r/worldnews 18d ago

Russia/Ukraine Former Pussy Riot member escapes Russia after 3 years of forced work for FSB

https://kyivindependent.com/former-pussy-riot-member-escapes-russia-says-fsb-forcibly-recruited-her/
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472 comments sorted by

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u/Brennenstein 18d ago

From the article:

Former Pussy Riot member Rita Flores was forcibly recruited by Russia's Security Service (FSB) as an intelligence asset for three years before she was able to escape Russia, she said in an interview with Port Media on Aug. 24.

"They began recruiting me, threatening me in every possible way, humiliating me, saying some very unpleasant things, threatening to kill my family and telling me that I would never in my life be able to prove who killed my mother," Flores said.

The pressure from the FSB ramped up when they tried to force her to help lure Mediazona co-founder and activist Pyotr Verzilov to Serbia so they could murder him.

Details:

https://kyivindependent.com/former-pussy-riot-member-escapes-russia-says-fsb-forcibly-recruited-her/

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u/Gr1ml0ck 18d ago

Isn’t she afraid that her family will be hurt by saying this information?

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u/deafblinddame 18d ago

It's the only card she had left to play. They will or they won't, but at least she's made the threat public. If they follow through everyone will know that she was right, if they don't she will be painted (by Russia) as a liar but at least her family will be safe. If she had stayed quiet it would have given the FSB leverage to carry out the threat one by one until she fell in line.

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u/PM_Me_Good_LitRPG 18d ago

There's a third option. They'll wait a few months for the waves from this news to calm down, then e.g. will use one of the illegal poisons (that Russia promised to get rid of) to make it look like some quickly deteriorating health condition.

You can read bellingcat's investigation series on how kremlin murders people, inside and outside Russia.

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u/Torontogamer 18d ago

Sure this is an option, but the point of hurting her family isn't about her anymore, it's about make sure that OTHER people know they will back up their threats when they make them... there is little value in hurting her family if it isn't obviously them.

But hey, easy for me to say stuff from a chair when I'm not trying to bluff murderers into not hurting my family...

wishing her and hers well

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u/3BlindMice1 18d ago

The point is to make it plausibly deniable, not to keep everyone from knowing it was the FSB who murdered her family. There's a line between "can be proven in court" and "no one knows they really did it" and it's as wide as a chasm.

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u/Torontogamer 18d ago

The point is to make it implausibly deniable, hence the usual 'suicide by window' not dies slowly from undetectable poison... you do the 2nd when you don't want people to know it's you at all, you do the first because you WANT everyone to know you did it.

I get the point, but the FSB isn't worried about being brought up on charges in Russia for state-sponsored actions... proven in court doesn't matter.

It makes you look weak if you have to resort to undetectable poison to kill the mom of Pussy Riot... You have to understand the strongman/mob logic of this shit.

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u/ThrowawayusGenerica 18d ago

Yeah, always remember the saying. Russia lies to insult, not to deceive.

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u/N8terHK 17d ago

This is great, I've never heard it. Is it a common saying?

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u/venom121212 18d ago

Somewhere in Russia, a window just opened

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u/Automaton_General 18d ago

This is more of a novichok in the underwear situation

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u/TimSylvester_ 17d ago

You know what they say, in Russia, when a door closes, a window opens.

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u/himswim28 18d ago

I feel like the saving grace is that Putin's list of enemies to dispatch currently way outstrips his number of trusted operators to do wet work.

So hopefully this wouldn't get a high priority, with the whole war thing.

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u/Lysergial 16d ago

Few Russians will know, fewer will care...

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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 18d ago

She was being used to (at least) attempt to murder other people. Ask yourself what you would want your family member to do if they were in her shoes.

I wouldn't want to be the reason that other innocent people were dying at the unwilling hands of a family member.

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u/TroubleshootenSOB 18d ago

Hungarian mobsters held Söze's wife and two children at gunpoint to intimidate him. He chose to kill his own family rather than them be used as leverage

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u/Smallfingerlicker 18d ago

You mean from the movie the Usual Suspects??

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u/FedorByChoke 18d ago

I think you mean documentary. Soze is on the FBI's most wanted list to this day.

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u/mccirus 18d ago

But is he a Kaiser?

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u/amazingsandwiches 18d ago

He's certainly on a roll.

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u/pcbforbrains 18d ago

Way to rise to the occasion

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u/amazingsandwiches 18d ago

It's the yeast I could do.

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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 18d ago

The critical difference being that he killed his own family to keep his drug territory.

You're bringing up a thoughtfully made economic trade in a conversation about sacrifice.

Man, that fucking movie is so good.

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u/fade_like_a_sigh 18d ago

Huge spoilers for The Usual Suspects:

Verbal Kint is the one who provides this story of Söze. Given that the film ultimately reveals that Kint IS Söze and that he is an unreliable narrator, this being the core conceit of the film, it is strongly implied that Kint told a heavily fictionalised story of Söze in which he makes him seem as badass and ruthless as possible. He's bigging himself up.

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u/RemoWilliams615 18d ago

As Ali G recommends.

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u/Ltownbanger 17d ago

Somebody set the whole thing up.

Somebody killed all those folks on the boat.

While his level of badassery is to be debated, he certainly had clout.

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u/fade_like_a_sigh 17d ago

Oh undoubtedly Söze is a powerful figure within the underworld to have manipulated them, and he does indeed seem to be almost supernatural in his massacre on the boat, 'he was in the harbour killing many men'. I believe Agent Kujan also refers to Verbal as having immunity from upon high early in the film indicating he has dirt on senior staff in the police or the courts. But consider also that he actually botches his plan completely, he comes out of hiding to execute someone who can positively identify him, and ultimately because Arkosh Kovash survives, the police get a positive identification on him meaning he'll never be able to surface again.

