Wagner mercenaries were on Thursday reported to be trying to head back into Russia after threatening retaliation over the suspected killing of their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash on the orders of Vladimir Putin. “The convoys are likely heading towards the border with Russia,” the centre said. “There’s a lot talk right now about what the Wagner Group will do,” he said.
I don’t want to sound mean, but that sounds like a massive overcomplication from Putin’s side. To me, what you’re saying seems to make sense, but you and I are not Putin - I think neither of us is a narcissistic psychopath that’s been killing people en masse for at least a couple of dozen years. What makes sense to you or me might not necessary make any bit of sense to Putin - we wouldn’t have seen this war play out, nor the Crimea annexation, nor even Euromaidan, because without Putin’s egoistic attempts to control Ukraine via proxies (Yanukovich and the entire war in Donbass being the prime example) or directly.
If we start talking about this from positions of common sense, we’ll simply go back so far back in time that it’s just easier to assume that everyone would be better off without Putin as a whole in the first place, from the very beginning.
First of all, thank you! It’s probably my most cherished skill - really did open a lot of opportunities in my life in many ways. Not really sure I wouldn’t be rooting for Putin if it wasn’t for English leading me to more liberal places, first outside the Russian internet, then - interestingly enough - inside the Russian internet and Russia itself.
As for the English sources, I’m afraid I can’t recommend anything. Things I know and share are mostly courtesy of the Russian-native sources of various kind, complied in my mind over years and years of discourse.
Since links to other social media sites are forbidden by the rules here, I’ll leave a few easily-searchable sources below. Keep in mind that none of them are native English speakers, but all have their content readily available in English one way or another. It’s not as easy as I’d love it to be to share with you, but it’s the best sources I could think of to share with someone outside Russia, helping them understand what’s actually going on.
I really appreciate you taking the time to write all this out!
I wouldn’t know what questions to even ask without first going through and watching the videos from what you posted.
I guess my own questions right now would be about technology and access to information.
Like how difficult is it to use the internet in Russia? Have you traveled internationally to have something to compare it to? I heard a lot of people use VPNs, do they worry a lot about being caught? What can’t you do without a VPN?
I am also curious if you consume any western media, and if so what are your favorite and least favorite outlets. I am also curious what western sources have seemed the most accurate to you about Russia in general, if any at all.
You’re welcome! Here’s some more, then!
It seems easy and straightforward, honestly. We got 4G and previous generations, so even if you don’t have a proper landline, you’ll most likely be more than fine with cellular. That being said, that’s the situation in the cities, and I really have no idea what it’s like in the villages and such, but given that there are dedicated village bloggers of various kind (some of them basically blogging about their remote work from the village), I’d say it’s probably fine overall. Russia may be big, but not entirely in a good way - there are huge swathes of basically unsettled land, some of which is not even likely to be settled because it’s either straight up impossible or doesn’t make any sense at all, so building infrastructure around this part of the globe is a little challenging (especially with rampant corruption running amok for 20+ years with many officials that actually mean anything being basically put in their place by Moscow, not elected by the locals as would be most sensible for a federation of its scale).
As to whether I’ve been outside Russia - no. Technically, there was one time when I was on a train that had to pass through Kazakhstan, but I wasn’t allowed to step out of the train as that would count as trespassing or whatever (because nobody granted me entry in the first place, and from the legal perspective, I was under Russia’s jurisdiction the whole time while on the train). I talk to a lot of people outside Russia, spend most of my time in the English- or German-speaking parts of the internet, so I know that there are places that offer speeds that basically no regular consumer here has; we do have relatively high-speed plans, though, like 1 GBit/s+, but I’ve always seen them a little excessive for my use cases - more importantly, I’m not sure my hardware (the router and the built-in ethernet port on my motherboard) even support that kind of speed. I’m pretty fine with my 100 Mbit/s downloading speed (the upload seems to match).
I don’t think any of them care, to be honest. The VPN has become a necessity for people that use twitter, Instagram, other Facebook/Meta products, and many news outlets, including both Russian and foreign. The vast majority of our VPN users just do for recreational purposes rather than to stay safe, and given that we can’t easily pay for a lot of the decent VPN providers out there, many fall back to the free options - which is, of course, a privacy nightmare, but it’s actually only marginally better than the paid option in that regard, because no matter what they tell you, they, too, can (and likely do) gather your data; they all sell it for some sweet cash from the marketing agencies and such.
