Russians With Attitude

Forced shut down! 🔹 Russian Defence Ministry

Whew. Thanks, guys!

Surrogate Futurism: on the Russian-Ukrainian war as Europe's last civilizational fantasy. Full episode over at Substack.

One of the most frequently asked questions we hear is: when and how do you think the war will end? So, here goes -- a meta discussion on the Special Military Operation. We covered a wide range of topics, such as the failure of the Russian “Realpolitik” approach in 2022, interpreting Western Russophobia as religious mania, the esoteric core of Ukrainian nationalism and why it’s different from your regular “Eastern European butthurt nationalism”, some Zelensky psychoanalysis. We also discussed certain cultural and technical aspects of the eventual SMO finale. To understand why the war is lasting so long, it is necessary to understand some underlying motivations: COVID as a trial run for rule by emergency and militarization as “surrogate futurism” for the West. Will there be further escalation between Russia and the EU because of this? Also, some wider talk on the Russian economy and the one non-military sector that is positively booming right now and will keep growing for the next decade. Full episode available to subscribers over on Substack.

What's effectively poisoning the Western, and especially Anglo-Protestant, conception of modern Russia is the assumption that our societies are fundamentally the same, and that it's simply the laws, institutions, or constitution that make them different. Hence all the easily quantifiable "freedom" rankings based on what the rules say on paper. When they look at the Ukraine war, they naturally imagine their own society fighting in a conflict on that scale, then apply the rules they believe Russia is operating under and immediately picture what they think would happen: torch marches, a full-on war economy, all-encompassing propaganda, psy-ops and most importantly, a population heavily propagandized into becoming attack dogs of the regime. In other words, they imagine what the US/UK would look like if it found itself in Russia's position, and then project that image onto Russia. But that's not at all what's been happening in Russia. Because beneath the laws and institutions, we are, in many fundamental respects, a different society. No matter how tyrannical the formal laws might look on paper, they are routinely ignored, circumvented, negotiated around, or simply treated as something belonging to a separate sphere of life. There is a real wall between the state and ordinary people. The state does not need, and generally does not receive, fanatical ideological support from the population to function. At the most basic societal level, Russia is far more attuned to a "live and let live" ethos than it is generally given credit for. The Russian state can play whack-a-mole with particular dissidents, organizations, or troublesome individuals. It can make examples of people. But that's about the extent of it. It has relatively little interest in micromanaging the inner life of the average person, and even less ability to turn the entire population into true believers. This is the part Americans have a hard time understanding. They're accustomed to having enormous parts of their lives controlled not even by the state, but by social expectations, opinion leaders, HR departments, neighborhood norms, cancel mobs, corporate culture and suburban Karens with 911 on speed dial. This type of control is informal and decentralized, which makes it almost invisible as coercion. So when they imagine adding a genuinely powerful state on top of that, they picture something much more terrifying because, for them, it really would mean being caught between a rock and a hard place. Of course that would be a miserable way to live, which perhaps explains the strange pride Americans take in not having military parades, or even socialized healthcare. They're suffering enough as it is, and with the state's role expanding, they just know they'll be getting procedurally raped in a FEMA concentration camp next week. Russians have spent generations becoming absolute fucking professionals at maneuvering around the state. You learn which rules matter, which ones don't, what can be worked around, who you need to know, and when the official line can be safely ignored. Call it "degenerate Slavic corruption", or a shining proof that Eastern Europe is doomed, call it whatever you want. I call that freedom.

There's a random wholesome story from Russia: 121-year-old grandma Yakha Khashagova from Chechnya voted in an election. Her passport says she was born in 1905, which would make her the oldest person in the world. I decided to check the story. No Imperial Russian birth certificate survived, but that's not particularly surprising for Chechnya. Other details are definitely less believable. Yakha says she was deported to Kazakhstan in 1944, where she married a Chechen shepherd. Together they had 11 children, five of whom died, leaving six alive. This sounds perfectly plausible, until you remember that, according to her 1905 birth date, she was already 39 when she married and then continued having children for many years. Her last child was reportedly born in 1964, when she would have been 59. The whole story makes a lot more sense if she was born closer to 1920, very possibly with no documents to speak of, and then had a passport issued well into adulthood that gave her year of birth as 1905 -- either by mistake or simply because nobody knew her exact date of birth. By the 2010s, it had become something Kadyrov could boast about, and there was little incentive to correct it, considering that Chechnya has the highest rate of divorces (on paper), as well as the highest share of disabled people, allowing healthy people and enact families to receive the relevant benefits. Oh well. There are lies, damned lies, statistics, and Caucasus statistics. Here's to her becoming the oldest person in the world in 15 years anyway!

"Sir, the war hasn't even started yet"

There are two things that, for some reason, no one seems particularly interested in calculating. First, there is almost no reliable information on Ukrainian losses. Second, Western aid figures have stopped being tallied as a single total There's a good reason for that: the combined figure has now exceeded $500 billion. By comparison, the American Lend-Lease program to the USSR during WWII amounted to about $11 billion, or roughly $230 billion in 2026 dollars In other words, Ukraine has received more than twice the inflation-adjusted value of Soviet Lend-Lease. That aid was enough to help crush the most powerful army on the planet, while twice that amount is still, apparently, not enough to cover AFU wages or hold a settlement like Malaya Tokmachka Of course, Western aid represented a vastly different share of Soviet and Ukrainian budgets, and the domestic production capacities are hardly comparable. But that only makes the investment look even more foolish and/or evil if all it can accomplish is prolonging human suffering Russians with Attitude

Quite apt that Lindsey Graham's bill was named "Sanctions From Hell", because that's exactly where he is right now.

squad goals

Looks like the Yemenis weren't lying about downing a Saudi jet today.