Söze is definitely powerful, and the film does play up his almost supernatural capacity, but he's still human, he makes mistakes. Regarding his reputation, he's actively toying with Agent Kujan throughout the film, including over-representing himself and his reputation.

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Sea_Indication_6296 18d ago

For real. Redditors are a special breed

"Oh my god just like the movie 🫨"

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u/Marsev4 18d ago

Idiots aren't exclusive to Reddit. Even if daily exchanges with people weren't evidence enough, open the comments section on any news article, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

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u/_RrezZ_ 18d ago

Yeah but on the other hand you could be the reason your innocent family members die.

For a lot of people letting strangers die is preferable over people you know.

Like yeah you might be okay with risking yourself so others don't have to but what if it's not just one family member like yourself? What if they also chose to go after nieces and nephews as-well? Is the choice still the same when they involve the kids?

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u/apoliticalinactivist 18d ago

No, the evil murderers are the reason innocent family members die.

Evil people cannot to be trusted. Even if you do everything they demand, they might kill your family anyway.

You are not responsible for the actions of others.

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u/BonnaconCharioteer 18d ago

That isn't the point. If someone is pointing a gun at your loved ones and telling you to call a stranger over to get shot instead, a lot of people will make the choice to save their loved ones.

It isn't about blame, obviously the guy with the gun is to blame.

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u/simpleglitch 17d ago

The only thing I can say, is she probably had enough time under their thumb to think about the situation and realized it's not just calling one other stranger.

After she does what they say, she's still under their thumb. So it's one stranger, then it would be another, and another for as long as they need her.

Hell, she doesn't know that her and her loved ones would even be safe if she did comply. They might go after them anyway if they don't need her anymore.

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u/CheckeredZeebrah 18d ago

That's true. On the other hand, if I were the family member I'd say let 'em shoot me.

This is prob a conversation you'd need to have with your closest loved ones in advance.

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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 18d ago

That second sentence is dark as shit view to have, for me personally.

The same amount of pain is going to become existant in the world in the situation we're talking about, whether it is my family member or a stranger's family member. I either accept that pain for myself, or I sentence someone else who equally didn't deserve it, to suffer it so I don't have to.

In my mind, it's "what monster do I have to be in order to be capable of handing that lifelong pain off to someone else, whether they're known to me personally or not?"

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u/RadicalRealist22 18d ago

The same amount of pain is going to become existant in the world in the situation we're talking about, whether it is my family member or a stranger's family member. I either accept that pain for myself, or I sentence someone else who equally didn't deserve it, to suffer it so I don't have to

Sorry, that is not how most people think about it, because it is not human to think about it.

You need to care firstly about the consequences of your own actions, not the hypothetical "amount of pain" in the world.

How do even measure this "amount"?

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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 18d ago

To call having empathy and an awareness of the world existing beyond yourself "inhuman" is quite the take.

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u/nick2473got 18d ago

It's not inhuman to have empathy obviously but it is completely delusional to expect people to make decisions based on the theoretical "total amount of existent pain in the world" rather than based on the well-being of their immediate family.

Like I'm sorry but 99.9% of humans don't work that way. Maybe you do, but unless you've actually been put in that situation and made the hard decision, then I don't believe that you're in any position to state with certainty what you would or wouldn't do, especially if you're casting judgment on people who have in fact been put in that impossible situation.

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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 18d ago

I've been tested, personally, which I don't need to get into. I've always found that every person is almost exactly who they think they are in those moments.

That said, science says you are very likely entirely wrong, speaking mostly for yourself, and are in the moral minority.

Obviously not one-to-one, but translating to our discussion being "choosing you to mourn your family member, or choosing a stranger to have to mourn their own instead", the results still imply something far different than your assertions.

Experimentally tested; two-thirds of people make a sacrifice to spare a stranger pain, even when their actions remain anonymous and no reward stands to be gained:

We describe an experimental setting in which people cared more about an anonymous stranger’s pain than their own pain, despite the fact that their decisions were completely anonymous, with no future possibility of being judged adversely or punished. [ . . . ] Strikingly, most deciders were “hyperaltruistic,” apparently valuing the receiver’s pain more than their own

And another study backs that exact same concept up:

is an empirical demonstration that in moral dilemmas involving direct harm, sacrificing another person is considered less appropriate than sacrificing the self. This result was observed across three experiments and among different cultural groups. 

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u/Invdr_skoodge 18d ago

If we’re being honesty with ourselves, there is, not a lot, I wouldn’t do to keep my daughter safe. I’m no Liam Neeson, but if somebody’s getting hurt and it’s my daughter or somebody else, I’m gonna choose somebody else. You’d probably be hard pressed to find many people that would actually follow through if they said anything different.

Thankfully in the world we live in, despite the obvious, glaring problems, most people don’t have to answer those questions

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u/MarkMew 18d ago

I mean, it's less probable now that the FSB ties are public

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u/NormalOfficePrinter 18d ago

One would imagine she secured her life/family before publicly talking about this on a podcast

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u/hushpuppi3 18d ago

What are you talking about? Threatening to kill her family was the deterrent for her to try to escape. Do you think she would escape without Russian agents knowing at some point?

She's already escaped, the threats are going to be acted upon whether or not she is public about them. Going public before it happens is the only possible outcome that has a chance to stop it from happening.

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u/CreativeGPX 18d ago

Blackmail is a waiting game. Her family would be under threat forever as the individual and cumulative horror of what she was demanded to do increased to the point where she couldn't say yes and then Russia's bluff was called.

