the Russian Hell".
A month has passed, and the sinners meet to compare notes. The Russian asks: "So, what's it like in your place?"
"It's exactly as advertised; I have to eat a bucket of shit every day, regular as clockwork, but other than that I'm enjoying life. What about yours? I can barely get through one bucket, two must be horrible!"
"Pah, it's not so bad. Most days, there's a shortage of shit, and they don't have enough to feed even one bucket to most of us. And sometimes the buckets get stolen altogether. Just like home; I love it!"
You may think it's merely a joke, but it's actually a premise of one of the main novels of an author who is considered to be one of the most (if not THE most) influential in modern Russian literature: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/vladimir-sorokins-...
As an observer of many political discussions on various russian forums (pre-conflict and troll factories era), I can tell that these are nowhere near a level which you even remotely could call reasonable. Our political mentality and education is traditionally a non-funny joke. That’s what gp meant by “banalities nobody gives a shit about”, I believe. It’s always some populistic and accusing bullshit and nothing a reasonable adult could get interested in.
>Russians at large know perfectly well that their media is censored and the government is corrupt. They just don't care.
How does it get to this point? I live in a country with a fairly corrupt government with a free media(South Africa) and most people rank corruption as the biggest problem facing SA after crime.
..the big government projects to create jobs have failed due to above corruption & a low skill workforce. Plenty natural resources being dug out but instead of oligarchs we have Anglo American &other multinational mining companies taking most the profit&on ward processing.
But for the general population to really not care about censorship,war&corrupt government, surely these are basic values we take for granted as humans? &So long as we have encryption, tor & VPNs at our disposal, citizens of all nations can transcend the self serving narrative pushed by governments.
'All we need to do is keep on talking' (encrypted) great Pink Floyd track btw
.
> How does it get to this point? I live in a country with a fairly corrupt government with a free media(South Africa) and most people rank corruption as the biggest problem facing SA after crime.
(I'm speaking from an Arabic background)
The cost of speaking up is too High, you know what happens when someone speaks up, and its not worth it.
Nothing will change, and your life will be ruined, and your family will be affected too.
In my experience(not Russian), people talk about the goverments action privately and with trusted relatives, just don't expect any action because no body is going to risk it.
> But for the general population to really not care about censorship,war&corrupt government, surely these are basic values we take for granted as humans? &So long as we have encryption, tor & VPNs at our disposal, citizens of all nations can transcend the self serving narrative pushed by governments.
A lot of people can see what happens when you speak against the government, and what happened in other nations when the people rose up, it ends up in a civil war or a never ending cycle of corruption.
They see they have food, they have a good or acceptable life, they have electricity.
That's enough, and its not worth it to risk dying in prison for speaking against the government.
Its mostly happens when people have nothing to lose.
And dont dismiss that a lot of people support the government, they see the positives, see change, and just simply ignore the bad things, for them rising against the government is how you end up in a destroyed country.
I would imagine because, going back to even before Soviet times, all the people who do care are either disappeared or flee, leaving behind only the people who are too jaded to effectively resist.
Russian absolutism is generally more, well, absolute than other places. Though it's imperfect, a video[1] by Kraut gets the gist across.
Russian society has always been at this point, at least, according to the trend of 19th century literature and foreign accounts I've read going back to the (I think) 17th century.
If you are willing to spend a little time to better understand Russian society, search out the online videos with Mark Galeotti. He is a political scientist specializing in the politics, military, and organized crime of Russia and Ukraine. His discussion of the history of the parallel criminal social structure of Russia/Ukraine is quite interesting.
Most Russians just assume that's how things got to be run everywhere and just perceive it as a normal state of affairs: whoever has the biggest stick, has the privileges. Many just openly say that if they were in a position of power they would do the same.
Russians respect brute force, but they don't respect money; so they are much more irritated by privilege and extravagance displayed by businessmen, even if it's earned in a legal and ethical way, than by someone in a position of power, especially (as in cases of police, fsb and other sikovikis) if it's power rooted in violence.
When communism and ussr fell, criminality in Russia skyrocketted. It also had huge economic problems. All post communist countries had these problems, but it much worst in Russia.
Quite a lot of people concluded democracy is a mess ruled by uncontrolled mafia. And the rest focused on own life, because they needed to.
And then obviously slow crackdown on opposition destroyed organized political groups.
That's not entirely true; criminality was very high in USSR as well, even though it was swept under the rug, and USSR as a country was built in large part by criminal syndicates and structures that were victorious in crime wars of chaotic 1920s. Most of 1930s NKVD came directly, or were coordinated by, former gangsters, starting with Stalin himself.
Crime skyrocketed in 1990 as state lost power, as people lost jobs and quality of life went down for a lot of them. In Russia even more then in satelite republics. That is true both in statistics and in experience of living there. The mafia bombing attacks were the thing of 1990ties and after. They were not a thing before. They are not a thing now, it calmed. People did not even locked doors prior 1990 in quite a lot of places. Things started to be stolen they started to lock.
1920s is extremely far in history. There was whole WWII after that. There were purges after that. So much happened and power changed hands so many times in between, that it does not matter all that much.
Claim that criminality was comparably high in USSR is false.
> (If an anonymous TOR user can obtain bridge address, shared by any means, email, Signal, messenger pigeons or whatever, RKN operative can obtain it as well)
As a Tor relay operator, this always seemed like the most silly aspect of bridges: if someone really wanted to block Tor, wouldn’t they just block any bridges they encountered?!
Some of the bridges are even published on public pages, wouldn’t that defeat the whole point of bridges in the first place?
> Tor is also working to stop the potential abuse of bridges. In 2016, researchers proposed a system called Salmon that aims to weed out those accessing bridge details with the intent of blocking or abusing them.
I was talking only about public bridges, because this is the use-case that RKN is trying to prevent: people have a free way to access blocked information. People who have means find/access a private bridge can have a private VPN too, and it'll work much better for this purpose.
Btw, it is quite difficult now to have private bridge or VPN because of idiotic ban on Mastercard / visa payments Russians can't pay for hosting without a lot of trouble. While inside radishes Russia Mastercard/Visa work fine. Putin is happy: dissidents are cut off, his supporters didn't even notice.
It is interesting to me that they explicitly block Tor. Russia appears to allow several commercial VPN providers. I only know this because I watch a handful of Russian youtube vloggers that try to show how things are going in their city or in their travels around Russia. That makes me wonder if they have an arrangement with those VPN providers to provide data on some of their users. Or perhaps another theory is that the vloggers have been coerced into working for the state but try to make it look like they oppose it.
However, Google reports a mere 3.51% IPv6 usage (compared to 51% in the USA) so I don't know how practical IPv6 would be even if all Tor nodes were fully usable over IPv6.
This has been really fascinating to watch. A patch just landed in Pion DTLS[0] yesterday to make the fingerprinting harder. I don't remember all the commits, but the Tor devs are absolutely amazing to work with and submit patches that are pretty much perfect :)
If you haven't had a chance to investigate WebRTC I really think it is worth it. WebRTC gives up P2P Data/Media everywhere and it is really hard to block (because so many companies depend on it). To me it really feels like the best path forward to circumventing control. It also is a great career move. You can help people build conferencing tools during the day, and Censorship Circumvention at night.
Agreed on WebRTC. It is the only transport that meets all my own requirements for true p2p. It has a lot of issues, but once you write enough code to iron those edges away it is the only option for all-platform, high-speed universal p2p.
A tor-like protocol baked on top of webrtc could do some amazing things :)
You can help by running a Snowflake proxy (which merely functions as a gateway to the Tor Network, so you don't need to worry as no traffic exits from your IP) if you're in a country that doesn't censor Tor. You can either run the standalone Snowflake proxy:
> It has found ways to avoid Russian blocking efforts, and this month, it was removed from Russia’s list of blocked websites following a legal challenge. (Although this doesn’t mean blocking efforts will instantly end.)
The website is blocked again. [1]
> However, people are able to connect to its services using volunteer-run bridges—entry points to the network that can’t easily be blocked, as their details aren’t public—and Tor’s anti-censorship tool Snowflake.
It seems that plenty of bridges (the ones you obtain via the website) are blocked, refuse connections, or otherwise don't function properly. I've checked yet again now, with a bunch of hand-picked bridges to which connections at least succeeded at some point in the past, and connections over Tor just time out.
It is still helpful though, but unfortunately "beating" looks like an overly optimistic way to describe this.
Public bridges often get blocked (the CCP does this too). Tor then spreads them privately through social media with people they trust in the country. Those are harder to find, but that’s also why they’re harder to block.
Actually the Russian internet censorship is mostly bypassed by simple VPN app/extension. We have problems paying for them because VISA/Mastercard payments don't work, but there are plenty of free ones.
Tor is mostly used for darknet/drugs/weapon selling. Nobody is using it to read some new Navalny's post.
Mullvad, http://mullvad.net/, accepts bitcoin and monero, which are currently uncensorable payment mechanisms, especially monero because it's base chain is truly anonymous.
Owning monero and bitcoin in self custody is a "rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it" kind of thing. If you wait until you need it, it's too late.
Using any kind of centralized VPN service is dangerous, they're first to be put on ban lists. Best kind of VPN is tiny personal VPS. You can run simple unobfuscated wireguard and it'll work, nobody cares as long as it stays tiny.
No, it is not stronger or better for purposes of accessing blocked websites. Internet accessed through TOR is much-unusable due to low speeds and endless captchas.
If that is your goal, tor by itself is unlikely to be enough. I don't recall base tor having any effective protection against "government is watching my pipe and I need it to not be possible to tell I'm using tor".
I say "base tor" because I recall some work towards tunneling tor through other traffic to hide that it's happening, but as far as I know tor doesn't do that by default.
What censored resoures you (or other people) access throgh vpn that provide information unavailable otherwise in Russia? (political info, not drugs etc)
Twitter is probably the highest-profile one, but there are a lot of resourses that have been banned in Russia over the years, with torproject.org being unblocked only a couple weeks ago.
Today I used VPN to access cilium.io. I'm from Kazakhstan, though, and it seems to be blocked on US side, but who cares. Plenty of useful websites are victims of collateral damage where they're banned for sharing IP with other websites or they ban me for some weird reason.
Specialized? Obscure? It exposes a SOCKS5 proxy at localhost:9050. If you can figure out how to use a VPN, you can figure out how to use Tor. In a way it is easier than a VPN if you are just using something like Tor Browser or Orbot.
It's always other governments who are authoritarian and for whom censorship circumvention is a good thing. Of course they surely are relatively more authoritarian but everywhere has censorship that the locals want because it's their country with their culture and their rules.
New Zealand imprisons people for sharing the video of the Chirstchurch mosque shootings. I'll bet Tor is doing a good job helping circumvent that censorship too.
As a Russian, as soon as the whole thing started back in February, I installed my own OpenVPN server on a OVH instance in Singapore linked to a bank card issued to a friend in Germany (he's nice enough to pay 5 euros/month for me at no cost), and so far it's worked well - public VPN's the government knows about can be banned, if a VPN service is foreign it can be difficult to pay because of sanctions on my Russian bank, and my setup has been pretty stable, although some sites recognize it's a cheap OVH istance and block it.
So far, in my experience, the problem has been not as much about Russia's censorship as about Western sites blocking access to Russian users just because - on a good day I can bump into a dozen of such sites (by default I surf with VPN disabled).
Another option is to set up a couple WireGuard peers on a VPS and send the config(s) over Signal or other secure means to Russian friends and or acquaintances.
Sure, I'm aware of spam and alike, but it used to be much rarer before the invasion, so I concluded it must be part of the broader protest against the invasion (which includes companies leaving Russia). Now even some obscure technical blogs often return 403's. Some sites, upon detecting you are from Russia, also show the Ukrainian flag with some political message instead of the usual content, which go away if you switch to VPN.
Most of the ISPs that block russian sites (RT, etc.) do it on DNS level, so just changing the DNS allows you to open those sites.
And yes, this is a dark part of EU history... someone like putin blocking websites... sure, he's more or less a dictator, and we expect dictators to do stuff like that. But EU, a "pillar of democracy" blocking sites, because they don't like what they say, and because they show a different side to western propaganda... that's a bad precedent to set. But yeah, unironically writing articles like "evacuation of azovstal" [0] with a headline photo like that, takes some guts and needs some censorship to pass
> because they don't like what they say, and because they show a different side to western propaganda...
News stories are often engineered to achieve a specific desired outcome.
What do you call something that is engineered to cause destruction or chaos? I would call it a weapon. Just because it isn't incendiary, doesn't mean it is any less able to cause destruction. You wouldn't let someone who has engineered an explosive bring it through your borders. I don't understand why you would let someone who engineered a story for the purpose of creating chaos transmit on your equipment.
The west has sanctity for all communication due to the potential of misidentifying good faith communication as bad faith. Good faith communication should enjoy a level of sanctity, but to say bad faith communication should be treated with the same sanctity as good faith communication in all situations seems deeply optimistic at best. At some point the pragmatic call has to be made that the risk of labeling a good faith communication as bad faith is low enough that action must be taken.
