Who’s Behind Russian Failures in Ukraine? Russians Ask. Jewish Bankers or the Pope?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 2 – Given that Russian forces have failed to capture Kyiv yet, even committed Russian patriots are beginning to ask, some Russians joke, who is to blame? The majority seem inclined to suggest that it is either Jewish bankers or the Pope, Tatyana Pushkareva reports in her latest compilation of Russian anecdotes.

            Among the best of the rest (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/43069/-) are the following:

·       Regardless of whether the ruble exchange rate goes up or down, prices in Russia rise, the result of what the Kremlin calls the steady growth of the well-being of its population.

·       The same Kremlin media that tracks a two percent increase in the price of computer chips in Britain manages to ignore that hundreds of thousands of Russian pensioners are now dumpster diving for food.

 ·       Having been told that no Russian leader has assets abroad, anyone who asks about their wives and children having such possessions is obviously a scoundrel who has been zombified by Western propaganda.

 ·       One in every three Russians entering university want to study computer programming because there is no profession which makes it easier to find work abroad. 

 ·       It is not true that the new Russian youth organization is the same as the Soviet Pioneers, its backers insist. Those in the Pioneers were “true Leninists;” those in the new one will be called “true Putinists.”

 ·       Russians who live on less than 150 US dollars a month aren’t poor, the Kremlin says. The real poor are those in Europe who have to make do on several thousand euros a month. And why are they poor? Because they don’t live under Putin.

 ·       No Jewish masons could discredit the Russian Orthodox Church as completely as Patriarch Kirill with his toadying to the Kremlin does.

 ·       Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman, has gone too far. When asked if Putin plans to close “the window on Europe” Peter the Great opened, Peskov said “no one plans to close anything.” Calling Putin a nobody is overkill even for Peskov.

 ·       “Instead of developing a country with great potential, they plundered it. They closed unwanted mass media, they killed independent journalists, and they banned political parties. No one in the corrupt government thought about the people.” This is what Vyacheslav Volodin, Duma speaker, says about Ukraine; but not about the country you thought he was referring to.