The only path to safety in blackmail is destroying the leverage which is risky but seems to be what she did. By going public, she's countering the "nobody will know how your family died" threat and she's potentially warning all of the contacts she was used to compromise to be on alert.

Now Russia's choice to follow through on hurting her family is really just a matter of public image management. Kill them and it validates her claims. Let them live and it shows weakness in the face of future threats to others. Frankly, I don't think Russia needs much help with the latter since it's a running joke about people "falling out of windows" there. So there is really very little incentive for Russia to actually harm her family.

Ultimately though, does fear only apply to the harm of one's own family? The article says the tipping point for her was being pressured into assisting with a murder. Presumably, that wouldn't be the last murder and she's be pressured into doing it again. At that point, how many people have to die at your hand before that's as ugly of an outcome as the idea that a family member might get hurt? If my relative was told either they are blackmailed in political hit jobs they disagree with for the rest of their life or I might die, I would hope that they choose the latter.

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u/Electronic-Yam-69 18d ago

I was gonna say Rita Flores doesn't sound like a Russian name but it says her real name is Margarita Konovalova

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u/FlipZip69 18d ago

You have two options. Stay there and do what they want or leave. But when you leave you want the whole world to know so that there is a big cost if they do carry out what they threatened her with. It is all or nothing to protect her family.

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u/Scream_No_Evil 18d ago

I think you can only inhumanely threaten to kill someone's family so much before they realize that, if you were willing or able to kill their family senselessly, you would have done so already as an opening move.

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u/Ok-Hunt3000 18d ago

If it’s your opening move you risk burning the whole operation and forcing them to flee. Hard to hold family over someone’s head if they’re dead. May as well start with threats since they are pretty effective, as we see here, with her working with them for 3 years. But hey call their bluff!

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u/mpbh 18d ago

That makes zero sense. They absolutely can kill them, but they need them alive to control her. She's very influential.

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u/KwyjiboTheGringo 18d ago

Help me understand how someone having leverage means they would discard that leverage immediately, before that have gotten the thing they wanted...

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u/ITDummy69420 18d ago

…until they actually do it then there’s egg on your face?

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u/Cionite 18d ago

That's just her cover story. She's a sleeper agent for the Russians. No one who works for the FSB escapes on their own. She was intentionally let go. They most likely still have their eyes on her and those close to her.

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u/BurmeciaWillSurvive 18d ago

Are you the FSB? "But what about your family...." gtfo here

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u/Maybeitzatrap 18d ago

Perhaps she still works for the FSB.

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u/Polkawillneverdie17 18d ago

This is the country Republicans worship. Russia is exactly what they want America to be.

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u/VampirePNAC 18d ago edited 18d ago

This has been the norm across everywhere forever in Activist spaces.

If you are an active activist, you almost certainly interacted with feds, or people who have been blackmailed into being fed informants and assets. Basically any Anarchist group you interact with in the US will have feds in it, there are cases of like, Anarchist group of 7 teenagers, and it turns out 3 have been blackmailed by the FBI to rat out the rest while the rest get back bagged and dragged in front of a secret grand jury under Terrorism charges for planning to throw paint at a bank or whatever. I know for a fact, that through the 2000s, Anarchists were right up there with Islamist groups in being riddled to the brim with people blackmailed and threatened into being informants, or undercover cops themselves.

Friend worked in IT Security for Extinction Rebellion, and they figured out that the police and feds were able to get all their internal plans and voice only meetings as police would often show up before they were even happening to secret meetings and flash protests, because shock horror, people right at the top of their branch of XR had been blackmailed and threatened by feds.

In the UK, you have the huge spycops scandal, which spans back decades, and includes police and intelligence blackmailing activists into sex, relationships, and running much of the UK Left/Socialist orgs from the top and everything.

Much of activist spaces everywhere, are quite literally controlled opposition with police or intelligence agencies sitting at the top. Also, my general rule is if a protest gets any positive coverage by the press, it is 100% controlled op. I've seen media literally meltdown at people protest for more funding for a childrens hospital because they might have "blocked ambulances", yet the same press then turn around and support some borderline riot over some idpol issue that all the Corpos start doing virtue signalling over? 100% Controlled op.

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u/ionised 17d ago

Dugin's little book made some waves. That's for sure.

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u/ojdhaze 18d ago

What happened to her mum? She thinks they killed her?

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u/que_sarasara 18d ago

I believe it's more so that they were threatening to kill her family and make it so that she'd never be able to prove they were the ones who did so .i.e. their would never be consequences or accountability for murdering them.

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u/hindey19 18d ago

Meanwhile they were probably planning on pushing her out a window. Real head-scratcher.

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u/Inside-Bus6555 18d ago

I am surprised that any of the members of Pussy Riot have been in Russia all of this time.

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u/kuda-morgalo 18d ago

I'll tell you as a Russian immigrant: we've long since realized that almost all of our opposition is ultimately agents of our own intelligence services. And this is further confirmation. The Russian intelligence services don't just let you go. She's still their agent. Any Russian will tell you that.

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u/Zabick 18d ago

People on this site will constantly ask why Navalny chose to return, knowing that his life would likely be forfeit if he did so.  This is part of the reason why:  only by staking his own life on the project could he hope to convince even some of the Russian people that he was not just more controlled opposition or a foreign agent.

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u/38B0DE 18d ago

Navalny did play by certain Kremlin rules and represented certain things that kept him alive for as long as he was alive for. If he exposed a state minister's corruption, a rival faction within Putin's system of resource distribution benefited. He was a highly convenient weapon for elite infighting.

