this film is NOT russian propaganda

what it is, is a giant dump on putin's head

it isn’t every day that one wakes up to a war having started, somewhere on this planet, but if you live long enough, those unfortunate days on which you’ve woken up to a new war beginning, do begin to ‘pile up’. sadly, in recent years, they seem to be happening with a tad more regularity. i’ve already woken up to far too many wars having kicked off while i slept.

this — the seeming regularity of ‘new wars’ sprouting up — is perhaps an unwelcome harbinger, one may assume, of what is to become humanity’s ‘new normal’, during what could be, if we’re not careful, our own rather ignominious denouement as the dominant species on this ‘shiny ball of blue, we call our home’.

just to be clear, from the very beginning… NONE of what i wrote in the previous paragraph is a good thing for us, overall. the level of death and destruction humans are capable of, with the technologies we have at hand, developed for the very purpose of mass destruction and the infliction of death upon ‘the enemy’, should really be ‘tools of last resort’, and brandished only as a ‘deterrent’ to other groups, but are instead used almost indiscriminately, by some bad actors, over and over again. the LAST thing anyone should ‘want’… is a war.

yet, here we are… again. wars all over the place, with others threatening to break out, or expand into much larger, more serious ‘regional conflicts’, and the like. weapons manufacturers still do a booming business, literally, no matter what ‘the economy’ might be doing. this is, unfortunately, how it is.

hell… we even have ‘information wars’, now. everybody’s reading a different PLAYBILL about the same play, which makes for some very messy ‘debriefing’ after the curtain comes down, at the bar as you all try to decide — and argue over — what the play is about.

that’s what THIS piece is about, really: the ‘information war’ aspect of things, and, specifically, the new canadian documentary film ‘russians at war’, which i was fortunate to be able to see screened at TIFF, on tuesday afternoon of this week. it was the first ‘public screening’ of the film, which had been scheduled to run during the recently completed toronto international film festival. due to some ‘controversy’ over the film, which deals with a group of russian soldiers who have been thrown into (or volunteered for) vladimir putin’s invasion of ukraine, the film did have an initial ‘press only’ screening while the festival was ongoing, but the two public screenings scheduled to follow it during the festival were canceled, and everyone’s ticket money was refunded.

i should say, once again, for the sake of clarity, where my own allegiance lies. i am all in FOR ukraine kicking russia’s ass the fuck out of ukraine and for russia to pay a HEAVY goddamned price for what putin has done to that country, entirely unprovoked. this is a violent and destructive war of aggression that’s going on for no better reason than what putin wants his own ‘legacy’ as a russian head of state, to be: he wants to be the guy who puts all the jigsaw puzzles of the old soviet union back together as one big soviet land mass under moscow’s control.

to be clear… putin is out of his fucking mind to even hope for such nonsense to become real. he, like everyone else in authoritarian strongman world, is stuck in the pointless past, dreaming of being ‘the guy’. that won’t be happening for vlad. he’s going down in history as a dumbfuck super egotistical short man syndrome asshole, and as a wholly unrepentant dictator with a massive body count beside his name, floating downstream for eternity on a river of blood and carnage he wrought.

all of the money he’s stolen won’t save putin, now. he’s already a dead man walking. the only question remaining is how long he can maintain his grip on power in that country, because this war he claimed would be concluded in ‘3 days’ — which he cockily began 2 and a half years ago — will be his undoing.

and that, is kinda what the film ‘russians at war’, is about.

while the movie’s about a small group of soldiers, its also about the tension between putin’s blasphemous patriotic claims about russian greatness being resurgent under his steady hand, or trying to convince the world ukraine has a ‘nazi problem’ in order to justify brutally invading and attacking a sovereign nation outside russia’s borders, AND keeping his own population in the dark enough about what’s really going on with the ‘war effort’ next door, and NOT having his own people find out that russia is losing the war, and BADLY.

the russians back home don’t know how badly its going for their boys in ukraine, because all the ‘news’ they see, hear, and read, is utter propaganda nonsense emanating straight from the kremlin. the russian soldiers in the documentary say as much. the soldiers at the front KNOW what’s going on because they’re THERE, getting slaughtered at every turn. and the soldiers REALLY don’t want to be there… getting slaughtered.

