Posted on 03/17/2024 5:28:45 AM PDT by Eleutheria5
For the first time in two years many Russians are trying to make a difference but they are still minority.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
All polls and personal interactions I have tell me that the vast majority of Russians love Putin.
They’re weird that way.
You can’t have a poll that reliably reflects public opinion when speech is stifled. So there is no telling what people really think, except to the extent that gas-lighting works.
Welcome to 21st Century America.
unfortunately at this point in time Putin’s Russia is more believable than Biden’s America
As explained to me by a Russian, the Russians inside of Russia love him, but the Russians outside do not. The inside Russians don’t want to become another USA and it’s their choice not our media’s.
BIDEN, DEMOCRATS, RINOs, DEEP SWAMP vs LEGACY AMERICANS - CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ESCALATES TO RIOT, ARSON AND MURDER
Sure, just like Iraqis loved Saddam, he always got 90% of the vote too!
Here’s a little secret - this is how dictatorships work ...
They use all the tools of the State to manufacture a pre-rigged result, to make it look like the Dictator is popular
Meanwhile, all the serious opposition candidates have been disqualified, jailed, or killed (in the case of Navalny, all 3)
Let’s see how popular Putin is when he thanks the Russian people by condemning another 200,000 to die when he orders another mass-mobilization
The attacks on Russian civilians as they vote is not having the desired effect of pumping up sagging Ukrainian public support for NATO’s war. Of course, these Ukrainian/NATO attacks on Russian civilians further drive home the necessity of Putin’s SMO for the average Russian. Imagine the lunacy of ISIS attacks on American polling places in an attempt to undercut Trump’s support as he eradicated ISIS. The NATO string manipulators are very, very stupid people.
You can’t measure Putin’s Russia by the measurements of Biden’s America. This is the mistake that they all make. Biden’s America is a comedown from a tradition going back 250 years of freedom. Putin’s Russia never had freedom except for a few years, and a Russian who remembers that time remembers economic collapse and mass disillusionment, not dancing around maple trees like a bunch of munchkins. To them, a dictator ruling with an iron hand is a good thing, provided they have enough to eat.
So the whole paradigm of America doesn’t even work for Russians. They have no conception unless they spent time in America.
To an American, Biden’s attempts at gas-lighting and censorship, devaluing the dollar and opening up the borders is a horror show, unless you’re a leftard who believe it’s “social justice” or some damned thing.
To a Russian, Putin’s tyranny is normal, only now they don’t have heat, eggs and everything else costs too much, McDonalds closed down and left, and the new cars sometimes come without steering wheels, which you sometimes have to buy separately after paying full price, and their sons went off to war and didn’t return, plus a drone just crashed into an oil refinery, another one crashed into an office tower last week, and your neighbors went Galt to Uzbekistan.
But they’ve been gas-lighted into believing that America is much worse, when in fact you might as well say that America is on a different planet, in some ways worse and in many ways better, but with a totally different measure of values.
If free speech is stifled in America, how come we are on Free Republic speaking freely. There is less free speech due to government pressure on social media and a monolithic MSM, but there is still free speech in America. It’s just not as easy as it was before.
. It’s just not as easy as it was before.
ARTICLE
Could Putin lose? Everything you need to know about Russia’s presidential election:What to expect from Russia’s presidential election - and what it means for the war in Ukraine.
Sky News
Michael Drummond
Friday 15 March 2024 08:32, UK
https://news.sky.com/story/could-putin-lose-everything-you-need-to-know-about-russias-presidential-election-13087586
“Russians are heading to the polls for their country’s presidential election - with only one expected outcome.
With Alexei Navalny dead in unexplained circumstances and opposition candidate Boris Nadezhdin barred from running, there is nobody remaining to pose a serious obstacle to another six years of rule by Vladimir Putin.
Nonetheless, the election will be closely watched by those looking for insight into Russia’s political machinations, as well as opinions across wider Russian society.
So what should we expect from polling day in Russia, and what does it mean for the war in Ukraine?
Sky News takes a look at some of the key remaining questions.
When is the election?
Most voting takes place in Russia and in the annexed regions of Ukraine over three days between 15 and 17 March, though some regions vote in advance.
Russia is a huge country with 11 time zones and large expanses of sparsely populated and remote areas.
It’s so big that the electoral commission uses helicopters to access remote areas in Siberia to stage pop-up voting stations.
An exit poll should be available in the hours after polls close, with official results posted a few days later.
It’s the first time multi-day voting has been used in a Russian presidential election, as well as the first allowing voters to cast ballots online.
Opposition groups in 2021 said digital votes in the country’s parliamentary elections showed signs of manipulation.
The vast majority of independent Russian media outlets have been banned and anyone found guilty of spreading what the government deems to be “deliberately false information” about the country’s invasion of Ukraine can be imprisoned for up to 15 years.”