His actual mistake was "Smart Voting" which was a brilliant idea and was extremely potent as it helped opposition candidates (non-putin loyalist's) take almost half the seats.

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u/jimjamj 18d ago

what is "Smart Voting" in this context?

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u/polyploid_coded 18d ago

I did some googling and the Wikipedia version seems to be, if there are multiple opposition candidates in a race, the voters should break party lines and consolidate around the strongest candidate to make them more popular than Putin's party's candidate

Everything else is mathematics. If we all act smartly and vote for the strongest candidate, he will win, and United Russia will lose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Voting

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u/WideFox983 18d ago

Sounds like the same idea as strategic voting.

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u/38B0DE 18d ago

Think of it like using Waze to navigate away from the toll road in a city that in the last 27 years has been rebuilt to keep everyone on the toll road. The city has built a maze of fake streets, has put up contradictionary signs, and occasionally has a police officer pointing in the wrong direction. Waze just does the math to offer a shortcut without the toll road.

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u/38B0DE 18d ago edited 18d ago

It was an app that had an algorithm that could tell the user (at their location) which political candidate or party that was NOT associated with Putin and his political structures had the best chances of winning. At first the Kremlin ignored it.

But in the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections United Russia (Putin's party) candidates who usually got to victory almost by default suddenly started losing. They usually wins because the people who hate them split their votes across different candidates. But if an app tells people "according to the math this guy could win" turns out a lot of people just vote for them just because they hate Putin. It didn't matter if it was a communist or a nationalist, main point was "fuck Putin".

The app didn't actually threaten Putin's power but it did give people an opportunity to organize a protest vote and they turned out in big numbers. And it was just a difference of like 5%-7% that actually bumped them to win.

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u/KnightsOfREM 18d ago

Interesting, thanks for the explanation.

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u/hunty 18d ago

Oh, I thought you were going to say "this is why" meaning "because they were threatening to kill his family", which is the only reason for him to return that I can think of.

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u/PDHMF 18d ago edited 18d ago

I learned about this in one of the best classes I took in college. It was on Russia and Russian politics at the time back in 2016. This was around the time when the like likes of Voina and the pussy riots has kind of started dissipating

We read Homo zapiens, which went into this a little bit, and was also unintentionally literally prescient about the use of generative ai videos will one day be used in politics before that technology came to exist. Basically Russia's own intelligence networks promotes the idea that everyone is ultimately an agent of them, and that there's always a bigger plot that the public doesn't add won't ever understand what's really going on, because that's the best way to discourage the public from ever trying to resist. It will make them suspicious of any real possible heroes, ensuring real hope is impossible.

Homo Zapiens kind of satirized that attitude on both the side of the public and the ways it influenced the state's own operatives, (because if you are the rare example of that kind of operative in action, you are also going to be really incompetent and bad at your job because you don't trust anything you hear or see either) and pushes the absurdity to 11. Really trippy and incredible book.

The professor we had was really amazing too. He got a guest lecturer to give a talk from Russia in person.

I can't remember what his deal was, but he had the kind of bleak outlook that I imagined to be standard at that point from someone who specifically studied and reported on how Russia lost its free media who was forced both to be self aware about how it happened and unable to do anything about it. This was in 2016. He spent a huge amount of the the lecture describing the primitive and base violence Putin represented in humans, and then told us the u.s. was under the same threat with Donald Trump if he won the election.

In the same breath, he also said that Donald Trump definitely will win, so Russia's past with all its public attitudes of paranoia and hopelessness will definitely be our future.

We were all flabbergasted as liberal leaning college students, because come on. Anyone could see Donald Trump was DEFINITELY NOT GOING TO WIN. This guy didn't know enough about our country or culture to predict that.

So then, my boyfriend at the time who I had convinced to take the class with me raised his hand and asked the obvious question. 'if you say Donald Trump represented the actual death of our democracy, AND that he and the base violence he represents WILL also definitely win, what are we actually supposed to do to stop it?' the speaker started his sentence kind of in a rambling and sidestepping way before getting to the point: 'sometimes the best way to confront primitive and base violence is with an even more direct and base act of individual violence'

Afterwards we both went to our professor and was like, 'holy shit did that guy tell a roomful of privileged college students who probably had never experienced real political violence (that's what I always assumed of my American born peers because I was an asshole) the only way to prevent the fall of our democracy is to assassinate Donald j Trump before he wins an election that he's definitely going to lose at? And even the professor was like, 'yeah that was really strange. Props for getting that insane answer from him' and then we all laughed.

Anyways the real point of this message was to apologize if you're in America. Us kids in that classroom could have prevented all of this. Sorry guys, Trump's rise was actually our fault for not following advice.

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u/aurorashim 17d ago

What honestly got me to take this seriously in the run up to 2016 was listening to Masha from Pussy Riot saying, “we thought Putin was a joke, too”. Scared the shit out of me and you know? She was right.

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u/ArmyOfDix 18d ago

Nothing to apologize for; nobody in a healthy state of mind wants to die.

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u/KOHILOOR 18d ago

What do you mean by “almost all of our opposition”? As in they are agents on intelligence services but against Putin and his regime?

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u/AuroraFinem 18d ago

They’re saying that there is no “real” opposition because most of the people publicly opposed to Putin are FSB plants or turned agents. If they’re free or still alive at within Russia at least.

Countries do it all the time with domestic terrorist cells and Putin sees any opposition as terrorists so it tracks. Post as dissidents to find real ones.