>What do you call something that is engineered to cause destruction or chaos?
Depends is that thing a lie or the truth?
The Pentagon Papers were designed to cause destruction and chaos. They were the truth. Should we have banned them because they let people see what their government was actually doing? Would it have mattered if Pravda posted them instead of the NYT?
RT isn’t banned because we don’t like what it says - it’s banned because it’s a part of information war. It’s not media - you won’t find there a single fact you wouldn’t get from western media.
Which, btw, is very obvious when you actually look at RT. It’s a (more American than Russian for some reason) right wing sewage pool in the comments and some Daily Mail level “journalism” above.
It is an information arm of the Russian government. Restricting direct actions of other government on your territory is a well established international practice.
Europe doesn't ban [dis]information from Russia (until of course it violates specific laws of a given country against say inciting violence, propaganda of genocide, etc.)
RT is a propaganda department of Russian government. Most countries do regulate behavior of the agents of foreign governments on their territory.
It is up to a specific government whether they allow another government to come in and for example spread propaganda or mine coal or build railways. Usually there is some reciprocity expected. Russia blocked not only West government propaganda agencies, it is also blocked independent media. So, the West governments are more than expected to block Russian government propaganda operations, especially given that non government information flow from Russia isn't blocked (that would be the censorship similar to that Russia has been doing, and West hasn't done it yet).
> RT is a propaganda department of Russian government
So is BBC. And they lied about iraq having weapons of mass destruction. We didn't ban them.
Yes, russia is led by an ex-kgb dictator... do we really want to be the same as him, and do the same things? Are we really no better at censorship and propaganda than him?
>So is BBC. And they lied about iraq having weapons of mass destruction. We didn't ban them.
do you really think that that BBC lying was a deliberate action of Great Britain government against your country? I think nobody thought that, so it wasn't banned.
In general you're mixing 2 different things - an operation of a foreign government on your territory and information content. Blocking the first is sovereign right while blocking the second is censorship and is a mark of dictatorship.
The RT operation in EU is blocked, while the content isn't - you wouldn't get punished for forwarding or retelling (on your own volition without any payment from Russian government for doing so) a content of RT propaganda contradicting official information of EU. In Russia BBC is blocked as an operation as well as its content - i.e. you'd get criminally punished for forwarding or retelling (again, even at your own will) a BBC content contradicting official [dis]information of the Russian government, i.e Russia does have censorship.
The BBC lying might as well be. Good luck keeping a job at the BBC if you are the kind of person that wouldn't have taken the US on their word in that situation.
Instead of keeping an editorial line on a list of subjects, organizations like the BBC simply maintain a culture, from the top down, where if you were to threaten propaganda by the government or it's allies that is too valuable, you will lose your job.
Are you sure BBC or CNN weren’t banned in Iraq? Because there is a quite a difference between the offensive side (US and UK in Iraq, Russia in Ukraine) and the defending side.
Also, RT block is very different from censorship in China: it’s aimed at the outlet itself, not at its users.
> So is BBC. And they lied about iraq having weapons of mass destruction. We didn't ban them.
And that is relevant how? Here comes the whataboutism.
> Yes, russia is led by an ex-kgb dictator... do we really want to be the same as him, and do the same things? Are we really no better at censorship and propaganda than him?
Russia uses misinformation as an attack, EU blocks it.
Sure. BBC World Service wiki page describes some of the history/scandals [1]. For example, there has always been a MI5 office inside BBC headquarters. More in depth investigative journalism has been done by Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, et al. [2], specifically this article is very damning and caused Twitter to implement a warning label about "potentially hacked materials" (implying they are true) [3]
Do you have any that isn't presented by people who actively spread Russian propaganda?.
Perhaps an article from a website that isn't actively known for misleading reporting and being sympathetic to authoritarian regimes.
The wikipage on the grey zone is pretty damning. I mean using these people as a source for anything on the west that is critical would be a huge mistake.
> The website published pro-Russian propaganda during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the debunked claim that Ukrainian fighters were using civilians as human shields, and that the Mariupol theatre attack was staged by the Azov Regiment.[24] The Russian fake news website Peace Data republished articles by The Grayzone in order to build a reputation as a progressive and anti-West media source and to attract contributors.[38]
Sorry, can you address any of the claims made by the journalists? or only engage in smears?
Why do you think Twitter added a "hacked materials" warning to that article instead of simply removing it as "Russian misinformation", as they have repeatedly, and perhaps justifiably done for other tweets?
Wikipedia is totally unreliable for controversial topics that challenge the media establishment. Just look at their list of "reliable sources". It's a bad joke!
It doesn’t matter if Russia didn’t directly invade NATO yet - it invaded a western country and it poses a threat to others, and that alone is enough for NATO to pacify it to ensure safety of its citizens.
It’s not “anything”: it’s not like Fox News is banned, or antivaxers. We are talking about an actual shooting war between a genocidal regime and the western civilization, and the ongoing process of Russia turning from “Nigeria with nukes”[1] into North Korea. It’s a once-per-century event.
In my free country media has to obey rules. There are rules for porn, ads, defamation, bad language. Not sure where youa re from that media can has no rules and they can publish anything without any consequences.
But that media is not in your free country, it's hosted outside. You're banning people connecting to servers in other countries, hosted under their laws.
That is irrelevant, Google, PornHub respect the local laws if they want to do business here. I don't think my country constitution protects the free speech of Russian media, they can spawn a local media and then follow the local laws if they want constitutional protection, but just to emphasize in my country TV channels were closed because they ignored the laws too many times and fail to pay their fines.
Also no need to pretend you don't know what Russian version of the "facts" are, you can find what their claim in media and social networks. But in Russia world each fact might be in a superposition of 3 realities, the initial Russian fake reports, then when caught the second altered fake report , and the third convoluted fake version where the army of trolls found all their previous holes and patch them with more idiotic falsehoods. 2
> That is irrelevant, Google, PornHub respect the local laws if they want to do business here
But they don't do business "here", they do their business "there". We're "here" and connecting to their service "there". EU doesn't want us to connect to their business "there".
> Also no need to pretend you don't know what Russian version of the "facts" are, you can find what their claim in media and social networks. But in Russia world each fact might be in a superposition of 3 realities, the initial Russian fake reports, then when caught the second altered fake report , and the third convoluted fake version where the army of trolls found all their previous holes and patch them with more idiotic falsehoods.
I was born in yugoslavia, I know how the government-lead media is. And that's another reason to not-censor foreign media, even foreign government owned, because the real truth is always somewhere between what russians say and what the western media says. I really don't want to read articles like this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2022/may/17/evacua...
Maybe read higher quality media, if you don't like the West go ahead and read media from here in Easter Europe. I am also checking BBC News and I am plesently surprised that they always mention things like "Ukrainians say" , "Russian diplomat says" , "we can't confirm" . This means that you will get the news with a delay on this website because they have actual employee that will connect with real people in all camps and ask fora response, they also have articles debunking fake news from Russia etc.
I am in EU and I have access to TASS https://tass.com so at least in my country I can get free access directly to Russian main media, I can also see the Russian trolls version of facts on social media and Russia has a group of fans that promote their alternate reality so we are not in "danger" of not knowing what Putin wants us to know.
TL:DR
- we don't have absolute free speech in EU, most constitutions have limits and consequences for bad behavior (we are not USA)
- there is high quality western media(stop reading tabloids)
- if you hate the waste read Easter European media, Ukrainian neighbors have journalists on the ground and they are also more familiar with the history of the region and remember media past Russian/Putin actions
- only a few propaganda media channels might be blocked, there are plenty Russian media channels available, so only "concerned trolls" will raise the issue that we the poor EU guys can't read Putin approved facts.
If I make a law in my country that allows me to throw rocks at people in another bordering country without repercussions, then that other country should just let me do it because those are my country's laws?
If Netherlands allow smoking marijuana, and your country doesn't, should you remove all the signposts pointing towards the Netherlands (DNS block) and block the border crossings (IP block), because you're afraid some of your people will go there to get high?
You're conflating intent of one law with execution of another.
No one would do that, because it's stupid and ineffective.
Instead you potentially punish the citizen for having committed a crime on foreign soil, and/or arrest the dealer should they come to your country. This is something nearly every nation state already does. Another thing to look at is extradition treaties.
In the case of disinformation, punishing someone for reading it doesn't stop the spread, but the manufacture of it is undesirable. Current execution is the best method to reach the intent, because doing things like blowing up webservers is undesirable.
how do you know if something is disinformation if your government blocks your direct access to the content and suggests that you read local moderated outlets instead? You just blindly delegated your conclusion forming capacity to a third party that decides for yourself.
Because all this content is still easily available, it’s just that you need to consciously want to access it instead of being served it by “I’m being lucky”.
> Instead you potentially punish the citizen for having committed a crime on foreign soil, and/or arrest the dealer should they come to your country. This is something nearly every nation state already does. Another thing to look at is extradition treaties.
But they didn't commit a crime on foreign soil... they did something legal there.
The servers, manufacture and the information is created and stored in russia, and we're just "travelling" (with our IP packets) to russia to read that content there (I'm assuming the servers are located there).
I still remember when freedom of speech was a right people fought for, even if they didn't like what "the other person" said.... sadly, this is changing and bringing with it dark times.
> But they didn't commit a crime on foreign soil... they did something legal there.
Irrelevant to how a state chooses to organize its criminal code. If the act is considered severely criminal in nature then most nation states do not care where it occurred, nor should they.
> I still remember when freedom of speech was a right people fought for, even if they didn't like what "the other person" said.... sadly, this is changing and bringing with it dark times.
Lies by foreign actors are not the same as opinions or criticism of a country's own citizens.
They are an offense against the public and should be policed. This isn't about simply "not liking what someone said". This is about statements that have negative value; created for the express purpose of causing confusion and harm.
Of course we are at war - Russian nazis invaded, and so we are defending. But you can’t send nukes, because
1. Nukes are bit more complicated than vodka or coal, and given that nowadays Russia can’t even make a car, nukes need regular servicing, and the rest of its armed forces are a joke, it’s highly unlikely their nukes are any better.
2. Sending nukes would turn Russia into wasteland; rest of the world would do better because of its natural advantage.
I’m sorry but people in general aren’t critical thinkers — broadcasting false and misleading communication should be avoided since it’s extremely dangerous. See the storming of the Capitol Building. It’s especially dangerous when that communication is meant to undermine your country and what your country stands for.
so then why do we have this conversation at all? Russia has done nothing wrong, it's just protecting its own dumb proles from false and misleading information meant to undermine their country and what it stands for.
It's relevant, because we didn't ban western media (well, our own) back then, for spreading false propaganda (ending in many many deaths), and we're banning RT now, because it's "them" and not "us".
If we hate false news/propaganda/... then ban cnn (and many other media), but we clearly want (and allow) "that kind" of propaganda, just not the russian one.
Look at the headline image, the title ("evacuated"), and the "feels" that they're trying to produce. And the reality? They surrendered and were taken as prisoners of war to siberia.
If someone has surrendered, i want our media to report "surrendered" and if they were taken as prisoners, I want to see "prisoners" mentioned somewhere... I have no idea what they were trying to achieve with an article like this, but it sure as hell wasn't truthful reporting.
the information i got from rt was that putin says he’s invading bc the us is putting missiles in ukraine, which take a certain amount of minutes to hit moscow, which putin claimed was unacceptable to russian national security. from the west the only info you get is that he’s crazy and there was no reason at all for the invasion. so without even getting into details of is it actually true or not, it was nice to at least hear putin’s rationale, because the west’s explanation that he’s doing this for no reason except that he’s crazy is really insulting to the intelligence of everyone who is not a complete moron. but unfortunately that is 99% of people.
“the us is putting missiles in ukraine” — first time I’m hearing that explanation. Didn’t he invade because Ukraine is “full of nazis”? Or was it due to the “nukes Ukraine was planning to get”? Or to “return Ukraine to Russia”?
First it was freeing people of Donbass. Then it was NATO rockets. Then they started war and Nazi hoax come to be. Then they made a story that if they didn’t strike first, Kyiv would attack them soon. Then bald man compared himself to Peter The Great and thinks that he’s returning grounds to historic Russian empire.
See, that's the problem when "news" like RT hits on people that have no critical thinking ability. No one needs to put missiles physically closer for half a century now; they just launch from nuclear subs. Even Israel can do this.
(And this isn't even the stated reason! You can just watch Putins faux-historical speech!)
I don't think we can put aside the details of whether it is true or not (it's not), because Putin has full info about the fact that it's nonsense, so it's extremely relevant to his mindset (ie, it's a fabrication aimed at a completely unrelated objective).
So, for example, if russia became more friendly and cooparetive with eg. Cuba, that wouldn't be problematic to USA, because proximity doesn't matter that much?
