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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • When Russia has repeatedly denied requests from other journalists in the past, I don’t think that you can really associate Carlson with being “free press”. This is a business deal, not journalism. How should we treat people who engage in business deals with sanctioned individuals?

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tucker-carlson-vladimir-putin-interview-b2492192.html

    “Does Tucker really think we journalists haven’t been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine? It’s absurd – we’ll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now,” said CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

    The BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, wrote on X: “Interesting to hear @TuckerCarlson claim that ‘no western journalist has bothered to interview’ Putin since the invasion of Ukraine. We’ve lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months. Always a ‘no’ for us.”

    Yevgenia Albats, a Russian journalist and author of a book about the KGB, described Mr Carlson’s claim as “unbelievable”.

    “I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. The alternative was to go to jail. And now this SoB is teaching us about good journalism, shooting from the $1,000 Ritz suite in Moscow,” she wrote on X.



  • I wouldn’t call it propaganda or even news - it’s just theories at this stage.
    What we can speculate about is motive to deceive. Russia has been incurring some notable losses from Ukrainian anti-air defences recently, so there would be a motive from the Russian side to portray those anti-air defences as either ineffective or untrustworthy so as to try and sway public opinion about its use.

    Claiming that POWs were onboard the plane aligns with that motive but it also raises questions such as:

    1. The plane was reportedly shot down after taking off from Belgorod, so if it was carrying POWs away from Belgorod, what was the intended destination? It doesn’t seem logical that Russia would fly from Belgorod into Ukraine (unless they were stupid or taking the risk).
    2. Why not transport POWs to Ukraine by road or rail, given that Kharkiv is only a 90 min drive away?









  • It’s a poorly designed chart, likely published this way so that it confuses the average reader and hides how bad the numbers actually are.
    If you add up the year-on-year budget performance, the Jan-Aug 2023 budget performance is about 2.6 trillion rubles WORSE than last year.

    The reporting tries to cover up these bad numbers by focusing on the surplus in June 2023 - the highest result since March 2021. However, the June result would not offset the deficit experienced in April 2023, let alone the Jan and Feb deficits.

    There’s even a hilarious typo in the news story where the author has stated “800 trillion” instead of the actual “800 billion” result, plus they mixed up the months - the 800B was in June, not August. They really should run these numbers past an analyst before printing the story, but I expect disinformation is the real goal.