[excerpt]
Desperation is the only way to describe that fantasy.
Give it a rest. The only one you’re fooling is yourself. Ukraine is still fighting. They win some and they lose some, and that’s how wars go. But Russia already lost their objectives when they failed to march into Kiev within two weeks. If you like Russia so much, why aren’t you at the front killing those evil Ukrainians. There might be some maternity wards that haven’t been bombed yet.
If you expect them to get to you eventually, you prepare to push back at them. Stop feeling sorry for yourself in advance, and stop being reactive. Be proactive. Plan and stock up.
Free speech is America is on it’s way out. You may be talking now, but if Biden steals the next election, free speech is over.
Take a look at what is happening in Canada.
“If free speech is stifled in America, how come we are on Free Republic speaking freely.”
Look at the donation meter.
Are some of us getting ‘disappeared’?
WIKI
In November 2023, Nadezhdin announced his candidacy in the 2024 Russian presidential election. He was subsequently barred from running in the election by the Central Election Commission, which claimed to have found “irregularities” in signatures supporting his candidacy.
Nadezhdin was born in Tashkent, Soviet Uzbekistan. He survived the Tashkent earthquake, which occurred on his third birthday. In 1969, he was brought by his parents to the city of Dolgoprudny where his father studied at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), and his mother was a student at the Moscow Conservatory. For five generations in the Nadezhdin family, all men bore the name Boris. His paternal grandfather was a Soviet Uzbek composer and associate professor at the Tashkent Conservatory. His maternal grandfather fled to Uzbekistan from Ukraine after the October Revolution.
In 1979 he won the second prize at the All-Union Mathematical Olympiad among high school students. That year, he graduated from the Specialized Boarding School No. 18 for Physics and Mathematics at the Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 1985, he graduated with honors from MIPT. From 1985 to 1990, he was an engineer and researcher at the All-Union Research Center for the Study of Surface and Vacuum Properties.
In September 2022, as Russia retreated from Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, Nadezhdin criticized Russia’s intelligence services and called for negotiations to end the conflict on an NTV current affairs show. He criticized Russia’s war strategy, stating it was impossible to beat Ukraine using its current methods and materials, calling the strategy “colonial war methods.”
On 31 January 2024, Boris Nadezhdin brought signatures in support of his candidacy to the Central Election Commission. This is the last day to submit signatures to participants in the elections. According to him, signatures were collected in more than 120 cities, a total of 208,000 signatures were collected, of which 105,000 were brought to the CEC. Before bringing the signatures, he gave a speech in which he thanked everyone who donated money for his presidential campaign and claimed that “never in the history of Russia has there been such a thing that a presidential candidate’s campaign was entirely based on donations”.
In his political program Boris Nadezhdin described himself as “a principled opponent of the current president’s policy”. Nadezhdin declared the termination of war as a main statement in his election program and wanted to initiate a new peace negotiations with Ukraine and the Western countries. His campaign manifesto stated that “special military operation was Putin’s error. Because it was not possible to reach its goals without huge impact on Russian economy and demography”. Nadezhdin accused Putin of dragging Russia back into the past and expressed concern that Russia is becoming a vassal of China after being cut off from Western countries following the invasion of Ukraine. Nadezhdin became the only potential candidate who was opposed to the war in Ukraine. His comment that the invasion of Ukraine was a “fatal mistake” by Putin was remarked by NBC News to be “a rare public stance in the country where the regime’s loudest critics are either jailed, exiled or dead”.
In January 2024, citing unidentified sources in the Kremlin, the independent news outlet Vyorstka reported that the CEC, at the behest of the Kremlin, will likely reject Nadezhdin’s registration due to his criticism of Putin and anti-war stances. In late January 2024, a source in the Putin administration told the Latvia-based news outlet Meduza: “There’s a portion of the electorate that wants the war to end. If [Putin’s opponent in the elections] decides to cater to this demand, they may get a decent percentage. And [the Putin administration] doesn’t need that.” It was already widely thought that authorities would not welcome a candidate who is openly anti the war in Ukraine. On 30 January 2024, Kremlin propagandist and television presenter Vladimir Solovyov warned Nadezhdin: “I feel bad for Boris. The fool didn’t realize that he’s not being set up to run for president but for a criminal case on charges of betraying the Motherland.”
On 8 February 2024, Nadezhdin was barred from running against President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s March presidential election due to alleged “irregularities” in the signatures of voters supporting his candidacy. The election commission claimed that only 95,587 of his signatures in support of his candidacy were valid, just short of the 100,000 needed to run. His team said that some of the “errors” the election commission had claimed existed were merely minor typos that happened when handwritten names were put into its computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Nadezhdin
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