You're shifting goalposts because you don't have any rebuttal to my point.
In the many years that Cuba was friendly and cooperative with the USSR, the US never made any more than a joke attempt at a military intervention. The US was obviously not thrilled, but never did anything comparable to the current invasion of Ukraine. Not sure your point.
Sanctions cost lives too. And sure, there is no equivalence between them and the literal ethnic genocide Russia has been perpetrating for the past five months, but you can’t really claim US isn’t actively hostile towards Cuba: it literally destroyed the country and is forcibly keeping it like that purely to keep votes of Cuban diaspora.
But that’s besides the point, which is: like it or not, in politics might makes right, and Russia very obviously lacks the might.
I mean.. let's be honest.. if it's a cold winter this year, Russia will be punishing all of us. I live in slovenia, we're tiny, we have only a handful of soldiers, and we're still a part of occupying forces in countries like syria... so maybe we deserve it... but i prefer watching "punishments" on tv, and not by being cold and hungry in my own home, because a few politicians are in a dick-size competition, while they're stealing a bunch of our money and helping their pals in the weapons industry.
Most of the gas is used for industry, not heating. And even the industry seems to be able to lower the usage quite drastically. It’ll be tough for economy of course.
Also, everyone has just realized Russian army was all bluff. Every single country bordering with them will take advantage of this. Which means there will be multiple parties we can buy the formerly Russian gas from.
Yep... and if true or not (and let's be fair, if Ukraine joined NATO, there would actually be missles located there), the west used even worse propaganda, even twice in a row ([0] and [1]).
What people need to understand is that 'words have consequences'. The 'truth' isn't that important in communications because people can't discern it.
People don't know, and often do not care what the truth is.
Putin, Xi etc. can easily convince millions of Europeans of their view of the world, which will mostly be based on lies. It's a key pillar of their respective foreign policies.
That disinformation has material effects in civil culture.
So put another way: we don't want to 'completely ban' content from Russia, but rather, not make it part of the populist lexicon.
It's a bit like removing a TV station from broadcasting as one of the 'major channels'.
If Europeans conscientiously choose want to get RT, they can. But the West shouldn't allow Russia or China to broadcast directly into people's homes willy nilly. My god man.
Information is by far the most powerful weapon.
If either Putin or Xi lost their power to censor, their respective governments would collapse, frankly I suggest both of them would be literally dead. Very quickly, within a few months.
The internet is giving us the biggest lesson in 'Critical Theory' imaginable (i.e. competing narratives) and of course, we have our own narratives (and internally huge competition over them), but still, some truths are a bit better than others.
Hitler was a popular charismatic figure in Europe before the war.
Would you have made sure that his big Prime Time speeches were lined up with broadcasting so that everyone in Europe had the opportunity to hear what this wonderful man has to say in 1936? Because he bought network time on the Radio? And bought placements in all of the cinema theatres?
Or would you let the press do a little summary and put it in a few newspapers and maybe that's that?
What about the extra few hundred thousand people who are going to die from a disease, because some wayward doctor is running around telling people 'the government created the vaccine to control people' and 10% of the population believes it. What 'more speech' is going to convince those people of the truth, when 'more speech' from any rational, reliable medical source only makes the idiots more suspicious? Do we just let them die?
'Freedom of Expression' is a very important right, but now and again, there are issues we have to contend with.
Information is power, the press knows that very well, which is why even though they guise their narratives in 'pretty much mostly facts' - they can still drive bias and manipulation through.
We have to contend with the reality that 'the truth' - which is probably what we are all seeking, is somehow not well communicated in the commons, terribly communicated by politicians, somewhat well communicated by our the government (depending on the area), and reasonably well communicated by the mainstream press, but with large swaths of bias. And yes, generally defer to 'Freedom of Expression' as a hugely important pillar of freedom.
I don't think it should be blocked, as opposed to removed from broadcast, however, there should be a reasonable way around it.
Right now on RT.com they are spreading some fairy bad propaganda, and this illustrates the problem.
A few days ago a Russian soldier castrated then killed a Ukrainians soldier, it made waves around the world, the next day the prison facility where Ukranian soldiers were held was 'blown up'.
The Russians blamed it on HIMARS strikes, but as can be seen from satellite imagery it can't really be the case, it's also really cynical to suggest that somehow Ukraine would just go ahead and kill it's own citizens.
It's believed Russia did that to cover up their prison/torture situation but that's hard to know for sure.
The ultra Machiavellian approach of the Russians is to literally blame their atrocities on others, i.e. akin to Hitler saying: we didn't kill the Jews, we left them just fine, the Americans killed them when they overran the positions!
Russians will create diversionary media events to distract/suppress from the situation knowing the fact about 'the internet' is that it doesn't discern the truth.
There were small bomblets/mines in Donestk city yesterday, which would definitely injure someone if they stepped on it (likely requiring foot/leg amputation) but probably not enough to disable a tracked vehicle.
Russia is claiming those were somehow place by Ukraine, of course, Ukraine doesn't seem to even have the capability to do that, let alone the rationality - why would Ukraine arbitrarily drop such things way behind enemy lines? It makes no sense. They are almost assuredly placed there by Russians to create a false controversy (can't be sure on this though).
RT.com is as I write this being used to promote the false narrative and to say 'oh, Ukraine is committing war crimes!'
Do you see how easy that is?
RT exists for this reasons: to place ugly lies, to give them the veneer of credibility.
A couple months ago, Russia launched a Tochka missile on a train station where civilians were gathered for evacuation. Dozens of civilians were injured and killed. Russia blamed it on Ukraine, and used RT to promulgate the 'fact' that they didn't have Tochka missiles in their inventory, thereby 'proving' that it could not have been them. But more recently, verifiable evidence has come to light (from Russian sources!) showing Russia launching Tochka missiles, which we know they have. Their response? Who cares. The lie already happened, their 'propanda' already had it's effect and even to this day, they will avoid the question of 'Two months ago you said you had no Tochka missiles, now you are launching Tochka missiles?'.
So imagine trying to have a conversation with a total psychopath who lies to your face, and when evidence comes to light showing they lied, they still won't admit their lies. You know they are lying - they know you know they are lying - and of course you know, they know, that you know they are lying.
But it doesn't matter. The misinformation is out there.
It's a similar story for the downing of flight MH17. The evidence points to Russia having done it, likely by a wayward Buk operator. But RT is used to propagate disinformation and lies about the event, so as to cloud the reality of the situation.
Millions of people around the world, including in the West will 'fall for it' - you can even see it on this thread. They become 'useful idiots' for the propagation of the lie.
Even US idiot Congressman and notable media figures will repeat the 'talking points' promoted by RT. This happens not so much because they 'support Russia' per sey, rather, they use this information to attack their local political opponents in the US, or wherever.
Russian allied governments in China, Africa, M/E etc. happily pick up on this 'news' and run segments on it.
In this manner, Russia can literally blow people out of the sky, and very simply use their mass media tools to 'convince' 1/2 of the world that the Ukranians did it themselves.
Hitler telling the world that 'The Americans Killed The Jews, Not Us' - that is the purpose of RT, that's why it exists.
>"Putin, Xi etc. can easily convince millions of Europeans of their view of the world, which will mostly be based on lies."
If your own government / media can not convince them otherwise it is quite pathetic then. Normal person should be able to see through Putin's bullshit, particularly the one that is "based on lies". If however you are educating mostly vegetables that can't think on their own and do some fact checking you definitely deserve it.
Honestly, with the current state of western governments and media and the mistrust in them both, censoring RT makes people believe RT even more, because if your untrustworthy government doesn't want you to read stuff there, "it must be true".
> West shouldn't allow Russia or China to broadcast directly into people's homes willy nilly. My god man.
What will happen if West would allow it? Will it collapse? If not, why censor it? If it will, what's the difference between West and Putin? Both will collapse without censorship.
> The Grdelica train bombing occurred on 12 April 1999, when two missiles fired by US aircraft F-15E Strike Eagle hit a passenger train while it was passing across a railway bridge over the Južna Morava river in the Grdelica gorge, some 300 kilometres (190 mi) south of Belgrade, Serbia. At least 20 civilian passengers were killed or declared missing. Estimates of the total death toll run as high as 60.[1] It is considered the deadliest rail disaster in Serbian history.[3][4]
So, nato bombed a civillian train, claiming it was an accident, because the train was "so fast",... which anyone knowin trains in serbia knows it's a lie. So, nato sped up the video:
> Later investigation by Frankfurter Rundschau asserted that the video was sped up 4.7 times.[8]
So again... we have an area of a country, where "other people" live and want their own country, main country won't let them, there are some shootings, shellings etc. for years, and then an "outside" superpower intervenes, basically destroys the main country to achieve independence for that area. Kosovo, ukraine.. it's all the same, just different actors.
> So again... we have an area of a country, where "other people" live and want their own country, main country won't let them, there are some shootings, shellings etc. for years, and then an "outside" superpower intervenes, basically destroys the main country to achieve independence for that area. Kosovo, ukraine.. it's all the same, just different actors.
There’s no “other people” in Ukraine. There are Ukrainians and Ukrainians. There’s no other people that want “other country”.
But nice straw man, 40 rubles deposited to your account.
> There are Ukrainians and Ukrainians. There’s no other people that want “other country”.
This is very untrue. East Ukraine is mostly Russian ethnically. Even languages are different in Western and Eastern Ukraine.
Before 2014 some guys who are now in Azov Batallion identified themselves an Russian nationalists.
While many things changed since, there are still many people on the East who identify themselves as Russians.
Think about it - Mariupol was taken by DPR troops and Crimean marines. Basically by people who live on territories Ukraine claims its own. Donetsk is shelled
1) You have to back 25 years to find an accident which you contort and completely turn upside down?
2) This was not an act of 'propaganda' by NATO. NATO hit the train and literally admitted to it the next day. There was no claims that the Serbians 'did it to themselves' or 'cover up'. There is no 'propaganda' or 'information' issue here.
3) It was assuredly an accident. There is absolutely no reason for NATO to hit arbitrary trains with civilians otherwise, even cynically. In fact, as they admitted the mistake immediately - it was hugely costly in terms of bad press, winning hearts and minds. Why would NATO do such damage to itself for no reason?
4) NATO intervention in Kosovo/Serbia is obviously nothing like Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Kosovars were being killed by Serbians and are very, very happy to have the protection of NATO in that regard.
5) Your repulsive implication that somehow Ukraine is similar to Kosovo in that it's a 'breakaway' area that wants 'independence' is disgusting Russian propaganda: Ukraine is a sovereign country, not a wayward Russian territory.
While Serbia/Kosovo is a complicated situation, Serbians will have to stop killing Kosovo citizens, thankfully NATO achieved that, and at least we have that.
Russia has no business being in Ukraine - full stop. Russian forces in Ukraine will have to leave or be killed, and when it's over Russians will be responsible for paying damages to Ukraine, and be forced to recognize their atrocities.
> 1) You have to back 25 years to find an accident which you contort and completely turn upside down?
Yes, because the planes flew over my head, 400km away and bombed people there... not long before that, we were a part of the same country. People from eg. pakistan had planes bomb weddings there, and another "whoopsie, accident", and they're not even at war with them.
> 2) This was not an act of 'propaganda' by NATO. NATO hit the train and literally admitted to it the next day. There was no claims that the Serbians 'did it to themselves' or 'cover up'. There is no 'propaganda' or 'information' issue here.
Yes, nato pilot waited for the civilian train to cross the civilian bridge that the nato was bombing, to hit the train too.. that's why they had to speed up the video, because the wait was long.
> 3) It was assuredly an accident. There is absolutely no reason for NATO to hit arbitrary trains with civilians otherwise, even cynically. In fact, as they admitted the mistake immediately - it was hugely costly in terms of bad press, winning hearts and minds. Why would NATO do such damage to itself for no reason?
I mean.. they did hit a LOT of civilian targets, not by mistakes, but intentionally, "by design". They even carped bombed a city. A TV station. Not a "whoopsie" but they targeted it and hit it. Also a tobacco factory, and many others.
> 4) NATO intervention in Kosovo/Serbia is obviously nothing like Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Kosovars were being killed by Serbians and are very, very happy to have the protection of NATO in that regard.
So were the russians in ukraine. Look, even reuters was writing about that before 2022:
So, you want independent kosovo but not independent lugansk/donbas regions?
> 5) Your repulsive implication that somehow Ukraine is similar to Kosovo in that it's a 'breakaway' area that wants 'independence' is disgusting Russian propaganda: Ukraine is a sovereign country, not a wayward Russian territory.
So is serbia. But a superpower decided an area wanting independence will get independence, and it used bombs to gain independence of that area. Catalonia is an area where superpowers don't want independence, so they don't get it. Eastern ukraine regions are the same as kosovo, just with a different superpower.
> While Serbia/Kosovo is a complicated situation, Serbians will have to stop killing Kosovo citizens, thankfully NATO achieved that, and at least we have that.
