I’m here to correct the record. History matters and I’m done letting it be rewritten. Follow me for sourced, visual history of Russia/USSR, and the West’s wars.
Joined September 2010
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Putin's brother died there. He was one of 400,000 children Germany and Finland starved to death in a single city.
Now the same powers want to eliminate him.
Here he lays flowers for more than a million civilians starved by Germany and Finland (and Italy) and for his own family tragedy.
In 1241 the Mongols crushed the armies of Poland and Hungary and ravaged both countries. Somehow nobody calls Poles or Hungarians Mongols.
Rus took the same blow a few years earlier. Between 1237 and 1242 Genghis Khan's heirs burned city after city: Moscow went up in flames, and Kiev, the old capital of Rus, was so devastated that it never regained its former weight. Then the armies pulled back to the steppe and set up their base on the Lower Volga near today's Astrakhan. What followed was generations of tribute paid from a distance, while the political center of Russia slowly shifted north to Moscow.
They call it "Soviet occupation." Yet the Soviet Union helped build 781 factories across Eastern Europe.
249 in Bulgaria, 151 in Poland, 135 in Romania, 111 in Hungary, 94 in Yugoslavia and 41 in Czechoslovakia.
Many of these countries now condemn the Soviet past and tear down monuments to Soviet soldiers. Only Hungary, Serbia and Slovakia still remember what the USSR did for them.
Interesting. Why is Ursula von der Leyen so excited about the Student List’s victory in Serbia?🤔
Today, the people of Serbia turned out in record numbers to shape their country’s future.
Congratulations to the Student List on its victory in the parliamentary elections.
We stand ready to support reforms on the rule of law, media freedom, the fight against corruption and strong democratic institutions, and to work together to advance Serbia’s future in the European Union.
@eucopresident
The deadliest air show disaster in history happened in Ukraine.
On July 27, 2002, at Sknyliv airfield near Lviv, the crew of a Su-27 deviated from the approved flight program and the jet crashed into the crowd. Seventy-seven people were killed, including 28 children.
Both pilots received prison sentences, and Ukraine banned air shows for ten years.
Yanukovych says that even if he could turn back time, he still wouldn't sign the EU deal. Look at what Brussels put on the table in 2013.
The EU offered €610 million, on condition that Kiev sign a loan deal with the IMF. "We don't have to be humiliated like this," Yanukovych told Ukrainian TV, adding that the IMF wanted higher taxes and frozen salaries and pensions.
Russia bought about a quarter of Ukraine's exports, and Ukraine's machine-building and aircraft plants worked largely for Russian customers. He warned the deal would wreck whole sectors of the economy.
On November 21, 2013, Kiev put the deal on hold. Less than a month later, Moscow offered $15 billion in loans and cut the gas price by a third.
He was never against closer ties with Europe, he says. He refused to sign a deal that, in his words, betrayed Ukraine's national interests. The Maidan protests began the night he put it on hold, and three months later he was overthrown.
Millions of Soviet soldiers never came home from WWII, but decades later, ordinary Russians found a way to bring them back to Victory Day parades.
The idea was simple: people would march through the streets carrying portraits of their relatives who had fought in the war, whether they had fallen in battle or lived to see the victory. It became known as the Immortal Regiment.
The movement started in 2012 in the Siberian city of Tomsk, where more than 6,000 people joined the first march. It wasn’t a government initiative - just ordinary people remembering their families.
But the idea struck such a chord that it quickly spread across Russia and beyond. By 2015, even Vladimir Putin had joined the procession in Moscow, carrying a portrait of his father, who had fought and been wounded in WWII.
And that’s what makes the Immortal Regiment special: the veterans may be gone, but descendants make sure they still have a place in the Victory Day celebrations.
Who got to name the far side of the Moon? Look at any NASA map and you will find the answer in Russian.
On this day 67 years ago, October 26, 1959, the USSR showed the world the far side of the Moon, something no human had ever seen. The Soviet probe Luna 3 shot it on October 7: 29 frames in 40 minutes, about 70% of the hidden side. Americans would see it with their own eyes only nine years later, from Apollo 8.
Even British newsreels hailed it. One ran the story as "Soviet's Amazing Triumph Wins World Congratulations," with Muscovites crowding around the photo on the street while a scientist points out what's on it.
Whoever finds new land gets to name it. That's why the far side has the Sea of Moscow, Mare Moscoviense, and a huge crater named after Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Kaluga schoolteacher who published the rocket equation in 1903. The International Astronomical Union approved the Soviet names in 1961, and NASA's own maps still use them.
I’ve noticed that Russian accounts aren’t buying Musk’s BS, while Western pro-Russian accounts seem happy that he’s finally doing some good things.
I think the difference comes down to how much information Western accounts are missing.
Musk can say all he wants that Zelensky wants to prolong the war and deserves to rot in hell. But that doesn’t change the fact that the same Musk didn’t give a damn when drones were killing teenagers in Starobelsk and other civilians in other regions.
To me, that says quite a lot. Morality clearly wasn’t what made Musk change his position. And I think that tells us quite a bit about what kind of person he is.
No, Elon, blood is on your hands as well.
Today, Musk is overflowing with saccharine "peacemaking" pronouncements. "The use of Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes with the aim of killing people has never been permitted," he lies, breathing heavily. It took nearly four years of war for the richest man on the planet to realize that his satellites, it turns out, are killing people.