that vibe really does come through while watching the film. this is putin’s war, alone, and the vast majority of soldiers don’t even know why they’re there, or what they’re doing any of it for. nobody does…

which is where the ukrainian protestors enter the picture.

again, to be clear, i DO NOT begrudge ukrainians their outrage. i’d be pissed too, frankly, were i in their shoes. what russia’s doing to their country is UNFORGIVABLE.

that being said, i do wish that they were more open to at least acknowledge that what the film shows is a bunch of russian soldiers, the great majority of whom are NOT there by choice (though some are there of their own volition; that’s true), who don’t know why they’re there, and who are fucking pissed at the abject dysfunctionality of their own military commanders, all the way up the chain of command… such that one of those even exists, really, in that army.

the russians at the front are fully aware that this war is a cock-up, a shitshow, a bad dream come to life — as long as ‘life’ may last for them. for most, it isn’t very long, and the rate of attrition is tremendous. in 2 years russia has lost far more than 10x the number of personnel than what the US lost in vietnam in 10 or 12 years of heavy fighting. this war is a meat grinder for the russians, and those at the front know that reality all too well.

what the film really does is show the juxtaposition between the ‘official line’ coming from mother russia, and the ‘reality on the ground’ in the war zone(s). the kremlin pumps out a steady stream of nonsensical bullshit about ‘how well it’s going for us’ in ukraine, while the soldiers know what’s really going on, and how russia is getting creamed every day and can only maintain the ‘appearance’ of being a functional military by throwing more and more bodies at the front.

which is where the whole ‘nasty rate of attrition’ becomes so real for them.

it’s a hard sell for the kremlin these days, because too many guys come back from the war dead, and those who do make it out alive have stories to tell that DO NOT line up with the kremlin’s messaging, in the slightest.

that is what the film offers to everyone who sees it: the slight hope that eventually enough russians will grok the pointlessness of this war, and start opposing it in numbers so great that putin can’t arrest them all.

everybody knows what happens to dissenters in russia, under putin’s reign. that road runs through the basement of the FSB building in moscow, to a gulag in siberia, and then back to the front in ukraine with gun in hand (if you’re LUCKY!) and a kick in the back to ‘GO!’

because of the state ordered foreign media blackout inside russia, films like this are one of the only ways to get that message TO russians, inside russia, whether it be through word of mouth, or whatever method may work… the point is to show russians that this war is WRONG, on so many levels. and that it is russian soldiers saying so.

before the screening on tuesday, i had arrived early (sometimes the subway DOES work the way it should and doesn’t break down twice en route), and my ticket provider was running late, so i had time to ‘take it all in’ outside the theatre entrance, in terms of the contingent of ukrainian protestors assembled on the sidewalk, the various media types ‘working the crowd for quotes’, and the many members of the toronto police service who were on hand, ‘just in case’ there was going to be any ‘excitement’ happening.

it was fairly mellow, really. at one point i asked a nice young woman from cbc/radio canada how many of the protestors she’d spoken with had seen the movie — remember, at that point the film had only been screened for credentialed members of the press, so not very many people HAD seen it, yet. she said only one or two of them, which was probably accurate, given that fact.

as such, the majority of those protesting outside TIFF on tuesday hadn’t seen the film, and were relying on a wide array of interview snippets said by the director, and the few available reviews of the film, presumably generated as a result of the festival’s one press screening of the doc, to date, and the very few ‘clips’ released online during the festival.

when the film was originally scheduled to be screened publicly during the festival, there was perhaps an unfortunate overlap in toronto between the film being at the festival, and the annual ukrainian festival on college street, happening on the same weekend. i only noticed the overlap while on the subway heading to an ultrasound appointment on friday the 13th, where i saw a subway ad for the ukrainian festival dates… thus, the aforementioned ‘overlap’.