And ukranians should've stopped with the attacks on russian minorities in the east.
> Russia has no business being in Ukraine - full stop. Russian forces in Ukraine will have to leave or be killed, and when it's over Russians will be responsible for paying damages to Ukraine, and be forced to recognize their atrocities.
Yes, and slovenian (my country) troops have no business being in syria. I don't know from which country you are, but i'm guessing your troops have no business being in some other sovereign country either. And you want pay damages and won't recognize your atrocities. If you're an american, you might just imprison another whistleblower for exposing war crimes... you have a history of that.
"What is the difference between the Allied 'liberation' of France and Hitler's 'liberation' of France? They both deserve an equal voice!"
If you're wading int moral relativism, then what is the point, really?
The West mostly acts in good faith (not always), and, bad information mostly is marginalized though definitely available.
For example, we suppress some kinds of bad information about health, and definitely suppress things like 'how to make nuclear weapons' etc. though generally, it's available if you really try. We don't completely shut down pirate bay.
RT.com is a propaganda outlet, designed to spread falsehoods and to undermine civic integrity.
If RT.com was 'in every home', a large swath of Europeans would come to believe things that are not true, and likely undermine important efforts, specifically around security.
Stalin controlled 17% of the Bundestag during the Wiemar Republic through direct control over the Germany Communist party. He used information, thugs, violence, populism to try to overthrow the Social Democrats (center left) many times, in an attempt to spread his tyranny. He even worked with the far right (aka nascent Hitler) during that time, as they were considered fools. The far right used the legitimacy of Soviet intervention as a means for violent populism. They lied themselves about various things in order to gain power. Mass destruction ensued.
The Russians ironically initiated the spread of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' a pretty good example of 'misinformation' which has seriously dire consequences.
30% of Americans believe that 'Joe Biden Stole the Election' which combined with events on Jan 6 which was a clear and direct attempt to dismiss valid votes in lieu of political 'votes' to overthrow the government, has very real consequences. None of that could have happened of only, say, 1% of Americans believed the election stolen. And that's in a media system where most mainstream outlets did not directly promulgate the lie (Fox News didn't sufficiently question the lies about election integrity, but they didn't usually directly support the lie either).
The issue matters, greatly.
I have access to RT in North American and I don't think it's a big deal, but collectively it is, much more so in Europe where there are Russian sympathizers.
For example, RT was pulled form regular broadcast, which is rational.
Someone noted above that 'Vodafone' blocked them from RT.com, which I think is fine so long as there is some way to conscientiously get around that arbitrary blocking.
Finally, you'll note that Russians do have access to tons of information from outside the censors, but they don't access it, or even care to, which denotes how kind of 'lazy' most of us plebes are - we tend to watch what is in front of us, and believe what we want to believe.
Go ahead and watch Russia 1, i.e. Russia's main TV broadcast for a bit, translated into English. It's utterly shocking, now contemplate that 50% of the country believes most of what is beings said because of how they are being fed information.
This idea that 'the truth' rises to the point is worse than naive, it's extremely dangerous because it's absolutely false. The most engaging ideas that appeal to our impulses are those that 'rise to the top' to become 'truth'.
It's a serious issue. Though again, Europeans should be able to access RT by jumping a few small hoops.
Serious points, well thought and written. Why would someone downrate it, is beyond me.
I share your views. I'm reading all comments here and many of them are so naïve. Propaganda doesn't harm - that kind of thinking is really flabbergasting. Try living in Russia for a change, and experience the (dis-)informational torrent there.. you'll come back a changed man, I can promise you that. And then tell me that it is harmless..
(For the record, I'm not from Russia, I just happen to live near it and see all the dirty tricks it does first hand)
>>What will happen if West would allow it? Will it collapse? If not, why censor it? If it will, what's the difference between West and Putin? Both will collapse without censorship.
>If you're wading int moral relativism, then what is the point, really?
It's neither moral relativism nor whataboutism to ask for the principle that divides our "good" censorship from their "bad" censorship.
Once that mechanism for censoring RT is in place, what is the principle that will keep bad actors who gain the reins of power from censoring inconvenient truths or political opponents?
The mass adoption of some terrible idea by the populace in history nearly always accompanies control of information or censorship.
Unfettered access to all ideas, even bad or nutty ones, will lead to some bad or nutty people adopting those ideas, but collectively people understand what's true.
This is why it's shocking that Europe is adopting the tactics of control that dictators use.
Not just that, but if RT lies, it would be easy to prove it's all lies, and show the truth or other media outlets. If you just censor RT, people will believe them even more, because of the distrust in western media and governments.
Failing to distinguish the moral difference between actions like the German Imperialism and literal holocaust i.e. murdering millions of people in chambers, and the Allied liberation of the Continent - and especially gaslighting those that point out that obvious difference between the two by calling them 'children' and 'war pigs' - has to be one of the most repulsive things one can possibly do in writing, so no, f&&k you.
This whataboutism is exactly why RT is currently suppressed: the Russians have painted Ukrainians as a 'non people' who do not have an identity and do not deserve to exist, with rampant cultural Nazism embedded in the society, in order to justify their invasion, conquest, mass murder - and they want to the world to see it this way as well.
A large swath, possibly the majority of Russians, believe in this incredulous repulsive lie, and are happy to see Ukranian citizens mass killed, just hop on Telegram to see what is in 2022, something you didn't believe modern people would ever say.
This is the effect of RT and 'Russia One' TV, where every day Russians are subjected to hours and hours of beyond pale insanity.
Literally on this day, Russians have murdered about 50 prisoners near Donetsk by blowing up a prison camp, while blaming their repulsive crimes on Ukrainians themselves. This is likely to destroy evidence of a crime committed just yesterday, whereby Russians cut off the testicles of a Ukranian soldier, put them in his mouth, shot him, tied him to a car and dragged him through the streets. [1]
Literally on this day, on Russia One, ex-Russian General and Duma member is calling for Russia to 'bomb Berlin' into the Dust - in front of millions of Russians. Every few days they yell about 'Nuking London and the entire UK'. They do this for three hours every day, on the 'primary' TV Channel, of course state-backed. [2]
From an 'information perspective', this matters, because apparently, about 10-20% of people 'in the West' will just 'believe' these utterly repulsive lies (akin to Hitler blaming the death of the Jews on the 'invading Americans') - which is why we suppress this information.
Thousands of random Telegrammers (such as Олег Царёв - follow the links in his feed) perpetuate horrific propaganda, in some ways much worse than anything apparently the Nazis were doing at least in public, for millions of Russians to be elated. Again, obviously a concern about how information is propagated - it elicits people into a bloodthirsty fervour.
Surely Hitler had a few legit complaints about the Versailles agreement, fair enough, but we still would not have wanted to broadcast his speeches live to the entire world in the name of 'free expression'.
And so, don't want this repulsive Russian ultra-fascism on our airwaves. If someone really wants to find it - they can.
Moral absolution is never black and white, it's often close enough.
You can have principled and ethical standards for judging historical events and characters without regressing to the juvenile act of moralizing.
Western establishment media constantly moralizes the Ukraine conflict because the reality is much more nuanced and not aligned with Washington's foreign policy goals in the region.
It's much easier to say "Putin bad" than deal with the decades of ugliness involving the Budapest Memorandum, Orange Revolution, Pinchuk's YES campaign, Kolomoyskyi's propaganda drive, Maidan coup, Sevestapol, etc. and Washington's often direct involvement in all of the above.
"without regressing to the juvenile act of moralizing."
? It's not 'juvenile' to call a murderer, a murderer.
It's juvenile to contemplate otherwise with whataboutery.
Putin is a mass killer, absolutely, within the historical realities of "Budapest, Maidan, Orange Revolution, Donbass - and even 'Washington's Involvement'"
It's juvenile (or maybe 'in bad faith', or 'dumb', or 'evil')to hide under their propaganda and hold it at face value.
Putin has been interfering in Ukraine since it gained independence, he poisoned Yuschenko (and of course poisoned and killed so many of his other opponents), he has his GRU thugs all over Ukraine corrupting, bribing etc. trying to gain control, trying to turn Ukraine into a vassal, exactly along the lines of Belarus, where has that living fart Lukashenko do whatever he wants.
He bribed and played 'both sides' of the 2014 Donbas conflict and lies blatantly all the time about supposed NATO concerns etc..
Putin is a Russian Imperialist Fascist who is 100% responsible for the war, mass murder, suppression within his domain (Russia, Belarus etc.) in the same vein as innumerable leaders before him.
> It's much easier to say "Putin bad" than deal with the decades of ugliness involving the Budapest Memorandum, Orange Revolution, Pinchuk's YES campaign, Kolomoyskyi's propaganda drive, Maidan coup, Sevestapol, etc. and Washington's often direct involvement in all of the above.
I dunno it’s kinda easy to say that the guy commanding his army to exterminate an entire country is “bad”.
This is less moralising and more that the world has decided maybe Russia shouldn’t be raping Ukrainians?, executing citizens?, committing genocide?.
There’s no amount of meddling that should make the above justifiable. This is evidenced by Russia constantly changing their reasons for invading, they know there’s no valid reason.
> the guy commanding his army to exterminate an entire country is “bad”
If this were true, why did Moscow not simply cull the entire population of Kiev with a thermobaric carpet bombing on day 1? Why have civilian deaths so obviously been minimized?
When you start from this outrageously false premise, despite an abundance of evidence suggesting other motives, you concede any chance of accurately diagnosing this conflict.
> If this were true, why did Moscow not simply cull the entire population of Kiev with a thermobaric carpet bombing on day 1?
Because they want to capture the people too.
> Why have civilian deaths so obviously been minimized
I didn’t knowing that lunching anti aircraft carrier weapons at shopping malls was considered “minimising civilian deaths”.
Russia uses civilian deaths as a weapon of war. They also use forced deportation and filtration camps (which are used to torture and kill civilians) as a weapon of war.
Russia in way minimises civilian deaths in fact they try and maximise them.
> When you start from this outrageously false premise, despite an abundance of evidence suggesting other motives, you concede any chance of accurately diagnosing this conflict.
https://youtu.be/qciVozNtCDM
No one forced Russia to invade, no one forced Russia to rape, no one forced Russia to commit genocide. The decision to do and support these actions lies solely with Russia itself
I’m kinda interested how you explain away the Russian embassy saying that legitimate Ukrainian POW’s should be executed?, war crime, but then again Russia seems to be trying to tick off every war crime it can.
Frankly, it's not even worth replying to this disingenuous goalpost-moving and "firehose of falsehoods" tactic. I've linked an informative resource above for anyone interested in factual debate on this topic.
> Frankly, it's not even worth replying to this disingenuous goalpost-moving and "firehose of falsehoods" tactic. I've linked an informative resource above for anyone interested in factual debate on this topic.
You're not responding because there's no response. The Russians are killing, raping civilians and committing genocide in Ukraine.
There is no reason for Russias war of aggression other then because they want to capture a country that they claim doesn't even exist.
There's insurmountable evidence that the Russians aren't avoiding civilian casualties and that they are using them to inflict a terror campaign on Ukraine as a whole.
There is no goalpost moving, there is only the truth.
I will admit I haven't seen Russia's supporters accuse other people of using the "Firehose of Falsehood" before, but then again it was only a matter of time really as Russia and its supporters accuse others of doing what they/it does.
>There is no reason for Russias war of aggression other then because they want to capture a country that they claim doesn't even exist.
False. The expansion of NATO to the east, 2014 anti-russian coup in Ukraine, the refusal to follow to Minsk agreements(guaranteed by western leaders, who failed them too) and militarization of Ukraine were the major reasons of the events.
Another false: Putin never claimed Ukraine doesn't exist.
> False. The current actions are not genocide by any means.
Despite popular belief genocide is not what the pro Russians want it to be, and Russias actions clearly fit within the UN's well defined definition of genocide.
>> In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
>> Killing members of the group;
>> Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
>> Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
>> Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
>> Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
We already have evidence of many of these individual things (of which any constitutes genocide).
The Russians have already been forcibly deporting children and sending them to Russia, so point 5 is met.
The Russians are on video castrating Ukrainians so we have point 4 met.
The Russians have been indiscriminately bombing civilians so we have points 1 and 2 easily.
> Even raping of civilians is unproved.
I see you avoided the whole indiscriminate killing of civilians, of which Russians are already in jail for.
It seems like you wouldn't be satisfied without video evidence of these crimes, but don't worry the Russians the will answer for their war crimes in time.
> False. The expansion of NATO to the east, 2014 anti-russian coup in Ukraine, the refusal to follow to Minsk agreements(guaranteed by western leaders, who failed them too) and militarization of Ukraine were the major reasons of the events.
Why does Ukraine have to abide by the Minks agreement but Russia is free to wilfully for years violate the Budapest agreement where Russia promised to not invade Ukraine of threaten its territorial borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nukes?.
None of these are "reasons for these events", what all these are is Russias excuses to try and dominate another country and eliminate their statehood.
