These are the guys we are meant to think are slavering, frothing at the mouth criminals and monsters, huh? I'm surprised they had time froth, and slaver between helping old ladies and defending their homeland.
All of Russia celebrates the glorious liberation of Medvedchuk, probably.
“I’m extremely unhappy about yesterday’s news. The whole situation doesn’t even make sense to me. Whenever combat or tactical decisions have been made, they’ve always consulted with us, the active participants in the special [military] operation. But now…” Kadyrov wrote. “Handing over even one of those Azov terrorists should have been out of the question,” he wrote.
It's little known in the West (and even in Russia, where it's not spoken about publicly), but the sacred cause of installing Medvedchuk as the president of Ukraine was the entire real reason why Putin has sent many thousands of his people to their deaths and may well start a nuclear war over it because why not.
From early February (3 weeks before the invasion):
Great wars sometimes start over small offenses. A murdered duke. An angered pope. The belief of a lonely king that his rivals aren’t playing fair. When historians study why armies began gathering in Europe during the plague of 2021, their interest might turn to a teenage girl, the goddaughter of Moscow’s isolated sovereign.
Her name is Daria, a young Ukrainian with a shy smile and big brown eyes. When she was born in 2004, her parents asked their friend Vladimir Putin, then a few years into his reign in Russia, to christen her in the Orthodox tradition they all share. The girl’s father, Viktor Medvedchuk, has been close to Putin for decades. They holiday together on the Black Sea. They conduct business. They obsess over the bonds between their countries and the Western forces they see pulling them apart.
“Our relationship has developed over 20 years,” Medvedchuk told me in a rare interview last spring in Kyiv, near the start of the current standoff between Russia and the West over Ukraine. “I don’t want to say I exploit that relationship, but you could say it has been part of my political arsenal.”
Putin could say the same about Medvedchuk. The leading voice for Russian interests in Ukraine, Medvedchuk’s political party is the biggest opposition force in parliament, with millions of supporters. Over the past year, that party has come under attack. Medvedchuk was charged with treason in May and placed under house arrest in Kyiv. Just last month, the U.S. accused him and his allies of plotting to stage a coup with help from the Russian military.
Wednesday's record prisoner swap between Moscow and Kyiv nearly seven months into the war saw the release of fighters from Ukraine’s Azov Battalion who led the defense of Mariupol in the first months of the war that later became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.
Moscow’s decision to release Azov soldiers, including the battalion’s commander and his deputy, was seen as a betrayal by pro-war and far-right voices.
“The release of five British mercenaries and the exchange of all the remaining members of the Azov Battalion, made yesterday by agreement with [Saudi Arabia] and respected Kyiv allies, is worse than a crime... and worse than a mistake. This is RANK STUPIDITY,” wrote Igor Girkin, a former Russian intelligence officer who led pro-Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine in 2014, in a Telegram post.
Russia previously considered banning the exchange of the Azov fighters, with State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin in June calling the battalion’s members "Nazi criminals" who must be brought to justice.
Wednesday’s swap, as a result, marked an unexpected U-turn.
“What did they say two months ago? ‘We will definitely not give them away!’” said a Telegram post by Grey Zone, a Wagner-linked Telegram channel.
“This is just like before, when they said Kharkiv was Russia forever,” it said, referring to Russia’s retreat from Ukraine’s Kharkiv region this month.
Officials in Kyiv lauded the prisoner swap, which came just hours after Putin ordered a “partial mobilization” of Russia’s reservists.
"It is not a pity to give up Medvedchuk in exchange for real warriors," Zelensky said in a video address.
These are the guys we are meant to think are slavering, frothing at the mouth criminals and monsters, huh? I'm surprised they had time froth, and slaver between helping old ladies and defending their homeland.
All of Russia celebrates the glorious liberation of Medvedchuk, probably.
It's little known in the West (and even in Russia, where it's not spoken about publicly), but the sacred cause of installing Medvedchuk as the president of Ukraine was the entire real reason why Putin has sent many thousands of his people to their deaths and may well start a nuclear war over it because why not.
From early February (3 weeks before the invasion):
https://time.com/6144109/russia-ukraine-vladimir-putin-viktor-medvedchuk/
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/22/moscows-azov-medvedchuk-swap-inflames-russian-hardliners-a78868
Cheers
Was someone under the allusion that Putin was a Saint?
Dude is better than the clusterfucks we have in the West. Also much more honest in his dealings.
I mean, hey, we could all use a friend like Putin, when named Medvedchuk. Wonder how many think Pelosi, or Soros can be counted on like that?