Perm? Wow… that’s a long-distance smoking accident if I ever saw one!
Novel_Source372 on
This is how this war will end by taking the fight to Ruzzian soil !
DungeonMasterSupreme on
A very good friend and colleague of mine from before the war lives in Voronezh Oblast. The minute the Kremlin started pumping anti-Ukrainian propaganda, he went full vatnik on me. Ranted about how Russian speakers were being oppressed, bombed, and stripped of property, and all that bullshit. Everything short of saying we were actively committing genocide in the Donbass.
All this despite the fact that he knew my wife was a native Russian speaker, as is her father, and had spoken Russian with her many times, and that we had been actively hanging out and playing video games together virtually every night we were supposed to be getting oppressed and bombed.
Before this happened, I didn’t understand Russia. A close Russian friend, western-leaning, working in a digital market, fluent in English, university-educated abroad, etc., of supposed intelligence just completely flipped to being a radical extremist and racist because of propaganda.
I still *don’t* understand it. But at least now I get why people in the West don’t get it, either. It’s hard to imagine finding out one of your closest friends has a switch in their head that they can just have flipped by the state, where one side has them a decent, intelligent person, and the other side means they’d shoot you on the spot if you saw them again in real life.
All this to say, every time I see Voronezh on fire, I smile. And I still check the fucker’s Steam page once a month or so to see if he’s had his ass plucked out of his gaming chair and sent to the frontlines yet. But nope. He’s playing The Finals right now, while he’s supposed to be working. The perks of working IT; immunity from the draft. For now.
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Perm? Wow… that’s a long-distance smoking accident if I ever saw one!
This is how this war will end by taking the fight to Ruzzian soil !
A very good friend and colleague of mine from before the war lives in Voronezh Oblast. The minute the Kremlin started pumping anti-Ukrainian propaganda, he went full vatnik on me. Ranted about how Russian speakers were being oppressed, bombed, and stripped of property, and all that bullshit. Everything short of saying we were actively committing genocide in the Donbass.
All this despite the fact that he knew my wife was a native Russian speaker, as is her father, and had spoken Russian with her many times, and that we had been actively hanging out and playing video games together virtually every night we were supposed to be getting oppressed and bombed.
Before this happened, I didn’t understand Russia. A close Russian friend, western-leaning, working in a digital market, fluent in English, university-educated abroad, etc., of supposed intelligence just completely flipped to being a radical extremist and racist because of propaganda.
I still *don’t* understand it. But at least now I get why people in the West don’t get it, either. It’s hard to imagine finding out one of your closest friends has a switch in their head that they can just have flipped by the state, where one side has them a decent, intelligent person, and the other side means they’d shoot you on the spot if you saw them again in real life.
All this to say, every time I see Voronezh on fire, I smile. And I still check the fucker’s Steam page once a month or so to see if he’s had his ass plucked out of his gaming chair and sent to the frontlines yet. But nope. He’s playing The Finals right now, while he’s supposed to be working. The perks of working IT; immunity from the draft. For now.