i’d like to think that was just an unhappy accident, in terms of trying to schedule the film festival times, perhaps based on when the director could be there for the Q&A. there’s always a million little factors when organizing such an event. i doubt it was intentional to place the film showings (that were ultimately canceled) on the same weekend as the ukrainian festival. but i don’t know, and shit does happen. that much i DO know.

when i came out of the movie, i spoke to a woman who was protesting, and asked her if she had seen the film, yet. she said she had not. i told her she should see it, because it is not as she was describing it from her ‘notes’, prior to me seeing the film. i tried to explain to her that the gist of the movie was ‘the russians don’t want this bullshit, either’. she was having none of it, and i got tired of talking to her and went home to eat something — i wasn’t planning to see a movie midday, and hadn’t yet had breakfast, but i got a call 90 minutes before showtime asking if i could make it downtown by then to use a free ticket. turns out i could, but by suppertime i was more than a little peckish.

i learned the next day that the protestor i spoke to saw the 6:30 screening, and was unmoved by any of it. she happened to be a ‘friend of a friend’, and i was able to peruse her own long post about it. she seems to have missed the point of the film, entirely. which i also understand. when you go in with such blinders on, can you really be blamed for missing the forest, for the trees?

and, look, i’m not trying to glorify these russians in the film, or any other russians, for that matter. i fully understand that THEY’RE ‘the bad guys’ here. that’s not hard to comprehend for the laymen among us (IOW… for all of us). but those russian soldiers are also sentient humans, and THEY understand the position THEY’RE in, trapped under putin’s tyrannical thumb. they didn’t want this, but here it is. that, too, is pretty easy to understand. the reality IS what it is.

that doesn’t make it right by any means, but it DOES give us a window to see ‘what’s behind the curtain’ of this war. and what the film shows us is just how fucked the russian army really is, and how against the abject stupidity of throwing all of your own people to their deaths for some bullshit vanity project from their very own deranged shrimpkin lord of the oligarchs, who’s already stolen from them everything they once had as a people, everybody seems to be, in truth.

yes, of course there ARE those who want the war, for whatever misguided reasons. it is a folly for which the cure is to be sent to the front, from whence they shall never return… most of them, anyway, won’t return alive.

but the overall vibe the soldiers put out is one of resignation to their fate, individually and as a group. those who did volunteer out of patriotism were quickly disabused of that nonsense upon arrival at the front, where there is almost no command structure in place, and the entire exercise reminds me of that wild night scene in apocalypse now at the do-lung bridge, in which captain willard (sheen) asks a marine who the commanding officer is, and the grunt says back to him, between hits on an opium pipe, ‘ain’t you?’

in short, the ‘structure’ is lacking when it comes to russia’s military. soldiers on the ground are very poorly equipped, resupply lines are practically non-existent in an organized manner, and pretty much everything is done by the seat of their pants. once prigozhin’s wagner group baddies imploded and all the seasoned mercenaries from their ranks got sent to africa to do putin’s bidding in various conflict zones, there, the quality of the russian fighting force inside ukraine fell off a cliff.

they were now sending tens of thousands of convicts into the fray as a ‘get out of jail, free’, card, and when they ran out of prisoners they started a draft and began to throw the nation’s best and brightest into the meat grinder of no return.

the russian people have begun to understand that this war is for nothing, despite the kremlin’s non-stop entreaties to them about all the ‘russian glory’ to be had with it. what a farce the modern world can be. they could do a whole new series called ‘mad men’, about the powers of dictatorial persuasion, and the ensuing havoc wrought from such fatuous pronouncements by their ‘dear leader’.

after the film was over, there was a brief Q&A featuring director anastasia trofimova, producer cornelia principe, editor roland schlimmer, and TIFF programmer sean farnel (in the interest of full disclosure, it was sean farnel who furnished my friend — an avid moviegoer & film festival supporter through the years — with a pair of last minute tickets, allowing me to see the movie rather unexpectedly).

there were several questions asked, many of which had to do with HOW director trofimova managed to film all this shit by herself in a war zone, and there were also a couple about the nature of the conflict from ukraine’s point of view. for example, there was a ukrainian woman sitting in the row in front of us who asked a question of those assembled onstage. to be fair i can’t remember precisely what her question was, but when she had heard the answer, at some point she turned around and asked me if i empathized with the soliders we had just been watching, and i told her i did, because i did. i can understand the situation that THEY are faced with.