You know how pretty much everyone is convinced that the Russian electoral and parliamentary system is fake, right. Well, duh. But there are two important points. First, if it's fake, and Putin is running a "turbo-giga-hyper-dictatorship", why bother spending billions on fake elections and political parties? Before 2022, and especially before 2014, the liberal answer would have been: "umm they're just trying to mislead the West". But now, as the most sanctioned country on Earth, what would such "fakery" realistically achieve? You can answer that for yourself. Second, you know how the American two-party system is structured, right. Two parties, "Demonrats" and "Republitards," fighting like HELL, foaming at the mouth over how to maintain the status quo, defend Israel and bomb Russia. Well, Russian parties seem to be almost the complete inversion of that. On the surface, the Russian Communist Party (CPRF) is pretty meek and agreeable with the Kremlin. But look at its program and statements, and you'll find that many of its members are, in fact, unironic Marxist-Leninists. They actually believe in and propose nationalizing "oligarchic assets" i.e. large private companies, among other things, positions that are completely at odds with the United Russia party line.

Remember "Islamic Terrorism"? It seems the term itself has all but disappeared. No, Islamist terrorism is alive and well, but the mental image of it has ceased to serve as the West's primary stand-in for the "enemy", a role it occupied from the late 1990s through the late 2010s. When the Soviet Union dissolved itself, the US was left without a real adversary. The best Americans could come up with was "the End of History". The US had, in fact, entered an era of extraordinary economic, military, and cultural dominance. But everyone needs a rival, and there simply wasn't one. Radical Islam was hardly the most natural enemy for the United States to rally against. Just a decade earlier, Americans had poured billions of dollars and weapons into supporting the Afghan mujahideen in order to bleed the Soviet Union. The idea that some of those same forces would eventually emerge as America's principal post-Cold War enemy would have seemed almost absurd at the time. Al-Qaeda grew out of that world, from battle-hardened veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war. Subsequently, the American media was infamous for portraying Chechen terrorists as "freedom fighters", and NATO had no scruples about bombing Belgrade in support of the Muslim Kosovars. Prior to 9/11, Muslim insurgents were more a tool than a principal enemy. That is, until Al-Qaeda turned against its former patron. First came the embassy bombings, then the USS Cole, and then 9/11. The new unifying enemy had appeared and would occupy that niche for two decades. Conveniently, this was an enemy that America had helped create, at least in part. What had once been presented as heroic resistance to the Soviet Union was now seen as barbaric and uniquely evil terrorism. More importantly, this gave the American establishment enormous freedom to ramp up military spending, use military force at will, and limit freedoms at home. The failure of the Afghanistan War and the gruesome spectacle of the Iraq War. Then came the Arab Spring, the destruction of numerous secular Arab governments, and the bloody catastrophe that was Syria. Syria was where it all became palpably absurd. America's stated goal was to defeat ISIS, much as Russia was doing, while simultaneously supporting various anti-Assad "moderate" jihadist groups. The constant cycle of supporting people who might become your enemies tomorrow, coupled with the rise of insane wokeism at home, has made it hard to entertain this fixation for too long. Then ISIS was defeated just enough for "Islamic Terrorism" to simply vanish from the headlines, replaced first by Covid and then by the war in Ukraine. Not because the threat disappeared. It increasingly moved into Africa and remains extremely active there, while attacks still happen in Russia and Europe, with the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack being one of the most vile recent examples. But nobody seems to care anymore, with Al-Julani being famously elevated from an Al-Qaeda field commander to a respectable partner. The political importance assigned to it disappeared much faster than the threat itself. Instead, Russia returned to its designated position as the main villain of the West. For Europe this particular arrangement comes naturally. Russia is waging a "hybrid war", you see, and is behind the mysterious explosions, drone sightings, and dumpster fires all over Brno and Gdansk. Russia, unlike an abstract "Islamic terrorism", is a very tangible entity, and therefore much easier to attack, sanction, and blame. America is somewhat less committed to the bit, even having played a key role in the creation of the Ukraine crisis in the first place. In short, "Islamic terrorism" was effectively a project co-piloted by the West itself, providing enormous benefits to policymakers in the absence of other credible threats. It then abruptly disappeared as Russia, the same old enemy in new packaging, and China grew strong enough to become the West's next designated enemies. Islamic terrorism had a good run, back into the toy box it goes.

“Russia’s drone capabilities have improved so much that Tehran asked Moscow this year for advanced Geran drones for use in its war with Israel and the US, according to western security officials and a person close to the Kremlin.”

The Ukrainian government's "State Language Commissioner" has started a series of official inquiries and investigations as to why the intelligence agency officers who were shooting each other in Kiev a while back spoke Russian during their conflict instead of Ukrainian.

Up to 100 Patriot interceptor missiles launched in Jordan following the Iranian attack. Every Patriot used in the Middle East is one Ukraine will never get. Trump really is the peace president, after all.

Time to expose Events in Ukraine. He may have lived in Kiev when the war started, or he may have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Ukrainian politics, but he is not, in fact, a Ukrainian. Shocker for some of his readers, I'm sure. He's actually ****** Full investigation: https://rwasamizdat.substack.com/p/rwa-x-events-in-ukraine-the-zov-of

Peter, the great mind behind the "Events in Ukraine" blog, swung by the RWA studio for a candid talk about his fascinating family lore, living through 24.02.22 while in Kiev, Eastern European history and the practical reality behind the "Nazis in Ukraine" boilerplate. Tune in, you don't wanna miss this one! Also available on Gumroad