> Another false: Putin never claimed Ukraine doesn't exist.
`When it came to Ukraine, Putin flared up. Addressing Bush, he said: "You understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? Part of its territories is Eastern Europe, and some, and significant, are donated by us!"`
Everything you said is false, is true, strange that.
> Why does Ukraine have to abide by the Minks agreement but Russia is free to wilfully for years violate the Budapest agreement where Russia promised to not invade Ukraine of threaten its territorial borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nukes?
Maybe because giving up the nukes wasn't the only condition for the sovereignty of the state that USSR (and Russia as a successor) granted to your leaders on peaceful terms in 1991? Remember, your country didn't have to fight a war for its sovereignty, the peaceful transition of a regional power was one of the greatest achievements of that generation.
Maybe the modern Ukrainian elites and the current president shouldn't have been frivolously contemplating the idea of joining a military bloc [1]. Maybe they shouldn't have been frivolously contemplating the idea of obtaining nukes either [2], maybe they shouldn't have been saying that "The agreement is not an official treaty. It is neither legally binding nor does it carry an enforcement mechanism".
Your leaders should have known that your foundational documents predate the Budapest Memorandum, and they outline all conditions under which your sovereignty was guaranted [3]: "The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention to become a permanently neutral state in the future, which does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three non-nuclear principles: not to accept, not to produce, and not to acquire nuclear weapons."
> Maybe because giving up the nukes wasn't the only condition for the sovereignty of the state that USSR (and Russia as a successor) granted to your leaders on peaceful terms in 1991? Remember, your country didn't have to fight a war for its sovereignty, the peaceful transition of a regional power was one of the greatest achievements of that generation.
Tonnes of other soviet block countries joined NATO with no issues whatsoever only reason Russia took issue with Ukraine is that they thought they could win a war against them, if only they didn’t drink their own Russian strong too much they might of won instead of having their military destroyed for the next 10 years.
Russia tried to keep its influence over Ukraine and ban anyone from trying to free them from Russias grasp. This was never going to work because we all know Russia never keeps its promises anyway.
> Maybe the modern Ukrainian elites and the current president shouldn't have been frivolously contemplating the idea of joining a military bloc [1]. Maybe they shouldn't have been frivolously contemplating the idea of obtaining nukes either [2], maybe they shouldn't have been saying that "The agreement is not an official treaty. It is neither legally binding nor does it carry an enforcement mechanism
Ukraine has made it obvious to all post soviet states that the only way to protect themselves from Russian wars of aggression(of which their are many) is by strong military alliances or perhaps nukes.
You cannot stamp your feet and be surprised when someone tries to protect themselves from their neighbour who has a habit of invading and annexing people just like you.
> our leaders should have known that your foundational documents predate the Budapest Memorandum, and they outline all conditions under which your sovereignty was guaranted [3]: "The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention to become a permanently neutral state in the future, which does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three non-nuclear principles: not to accept, not to produce, and not to acquire nuclear weapons."
Ukraines founding predates Russia itself. Ukraine is sovereign and no amount of feet stamping by the Russians will change this.
But if you think Russia is justified in its war go ahead and believe that but know that the vast majority of non dictatorships disagree with you.
Btw I’m not Ukrainian so they aren’t “my leaders”, i merely support them in their struggle for sovereignty against their neighbour who has conquered them once before and is once again trying to genocide them out of existence.
> Tonnes of other soviet block countries joined NATO with no issues whatsoever
Because they had their own terms and circumstances. Ukrainian SSR had its own terms and circumstances too, they compiled and signed the declaration in 1991. If the leaders didn't want to stick to the internationally recognised founding documents they shouldn't have signed it. One either follows the legal procedures or not, and if procedures are not followed and if the new government feels like violating the previously signed documents, then it's a bit odd to expect that the country wouldn't have a separatist movement within its borders.
> Ukraine has made it obvious to all post soviet states that the only way to protect themselves from Russian wars of aggression(of which their are many) is by strong military alliances or perhaps nukes.
They definitely made a good point about dangers of armed coups against democratically elected presidents that didn't break laws and were supposed to represent half of the country until the upcoming elections. Kiyvites didn't care much about legitimacy of their actions from the perspective of Eastern Ukrainians in 2013-2014. No referendum felt necessary when the coup had been decided and executed.
> Ukraines founding predates Russia itself.
Even if that were true, if the intention was not to follow the founding documents they shouldn't have been signed in their current form. But it isn't true, sorry. Ukraine founding does not predate Russia, because no reputable historian is able to draw a clear line between historical periods of Kievan Rus' (not Ukraine) and Tsardom of Rus' (not Russia), as it was ruled and disintegrated by the members of the same dynasty of Ruriks over a long period of time).
> Ukraine is sovereign and no amount of feet stamping by the Russians will change this.
Surely it is sovereign. When you say that something is sovereign, you usually reference the corresponding legal founding documents. The corresponding legal founding documents in case of Ukraine start with the Declaration on State Sovereignty of Ukraine of 1991, which all subsequent delcarations and memorandums reference to. You can check it yourself, the current Constitution of Ukraine, including the amendments of 2004, reference the declaration on its Preamble section on the very first page [1]. The declaration states clearly that non-military bloc status and absence of nukes are the foundational principles of the sovereign state of Ukraine.
> But if you think Russia is justified in its war go ahead and believe that but know that the vast majority of non dictatorships disagree with you.
I only mention this to bring clarity on the respective roles of the current Ukrainian elites and the government (including the president) in this conflict. They did everything to intentionally reject diplomacy, and it's the opposite of what they were paid for by the citizens.
>Because they had their own terms and circumstances. Ukrainian SSR had its own terms and circumstances too, they compiled and signed the declaration in 1991. If the leaders didn't want to stick to the internationally recognised founding documents they shouldn't have signed it. One either follows the legal procedures or not, and if procedures are not followed and if the new government feels like violating the previously signed documents,
I am not seeing anything that you have mentioned at all, the declaration is tiny and mentions nothing about military alliances or nuclear weapons at all. Seems like your entire premise that Ukraines founding document is predicated on a lake of nukes and military neutrality has no basis in reality.
> then it's a bit odd to expect that the country wouldn't have a separatist movement within its borders.
Funny that these Pro Russian separatist movements keep appearing in post soviet states its like the FSB and GRU funds them, and even sends soldier to arm them. I mean its not like the leaders of the LPR and DNR where literally FSB officer right?.
> They definitely made a good point about dangers of armed coups against democratically elected presidents that didn't break laws and were supposed to represent half of the country until the upcoming elections. Kiyvites didn't care much about legitimacy of their actions from the perspective of Eastern Ukrainians in 2013-2014. No referendum felt necessary when the coup had been decided and executed.
I know the Russians, and Pro Russian trolls like to call it an armed coup constantly but it reality, where the rest of the world exists it was a revolution that ousted a Russian agent that went against the will of the people and immediately ran back to his masters in Russia. Since then they have had many elections and power has changed hands multiple times unlike Russia.
> I am not seeing anything that you have mentioned at all, the declaration is tiny and mentions nothing about military alliances or nuclear weapons at all.
I cite and highlight the sentence from that page: "Proceeding from the right of a nation to self-determination in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and other international legal documents, *and Implementing the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine*, the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic solemnly declares [...]"
When the document says "implementing the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine", it references all chapters from that document (July 1990), with no exception, including the Chapter IX that mentions non-nuclear and non-military bloc principles. Simply put, the document declares the official beginning of implementation of the chapters under a new sovereign state.
> I know the Russians, and Pro Russian trolls like to call it an armed coup constantly but it reality, where the rest of the world exists it was a revolution that ousted a Russian agent that went against the will of the people and immediately ran back to his masters in Russia.
The US hearings on the event of 6th January 2021 call the thing "a coup" and "attack on the Capitol" [1]. By the same standard of the allied country, the events in Ukraine in 2014 should be identified as a coup too. And it was armed, violent, and successful too. One doesn't need to be a Pro Russian troll to discern patterns of the two similar events and the level of double-standards at play.
> the rest of the world exists it was a revolution that ousted a Russian agent that went against the will of the people and immediately ran back to his masters in Russia.
against the will of which people? How exactly do people of Eastern Ukraine fit into your narrative of the will of the people being heard during the coup, if citizens of Mariupol lost their right to representation by their elected president that didn't break the law and wasn't impeached in the first place? The chosen means to "get people heard" do not look particularly democratic to my taste. Due Process was invented for a reason, and it seems that the modern Ukrainian political tradition is not aware of it.
> I cite and highlight the sentence from that page: "Proceeding from the right of a nation to self-determination in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and other international legal documents, and Implementing the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic solemnly declares [...]"
When the document says "implementing the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine", it references all chapters from that document (July 1990), with no exception, including the Chapter IX that mentions non-nuclear and non-military bloc principles. Simply put, the document declares the official beginning of implementation of the chapters under a new sovereign state.
Can you link to the document that you claim states this?. It’s annoying to have to chase your references to things you claim exist.
> The US hearings on the event of 6th January 2021 call the thing "a coup" and "attack on the Capitol" [1]. By the same standard of the allied country, the events in Ukraine in 2014 should be identified as a coup too. And it was armed, violent, and successful too. One doesn't need to be a Pro Russian troll to discern patterns of the two similar events and the level of double-standards at play.
The difference is not double standards it’s the meaning of the word. In Ukraine power changed hands because of a vote in parliament, in the USA the people trying to coup the government where looking to subvert the government with violence and install their own leader.
> against the will of which people? How exactly do people of Eastern Ukraine fit into your narrative of the will of the people being heard during the coup, if citizens of Mariupol lost their right to representation by their elected president that didn't break the law and wasn't impeached in the first place? The chosen means to "get people heard" do not look particularly democratic to my taste. Due Process was invented for a reason, and it seems that the modern Ukrainian political tradition is not aware of it.
Ukraine wanted to join the EU this was already decided; Putin decided this would make Russia weaker so got his puppet to subvert that choice, which lead to him being over thrown.
> One doesn't need to be a Pro Russian troll to discern patterns of the two similar events and the level of double-standards at play.
I dunno your hardline pro Russian views seem to suggest that your views may not he neutral on this topic.
> with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group
Is a key sentence here. Your points are invalid because none of these actions(even if they really took place, because you know about them from biased source) were caused by intent to destroy Ukrainians as group.
>I see you avoided the whole indiscriminate killing of civilians, of which Russians are already in jail for.
Because the indiscriminate killing of civilians is a common thing in wars. It's nearly impossible to prove that killing of civilian was indiscriminate. About jailing - of course you can jail prisoners of war, but it does not prove anything. Ukrainian SBU, like Russian FSB is descendant of KGB. They can get any testimony they need, especially from helpless prisoner of war.
>Why does Ukraine have to abide by the Minks agreement but Russia is free to wilfully for years violate the Budapest agreement where Russia promised to not invade Ukraine of threaten its territorial borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nukes?
First, memorandum is not an agreement. These things actually don't oblige you to anything. It's like "we talked, and there are the thing we said".
Second, Putin thinks that US broke the first point of that memorandum by inciting the 2014 coup. Because Ukraine is not sovereign now - it is fully controlled by the West. So old rules are not working anymore.
And third, Minsk agreements were signed after the annexation of Crymea, so Budapest Memorandum was already broken. If you do not intend to follow agreements, you don't sign them or you are liar. You don't say "hey you broke our last agreements so i can broke these".
About this article https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/877224. It's funny that you brought article from 2008(14 years ago), which clearly states that Putin told Bush that he will attack if Ukraine or Georgia joins NATO. 14 years later he attacked and everyone: "look! Putin is liar!". He told you about consequences 14 years ago!
> Is a key sentence here. Your points are invalid because none of these actions(even if they really took place, because you know about them from biased source) were caused by intent to destroy Ukrainians as group
They all took place, Putins stated goal to remove Ukraine as a state and the idea of being Ukrainian. Russia says this very upfront and blatantly they don’t try and hide it despite how much more work it makes for its propaganda arm.
Let me guess your only unbiased source is Russia?. The same source that believes in Ukrainian super soldiers and Ukrainian black magic battalions because they failed to take city 300km from their border.
> About jailing - of course you can jail prisoners of war, but it does not prove anything. Ukrainian SBU, like Russian FSB is descendant of KGB. They can get any testimony they need, especially from helpless prisoner of war.
You seem not convinced even by a court sentence, what would you even convinced by? At this point in time you seem to require impossible evidence for something that we have clear video and photo graphic evidence for.
Unless you think a shopping centre is a valid military target?.
> Second, Putin thinks that US broke the first point of that memorandum by inciting the 2014 coup. Because Ukraine is not sovereign now - it is fully controlled by the West. So old rules are not working anymore
So because Ukraine decided and ousted their Russian puppet all the way back to Moscow and decided they wanted to have someone pro Europe they don’t deserve sovereignty?.
Btw the only person who calls the 2014 revolution a coup is the Russian puppet who got ousted and his Russian handlers.