the woman felt she had gotten her ‘gotcha’ answer from me, that the film had made me sympathize with the russians. but it was the only question she asked me. had she bothered to ‘follow up’, i would have told her that OF COURSE i am FAR MORE empathetic about the situation ukraine and her people finds itself in under the boot of putin’s illegal aggression towards, and ultimate invasion of their country on such specious fucking ‘grounds’ as what he claims to be a necessary ‘denazification’ of ukraine.

honest to fuck… it really isn’t hard to understand just how much bullshit and russian media disinformation as a coercion technique to get his own population on board with this murderous military nonsense, undergirds this war. as a result, i can understand the concerns from the protestors about how the film is REALLY trying to humanize russia’s position.

but i’ve now seen the film, and the film tells a very different story from what protestors are claiming. they speak of it being ‘soft propaganda’, and ‘very subtle’ to the point that ‘viewers don’t know they’re being manipulated by the kremlin’, and on and on it goes.

what that film told me was that the russians themselves aren’t into the fucking war. they never wanted it, and want it to end, now. it isn’t good for anybody, and everybody’s getting killed.

i don’t know about you, but when i watch several different funeral scenes, and more than one cemetery scene where all the ‘glorious dead’ are buried, sometimes 2/3rds of the town’s male population, and see the parents, the spouses, the siblings, the children, the cousins and aunts and uncles, and the friends of the fallen blubbering in pain by their gravesides, lamenting the pointlessness of this stupid, unnecessary war russia started, the message i take away from that is NOT one of how great russia is and how brilliant a military tactician putin is.

the vibe is undoubtedly, ‘what the fucking fuck!?’.

there is one widow at the end of the film, standing by her husband’s grave, who says flat out to the camera… ‘yes, you have my full permission to use this footage. people need to know what’s going on here, and that we don’t want this war, at all. what the fuck is it even FOR?’

knowing what we know about how putin’s regime deals with ‘protestors’, i would be curious to know what becomes of that particular widow, given her unflattering comments on camera, about dear leader shrimpkin’s precious ‘war’.

the woman protesting at TIFF on tuesday that i spoke to after i’d seen the film, had a photocopied ‘information page’ condemning the movie, the filmmaker, TIFF, and anyone else they could think to blame for the film’s existence. on that sheet was the fact that the director, anastasia trofimova, has worked for RT, the state russian broadcaster. this was enough to convince the protestor that it was OBVIOUS trofimova was a russian agent of the kremlin.

her saying that told me that she doesn’t understand the nature of the freelance tv business. i spent a decade doing such work, and i can tell you there are things on my own work credits i’m not overly proud of, but you also have to pay the rent, and a paying gig is a paying gig. now, i was only unhappy to have been a part of this or that commercial whose product i wasn’t on board with, or there have been tv shows i thought were unendingly stupid, but i didn’t have to watch them (and never did, in fact), i just cashed the cheques they gave me. in other words, i wasn’t choosing gigs based on geopolitics… i was just trying to ‘stay housed’ through the income my (sometimes very intermittent) work generated for me, and not end up on the street.

everybody has choices like that to make. its called ‘life’. i would imagine that anastasia trofimova had to make similar decisions regarding what ‘work’ she took on, and why (to pay the rent).

which is pretty much what director trofimova did. she happened to be in russia working for cbc as a news producer in moscow when the war broke out. when russia kicked out all the foreign press after invading ukraine, she had no gig anymore. a chance meeting on a train heading to moscow on new year’s eve in 2022 with a guy in a santa suit, solved that ‘no gig at the moment’ issue for her, in an unexpected and roundabout way.

various circumstances eventually draw trofimova to the war zone inside ukraine, when santa from the train calls her two weeks later, when he’s back at the war, about 100 kilometres from the front, waiting for unit reinforcements. trofimova asks him on the call rather bluntly, ‘can i come there?’, which surprised even her, she said. it was more than a little insane, what she was contemplating.

