Greetings nettimers after an absence of oh, two decades.
I've been following a bit the last couple weeks of posts on Ukraine and related subjects and there's much to meditate on. And thanks to Ted Byfield for pointing me in the general direction of this discussion.
I wanted to call your attention to a rather remarkable document that Christo Grozev (of Bellingcat) dropped last Saturday, seemingly written by an FSB 'dissident' (to the extent that such a term can be used in that context):
Here's the rough-and-ready English translation:
...and there's a German translation in the twitter thread. Weirdly, the 'voice' of the author immediately reminded me of the Scientist character in Tarkovsky's Stalker. You know the one, he smuggled a portable nuke into The Zone.
This is an important document. Grozev clearly believes it's no forgery, for the reasons he gives. It provides insight into the mental space of the inner-circle nomenklatura at a time of maximum stress.
Notes: "Nabiullina" is Elvira Nabiullina, head of the Central Bank of Russia and ex-Minister of Economic Development; Kadyrov probably needs no introduction but is top mafia warlord of Chechnya; Medvedchuk, Boyko and Tsarev are dud Ukrainian quislings, as will be all Ukrainian quislings; and Naryshkin is head of SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, currently working to fake that Ukraine was developing a dirty nuclear weapon and/or biological or chemical weapons. (Stalker, again.) He's the one Putin publicly humiliated on national television.
Concerning that, let's hope this doesn't spiral into some kind of nuclear madness, as it already threatened to do with the shelling of the Zaporizhzhia plant. For what it's worth, the FSB author is of the opinion that Putin is too conspicuously concerned with his own physical well being to allow that to happen.
Best from Ottawa,
Michael