> And third, Minsk agreements were signed after the annexation of Crymea, so Budapest Memorandum was already broken. If you do not intend to follow agreements, you don't sign them or you are liar. You don't say "hey you broke our last agreements so i can broke these".
Yes Russia is a liar, that is painfully obvious they never follow any agreements they make (binding or not) and they always shout scream and get their supporters to stamp their feet when others act the same way.
Why should anyone believer anything Russia says or sign or abide by any treaty Russia decides when Russia themselves don’t?.
> which clearly states that Putin told Bush that he will attack if Ukraine or Georgia joins NATO. 14 years later he attacked and everyone: "look! Putin is liar!". He told you about consequences 14 years ago!
Neither joined NATO and he would never attack if they did, it’s why all the former Soviet states try to join NATO because Russia is incapable and unwilling to even blink in the direction of a NATO member.
It’s also probably why Russia tried to force all the post soviet states to not join NATO so they can go pillaging again in the future.
The people of Mariupol are being disappeared by the Russians and don’t have any food or water.
Mariupol was peaceful before the Russians Nazis invaded. You can try and shout about Azov all you want but it might be better to do that in a war where the Russian Nazi PMC (Wagner) isn’t committing war crimes left right and centre.
> It's much easier to say "Putin bad" than deal with the decades of ugliness involving the Budapest Memorandum, Orange Revolution, Pinchuk's YES campaign, Kolomoyskyi's propaganda drive, Maidan coup, Sevestapol, etc. and Washington's often direct involvement in all of the above.
Should’ve started with that, Ivan. Nothing, short of literal genocide, justifies war against other country.
You can bet your ass that I'm afraid that an expanding, violent imperialist dictatorship will continue its historically proven tradition of undermining the political stability of my country and thereby make us much poorer and less free.
It just so happens that I'm not stupid, and am sufficiently worried about this real and imminent risk that I will support quite strong measures to defend against it. One of which is making blatant lies and propaganda from the enemy somewhat harder to access for the population of my country, who collectively have the power to surrender to this attack.
The problem here is that it takes just one case of intolerance to introduce cascading limitations, and after a short while most everyone is pointing guns to everyone else.
Neither Russia nor China are not going to open up their media unless there is reciprocity. But there is no longer any mechanism to source it.
> If either Putin or Xi lost their power to censor, their respective governments would collapse
Why?
I can see how a coordinated infowar attack could at some point topple either one (not just "freedom of speech" stuff but a barrage of weaponized propaganga), but I'm not sure why you take this happening as granted.
What are the truths that Russians (or even Chinese) have no way of knowing right now and that would topple China/Russia if they did knew those?
Xi and Putin would be toppled instantly without censorship because the reality of their oppression, out in the commons, without constant, total suppression of other ideas would expose them for what they are.
Why do you think it's illegal to even refer to the War in Ukraine as a 'War'?
They've threatened 15 years in jail with anyone who even hints at something that is 'not true' - in their purview - meaning - if you publicly say something against the ridiculous propaganda - you dissapear. Watch interviews of regular Russians on the street as the 'avoid answers' or 'struggle to find ways to say something, without actually saying it' because they obviously live in a system of fear, where just a few wrong words ends their lives.
Without the power to make sure that Russians do not talk about the war, about Putin's corruption, and how to 'get rid of him', Putin (and Xi) would be gone very quickly.
The #1 thing in our modern constitutions is 'freedom of assembly' - basically so that people can convene and have ideas. 'Rulers' don't like that because it's how they are overthrown.
On the other side - RT is a propaganda outlet that can hugely affect popular opinion and discourse, especially in a realm where people generally do have free access to information.
Most of Putin's lies are laughable, but most people aren't in a direct position to dispute them either, and so its' pretty easy for him to convince, say 10% of the population of the legitimacy of whatever genocide he wants to do.
Which is why we absolutely do not want RT on broadcast to every American every night.
Of course, freedom of information is important as well, so we do want to enable people to have access, and as such, only a very small subset of the population will bother with it. Those that are 'inclined towards information' which is probably a good thing.
People absolutely do talk about the war in Russia. Strelkov's last self-interview video got half million views. Yuri Podolyaka, who makes daily videos about current state of the front, talks about the war. Popular Russian military Tg channels get half million views on each their post. Youtube is not blocked and (AFAIK) no longer does any censorship on behalf of Russian Federation (they did block Podolyaka's channels persistently, though, so much for freedom of speech)
If your confidence rests on assumption that Russians are too scared to discuss the war, that's myopic.
"If your confidence rests on assumption that Russians are too scared to discuss the war, that's myopic. "
You're missing the relevance here:
1) Russian can talk 'about' the war, obviously, they just can't talk about it in a way that contradicts Putin's propaganda. And for at least some time, they literally could not use the term 'war' - and frankly - you still do not hear that word. They are afraid to use it.
2) That a few people can talk a bit more freely isn't evidence of much, when 1000's of people have been fined or imprisoned for speaking out even marginally.
Example: Strelkov is a hardcore, fascist ultra-nationalist Russian who is responsible for killing Ukrainians in Donbas, and who would burn Ukraine to the ground if he could - and his publicly stated objective is 'mas mobilization' and 'total war'.
His 'ultra nationalist murderer credentials' allow him to speak somewhat more freely about the situation than others.
If Putin wanted to arrest him at any time, he could, for whatever reason, on any kind of arbitrary charge, but there isn't much point to that as he's 'on the side of Russia' just a bit critical.
And of course, Telegram is littered with people 'talking about the war' but they do so in a 'pro Russian' or 'Neutral' way.
But:
+ How many Russian voices are calling for the war to end immediately because Russia has failed and Russia's actions are inhumane?
+ How many Russians are voicing the number of Russian soldiers killed?
+ How many Russians are calling for an end to Putin's regime?
The answer is zero or close to it.
While most Russians are in the range of 'neutral to support' the war, there are obviously millions, especially in Moscow and St.P. who don't want it - so where are their voices? Where are their Telegrams? Where are their web sites?
They don't exist, because they will be put in jail.
Try this guys YouTube channel [1] he walks about in Moscow and asks people subversive questions, because he obviously cannot ask them direct questions.
(It's a very good channel, not it's not a randomly sampled audience, they are younger and more urban than most Russians).
Significant numbers of people are unwilling to speak to him merely for the 'possibly controversial' nature of his questions.
In another background video, he indicates significantly more people are not willing to speak to him than even those he shows.
Significant numbers of people use 'carefully guarded' language to state their subversive opinions.
Some of them use ridiculous satire (i.e. by saying ridiculously ultra nationalist things) to make their point.
ZERO people on his channel ever refer to the war in an antagonizing, confrontational manner, in a way that would get them in trouble. None.
They never use the word 'war' to refer to the 'war' - if that's not obviously Orwellian.
If those questions were asked in America, UK or France, even during the Iraq war, significant numbers of individuals would have some very ugly words for Mr. Bush, the war etc.. I
Those 'regular people' are not remotely able to express themselves freely, which is evidence of Putin's ultra authoritarian control over them.
Also note he does ask in many videos from where people derive their information, the more likely they 'mostly watch TV' (which is mostly state controlled propaganda) by far the more likely they are to support the war and say incredibly fascist things.
If Russians watched 3 hours of 'completely free press' TV every night, and were allowed to express themselves publicly on the internet, Twitter, and 'assemble freely' without fear of repression - that war would have been over long ago. Putin would have likely been ejected long ago.
You are always one click away from hardcore pro-ukraine propaganda in YouTube and ukrainian channels in Telegram. A lot of prominent media figures - turned State Dept proxies - fled the war and now are outputting constant stream of anti-war, anti-regime, anti-Russia propaganda, to youtube mostly.
The information which you expected to topple Russia is widely available. Most Russians just don't want to lose the war and have their country toppled. But even if you persuade a simple majority of them, how would they proceed toppling anything? Did people topple any governments over unpopular COVID restrictions?
Why do you assume that the majority of Russians would like to watch TV channels which spit on them, magnify every their misstep and ignore their issues? Because that's the only mode free media found itself to be capable of.
> You are always one click away from hardcore pro-ukraine propaganda in YouTube and ukrainian channels in Telegram. A lot of prominent media figures - turned State Dept proxies - fled the war and now are outputting constant stream of anti-war, anti-regime, anti-Russia propaganda, to youtube mostly.
The amount of pro-ukranian propaganda, is nowhere near the amount of pro Russian propaganda that has been seeded by the FSB and GRU for years. Their systematic firehose of falsehood has been in full effect for years, ever since the "little green men" in Ukraine and the Russian shooting down of MH17.
You see far more pro Russian propaganda even on places like here then you see pro Ukrainian propaganda, probably by orders of magnitude.
Of course you would see more pro-Russian position in Russia than pro-Ukrainian position. How would you expect to see it otherwise? Simply adding "free speech" will not mute state propaganda, in Russia, China and elsewhere.
The reality is that most Russians are well aware of the nature of Putin, the war etc. There's nothing to expose, really. The majority just don't care all that much.
Thanks, this is an astute summary actually. They would care more if they thought their voices mattered, I think. You can absolutely see a form of resignation in their expression. They act as though they basically have no control over it, it's like 'it's not their issue'. I do however feel that they would be more empowered were they to get better information, particularly the 50+ crowd.
I don't think they will. I have all the information on this topic you can get but it doesn't matter since I can't do anything about it. At best I will not achieve anything, at worst I will get imprisoned and tortured, so what's the point in trying?
You seem to have a very benign definition of "worst". At worst, they are going to see their country collapse, a repeat of 1917, then misery and/or death of all people important to them.
Because that's what people have in mind when you friendishly suggest them to 'topple' their government.
You are correct if we're talking about somehow taking collective action, but I was talking from the perspective of a single person without a group they know well enough to start a revolution with. I think most people in Russia fit that description, at least all of the ones I know do.
> Putin, Xi etc. can easily convince millions of Europeans of their view of the world, which will mostly be based on lies. It's a key pillar of their respective foreign policies.
Is there any powerful country you can name that does not do this...?
The US government has an official propaganda ministry: USAGM.
Large "independent" media like NYT have admitted that they work closely with the DoD and other agencies to screen content before publishing.
Also worth noting that the former propaganda chief at USAGM is the current head of NPR.
And yet none of the above get "USA state media-affiliated" warnings on social media like Twitter, which digs the hole even deeper.
The de facto state media apparatus of the USA is unbelievably huge and underacknowledged. The DoD alone employs over 50,000 people working in "media" roles.
If NYT was a well funded propaganda organ of an armed organization that was explicitly intent on causing harm to a nation state, it absolutely would be restricted in many nation states.
This is the special privilege autocracies get, being hostile while also being allowed to speak.
"We described the article to the government before publication."
They use this as a defence; how can something be "treason" if it was literally approved by the government?
The NYT depends on government approval to publish some stories, including probably every international story. Not uncommon to have ex-FP/NatSec people in foreign editor roles.
It's easy to see why: if they don't work with the government, the government won't work with them and some other newsroom will get superior access.
Most major media outlets around the world confer with state agencies for information, there is some degree of responsibility to protect the lives of individuals and sensitive issues, that does not make them 'State Affiliated' nor 'Propaganda' outlets.
The NYT can and does publish whatever it wants.
More importantly, the NYT is usually fairly factual.
The CBC or BBC are 'state affiliated' though still mostly independent.
RT and Russia One are direct branches of state control - they coordinate their entire 'truth agenda' with FSB, GRU, Duma, Military and other officials to promote the state agenda. They promote mostly bombastic rubbish with little bearing on reality, and call for the invasion and nuclear eradication of Europe and America, specifically to get their own citizens in a frenzy.
Consistent with this policy is the punishment of anyone who publicly disagrees with the 'party line' or talks about the 'war' in any way that is inconsistent with Putin's wishes.
Fortunately, you or I can walk down any street in the USA/West and say almost anything we want about Biden, Bojo or Trudeau, and thankfully nobody will do anything about it.
USAGM is obviously biased, but it's also mostly truthy, and it competes with a a variety of any other voices. On the whole, it's hardly influential. Almost zero Americans for example, are affected by anything they say or do.
And of course, this notion that the DoD employs 50 000 people in 'media' roles is ridiculously false.
American media is painfully biased and narrative driven, it'd be hard to make sense of the world by 'just' watching either CNN, MSNBC or Fox, but thankfully we can watch all three and absorb information from an enormous variety of sources. All with the help 'media bias checkers'.
The information situation between Russia and the United States or any other Western country is not comparable.
You're doing the "our glorious soldiers, their savage brutes" meme, with far too many words.
Virtually all of this is true about both USA and Russian media. There are some minor differences due to historical circumstances, but the bottom line is that both have massive & sophisticated domestic and foreign propaganda apparatuses. Both governments crack down hard on credible, organized threats to their control. Saying "I don't like $LEADER" on the street, alone, is neither, and you won't get persecuted in Moscow for doing this no matter how much Radio Free Europe insists.