to her surprise, he says ‘if you can get inside ukraine… sure. i don’t see why not’, and thus begins her journey with ilya’s (santa guy) comrades in arms. they’re a motley assortment of soldiers, mercenaries, conscripts, and volunteers. most of them, by that point — the war was about a year into it, at that point when she began filming — were only there for the money. and most of them weren’t getting paid. it was a large and unpleasant problem for them, who without getting paid by the military weren’t able to send funds home to support their families. one guy said his wife had been threatened with eviction for not paying the rent. it was mid winter… and the command dysfunction and management of the war was fucking up everyone’s lives in a nasty trickle down sort of way. they didn’t like it one bit. they understood they were stuck, however. none of them were happy about it. they spoke of signing up for a 6 month tour of duty, that in reality only ends for them one way: going back to mother russia in a body bag, or, ‘feet first’, as the cook on a 6 month rotation who was already deep into month 7, said.

anyway, one of the points of contention over the film’s content was when trofimova does manage to get to where ilya’s unit is hanging back and recharging, the guys INSIST she put on a russian uniform. she doesn’t want to, but the ensuing short discussion about why she must, gives viewers a glimpse of the fact that the russian soldiers know all too well WHY she has to wear a uniform: because if she doesn’t, she’ll be ‘fair game’ for other russians to kill on sight in a war zone.

there’s also a tacit admission being made by the soldier when he tells her this fact. that they know the sorts of things their own fellow soldiers do to the civilian population of ukraine. that, to me, was almost the most chilling moment in the film, and none of it was spoken aloud… but was immediately understood by the viewer, given what the world already knows about the heinous war crimes inside ukraine being committed so routinely by russian personnel on the ground, there. anastasia trofimova is an attractive young woman… and the group of soldiers who adopted her at ilya’s behest, wanted to protect her from the worst among them, inside what was essentially a lawless ‘free fire zone’.

THAT’S why she wore a uniform, and the soldiers told her she had to. sometimes, you really just have to take people at their word, as not everything is a triple-blind psy-op. sometimes people just do the right thing in a given situation. giving her a uniform to wear in THAT situation was definitely the right thing to do in their eyes, so they did insist, and rightly so, frankly.

there’s another scene in the film, while trofimova is en route to meet up with ilya and she passes through the ‘disputed’ region of luhansk, which russia has claimed as their own since the war began, and renamed ‘lugansk’. the protestor i spoke to outside told me from her notes about this scene, and practically spat out the sentence ‘she refers to it by the RUSSIAN name for it! she’s a spy!’. i told her that, actually, in the film, trofimova calls the region by all three names it can currently be referred to, now, ‘according to whom you’re speaking with’.

let’s just say i was unmoved by the protestor’s talking point on that one. it was incomplete, at best.

you can gussy it up any old way you want to, really, in terms of trying to parse what’s ‘propaganda’ and what isn’t. i guess what i took away from the film was that the cogs in the machine don’t get to decide what the way forward is… but when the machine itself is broken so badly from the top down, and you start to understand that the war is only still going on for the sake of putin’s vanity and survival as russia’s top dog, then you begin to understand the bitterness being forged by these ‘policies’ manufactured by idiots and terrified lackeys at the kremlin, where everything is a sham sort of storefront facade with nobody actually minding the store, is when you can finally see the movie — and the war itself — for what it IS.

what it is, this film, is a document telling us that putin cannot keep up the facade of russia’s invincibility forever, and that his own support — all of which is simply a tyrannical illusion to begin with — is seriously waning amongst a very restless, agitated, and increasingly angry (angry at HIM) populace at home. to keep shit together in THAT sort of environment is a spiral of increasing suppression of everything in order to keep putin in power.

don’t misunderstand me… the russian state is very powerful, and is very harsh with it’s own people who step out of line. voicing dissent over the war at home inside russia, is the best way for people to see the front up close, because that’s just one way putin has of ‘generating new soldiers’ out of thin air. and he USES it, along with all the other ways he has of doing so. because he needs them all to go into the meat grinder he made just to keep things going as they are… which is basically a very bloody stalemate, at this point.