What I’m trying to say is that many VPN users in Russia aren’t privacy savvy people in the first place - certainly not like many of the fediverse users, so they barely think about the sheer prospect of being caught because of the VPN anyway. Besides, the Russian government as a whole has become incredibly incompetent over the decades of corruption and some autocratic processes, and is largely led by old men who probably see the internet as some sort of disease or stupid phase of the youth, so they’re not particularly effective at blocking people’s attempts to gain information - anyone who wants to bypass the many bans imposed on various websites and services initiated by Russia can easily do so (and does, at large).
Kind of a lot of things, actually, but as hilarious as it sounds, most of them are related to politics/news and porn. The latter actually came first when the old men who refuse to keep up with the times tried to make everyone stay in their outdated and long-dead world by going after - brace yourself - hentai and everything similar; I can’t recall the exact date, but it definitely started happening after 2012 when Putin decided that he wanted to stay in power, and as any sorry-ass autocrat that has nothing of value to offer, he invented some enemies to keep people busy - among the ever-evil Americans, the West, and damn liberals, apparently, the people that played with their willy watching pornographic cartoons were deemed evil enough to warrant bans on the many outlets they used to enjoy.
During the last several years, the Russian government has been fighting the news outlets much more rigorously, as you may know, and especially so once they started the war in early 2022. Many Russian and foreign sources are now inaccessible without a VPN, but they’re all kind of lazy bans that would probably work on people that wouldn’t really cause any trouble even if they had all the truth about Putin and his regime from all over the world - the more politically active people, who are much more likely to join protests, resist the war effort and autocracy, and cast their votes in ways that hurt Putin or his image during the elections, virtually never felt the ban because they know how to use VPNs, they’re very accustomed to using VPNs, and more importantly, the bans only concern the official websites of the outlets. In other words, you can just as easily find a mirror, a Telegram channel, some RSS feed (which offers rather short snippets these days, but still), any other feed, or even a YouTube channel that contains all the same news from the same outlet (can even be an official channel), all accessible just as easily as before.
There’s a natural question arising from the last point - aren’t they going to ban YouTube or Telegram? Well, it’s a very complicated matter as I see it, and they even tried (and did) with the latter, but reverted their decision some time later (I can’t remember the full story, though, but I think it should be available somewhere online). As for YouTube… I’m not entirely sure they will, because it’s a place that is frequented by much more people than just VPN-capable youth: it has a much wider audience in every possible regard, including age and political views, so an outright ban of the entire platform is definitely going to cause more hard than good; especially knowing that many older (or even just middle-aged) people have younger relatives who could probably contribute to some anti-Putin informational campaigns with greater ease if YouTube ever goes black.
There are some reports and concerns that YouTube may see some kind of a partial ban in Russia, but to be honest, I don’t trust the expertise of the people talking about this in that particular regard. Worst case scenario - more VPN users, which is not at all what Putin needs.
I’ve tried sticking to a few specific ones several times, but always had a little too much going on in my life that it always came down to the simpler option - having a dedicated news feed on reddit at first, then at fediverse, and these days, I realize that I don’t even remember the names of the outlets I see in those feeds.
In general, I know very little about the news outlets available in the West, so I can’t really say which I prefer. My only argument here would be this: German outlets are simply better; I’ve read tagesschau, heise, DW, Handelsblatt, probably some other ones I can’t remember, and it was always that much more better than, say, most of the American outlets, because the latter just seems to focus on driving up the engagement with all the emotion-inducing articles they post, and especially the way their journalists write them - I prefer a more dry relay of the events so I can build my own opinion, not have an opinion cultivated in me, because I’ve lived in a country with massive propaganda rule long enough.
In general, I try to read a little something from many angles, so I follow some Russian outlets as well as some feeds with multiple foreign outlets. I think I gravitate towards liberal/left sources more (although I’m not sure I understand the difference entirely - feel free to explain if you do), but that’s not my main criteria - I just want an outlet to have some respect towards its readers and itself, not post some random news one after the other, farming clicks and comments, and then posting some along the lines of “it wasn’t true actually, we just found out”, because, like, just have some patience and post something that can be verified, have some responsibility and accountability.