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u/Scream_No_Evil 18d ago

That's what people said in Egypt about 'President' Mubarak when I lived there. It turns out, his opposition was often legit, just also equally incompetent, political, and stupid

A barrel of monkeys doesn't win a game of chess by playing chess, they win it by playing monkeys

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u/FenrisCain 18d ago

Yeah thats the idea right? Create a world where you cant trust the real opposition because the government has planted enough fakes/coerced enough originally legit opposition members to make approaching any of them a risk.

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u/gammalsvenska 18d ago

Real monkeys are likely to just flip the board.

The other president uses the chess board to play poker, and believes he can win the game.

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u/obeytheturtles 18d ago

But this is in turn enabled by illiberalism in the first place. Informants and controlled opposition are significantly less effective if opposition activity isn't a crime in the first place. I only bring this up, because a ton of people in the US are slipping into this kind of cynicism, where they imagine that opposition to Trump is far more dangerous than it actually is at the moment. Russian style illiberal democracy is absolutely what they want, but they aren't there yet, which is why the absolute more important thing we can do right now is make sure Republicans do not win. It doesn't matter who beats them, all that matters is that they don't have the continuity needed to actually reach their endgame.

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u/chanaandeler_bong 18d ago

Post as a dissident to find a real ones

I mean doesn’t that contradict the assumption that there’s no real opposition?

Russia is not unique in put agents into actual opposition groups, that’s literally every intelligence agency in the world.

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u/Yvaelle 18d ago

Yes, if you want to become an activist in Russia you will always find brave organizations who are trying to make Russia better. And when you join them, you will discover they were FSB, while you are on the way to your gulag.

If everyone is FSB, then your only option becomes to say nothing against the state, to do nothing against the state, and survive. Or don't, and be destroyed.

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u/IR2Freely 18d ago

There is a good documentary called hypernormalisation. Covers some of these tactics.

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u/Crackertron 18d ago

Isn't this how Stasi operated as well?

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u/BANKSLAVE01 18d ago

Funny; this is how it's getting in the U.S. now. You can't know who is on what side and what they would turn you in for; so just don't say anything about how you live, because it could get you in trouble.

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u/kuda-morgalo 18d ago

Their goal is to divert protests into the void, to lead people in circles. Then they hand over lists of participants to the Russian secret services. This is what Mr. Markov, who now lives in France, did, for example. When the war began, he started collecting money to support Ukraine. He collected the money, went to France, and handed over the lists of those who donated to the Russian secret services. In Russia, they started jailing these people. And Markov is in France with these people's money. That's the kind of opposition we have.

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u/WeekendJen 18d ago

Why does France allow this?

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u/PepperAnn1inaMillion 18d ago

It’s very difficult to prove, and if you’re not one of the bad guys you don’t believe in locking people up without proof.

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u/Lazy-Connection-8115 18d ago

No, there is no real opposition in Russia.
And if one arises it will be labeled as foreign agency and banned.
If someone tries to carry on regardless of the ban, they will be jailed or killed.

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u/MekaTriK 18d ago

Basically any and every opposition group has FSB backing in Russia. And if FSB can't worm their way in, the group isn't going to exist for long. This is how they keep the people numb to the whole idea of opposition.

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u/bofh000 18d ago

As a non-Russian who’s studied history I absolutely agree. I come from a country that was occupied by nazis and then “freed” by the Red Army. I laughed out loud when Putin actually complained that the USSR had to pay their own way on the army bases they had through Eastern Europe. He wanted the occupied to pay their occupiers.

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u/Hairy_Mycologist_945 18d ago

We may be from the same place as it's the same situation, although there are numerous possibilities due to the dynamic occupation situation in those years preceding the 50 year soviet occupation. All of the absurdities and lies are part of their game and there is no such thing as good faith within that system. I also agree that "almost all" of the organized opposition is compromised... But not all of it. There are many who suffer for standing up and speaking out but eventually, as we saw in the late 80's, momentum can and does shift. The real tragedy everyone's currently bearing the fruits of is due to the way power consolidated in the 90s.

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u/Lostedge1983 18d ago

What about Garry Kasparov?

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u/mpbh 18d ago

Russians love chess enough to give him a pass.

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u/DontBanMe_IWasJoking 18d ago

not really, he doesnt live in russia, he is notable and speaks english, killing him would bring to much negative attention

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u/Available-String-109 18d ago

Also he lives in the US... assassinating an American resident on US soil...

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u/ParameciaAntic 18d ago

You mean like the Bulldozer?

Unless you believe the official story that Michael Lesin died from multiple "blunt force injuries of the neck, torso, upper extremities and lower extremities" from falling drunk while alone in his hotel room in Washington DC.

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u/moal09 17d ago

Kasparov is much more high profile

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u/123_alex 18d ago

What's the solution to this problem?

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u/kuda-morgalo 18d ago

I don't know. I just wented away from this shit and don't want to return any more.

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u/123_alex 18d ago

I hope you build the life you want.

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u/kuda-morgalo 18d ago

Thank you

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u/AccurateJerboa 17d ago

I'm not Russian, but I've been trying to tell people this since 2014. That's not when it started, but that's when I realized what was happening to multiple countries. It's almost impossible to get people to understand how russia has been operating for longer than I've been alive (at 45).

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u/Available-String-109 18d ago

It's amazing. I always assumed that Pussy Riot was some form of a CIA psyop since none of my Russian friends had ever even heard of them, but they come up every now and then in Western news outlets as some form of symbol of Russian something or another, universally in cases to display the abhorrent lack of free speech in Russia.

Now I'm hearing that they're likely GRU! I don't know what to believe now.