> The information situation between Russia and the United States or any other Western country is not comparable.
"Virtually all of this is true about both USA and Russian media. "
Really:
LIST OF JOURNALISTS MURDERED IN RUSSIA [1]
This is as obviously, laughably wrong as the "The DoD has 50 000 secret media men running around!!!".
Is 'Q' one of your 'sources' for that?
The US has largely a free press, and there's almost nothing you cannot say, and the government has very little, usually no control over information dissemination.
US President DJ Trump just spent 4 years screaming about the press, they literally banned him from Twitter and FB and you think 'Mr. US Government' is running the show?
US Gov. has no influence over 'Democracy Now' or 'Breitbart' or 'Mother Jones' or 'Joe Rogan' and barely has any influence with CNN/NYT etc. even though in those cases they obviously communicate.
There are innumerable sources of information available in the US.
Conversely, Putin directly controls most of the main 'information outlets' (i.e. RT, Russia One) as they are designed specifically to be propaganda outlets. He fairly aggressively censors outside information, though Youtube, Google are still available, he just fined Google something like $300M for conveying information he didn't want Russians to have access to i.e. the truth.
Of course Putin literally imprisons and murders journalists who dare publish information he disagrees with ...
... and of course they literally censor vast areas of the internet [2]
... and of course they literally ban large swaths of Social Media because they cannot censor it [3]
But keep trying to make that 'Russia and USA are the same' argument ...
Of course it does, because the alternative is giving privilege to other countries for the benefit of power politics. It won't end well either. Relying on censorship for such things really isn't a great idea.
Why? I mean... do we completely ban any country that invades any other country? Why just russia? Why their media? Why not media that said iraqi soldiers killed babies, and iraq has weapons of mass destruction plus all the countries that invaded iraq? Or afghanistan? Syria? Libya? What about countries that organize coups and fuck up countries like iran, making us look at "then and now" photos to see how progressive iran was? How about countries that bomb weddings in countries they're not even at war with?
Was blocking Hitler's propaganda during WW2 a dark side of Europe's history?
This is war! You can't allow the enemy to trick your population.
In Romania, when we were occupied by Russia, there were just 400 communists in the country. Those people were put in charge of everything by the occupiers.
If Ukraine is defeated, we'll be next, so it makes sense to not have any such people. A poll showed that only 75 % of Romanians blamed Russia for the war. 5 % blamed Ukraine, and the rest NATO/"the West"/etc.
That means that an incredible number of our people are traitors, and we can't allow Russia to communicate to them.
>I don't see any logical support for this conclusion even based on your narrative.
The AUR party was very pro-Russian before the war, and now, after the war, the politics in Romanian are getting incredibly charged to the extent that if you were to legitimately criticize actions of NATO or the EU, regardless of what arguments you bring, you'd be automatically be classified as an AUR fan, a Kremlin supporter, a Russian shill, and a traitor that must be silenced or locked up.
Basically any criticism towards NATO/EU is forbidden in Romania, on the basis that don't bite the hand that feeds you.
It's a bit (read 'a lot') more complicated than that. You can't compare WW2 1943 UK/Europe to present day no matter how you spin it.
There's valid criticism in how the EU and NATO handled not just the relationship with Russia and Ukraine, but many other issues from energy, mass immigration, COVID, fiscal policies to Brexit.
There's nothing to gain for us by not self reflecting on the mistakes of our political leaders who are conveniently trying to push Russia as the scapegoat for everything wrong today, many issues they set up, before Russia even invaded.
So yeah, 'Russia evil' and all that, but we should still keep our political leaders accountable for their mistakes and not let them get away with everything just because 'EU/NATO good' and if you point out issues then you're automatically a Putin shill like in WW2/cold war logic.
But of course - NATO has provoked Russia by allowing it to invade Crimea unpunished. If those HIMARS launchers got to Ukraine in 2014, we wouldn’t have the current war, and also probably wouldn’t have problems with gas supply, because Russia would already be pacified.
Still, this isn’t a good moment to focus on criticizing NATO where there’s a vastly greater evil to defend against.
And I definitely can compare this to Europe in 1943 - it’s the same ideology, forcing people to do the same kind of genocide, for the same reasons. Sure, Russians nazis only killed few dozen thousand people so far, but we know well what they intend to do - they are openly saying the purpose of the invasion is to destroy the Ukrainian nation. (Also note how ironic it is - Russia, which is neither a real nation not a proper state, is trying to destroy a vastly superior Ukraine.)
> That means that an incredible number of our people are traitors, and we can't allow Russia to communicate to them.
Ironically, that's the narrative employed by Putin when our (Russian) government bans western press. I hope that in future neither you nor Putin will be allowed to censor facts that I see.
Especially that media from both sides had been known to bend facts to support their narrative, and only way to navigate is to compare data from both sides.
I see as the priviledge to be able to read in English, Russian and Ukrainian, to be able to read information from all sides.
> but I want the ability to hear what the enemy says.
Read propaganda written for internal consumption then. I find it much more illuminating. Maybe through Google Translate, I think it's quite decent at ru → en translation these days.
Getting acquainted with both kinds of propaganda is informative. If you compare RT and internal outlets side by side, you see which stuff gets said for which audience.
> blocking sites, because they don't like what they say, and because they show a different side to western propaganda... that's a bad precedent to set.
You mean blocking sites because they spread blatant misinformation, fake news and generally text book demagogue?
So basically, every mainstream news media in the last few decades?
Or is it just when it's the "other guys" doing it? When it's "iraq has weapons of mass destruction", "iraqi soldiers kill babies", "trump inpatient, feeds fish to fast", "smirking kid attacks native american", etc?
Tor project doesn't block any sites in the code/protocol, but given that many/most of the exit nodes are in western europe you are at the mercy of any given circuit's exit node (usually the node's ISP) filtering.
I remember back when more exit nodes were in Russia, i'd sometimes not be able to visit different sites because the russian exit nodes I was connecting to were blocking them.
The remarkable thing about EU censorship is that the EU doesn’t seem to really censor that much.
Instead, the government decides what the narrative that they want to communicate is and the press willingly and uncritically reports it. Not all the press and not always, but there is a strong pull to the mainstream. This sounds rather ridiculous, but I’ve seen it time and again in Germany with the 2015 refugee situation, the Coronavirus pandemic and now also with the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Other countries don’t seem to do much better and critical thinking, presenting deep analyses or alternative explanations are very rare. What happens instead is that each crisis has a group of bad guys which are typically critical of the mainstream opinion, but are at the same time flawed (e.g. far-right, racist, anti-science, etc). Over time anti-mainstream opinions become associated with extremism and become easy to dismiss - unless reality diverges so hard from the mainstream that it forces a re-evaluation.
This makes it very easy to find out what the mainstream political opinion in say the UK or France or Germany is, but quite hard to get informed.
The restriction and indirect censorship of public discourse is pure poison for a democracy, but typically it’s those that claim to protect democracy that practice it.
All censorship is implemented to protect X from Y.
Where X is typically the local population which is not smart/strong/informed enough to understand why Y is harmful.
On the one hand, X are indeed usually ignorant because that is the natural state of humans, school is a worker assembly line as opposed to a place for sharing knowledge and their own governments lie to them and trick them all the time.
On the other hand, the censors typically have ulterior motives and their goals are aligned with keeping X in the dark.
You’re obviously wrong about there being nothing to gain from censored information. In fact, one can gain a very rare thing indeed - an own opinion that isn’t shaped by middlemen.
I'm familiar with French censorship, and I read the Democratie Participative journal by simply using north-American DNS providers like QuadNine or the Cloudflare one (1.1.1.1).
I've heard that Telegram now blocks a lot of Russian military news channels, at EU govt request, so you can't read war news from the "other side".
Telegram being the main source of raw information about course of military actions.
Try t.me/warjournaltg and see if there's anything blocked/not available (there are a lot of reposts, I wonder if their source channels would be unviewable or if reposts will be silently dropped)
My immediate thought here too. Is it possible to defeat US and European citizenship with Tor, as well? Looking for solutions once the "Disinformation Governance Board" gets rolling again.
Some folks get emotionally invested in tor and get really bent out of shape when you bring this up. You will hear silly arguments about open source code as if that was any kind of guarantee about what’s running on a server you can’t inspect. Or maybe according to some explainer they read, its secrecy is unbreakable, despite that correlation attacks on the protocol have been known for years.
Conclusion. Some random person created a bunch of Tor exit nodes doing some internal routing fuckery for :80 traffic. Anyone should assume their plain-text traffic is fine-pickings when over Tor (and probably any of the VPN providers anyway)
(If you are more concerned about traffic correlation perhaps be more careful where you are entering the Tor network)
No you don't have that right. The US literally had an Office of Censorship during WW2.
Every country has different rules during war, and here in Europe many Russian politicians have made statements about attacking us. We shouldn't allow the Russians any means of attacking us from the inside.
Although Russia is basically a dictatorship at this point, and courts aren't fully impartial, there's still place for maneuvers with good lawyers finding loopholes in the law - judges can't simply ignore the law outright, hence some limited success in courts. Usually it's about appealing to procedural mistakes which overturns cases. For example, a week ago a political case against a popular Youtuber was closed because of the statute of limitations - his "crime" happened a long time ago and so the government can't prosecute him anymore. However, if a case is initiated by Kremlin itself (not one of the less powerful agencies) then you'll get jailed no matter what (they can leverage FSB to fabricate evidence).
I have a russian friend living near Moscow, and he can fully use discord, chat to whoever he wants, view any region free video on youtube (be it extremely anti-Putin or anti-russian) etc. etc. without any effort on his part, just using normal programs, no tor or vpn. It seems that there are just so many avenues for information on the net, anyone in Russia who cares to know about something can find out immediately with minimum effort and zero technical knowhow.
It's just the majority of Russians dont want to know anything. Just like US citizens during the invasion of Iraq, most of them barely knew what was happening and simply didnt care to know. They were just comfortable in their assurance that USA was #1.
As I understand it, a ton of Russians, especially older ones, just rely on TV and print media for news, and those are much more tightly controlled by the Kremlin.
> Just like US citizens during the invasion of Iraq, most of them barely knew what was happening and simply didnt care to know. They were just comfortable in their assurance that USA was #1.
While the WMD aspect of the invasion of Iraq was bullshit, the rest of it didn't seem to contain nearly as much propaganda -- as in, just blatantly lying -- as what Russia's doing here. I don't think the US lied about US soldier casualties, for instance, acting like they were taking a small fraction of the actual injuries and deaths. Not to mention the war crimes seem enormously more common and severe with Russia's invasion, and those are all getting covered up by the Russian media within their country (e.g. "Azov/Ukraine did Bucha").
Basically any war will involve some amount of propaganda and atrocities, but some people are acting like the way Russia and the US prosecute war are the same, when that appears to be clearly wrong.
From my European perspective there's very little difference between the magnitude of terrifying things done by either the US then or Russia now... except maybe that Russia has less reach and power in the bigger scheme of things.
Abduction of people in allied countries to be brought to black sites, torture of inmates at Guantanamo (construction starting 2002), puerile attempts by officials at "downranking" the amount and definitions of torture inflicted upon people, varying degrees of war crimes committed while the highest instances of the world's powers debate vague points or outright lie about the very foundation of why they militarily attack another country, and this continued despite very public outrage at a few strikingly depressing "leaks" (smiling soldiers torturing inmates) or testimonies, and violence inflicted upon specific targets while keeping constant pressure on third parties to remain by the sidelines.
> Both of Thursday’s Al Nashiri and Zubaydah judgments “are striking for their frank and clear declaration that the CIA operated black sites in Lithuania and Romania at which torture took place, with the knowing acquiescence of the host governments,” notes Just Security’s Oona Hathaway. “The Court, relying in significant part on the 2014 US Senate Committee Report, dismissed Romania’s and Lithuania’s claims that, among other things, (a) the applicants lacked credible sources of evidence; (b) the black sites did not exist in their countries, and (c) if the sites did exist in their countries, the government did not agree to them and did not know that torture was taking place at them,” Hathaway said.
> The first of those existing rules came from Department of Justice, which in 2002 wrote a series of memos that gave a new, very narrow definition of torture. (The next year, lawyers at the DOD wrote a report that reiterated these rules.) To qualify as physical torture, the memo said that an act of interrogation would have to cause serious physical injury, "such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."
> A May 11 article in the Los Angeles Times exposed other methods of torture used by US forces: deliberately inflicting massive and severe burns, the use of electric shocks, and threatening detainees’ female relatives with rape. The Times article also revealed that the ICRC considers that between 70 and 90 percent of Iraqis seized and held by US forces are wrongly detained.
[...]
> After the bombing ended, US Special Forces and Dostum’s troops herded 3,000 surviving prisoners into sealed metal containers and drove them for 20 hours to Sheberghan prison. Most of the prisoners suffocated along the way. When the convoy arrived at its destination, the containers were emptied and the prisoners who had survived the journey were shot. Their remains were buried in a mass grave.