which is what the film’s about… the russian malaise over the senseless killing of their own in such great numbers over such an undefined ‘goal’, with this dumbass war they started with their friends and family next door. russia is being absolutely hollowed out by this war’s kill rate. and putin doesn’t give a single fuck. he just expands his recruiting efforts far beyond russia’s own borders.

what the film did while watching it, was give me hope that SOMEDAY there will be enough voices inside russia to shut this bullshit down, and take the keys away from putin. that’s still mostly a fantasy scenario, as things stand today, but there’s a solid glimmer of russian frustration with this shit, and THAT is what people should take away from it, if they take away anything at all. not every russian is gung ho to flatten ukraine. mostly they’re also prisoners of putin’s regime, for whom speaking out can be very dangerous for their health.

many who appear in the film spoke their minds resoundingly well. most of them were killed. but not all. many went back to russia to lick their wounds, or to engage in the time honoured military tradition of learning to live without a leg, or some similarly newfound disability they have thanks to the war coming along. those are the people who have the greatest chance to spread the word at home and push back against putin in whatever ways may be available to them, if any even are, realistically speaking.

there’s a lot of ‘fog of war’ involved in such things, but there can also be a sort of clarity when you’re ‘in it’. there are no shortage of such clips that can be found on twitter (on any online platform, really), featuring russian soldiers bitching about the shitshow they got dropped into, and how the command contingent is completely incompetent, after years of so much corruption in the ranks since the berlin wall fell and the once vast and tightly controlled soviet union collapsed under the weight of it’s own greedy dipshittery at the top.

its an age old story of how empires collapse due to too too much ‘territorial expansionism’, and the euphemistic like of such ‘official’ language being utilized to ‘sane wash’ the increasingly violent notion of modern day imperialism practiced by various authoritarian nation states.

i think by now most of us sentient folks are aware of the existence and complexity of ‘ops’, and what they try to achieve. we basically live inside a great big one unfolding right now, in real time, over things as diverse as the upcoming US presidential election, trump’s legal ‘troubles’, or how much influence taylor swift may have over everything from that aforementioned US election, OR over this year’s currently unfolding NFL season… to name but a few such potential ‘ops’ we’re presently immersed in, roughly speaking.

we live in an abundance of information, in which most of that information is somewhat ‘suspect’. as such, we all need to become our own parsers of the ‘information’ that’s available to us. with that in mind, there’s nothing like a ‘controversial film’ to illustrate just how differently everybody can parse something.

all i can tell you is that movie WASN’T russian propaganda, and if it had been intended to be, it failed, bigly. all it shows is a shitty, poorly equipped and poorly led russian military, full of middle aged drafted guys who don’t wanna be there and have no idea what the war is even about, or why it is happening, or what they’re doing while involved in it. they have almost zero ‘training’ before being sent into combat. the whole thing is HIGHLY unflattering to putin and his government.

as a result of all that unflattering content in the film, if anastasia trofimova ever sets foot inside russia again, she’ll be arrested just like alexei navalny was, just for showing up at all.

i, for my part, am but one pair of eyes and ears who took in the film this week, or wherever else it may pop up. that wasn’t a film of russian propaganda. it was a film about how close russia really is, internally, to the breaking point. the people have had enough of this bullshit war, and want it to end.

what i also know deep in my heart, is that putin and russia HAVE TO LOSE this ‘war’, and pay a heavy price for what putin has done to ukraine. no one ever really pays such a price in this silly world we live in, but i sincerely hope that little asshole gets what is coming to him, so deservedly.

one thing that could speed that day’s arrival up for us all would be if ‘the west’, collectively speaking, could get their shit together and actually SEND ukraine what it needs to WIN, and not just the fucking ridiculous and always month’s late drip drip drip of munitions being given to ukraine, just to keep the status quo stalemate bullshit in place.

there’s no fucking reason whatsoever for the west to have slow walked this support the way they have. i understand the importance of NATO’s rule 5, but at what point did the pentagon and everyone else MISS the fact that russia’s ENTIRE ARMY is a useless fucking garbage fire in progress?