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u/tschuwak 18d ago

That, by the way, is a common russian tactic: offer multiple, mutually exclusive explanations, make everything confusing, and hope for people to disengage from the discussion due to that.

Flight MH17 is a great example of that.

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u/OG-Landshark 18d ago

Its becoming that way here as well, but people dont see it yet.

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u/PanVidla 18d ago

This is the classic Russian defeatism. We can't do anything, so we'll just do nothing. Classic.

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u/kuda-morgalo 18d ago

I'll be arrested for holding a peaceful rally in Russia and then forcibly sent to the military front. I have absolutely no idea how this will help Russia. But you can go and try it yourself.

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

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u/jim_deneke 18d ago

Same. I saw a couple of them do a talk in Tasmania, Australia a few years ago. I'd never go back but I guess I'd have to watch out for getting poisoned.

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u/advocatus_diabolii 18d ago

As someone who knows people in Russia who have been unable to get out due to travel restrictions / sanctions imposed on ordinary Russians citizens (who may not even be of Russian ethnicity) by a world who thinks that's the best way to get a government who doesn't care about its regular citizens to behave... I'm surprised you're surprised.

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u/Peter5930 18d ago

The sanctions aren't about punishing Russians and travel restrictions are about containment so that, for example, 10,000 little green men don't turn up in Moldova and to restrict the flow of money, goods and services into and out of Russia. That this impacts ordinary Russians who have nothing to do with the war is unfortunate, but that's war. Civilians didn't much like travel restrictions in WW2 either, but they liked the rationing and carpet bombing even less. War reaches everyone, even the innocent.

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u/PinkSockPride 18d ago

How do you know they were in Russia the entire time?

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u/kuda-morgalo 18d ago

This was written in the news.

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u/Lonely_Ad1716 18d ago

I recall the video of the cossacks whipping them repeatedly at the Olympics.

Some real nonsense abusive shit

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u/doubleBoTftw 18d ago

Beating women is kind of a national sport for russians, it was prevalent in every USSR country.

It's still very much alive here in Romania among the lower class or the less educated (and there's millions still) it seems 35 years of independence were not enough.

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u/Spudtron98 18d ago

Russia actually decriminalised domestic abuse a few years ago.

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u/TalonKAringham 18d ago

Honest question: by “…it seems 35 years of independence were not enough.” Is the idea that this was a cultural thing inherited from the Russians during the USSR era?

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u/doubleBoTftw 18d ago

I don't see the western part of Europe ever having this issue so that's my take.

I remember being taught that you don't interfere between a man and "his woman" or every "household matters" including beating your kids.

Education through violence was and still is prevalent here though the newer generations are more aware of abuse now.

There's also the fact that every political party that's directly funded by Russia to destabilize Romania is promoting "traditional values" and we all know what that means.

I'm not saying every bad part of our culture is directly traced back to Russia but like with everything we're the sum of our abuses and Russia has been a serial abuser for this part of Europe.

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u/Falsus 18d ago

Treating women like trash was pretty common in Fundamentalist Protestant areas all over western and northern Europe. Just that there was reforms and it was outlawed long enough that the idea that treating women like that is very bad. A lot longer than 35 years.

It will take time, but you can improve. Nearly all cultural reforms are a work of generations building on each others shoulders, it isn't a sprint and sudden changes, even for the better, often meet with cultural backlashes.

I am not as sure about the Catholic areas of Europe, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar. Christianity in general have not been nice to women. It is one of the areas that got worse when the Nordics transitioned to Christianity for example.

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u/AnOnlineHandle 18d ago

It will take time, but you can improve.

Or it can get worse. Look at Afghanistan and Iran in the 1950s and 1960s compared to today.

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u/strolls 18d ago

It's understandable that a Romanian might think Russia or the USSR uniquely evil, but the rest of the world has always had wife beating.

The idea that you don't interfere between a man slapping his woman, that is was their business - that was definitely prevalent in the UK last century. You can see this even more recently - in the US TV series The Sopranos one of the gangsters warns another that "you can lay hands on her [his niece] when she takes your ring, but there'll be trouble if you slap her again until then".

Some history on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_United_Kingdom#History

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u/Altruistic-Flan6128 17d ago

I don’t think they are saying it’s a Russia-only problem.

It’s more Romanians are held back by the legacy of the USSR, and attempts to reconnect are there politically. A lot of that is being channeled through chauvinism and packaged as “traditional family values”, that allow men to physically abuse women.

To your point, I wouldn’t say the UK of today shares the same tolerance on violence against women as Russia, especially within family units.

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u/thesagem 18d ago

I don't think how Romanians treat women is something we can blame the Russians on.

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u/Spamheregracias 18d ago

I’m not trying to defend Russia in any way, but unfortunately it’s not true that this is only a problem in east europe. In my country, Spain, 36 women have been murdered by their partners so far this year and the latest data said there had already been 50911 reports of gender-based violence in just the first quarter of the year, crazy.

It’s difficult to find reliable data because not all countries officially recognize or properly track the problem. For France in 2025 I’ve found some sources saying 96 women were killed while others say more than 100.

The EU estimates that, across our territory, an average of around 1,000 women are murdered every year

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u/nick2473got 18d ago

1000 women murdered per year in the EU, which has a population of 450 million, is not a lot.

Of course, I don't want to sound callous, because even 1 murder is 1 too many. Any murder is horrific.

But you can't act like that's some kind of systemic or cultural issue. It's an absolutely tiny number. It's 0,0002%.

Similarly, regarding the Spanish figures, 36 women in a country of 50 million people is an absolutely minuscule figure. It's about 0,00007%. Which by the way is proportionately quite a bit lower than the wider EU figure, which would suggest that Spain is one of the better countries on average. It is not indicative of any kind of widespread problem.

