The statements about the war made by Muscovite political exiles cause public indignation because what they say is at odds with the horror of the situation. Instead of taking to European podiums and demanding decisive action to defend Ukraine, they ask [European officials] to lift sanctions against Russians and mumble helplessly about “one nation.”
It is obvious that, for the fourth year running, Russia has been waging not just a war against Ukraine on the front lines, but a bloody, boundless campaign of terror. Nearly every day Russian missiles kill [Ukrainian] civilians, including children. Ukrainian soldiers who surrender unarmed are executed on the spot by the Russians, or are even ritually beheaded. But you continue to talk about Russia’s “democratic future,” ignoring the fact that the entire country, including schoolchildren, has been slaving away at destroying the Ukrainians.
I am not a politician, just a microblogger who cares about current events. But even I remember InformNapalm’s OSINT investigation which showed that the Russian fighter planes bombing Ukraine are still equipped with French avionics. Without this unique equipment, Russia’s Su-30SM fighter planes are blind and cannot fly. Russia obtains this equipment through Kazakhstan, thus bypassing sanctions. The report came out a year ago. I don’t know what the situation is like now, but warplanes are still taking off from Russian airfields.
Why couldn’t you have talked about that in the French Senate? Especially since, a week earlier, a Russian missile fired from a fighter plane and packed with shrapnel killed twenty people, including nine children, in Krivyi Rih. The photo of a young [boy] in a coffin, whose face had been riddled by the tiny metal shards, is impossible to forget.
I realize that none of Moscow’s so-called opposition activists have the courage of political prisoner [Vladimir] Bukovsky and demand that Ukraine be given missiles to target Lubyanka. But you could launch investigations into the schemes by which Russia circumvents sanctions and obtains not only components for its fighter planes but also foreign chips for its missiles. You could demand that the Bosphorus be closed to Russia’s shadow fleet, which brings Putin the revenue to produce new missiles. Finally, you could show solidarity with Ukraine at least in word [if not in deed] and stop embarrassing yourself by repeating the impersonal and irrelevant slogan “No War.” You could do a lot of things in your safe havens. But instead you just wait for Putin to die and are not even ashamed to say so. Meanwhile, it is not so much the Ukrainians or the decolonizers who are waiting for you to act as it is your own fellow Russian citizens, who have not yet lost their minds and are basically living under occupation in Russia.
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As for the ridiculous claim that it is easier for non-Russians to go to war and that is why they make up the majority [of soldiers] in the [Russian] army, according to the analytical resource buryatmemorial.org, a total of 2,425 people from Buryatia have been killed in the “special military operation” as of March 2025. And you’ll pardon me, but hardly half of them are ethnic Buryats (as you can see from the photos). This is due to the fact that ethnic Buryats constitute no more than 31% of the republic’s entire population. According to Ukrainian figures, Russian losses have already lost 933,000 men in the war. Even if we multiplied the figures for Buryatia by ten, its war dead would still roughly amount to two and a half percent of the total. I emphasize that the Buryats are an ethnic minority in their own land.
According to Caucasian Knot, as of March 2025, 233 men from Chechnya, 121 from Ingushetia, 104 from Karachay-Cherkessia, and 112 from Kalmykia have been killed in the special military operation. Again, we can multiply this figure by ten for the sake of statistical rigor, but we still get hundredths of a percent of the total losses.
To put an end to the topic of Vladimir Kara-Murza’s ridiculous misinformation drop, yes, I saw yesterday’s post by the activist Anastasia Shevchenko, from which it follows that she was the mysterious “colleague” who shared with Kara-Murza the “observation” that it may be easier for non-Russians to go to war, while Russians find it psychologically difficult to kill Ukrainians due to their cultural affinity. Anastasia writes that the source of this hypothesis was not even her, but a third party who voiced this conjecture in a private conversation. Do you realize what has happened? This was not a scientific observation; no studies or surveys of Russian POWs were done that would indicate such a trend. This “information” came from the bush telegraph and was repeated by a [Russian] opposition politician in the French Senate, where decisions are made on the basis of the words people utter. And even after the ruckus that this delusional phrase caused among the public, no apology or explanation has been forthcoming from the politician.
Again, I am just a mom with three kids who left Russia to avoid supporting the war. In exile, I wash floors and clean other people’s houses so that I can send at least thirty dollars [a month] to the Ukrainians so they can buy drones. At night I write social media posts and read decolonial literature. I try to do anything I can to stop my former country from murdering innocent people. In my opinion, I have the right to demand that those who call themselves politicians, who have the bully pulpits and the opportunities, do something meaningful to ensure that Russia can no longer wage war.
There is nothing more important right now.
Source: Julia Khazagaeva (Facebook), 14 April 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader
