CBC News: “Zelenskyy’s speech [to Canada’s House of Commons] received at least a dozen standing ovations. There was also one for this man, a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians during the Second World War.”
(emphasis mine)
“fought in a Third Reich military formation accused of war crimes.”
AKA “Waffen SS”. I assume that caption originated with AP and not Zero Hedge.
How things change in 2 years:
Indeed. The quote was taken from CBC’s commentary attempting to sanitize Hunka’s involvement.
OR perhaps ALL this is more propaganda BS. So much that comes out of that region has proven to be thin air. Couple that with our own government’s propensity to lie to us, and it becomes hard to believe much of anything either FROM there or ABOUT there. This is one of those fly-in-your-face kind of “reports”.
The speaker of Canada’s parliament has resigned after inviting a Ukrainian Nazi veteran to attend a special session of parliament, and then calling the man a “hero” amid two standing ovations.
Anthony Rota stepped down as speaker on Tuesday after meeting with party leaders in Ottawa amid growing cross-party calls for his resignation.
“This house is above any of us,” he told lawmakers.
Earlier in the day, Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, called the situation “deeply unacceptable” and an “embarrassment”. The government house leader said Rota should do the “honourable thing” and step down. The Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, also criticized Justin Trudeau for the fiasco, saying the prime minister had “brought shame on Canada” after the government’s failure to have its “massive diplomatic and intelligence apparatus vet and prevent honouring a Nazi”.
“I will consent to an expedited vote on a clean CR without Ukraine aid on it.”
It is a cute talking point – but there is undoubtedly $25 Billion Plus in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act already earmarked for Zelensky, minus the usual 10%. And Congress as a whole has no interest in seeing that the laws they pass are enforced or that the budgets they (generally don’t) pass are followed.
Please just shut the whole mess down. Let’s wipe the sheet clean and start again.
Not likely to scare the Azov Brigade:
What they really need is a successor to Dmitry Utkin. I’m not sure Mikhail Vatanin is that man.
For that matter, I have a hard time seeing some soft-handed son take the place of a man who survived 9 years in the Soviet/Russian prison systems and managed to parlay a hot dog stand into a empire. I just can’t see Pavel Yevgenyevich getting the same level of respect from the troops.
They really are desperate warmongers.
From the CNN article: “The [US] decision could drive a wedge between Iran and Russia, which have formed a de facto defense partnership over the last several months ….”
Our Betters are really smarter than me. I would have guessed that the US giving weapons it stole from Iran to Zelensky who is waging a proxy war against Russia on behalf of the US might actually give Iran and Russia even better reasons to cooperate to bring down the Great Satan. Silly me – not up to CNN level of understanding.
More than just silly you. You have deigned to oppose OPENLY the vaunted opinion of the “experts” at CNN. What hurbis! What gall! ?Are you not fully aware of just how much checking and rechecking and truth-testing CNN does for every piece of published news. I mean, I just…
Sometimes you just crack me up, Gavin!
While some of the stories I’ve heard about Aeroflot accidents in the old days [1] would make you never want to go near the flight path of a Russian aircraft, this seems a bit much. I wonder how much this is believed by non-elite Russians?
This how you do propaganda.
The video has closed captions if it is unclear. “Footnotes” from comments:
[–] rhubarbjin Best Ukraine Meme and Best Video 2022 [S] 81 points 14 hours ago*
Hopak-dancing Russians in the summer snow. It’s 100% accurate. [YouTube](The song is a parody of “A Rumor in Saint Petersburg” from Don Bluth’s 1997 animated movie Anastasia.)
I guess this is practically ancient history now. If I include footnotes, can we pretend it’s educational content?
[0:08] That’s “Yevgeny V. Prigozhin” in Cyrillic. Our favorite warlord died on 23 Aug 2023, just one day after I finished writing the lyrics to this song. How inconsiderate of him.
[0:53] Sergei Shoigu is Russia’s Minister of Defense. Despite his blinged-out general’s uniform, he has never served in the military. All his medals were designed by himself and awarded to himself by himself.
[0:57] Yevgeny Prigozhin’s career can only be described as “eclectic.” He’s been a petty criminal, a street food vendor, a catering magnate, and he arguably perfected the business model of the “troll farm.” Of course, nowadays he’s most famous for being the public face of the Wagner Group.
[1:05] Shoigu and Prigozhin absolutely loathed each other and competed for prestige within Putin’s inner circle. Throughout late 2022 and early 2023 there was friction between Russian M.o.D. soldiers and Wagner mercenaries, sometimes erupting into actual firefights. Shoigu began to withhold military equipment, prompting Prigozhin to publish a series of increasingly vitriolic videos on his Telegram channels that culminated with his infamous “where is the f***ing ammo?!” rant.
[1:19] While the Wagner Group was on their “March of Justice” towards Moscow, Alexander Lukashenko (president dictator of Belarus) presented himself as a mediator and helped broker an agreement between Prigozhin and Putin. Well, at least that’s what he says. We’ll probably never know what actually happened, but by the end of the day the “March of Justice” was over and Wagner fighters withdrew to newly-erected camps in Belarus.
[1:24] Prigozhin was very insistent that he was not staging a coup (just, y’know, a military convoy driving towards the country’s capital seeking to replace some of its leadership). Despite his insistence to the contrary, there was wild speculation that Prigozhin had his eyes on the presidency itself.
[1:28] Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, has his own private army who is fighting on behalf of Russia. Well, allegedly. They mostly film themselves wielding high-end equipment against invisible enemies in obviously-staged skirmishes, and then post about it on social media. When Wagner fighters took over Rostov-on-Don, the Kadyrovites published a video claiming they were on their way to crush the rebellion. Predictably, they never showed up in Rostov-on-Don… Their excuse? They got stuck in a traffic jam.
[1:38] There’s an often-quoted anecdote about Putin: In 1989, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, a crowd of protesters threatened to break into the Stasi HQ where Putin was stationed. His superiors informed him that “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow, and Moscow is silent.” That event supposedly drove him to become president, so that Moscow would never be silent again in times of crisis. Kind of ironic, then, that the Wagner rebellion triggered complete paralysis in the Russian leadership and the mercenaries encountered no resistance on their drive towards Moscow.
[1:54] Today’s word is “apparatchik,” a derogatory term for a bureaucrat in the Soviet state apparatus. An apparatchik frequently transfers between different areas of responsibility with little actual training, is generally incompetent, and is only in it for the job benefits.
[2:06] As soon as news broke out, the Russian leadership withdrew into fortified bunkers while dozens of private jets took off from Moscow airports. No one knew what was gonna happen and everyone wanted to get out of the way. Putin was mockingly nicknamed “grandpa in the bunker” because of this.
[2:42] Interestingly, the citizens of Rostov-on-Don greeted Wagner mercenaries like pop stars. People on the streets wanted to shake hands and take selfies with them. Did they not realize what was happening, or did they not care?
Hamas planning:
Only problem in that video I see is how wrong he is about recoilless rifles. They are still in wide use, starting from the disposable AT-4 that he has almost certainly used in his old job, to the versatile and reusable Carl Gustav favoured by many NATO armies. Now, the old pierced casing recoilless rifles the US used to use are long out of regular service, but the US still uses other ones.
Could be in The Crazy Years:
Languages of the Indo-European family are spoken by almost half of the world’s population, but their origins and patterns of spread are disputed. Heggarty et al. present a database of 109 modern and 52 time-calibrated historical Indo-European languages, which they analyzed with models of Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Their results suggest an emergence of Indo-European languages around 8000 years before present. This is a deeper root date than previously thought, and it fits with an initial origin south of the Caucasus followed by a branch northward into the Steppe region. These findings lead to a “hybrid hypothesis” that reconciles current linguistic and ancient DNA evidence from both the eastern Fertile Crescent (as a primary source) and the steppe (as a secondary homeland).