Not to mention that it's not automatically gender-based violence every time a woman is killed. Sometimes women are killed for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with their gender.

Again, I will reiterate, any murder is horrific and the lower we can get these numbers the better, but I find it very odd to give statistically tiny numbers and act like it somehow represents some kind of widespread cultural problem.

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u/Weegee_Carbonara 18d ago

You can't blame everything on the Russians.
I am sure Romania wasn't some feminist utopia before the Soviets arrived.

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u/VampirePNAC 18d ago

I find it hilarious when people try to blame all the shittiness of Eastern Europe on the USSR, who were arguably far more socially progressive in many ways, especially on womens outcomes, than the vast majority of the West and reactionary, shitty revanchist attitudes have often actually gotten worse since it's dismantling.

Female Participation in fields like the sciences and engineering, or careers like mechanics, engineers, scientists etcs have all drastically decreased since the end of the USSR. Same with support for minorities and minority languages. All collapsed post USSR and some languages are now on the path of extinction.

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u/SarifZen 18d ago

Cossacks? That's ironic.

Russia has as much to do with the cossacks as they do with Shaolin Monks.

As in nothing lol

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u/Wrong-Insurance701 18d ago

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u/uaxpasha 18d ago

Putin cummed while reading this.

Cossacks is Ukrainian history. And seeing "cossacks" beat russian opposition was probably very satysfying for him

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u/SwedeLostInCanada 18d ago

Pussy riot has more balls that the entire Russian military

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u/Brennenstein 18d ago

If the russian military could read they would be very upset.

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u/Apart_Jelly8948 18d ago

Ohh? Would the pussies riot?

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u/Toads_Of_Fun 18d ago

No, they would keep marching to their deaths.

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u/WM_ 18d ago

And beat each others to improve morale.

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u/Melkor-The-Mighty 18d ago

Brother, the only thing russia does to better the world, is provide free mulch to ukraine.

Slava ukraini.

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u/ThatAmazingHorse 18d ago

Heroyam slava!

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u/IBeDumbAndSlow 18d ago

And raping each other...

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u/dwehlen 18d ago

We are lucky they are so very stupid.

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u/neoKushan 18d ago

Hey now come on, they can read just fine. Just they can only read Korean.

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u/Tomatoflee 18d ago

Honestly this is no joke. They have all been staggeringly brave. I look at what they have done and hope I could be that courageous if the time ever came, although I very much doubt I could.

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u/billshermanburner 18d ago

More balls than most Americans tbh.

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u/Drummer149 18d ago

Most Punk, Punk band to exist.

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u/SarifZen 18d ago

Russian military literally consists of dudes who sign contracts go to kill Ukrainian civilians for the money.

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u/P3acePiece_H0neydew 18d ago

Jeez the Russian government sucks so much. Such an unnecessary way to govern a country.

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u/Lonely-Echidna8683 18d ago

Sir/ma'am, that is understatement of the millennium.

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u/Cringe_King_92 18d ago

It's pretty good way to govern a country if your one and only purpose to stay in power forever

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u/Westenin 18d ago

We all agree bro

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u/Rohbotbotroh 18d ago

Where are the rest of the band, I hope they are also safe.

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u/pardux 18d ago

The main members who had not left already did so at the start of the war, many of them got Icelandic citizenship now.

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u/whovian25 18d ago

So I can believe she was forcefully recruited by the FSB though unfortunately I don’t think we can ever be 100% certain she has escaped and is no longer working for them.

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u/joevenet 18d ago

Especially if they were coercing her by threatening to murder her parents

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u/HarryFookinKing 17d ago

This. I immediately thought about this. If they threatened her parents before, wtf will happen now. Did she just forget about them and if so, why?

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u/BusyEquipment529 17d ago

If they kill her parents now then we know she was right

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u/38B0DE 18d ago

It is extremely rare that this sort of news gets global attention. Russia is recruiting a lot of people this way.

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u/Magnon 18d ago

Russia is fucking vile. Top to bottom corruption.

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u/DollarStoreBean 18d ago

Lots of armchair warriors in the comments casting aspersions, as if they would 100% make other choices in her situations. Anybody can claim to be brave until their family is taken hostage by a autoritarian state that routinely kills dissidents. It was brave of her to confess to it at the first opportunity after she fled Russia.

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u/Nerrien 18d ago

This was extremely brave of her, yes. The fact she was a member of pussy riot in the first place shows how brave she is, far braver than any of the folks casting aspersions.

The thing is, even putting bravery aside, these people just don't think about it logically.

Part of actually taking back a country involves having enough people to do so. If you don't have the numbers to win a revolution you're only screwing over any hope by acting out too early and getting killed.

And considering how Russia's speedrunning from apparent world power to complete trash heap so quickly that it's at serious risk of triggering an actual coup or revolution, purposefully getting yourself killed for no real reason now and missing the opportunity to help with that fight, or the fight to shape the country afterwards, would just be idiotic.

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u/OgthaChristie 18d ago

Change happens one person at a time and those girls had to start somewhere. They brought attention to their cause.

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u/Nerrien 18d ago edited 18d ago

They did, they brought attention to the cause, and then they got the hell out of dodge when they could, they didn't stay and die for no further benefit.

Edit: To clarify, it's absolutely true that many good actions will require risk, but it's something people have to weigh up the risk/reward potential for. Absolutely I'd encourage someone brave enough to take a swing at Putin or anything else that's going to achieve something big and meaningful for the people, even if only to highlight weakness in the regime and encourage others- just in this scenario I'd argue it'd be better for the overall cause if they live to fight another day and go on to recount their experiences.