had ukraine been given what it NEEDED to win, much EARLIER — including the ‘permission’ to fire at things INSIDE russia — ukraine would have done so that much earlier, and before so much of their own infrastructure was badly damaged or destroyed altogether by russia’s bombardments, and in the face of putin’s totally dysfunctional forces, the war could have been over a long time ago.

putin is never going to fire a nuke. he’s got a country full of missile silos that haven’t been serviced since the soviet union collapsed, and he’s pretty sure that he MIGHT have 5 or 6 warheads that would still work as intended.

the problem putin has on THAT front (over which he enjoys a good bluff now and then when things aren’t looking good for his troops or for the war in general), is that he doesn’t know WHICH 5 or 6 nuclear warheads they are… and, you know… good luck with ALL that, vladdie. happy nuclear easter egg hunting, dude, as it were…

this is where i feel president biden has dropped the ball, by being far too cautious where ‘provoking putin’ is concerned. putin should be being ‘provoked’ all the fucking time, in every way possible. if joe can’t see putin’s got nothing but bluster backing him, that he’s got nothing by now, then it is time for joe to go. i think biden’s been a tremendous president — he was indeed the right man at the right time for a sticky situation that had to be deftly handled; and, my word, was biden ever ‘deft’in that regard — but he is now out of gas for no better reason than that the presidency is a full time, never get to shut your eyes kind of gig. biden did everything he could, and he did a brilliant job on so many fronts, but i do feel that he has somewhat mishandled both ukraine, and all of netanyahu’s murderous genocidal insanity in gaza. it is time for president kamala harris to take the reins and carry america’s ball forward from here. she won’t fumble. she’s a badass.

as robert duvall says in the aforementioned film apocalypse now, ‘some day, this war’s gonna end…. ', and, eventually it did end.

i have the same thought about this one, and i do so hope that the day this stupid war in ukraine ends, comes sooner, rather than later. this is just senseless destruction for the sake of it, now. it was never about anything real. it was always a fantasy on putin’s part, this recovery of the old soviet empire, that fell apart in 1991 for good reason.

putin has been president of russia since 1999. he’s had 25 years to finish his restoration of the empire jigsaw puzzle in his mind’s eye. he’s basically gotten nowhere in all those years as head of state, while destroying everything in his wake. the legacy of russian territorial rejuvenation he tried to create did nothing but guarantee quite a different, disastrous legacy, for himself.

so, basically… FUCK russia.

they started this war, and we could have finished it a long time ago, IF we had really wanted to. but NATO’s rule 5 and an abundance of caution putin doesn’t warrant the west wielding, have held things up for ukraine considerably. that simple fact will be a stain on us all, until the end of time.

in terms of the point of view of the protestors, and all of their shouts of ‘SHAME ON TIFF!’ from outside the front doors — near the end of the movie, i had to pee, so quickly ducked out to do so; en route to and from i could hear them still chanting/shouting outside, downstairs, and the movie had already been running for almost 2 hours — i will say again that i do not begrudge them their outrage.

what i do find disappointing is that they cannot the take the film at face value for the PR win for THEIR — ukraine’s — side, that it IS!

all i know is that ACTUAL, literal, ‘propaganda’, as a rule, generally, doesn’t shit all over the ruling power and their bullshit war.

but that’s precisely what this film does.

if you still want to call it russian ‘propaganda’, then i’m afraid that’s on YOU. or, you could just take the W for what it is — indeed it IS a ‘win’ for anti-war enthusiasts — and know that if you keep telling such stories to the world, eventually the tyrannical and protective wall around putin and his exercising of his state power in this stupid and insanely corrupt, and illegal on every level, war, will be knocked down, just like the same sort of wall was knocked down in berlin, in 1989.

putin already knows how tenuous his own grasp on russia has become. it is high time everybody else did, too. if that means you have to see a ‘controversial’ film to really see the cracks in the foundations of putin’s hold on russia in real time… maybe you should see the movie. because the story it tells is not one of russian glory. it is a tale of outsized russian stupidity and a land grab folly for the ages… and of how much his people do not approve of such ridiculously poorly thought out things — especially things like nonsensical ‘special military operations’.