> Eleven soldiers were convicted of various charges relating to the incidents, with all of the convictions including the charge of dereliction of duty. Most soldiers only received minor sentences. Three other soldiers were either cleared of charges or were not charged. No one was convicted for the murders of the detainees.
---
And with all of these things, two full decades after that and with the full "freedom" of access to the internet that one has in Europe or North America, a lot of people still say with a straight face that those situations don't compare?
Talk about successful propaganda. I'm sure Russia is dreaming to continue achieving similarly too.
> After the bombing ended, US Special Forces and Dostum’s troops herded 3,000 surviving prisoners into sealed metal containers and drove them for 20 hours to Sheberghan prison. Most of the prisoners suffocated along the way. When the convoy arrived at its destination, the containers were emptied and the prisoners who had survived the journey were shot. Their remains were buried in a mass grave.
You’re really understating the case. Your post is missing dozens to hundreds or even thousands of human rights violations. That’s also the power of propaganda, it is hard to know and then also present the full breadth of the picture even in a general sense. A comprehensive analysis is almost impossible due to extreme secrecy.
All of this doesn’t change that it is wrong when Russia or anyone else does these things. America could arrest Bush and his entire band of illegal imperial war buddies to show Russia what happens afterwards, but we both know that there will never be accountability. Similarly when Obama said “we tortured some folks” but did not punish the folks responsible for torture, international law says he should be held accountable. This will never happen either - America set rules for everyone else and does not even require public servants to follow them. It is a reflection of the will and the general desire of the American people. They want blood, they want revenge, they do not care for justice for some enemies. Justice for 9/11 would have been to put OBL on trial like we did for the Nazis, but Americans I spoke with said it clearly: why should we risk one more American life? Why should we treat OBL fairly? He didn’t play by the rules after all! Those who hold these views could not see that the reason has almost nothing to do with OBL and everything to do with ourselves. That we even have to explain why a trial is important is a kind of moral decay that sets a terrible example for the rest of the world.
Putin appears to be banking on this moral rot being the default case for the world now. There is a fog of war, so we cannot know for absolute certainty but it seems pretty clear from decades of analysis. It seems from the Russian perspective, the West showed Putin and key Russians the way to perpetuate these crimes and walk free afterwards. It’s depressing and terrible, and so predictable.
We set the tone after the Second World War of a moral upper hand with trials for some of the worst Nazis. We, after 9/11 and the assassination wars by drone strikes, no longer maintain even the pretense of this moral superiority through law. This sets a new example for a new world, and the next seventy five years probably won’t be much like the last seventy five years in terms of general (but not absolute) peace.
It should not be like this. It is incredibly sad, impossibly short sighted, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Imagine an America that could find the energy for justice rather than brute force. We have to imagine it, if we can even do so, because the last twenty years have shown us a very different picture in the wider world. There were always exceptions, but now there is simply a new rule.
Providing some additional context. There is no statistics to back up the numbers and it's impossible to make one at the moment. It's rather how informed people in Russia feel plus some anecdata.
> As I understand it, a ton of Russians, especially older ones, just rely on TV and print media for news, and those are much more tightly controlled by the Kremlin.
All the news sources that are still not blocked either have a hand in their asses or are about to get blocked. They are completely controled by the Kremlin. Much more tightly is an understatement here. Unfortunately, so is 'a ton'. I'll try to elaborate.
Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the cities around them, have relatively high percentage of well-educated people with sufficient technical competency and mindfulness to avoid the censorship. I'd say that would be at least a good half of the population of these cities, which amounts (very roughly) to 10M. These people would try to find some facts, and form something resembling a picture of what's really happening.
Not too bad, really, but the thing is, I'd be surprised if there is another 20M across the rest of the country (the population is approx. 145M as of 2022). The farther you go from the big cities the faster the freethinkers' (tongue-in-cheek term) percentage declines. When the government says that 90% of the population 'supports' the war, I'm afraid it's not that far from truth.
What 'supports' means, though? As it seems, in reality, it means that the people aren't really bothered by the war all that much because they don't consider the country to be (much of?) an agressor. In small cities, people live in poverty and the only thing that's used to hold them together is the TV which gives the hope that some day life is going to get better. But there, of course, are a few hurdles to overcome. The current hurdle is to 'win against Ukraine'. Based on numerous interviews and personal interactions, that's what common folks really think.
I believe that they (most of them anyway) are not bad people, but merely simple and gullible. And when the president says that zombie-nazis were about to attack motherland, well, of course they praise the guy who sent the rockets their way thus saving the day. That's the gist of the propaganda, by the way.
As for the older people (even well-educated ones), can confirm. First of all, they are stubborn and know better. And they just can't believe that TV isn't a good source of information on the matter. My older relatives are like that and I don't really know how to convince them to think otherwise. As far as I'm concerned, no one has figured that out yet. For every bit of evidence TV has a piece of counter-evidence. You try counter that. I've taught them how to read independent news, but they don't trust them.
edit: brainfart with understatement/overstatement in the beginning of the post
I'm not as sure about the 2nd Iraq war, but there's no question that the 1rst one (and the embargo) was even more destructive than what is happening now in Ukraine. (Or maybe not any more, the Russians have been "catching up" fast..?)
OTOH there's that infamous quote about half a million dead children (slightly less in practice ?) having been "worth it", while Putin's regime prefers to deny/lie in those cases ?
I have a bunch of friends and relatives there. 99% of your average citizen's internet time is spent on ok.ru and vk.ru, which work very hard at putting you in a tight information bubble, just as any other social media platform. I think it's pretty much the same in every country, only the domains differ, not their substance.
> view any region free video on youtube
Only if you specifically look for it, and for the same reason.
btw, I have to help my non-technical friends with VPNs/proxies/reading news through sites like archive.ph/some other tricks. They definitely cannot read or watch anything they want without some technical expertise or someone willing to help.
It should be noted that there is no shortage of anti-war content on VK, either - it's taken down when reported, but whether it's reported is another question. It all depends on one's circles.
Telegram channels are big deal in Russia. They are the best source of information about war, from first hands, Russian and Ukrainian.
Don't forget that Ukraine and Russia are very tihtly related, with tons of friends and relatives on each side of a border. You don't need some Western media to get news about rumble on your backyard.
It turns out that friends and even relatives often stop listening if you repeatedly tell them something they don't like to hear, as many Ukrainians have found out.
This works perfectly in two ways. Donetsk is shelled for 8 years bu Ukrainian Army, nobody was interested enough to stop it. "naah those separs are shooting themselves"
The "8 years of shelling" talking point is one of the dumbest, I have trouble imaging who would believe it. We both know that Russia doesn't care even about its own people, let alone anyone else, with the sinking of Kursk and sieges of Nord-Ost and Beslan being shining examples of that. The indiscriminate destruction of large cities in Eastern Ukraine full of ethnic Russians is just another datapoint.
According to the UN, civilian deaths in Russian war on Donbas were 25 in 2021, lowest since the war began in 2014. How many have died in 2022?
If Russia wanted to stop needless bloodshed, all it had to do was to pull its armed forces out of Ukraine and leave rest of the world alone. Nobody wants to be a part of your pathethic "Russian world" of poverty and hopelessness, and now that everyone's seen the true "might" of Russian army, you've become a laughing stock of the world. Nobody even pays attention to the threats you make in regard to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
You don't even need to go to the UN. According to DNR government itself, Ukraine was ostensibly responsible for 77 deaths in 2021 - and only 7 of them civilians (which kinda gives you the indication of what they were aiming at).
And yes, you're absolutely correct: again, according to their own official claims, by May, they have already lost about 50 times more civilians since the beginning of the war than they did in the year before. So if the point of the war was to protect the civilian population of Donetsk, it's already objectively a failure of truly epic proportions.
And this is all before accounting for mass forced mobilization and the resulting mass casualties, because untrained office workers are sent to assault fortified enemy positions with Mosin bolt-action rifles. It got bad enough that several prominent public figures on the Donbas separatist side called it "genocide of the male population of Donbas by Russia".
That said, it is true that civilian casualties in Donbas were much more significant in 2014-2015 - over a thousand per year - and many of those were undeniably due to the actions of the Ukrainian military. It's also true that some people in Ukraine denied that any of that was happening when it did. I'd be surprised if there's any war in which this doesn't happen to some extent, though - what's unusual in the current situation in Russia is the sheer scale of it.
(There's a similar issue within Russia across generational rather than national lines, by the way - a family might not have any relatives in Ukraine, but the millennial kids are anti-war and generally pro-West, while their elderly parents call them Nazi sympathizers and cheer Putin.)
The network where I work breaks all the time. The cascade of firewalls often leaves us in a state that even DNS does not work. Tor and tor-browser usually work when this happens. I'm mostly using tor nowadays as a free proxy when network breaks.
The question is if it is worth the extra investment to try to
stop -everything- or if blocking 95% if good enough and let
some nerds have their fun on the side.
FBI broke / infiltrated TOR,
I am sure the Russians can do much more.
But does it need to achieve the goal they have set?
The US blocked Russia Today US on cable and YouTube.
You can still get it. But for the vast majority
they dont have to.
""
RT, the English-language news network funded by the Kremlin and based in Moscow, was dropped from YouTube and American cable in early March, but still appears on an assortment of alternative video-hosting platforms,
""
(Yes you can say that it was American companies not the government that banned RT. The distinction in reality is little. )
FWIW the Russian internet censorship is pretty weak because their propaganda machine relies on more traditional techniques for keeping things in check (domestic terror, lies about external danger, distortion of significant founding myths such as the victory over Nazism, exploiting native nationalism, and even just the basic need to feel sane via denial of reality). They missed the opportunity window to build a great firewall, but it seems it isn't needed after all.
Tor does not work in China. I was once tried to setup my own Tor Bridge on a VPS, the VPS ended up got blocked after just few days of use (actual time of use is more like 30 minutes).
If Putin really wants to, he can just buy the tech from China, and Xi is more than happy to sell since it gives him a grip on Russia.
Tor is not an anti-censorship tool all by itself, it's just a privacy protection tool. An anti-censorship program will have features that obscures it's traffic pattern, not 512-bytes fix-sized frames (cells).
Also I want to point out that, even through the firewall might allow the traffic through, it does not mean that the user is undetected. As the firewall might record the behavior and notify law enforcement to manually investigate the usage.
On the bright side 3 years ago I would have laughed out loud if someone told me to check out an obscure Jewish magazine, a falun-gong associated newspaper, and a Christian jokes site. Strange times
can you elaborate on that? as far as I know, my government (the USA’s) does little to limit my access to information beyond copyright issues. There is of course censorship on social networks, which is no doubt real, but it’s a much trickier problem to solve.
There is censorship on every network, not just social ones, and it's naive to think that's not connected to government policy. What I'm not aware of are any DNS level blocks (even at individual ISPs), but I'm afraid someone will correct me.
Now the other end of that tunnel still uniquely identifies you. It helps in some adversary models, but not many or all.
I work for the Navy. The Naval Research Lab where Tor and onion routing was started. I wrote a FAQ to respond to these concerns on Reddit here[0]. AMA if you want.
Now, time for a thought experiment. Imagine Tor was instead developed by Russian researchers working for Russian ministry of defense at the time. Would you use it to visit rt.com blocked in your country?
The funding was secured to protect $military comms. Allegedly the $military actively uses it, so it better be actually secure, especially when malicious foreign enemy actors have had two decades to study it. Academics have studied it to death, and some of their discovered attacks have actually resulted in transitioned improvements. I myself have the benefit of (1) being extremely familiar with how it works on the lowest level and what its weaknesses are, and (2) not considering myself a target worth my $govt's close monitoring.
Your point makes sense. My distrust comes from the fact that $militaries keep separate versions for toys they export/publish vs toys they use. See: M1 Abrams export variants, cryptography export laws (limited key lengths; restrictions mostly lifted), etc.
Tor is open source and protocol is open. You can hardly make different versions of it. I can't imagine that at least. The point of Tor is that US spy can send his traffic to whitehose.gov from Moscow and his bytes will not be different from bytes of thousands of drug addicts looking for some marihuana on dark web. FBI won't be able to tell a difference. That's the whole point of Tor. It makes no sense to maintain two versions of tor networks or something like that.
The downside is it doesn't have a browser bundle like Tor, but it's possible to configure Tor Browser to use it. Turning off scripting all together is really a better approach no matter which tool you use, be it I2P or Tor.
I just dont get it. Why would any one use vpn instead of tor if all you want is to circumvent the censorship? Tor provides access to restricted site for free the same vpn charges .
The algorithm is quite simple:
1. Attempt to connect to TOR
2. If it connects, blacklist the IP, goto 1.
3. TOR is unavailable
(If an anonymous TOR user can obtain bridge address, shared by any means, email, Signal, messenger pigeons or whatever, RKN operative can obtain it as well)