At Current Rate of Advance, Moscow will Need 1,000 Years to Occupy Ukraine, Some Russians Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 17 – Given that it took Russian forces almost a year to take Avdiivka and that there are more than 300 cities and 20,000 villages under Kyiv’s control, there is no way Moscow will be able to occupy Ukraine in less than a thousand years, some Russians are now saying to each other.

            That is only one of the anecdotes Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova includes in her latest collection (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/47791/-). Among the best of the rest are the following:

·       Other countries elect presidents, but Russia elects a sovereign. For that, there can be only one candidate. All the others are decorations. And Russian voters can’t imagine anything else.

·       After a Krasnoyarsk city deputy described contract soldiers returning from fighting in Ukraine as alcoholics and rapists, Russian officials are struggling to decide what to charge him with: fake news or revealing a state secret?

·       If Putin wants to save the Russian nation, he should stop telling Russian women to have more children and instead end the wars in which Russian men are dying.

·       The truth is like the sun: it hurts to look at it, but it is pointless to deny it exists.

·       Moscow is arresting in absentia ever more foreign leaders. If it restores the death penalty, Russians ask, will there be executions in absentia as well?\

·       Russians were traumatized by losses in the Afghan war but aren’t by the losses in Ukraine. Apparently, there were still some real people in the 1980s.

·       That one Russian in six is now prepared to say that he or she doesn’t trust Putin shows that Russia is still alive. When that figure falls to zero, then Russia will no longer exist but simply be an extension of North Korea.

·       It is foolish to ask how the Kremlin benefited from the murder of Navalny. A maniac kills not because he benefits but because he is a maniac.