it WILL be the death of putin, in the end, this war. i just hope ukraine can hold them off for as long as it takes to win and kick the assholish war-criming orcs out of their lands, never to have them return again. THAT is the dream at the moment, from where i sit.

sitting here, though, comes with a very uneasy feeling, as SO MUCH of ukraine’s future may be tied to who wins the US election in november. my feeling is that the results of that election won’t be close in the slightest, but trump WILL try to ratfuck it anyway, and things WILL get messy, and then some. i am confident that the result the people want will be what they get… and they do not want any more chaotic bullshit from the treasonous orange convicted felon, thank you very very much!

much like elbowing biden out of the way was, however, it won’t be pretty. but i trust the american people will reject the obvious criminal and keep their country moving forwards, and NOT backwards into some hellish GILEAD nonsense brought to everyone by scaredy-cat jesus freak toddlers who tremble in fear at the mere THOUGHT of women having any sort of say in their own lives.

all of that theocratic project 2025 bullshit republicans want to inflict on the american people via violent minority rule won’t fly in 2024. they might THINK they have the numbers to make it happen, but they would be wise to ponder putin’s folly, where numbers are concerned. he said he would capture ukraine entirely, including taking the capitol, kyiv, in THREE days. that was two and a half years ago, and kyiv is still happily in ukrainian hands, where it shall remain.

because, sometimes, numbers do lie. trump doesn’t have the numbers to win, even though he thinks he does. he never did… and that, too, is good news for ukraine, at the moment. as for the documentary itself, i think every man, woman, and child inside russia should see the film. it would speak to them in terms of the ‘what is this war FOR?’, question.

the answer the great majority of them would reach is that it’s for nothing, and it is time to end it, and bring an end to this cross border madness putin cooked up for no good reason at all, that has cost everyone in both countries so dearly.

tell me again how this film is russian propaganda, and i’ll tell you why anastasia trofimova can never go back to russia because of the film she made, and why she should be very careful when ordering tea from now on, anywhere in the world.

#SLAVAUKRAINI

author’s note, written on november 29th, 2024:

as everyone knows by now, trump ‘won’ the US presidential election, and will be POTUS again on january 20th. this redounds VERY BADLY for ukraine, as trump will cut all US support for them, and will probably also exit the USA from NATO itself. he has indicated a desire to do so, many times over the years. he now has the unbridled power to actually do it, as the republicans will now hold the unlimited power trifecta of the white house, the senate, and the house of representatives.

the election results were clearly NOT what i had expected to happen in that country. i really thought they’d choose sanity and decency over trump. they did not, and by the slimmest of margins trump won. as such, everything i had hoped for ukraine is probably as good as dead, much like the potential fate of ukraine, itself. trump’s electoral victory almost guarantees putin’s military victory, barring an extraordinary upping of the levels of support for ukraine from the EU and the rest of the NATO signatories, including canda, should the US in fact remove itself from NATO at trump’s urging.

the bottom line is that when trump won on november 5th… everybody else lost.

bigly.

what a fucking disaster it all is, frankly. none of this will end well, now… and all i can do is think about what volodymor zelenskyy must have been thinking when he heard that trump HAD in fact won. just imagine. my god… the utter anger, frustration, and gall of it all; what he’d already been through. seemingly now, for nothing, all thanks to the wildly misinformed ‘american people’. putin was getting creamed on the actual battlefield inside ukraine. but there was nothing the brave ukrainians themselves could do about how fucking stupid the average american citizen truly is. putin won by beating THEM into submission with online fuckery for the stupids.

i can hardly wait to see how they write it all up for the history books, several years from now… THAT should be entertaining, if nothing else, given who’s probably gonna be writing such books in the future, now that the USA mere weeks away from becoming GILEAD, itself. i guess they wanted the project 2025 bullshit a lot more than i thought they did. be alert for a lot of incoming ‘caveat emptor’ type stuff when it all gets very real in the states after january 20th.

it is what it is. ‘politics’. meh.