Vladimir Putin, a man who made a terrible mistake in attacking Ukraine, is trying to make it seem like he’s achieving success.
But it hasn’t gone well with all kinds of issues — from thousands of their troops killed and some very high-placed officers being taken out by the resistance to getting bogged down and not being able to take Kyiv yet. As I noted earlier, if the Defense Ministry has to make up a lie in order to post a propaganda “win,” you know it’s not going well.
On Saturday, however, the Ukrainians announced the death of another Russian general in fighting. According to them, Lieutenant General Andrey Mordvichev (commander of the 8th army in the southern military sector) was killed after they took down a Russian control post at Kherson. However, Russia is trying to subdue some cities by bombing and blocking them.
At this point, Putin was desperate for a big photo-op, and he threw one on Friday, packing Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium with thousands of people seemingly cheering for the war and wearing “Z” — a symbol of the war effort.
Putin wanted to show that his supporters were there, and he also wanted the 8th anniversary of Crimea’s annexation to be remembered. This scenario was not perfect and it created a lot of Nuremberg-like vibes.
The main motivation behind the military operations we began in Ukraine and Donbas was to “liberate people from their suffering from genocide”
President Putin addresses Moscow stadium at event to mark eight years since Russia seized Crimeahttps://t.co/umzJcuKJTF pic.twitter.com/sxePFwEEyK
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) March 18, 2022
The first is that quoting from the Bible when attacking and killing civilians is an example of cognitive dissonance.
However, people began to wonder what the problem was during Putin’s speech. Just as Putin was speaking, the video cut off to show a band performing for only a few second before it cut back again to Putin.
Putin was speaking in front of a stadium of 100k paid supporters at Moscow’s giant Luzhniki Stadium, when the feed cut out and started playing a concert by Oleg Gazmanov…
This is really bizarre.
Did he record his speech? pic.twitter.com/ED799Glsyo
— Jonny Tickle (@jonnytickle) March 18, 2022
It isn’t clear why, and it sparked conspiracy theories that either he wasn’t there and it was pre-recorded, or that resistance did it. The Kremlin claimed there was a “glitch.” Well, that’s one way of putting it.
The picture was not just hampered by the bug. BBC spoke with some of the peopleWho attended. Many were public sector employees who said they’d been pressured to attend by their employers. Some claimed that they had been forced into attending. Others were students who were told that they would get the day off if they attended a ‘concert,’ and didn’t know what the event was about.
Many of them didn’t even stay, booking it out of there about half an hour into the event.
Thirty minutes into the event, and here’s the flood of people leaving. I guess they didn’t want to hear @M_SimonyanRT propagandist and speaker who delivered one of the opening addresses. https://t.co/nnKI9oGbHa pic.twitter.com/fM5OvVzUYV
— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) March 18, 2022
So, while there were doubtless some real supporters there, once again, it wasn’t quite the picture that Putin would like to present to the world.
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