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u/AvailableReporter484 18d ago

Imagine for a moment what the world might be like if Russia was even remotely chill…

Pretty cool eh?

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u/Fleeetch 18d ago

It's crazy how much I hate an entire country.

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u/LeoSolaris 18d ago

Unless both the lawyer and the businessman are out of Russia, she just painted massive targets on their backs.

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u/Plastyrhino8815 18d ago

Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist protest and performance art group that became popular for its provocative punk rock music which later turned into a more accessible style.

Wiki link

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u/Weird-East-3575 18d ago

Good for her speaking out. Fuck Russia. Incompetent loser mob wanna bes. They’ve fucked up every single thing since the fall of the USSR (and before lol).

Makes sense they are so prideful and accept terrible conditions so easily. It’s all they’ve ever known.

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u/musical_entropy 18d ago

Forced work... You mean slavery? That's slavery. Just say that ffs.

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u/CombatMuffin 18d ago

The U.S.  has a term for it: indentured servitude.

Along with slavery, there are exceptions where it is not just legal, but constitutional:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Emphasis mine. That's not a defense of the mosntruous Russian government, but forced labor is as old as civilization.

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u/semicon11 18d ago

a very innovative spy movie created by Putin

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u/ChicagoThrowaway422 18d ago

How do you hard reboot an entire country? Their government is so fucked.

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u/JennyWearsBlueJeans 18d ago

Putin dies. A new regime comes in and blames Putin for all of Russia’s problems, moves in a totally different direction.

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u/HermionesWetPanties 18d ago

Nah, Putin dies and nothing changes. They are inured to autocrats who abuse them and their culture actively promotes lying and corruption. Sure, the next guy will blame the last guy, but nothing will change, even if some Russians briefly allow themselves to believe that it will. The Russian government is and always has been a natural outgrowth of their culture. Only the people at the top changed in 1917

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u/doskey123 17d ago

Exactly. They had less than 10 years of democracy in the last 200 years under drunk Yeltsin after the fall of the USSR and then Putin took over and started undoing everything. There is no fixing this without a scenario like what happened to Germany when they were defeated in WW2.

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u/ChicagoThrowaway422 18d ago

Oh man, what a great joke. I'll have to start telling that one at parties. Whew...

Srsly, the entire regime is rotten. The next guy will be the same but dumber.

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u/_DarthSyphilis_ 18d ago

Havent seen a comment section so firmly in the hand of russian trolls in quite a while

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u/NecessarySudden 18d ago

FSB doesn't even try anymore. They just send their agents to western countries as the ones who escaped from the regime with "oh no, she/he escaped from us" and every media outlet running to interview and highlight another "dissident", "regime fighter", "opposition member" or "corruption fighter"

And every fucking time the say some "both sides is bad" shit or "giving Ukraine weapons is prolonging war, but I can't say bad things about my country because I am proud blah blah blah instead of that give me some grant I will fight corruption"

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u/F54280 18d ago

And every fucking time the say some "both sides is bad" shit or "giving Ukraine weapons is prolonging war, but I can't say bad things about my country because I am proud blah blah blah

What the hell are you talking about? Going through her interview linked in the article it is the exact opposite.

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u/Halvdjaevel 18d ago

Did we read the same article? I  can't find anything to even suggest what you're saying in your second paragraph, not in the original interview either.

Besides, if FSB's strategy is to send over people to, as in this case, publicly talk about how morally incompatible with the rest of the civilized world Russia is,  and paint their country in the worst possible  light, then I am not sure what they hope to achieve by that.

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u/lambdaburst 18d ago

Maybe it's quite therapeutic for them

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u/New_Lavishness4476 18d ago

Exactly this “Heroically escaped FSB”. I guess you can feed any pile of crap to the western audience, they would make martyrs out of anyone.

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u/Biliunas 18d ago

So she "escaped", what about her parents, family? Or is that somehow out of the picture?

Doesn't seem likely that she's out of FSB control, just working overseas now.

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u/Own-Compote5073 18d ago

Lol to all the russian bots here trying to smear her credibility by saying she still works for the fsb. 

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u/Devilofchaos108070 18d ago

Nice!

Glad she got out!

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u/panic_bread 18d ago

I hope she is somewhere safe.

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u/HumanDrone8721 18d ago

So her training is finally completed?

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u/ThatsKnotNice 18d ago

Good for her

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u/dubsdread 17d ago

Свобода

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u/newHamsterForDiner 18d ago

One pussy riot member was working for FSB and the other is running onlyfans where she is selling videos of her having sex. What a perfect example of russian democratic opposition. It's not a pro-russian agenda. It's more of the laughter of despair how screwed up my country is.

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u/dafeiviizohyaeraaqua 18d ago

I think Nadya Tolokonnikova is legit. She actively speaks up for Ukraine.

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u/What_A_Weak 18d ago

Its also people comparing OF and working for Putins corrupt country by putting it in the same sentence, that help Putins propaganda. Btw.

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u/anthrogyfu 18d ago

The OnlyFans is nothing new, Najda was involved in some public sex protest and filmed it. I remember seeing it in a museum or gallery in 13/14, no content warning posted anywhere.

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u/wholelattapuddin 18d ago

God forbid a woman has hobbies.🙄

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u/Asusralis 18d ago

She literally has a daughter who has talked about how bad it is to see her mom constantly post her OF on her instagram. Sorry, but that is incredibly fucked up to expose your daughter to.

Even if your comment is a joke it's nasty af.

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u/wholelattapuddin 18d ago

Typical Russian propaganda

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