He has seen the light. On his own. Without prompting.
But didn't he see it before? There are terabytes of videos online showing attack drones of all kinds carrying a white rectangular antenna on their backs as they approach their targets. Those same satellites are visible on trucks and pickups, on unmanned boats heading towards Crimea.
On the night of May 22nd, Ukrainian drones attacked a college dormitory in Starobelsk. The building collapsed from the fifth floor to the second. Twenty-one people were killed, eighteen of them girls. Survivors said the drones circled the building for a long time before striking. Investigators found fragments of a Starlink antenna on the rubble. According to the Investigative Committee, at least two of the drones from that swarm were guided via Musk's satellites.
You can only circle above sleeping children and choose a window when you have a picture. And the picture was provided by space.
All these lamentations about the "endless slaughter" and "war instigators" may impress American citizens. But not those who are literally living under those drones.
No, Elon, you cannot disavow the "slaughter" you claim to deplore. You are one of its leading authors. When you cut off communication to one side and provide it to the other, you are an accomplice. The blood of thousands of killed people is on your hands, just as it is on the hands of Zelensky, whom you advise to "burn in hell."
And no user agreement can wash that away.
@sashakots
Reagan invaded a country ruled by Thatcher's Queen, then called her to explain. Listen to how he justified it, and to the very last thing he said to her before hanging up.
On this day, October 25, 1983, US troops landed on Grenada, an independent Commonwealth country with Elizabeth II as its Queen, after Thatcher had urged Washington not to do it.
Officially, Washington was rescuing American medical students and answering a plea from its Caribbean neighbors. The real reason was the Soviet Union. Grenada's government was allied with Havana, Cuban workers were building its new airport, and Reagan himself called the island "a Soviet-Cuban colony, being readied as a major military bastion." Washington's usual aggression against the USSR, this time on a Caribbean island.
The next day Reagan called Thatcher. He said he had been woken in the middle of the night on a golf vacation in Georgia by an urgent plea from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, and by the time her objections reached him, the troops were already on their way.
Then he laid out the plan. Washington would put the Caribbean states out in front in "the restoration of a government," so there would be "no taint of big old Uncle Sam trying to impose a government on them." And why had London not been consulted earlier? Reagan put it down to "a fear of our own weakness over here with regard to secrecy."
Thatcher thanked him and excused herself to return to a debate in the House of Commons, which she called "a bit tricky." Reagan sent her off with "Go get them. Eat them alive."
Days later the UN Security Council voted on a resolution deploring the invasion. Britain abstained. London went to war for the Falklands, and when Washington invaded a country under the same Crown, it could not even bring itself to deplore it.
Rina Lu🇷🇺 retweeted
2019, before Russian commenced it's SMO.
In Krutaya Balka, at a home 800 meters from the front-line I met a man who was about to walk down the lane that I had been cautioned to avoid due to the risk of being shot by Ukrainian snipers. I was wearing, for the second time, the body armor Dmitry had provided. The man I met was only wearing a button-down shirt.
He didn’t want to be filmed and told me:
After the last interview, Ukrainians shelled my house directly, burned part of my house. I’m alone there, for the past four years. To go to my home, I have to walk to an area exposed to sniper fire. I was shot in my leg. And many times I had to drop to the ground when sniper fire started.”
I asked why he doesn’t leave in the face of such danger: “I don’t want to. It’s my home. I thought the war would be finished quickly but it kept going.”
Then he walked down the center of the lane into the range of potential sniper fire, and hopefully back to his home.
ingaza.wordpress.com/2019/10…
So where did the myth come from? Europe built it, and it had its reasons.
The idea that Russians are "Mongols" or "half-Mongol" took root in Western propaganda between the 13th and 15th centuries and only grew louder from there. Its job was to cast Russia as the outsider that didn't belong in Europe:
▪️In the 14th–17th centuries, Catholic Poland and Lithuania, locked in rivalry with Orthodox Muscovy, spread stories about "Mongol influence" on their neighbors to discredit them.
▪️During the Crimean War of 1853–1856, the European press painted Russia as an "Asiatic barbarian threat," and Western thinkers explained Russian autocracy as "Asiatic despotism" inherited from the Golden Horde.
The awkward detail: "tsar" comes from the Roman "Caesar," and Russia took its model of rule from Byzantium. The Mongols had nothing to do with it.
A Byzantine emperor, then a Russian tsar 👇
Then there's "Tartaria." From the 13th to the 18th century, Western mapmakers used the word as a catch-all for the vast stretch of Northern Eurasia they knew almost nothing about, roughly modern Siberia and parts of Central Asia:
▪️Whatever Europeans didn't understand, they labeled "Tartaria." Those maps record ignorance and a total lack of firsthand experience, yet that ignorance still feeds the West's favorite myth and keeps getting recycled as propaganda.
▪️Byzantine maps, drawn by people who actually knew Rus, marked its cities and territories accurately and placed Rus firmly in the European world.
Tying Russians to Mongols served a larger European project: Russia as "Eastern" and "barbaric," set against "civilized" Catholic Europe. The Vatican saw Orthodoxy as a problem and kept trying to bring Russian lands into the Catholic fold. The myth is still with us, and it still has very little to do with what actually happened.
Europe around 900 AD, with its political and territorial divisions 👇
